DoingDS References SUP Project and Author

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The Digital Culture Program and the Social Science Research Council Labs has released its Doing Digital Scholarship (DoingDS) modules, a compilation of self-directed instructional resources aimed at scholars and students in the digital humanities and social sciences and their peers. The curriculum ranges from digital identity building to specific digital tools to developing projects for publication. It looks like a valuable resource for beginners or even advanced humanities and social science scholars looking to branch out into digital formats. Current practitioners might also find it useful for checking in on some of the latest work circulating in the field.

We were pleased to see one of our publications—Nicholas Bauch’s 2016 Enchanting the Desert, SUP’s first interactive scholarly work—cited as a prominent example in the module “Trends in Scholarly Communications.” The Project Lens exercise asks readers to browse the project and then follow some guided questions to consider some typical elements of digital projects including navigation, use of media, and credits.

Another of our contracted authors, Lincoln Mullen, is represented in the recommended reading list for the “Thinking about Data” module with his Computational Historical Thinking With Applications in R and in the “Building Digital Collections” module with his blog post on “Mapping the spread of American slavery.”

The “Picking a Platform” resource page is also a possibly useful guide for determining which tools might best fit different kinds of projects. While we at SUP still prefer HTML/CSS/Javascript for ease of sustainability and preservation, many of the tools and JS libraries on the list are ones we also endorse for scholarly works. And while CMSs like WordPress are often unnecessarily cumbersome, we’re glad to see that Scalar, the one content management system built specifically for scholarly publishing, made the list. Along with a basic HTML/CSS/Javascript framework, Scalar is also a system we recommend to authors.

As an intro, DoingDS is a good place to start, but authors should always consider what specific recommendations a publisher will have if the ultimate goal is to produce and publish a project that will persist. The reading lists and links to projects are perhaps the most valuable pieces of this project, so we’re glad to have representation there from our own authors. We’d love to see a future module on archiving digital projects using tools like Webrecorder or on working with an institutional or open digital repository for preservation. We look forward to following up on any updates to these modules as it’s still one of only a few resources like it out there for the digital scholarly community.