Davis Family Library Center for Teaching, Learning and Research

Facilitators: Jessica Holmes and Mary Hurlie Group projects, when designed well, can build problem-solving, teamwork and communication skills, yet many students (and some faculty) groan at their mere mention. During this workshop, we will explore strategies to maximize the benefits of collaborative learning activities. Lunch will be served. Please RSVP at ctlr@middlebury.edu by Monday, April 18.

This workshop will introduce you to the basics of planning a digital exhibit and get you started with your own Omeka.net digital exhibit. DLA Postdoc Alicia Peaker will be leading the workshop. She has also worked as the Director of Our Marathon (http://www.marathon.neu.edu), a digital archive, built with Omeka, of crowdsourced materials related to the 2013 Boston bombings. Enrollment is limited, so please follow the link below to sign up and reserve your space. http://sites.middlebury.edu/dla/2015/08/26/building-digital-exhibits-wi…

The Digital Liberal Art’s first Behind the Scenes Lunch will feature our new Postdoc, Kristy Golubiewski-Davis, as she demonstrates the 3D scanning tools and techniques she used in her doctoral research. This project is a case study using 3D scans of Late Bronze Age swords (~1200-800BC) to recreate community networks of knowledge. The aim of the work is to link the decisions of specialized craft workers to morphological data. Those data were in turn used to represent links in a social network. Come learn about 3D scanning, statistics, and network analysis.

Join us on Thursday, March 23rd from 12:30-1:30 for our next Behind the Scenes presentation. Professors of Psychology Marcia Collaer (Middlebury College) and Anthony Richardson (Saint Michael’s College) will present their work exploring the development of body ownership as assessed in the virtual world. Their work extends investigations of the rubber hand illusion into digital space. The traditional rubber hand illusion explores sensory and perceptual factors that give rise to a sense of ‘body ownership’ that can develop for an inanimate object (e.g., a rubber hand/arm).

Sam Liebhaber has been working on converting his existing Mahri Poetry Archive from a WordPress site to Scalar, which provides a platform for non-linear content exploration. The project is under contract to be published by Stanford University Press. The October 25th,12:15-1:30 Behind the Scenes will feature Sam and his Summer Research Assistant, Jeff Holland ’19, discussing the work done to create the project.

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP at go.middlebury.edu/DLARSVP

Join us on Wednesday, January 25th from 12:15-1:30 for our next Behind the scenes presentation. Caitlin will present new work visualizing the effects of Texas HB-2, a law that caused more than half of Texas’ abortion clinics to close their doors in late 2013. Working with Middlebury students Anna Cerf and Birgitta Cheng, Caitlin has tracked and visualized the closures of abortion clinics across Texas. She combines this information with data on health outcomes to estimate how decreasing access to abortion services has impacted women’s health.

How do recent debates and discussions on campus and in the national press around the topics of microaggressions and trigger warnings impact what happens in our classroom? How do we identify microaggressions that may have made their way into our speech patterns? How do we decide whether or not to issue ‘trigger warnings’ in advance of dealing with potentially difficult topics in our classrooms? Join us for discussion of these important topics.

Undergraduate research is an important academic experience for many students. But imagine if we could provide that experience to all students. Would we want to do that? Why? What would it look like? Join us for a discussion about (re) envisioning undergraduate research. Why is it an important component of a liberal arts education? How do students and faculty benefit? Can we imagine new models of authentic research experiences and attendant creative and/or scholarly processes that make them more available to more students, using fewer resources? Are there new challenges we face?

Despite claims in the popular press that Google has made libraries obsolete, we have found to the contrary that the library continues to serve the campus as a vital intellectual space that brings us together, and connects us to the information and services we need for our academic pursuits. Yet, how will our libraries need to change in the coming decade as the College charts a new direction, and as the information landscape continues to evolve? Who we are and where do we want to go? What are the challenges and opportunities we face?