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Finding Our Way to a Digital Humanities Community at SUNY Oswego

Published onMay 31, 2020
Finding Our Way to a Digital Humanities Community at SUNY Oswego
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Introduction

Doing digital scholarship can be lonely work.1 In “Divided and Conquered: How Multivarious Isolation is Suppressing Digital Humanities Scholarship,” Rebecca Frost Davis and Quinn Dombrowski describe the ways in which the mutual isolation of people, projects, tools, and skills is “hobbling” progress in the digital humanities (DH) (1). By way of explaining the etiology of this isolation, Davis and Dombrowski refer specifically to the problem of “incomplete information,” a term that captures how difficult it is for any single practitioner to keep track of developments across the DH world and the ways in which those developments might intersect with faculty, staff, and student interests at an institutional level (2). This problem leaves individual digital humanists unaware of extant resources, drives interested students away from further engagement with DH work, prevents intra- and inter-institutional collaborations from forming, and allows worthy tools and projects to go unnoticed and unheralded. Not only does this “multivarious isolation” result in a loss of motivation for individuals and missed opportunities for short- and long-term skill and project development, but it also risks the squandering of energy and resources on unintentional redundancies and interoperability failures (1).

As well as drawing attention to the isolation that often characterizes DH efforts, Davis and Dombrowski advocate for reducing isolation’s effects by tackling conditions of “incomplete information” head-on. “While there are many possible approaches for resolving problems caused by isolation,” they explain, “an elucidation of its scope and impact can provide useful context for efforts at remediation” (1). Identifying the problem, in other words, constitutes new information that can provide an important first step towards a remedy. Their article is, itself, an example of this elucidative work: by defining specific categories of digital isolation, Davis and Dombrowski enable the possibility of addressing these categories. “Divided and Conquered” is an argument in favor of attending more fully to the processes involved in bringing digital humanities initiatives to life, including a greater discursive transparency about the challenges and difficulties that are just as much a part of digital scholarship as are successes and completed products. Adopting a greater openness and transparency around the development of digital humanities competencies and initiatives is no small task, of course, especially when it comes to sensitive topics like funding strategies or failed efforts. As Susan Brown describes in her recent call for more process-centred types of digital editing and publishing platforms, “[t]here is still considerable resistance within academia to sharing work at early stages, despite the collective benefits of doing so” (289).2 What might it take, then, to overcome this resistance and to develop the “thorough knowledge of past, current, and developing efforts in the larger digital humanities community” that Davis and Dombrowski call “essential for avoiding duplication and properly contextualizing new efforts” (3)? 

One way to develop process-centred knowledge about the isolation that often attends DH initiatives is to examine the institutional conditions that shape those initiatives. In “Should Liberal Arts Campuses do Digital Humanities? Process and Products in the Small College World,” Bryan Alexander and Davis explore isolation’s impact on digital scholarship by addressing the “relative silence” of one particular educational sector in the digital humanities ecosystem: the liberal arts college (368). As Alexander and Davis detail, small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) have certain limitations involving funding and resource allocation that make the development of DH initiatives at such institutions a challenging affair. In particular, the smaller resource footprint of SLACs is rarely enough to support a stand-alone DH centre—that “key piece of college infrastructure” for digital humanists (369).3 Without the “anchoring” physical space, centralized technical expertise, and organic networking opportunities offered by a dedicated DH centre, digital humanists working at smaller institutions appear to be at a structural disadvantage (370). Rather than answering their article’s eponymous question in the negative, however, Alexander and Davis turn their attention to the creative ways in which small colleges “unbundl[e]” the features of the digital humanities center to generate alternative approaches to digital scholarship that reflect the mandate of the liberal arts institution, including innovative pedagogical work (375).4 Ultimately, Alexander and Davis argue, the unique philosophical and pedagogical principles shared by small liberal arts colleges generate “a different mode for the digital humanities, a separate path worth identifying, understanding, and encouraging, one based on emphasizing a distributed, socially engaged process over a focus on publicly shared products” (369).

It is in the spirit of these calls to action—calls to elucidate the scope of an institutional landscape, to discuss process, to share resources, and to resist isolation—that we write here. We are three tenure-track faculty in three departments (English and Creative Writing, Communication Studies, and History) who use digital tools in our teaching and research; we each found ourselves looking for support and sociality related to our DH work at our institution. From the vantage point of a small state liberal arts campus that espouses the values of liberal education identified by Alexander and Davis as key to doing the digital humanities differently, we want, in this article, to describe our own efforts to establish a campus-based DH community, to record a stage in the development of that community, and to share our work in the hopes of increasing discussion, debate, and awareness around the issue of barriers to DH community-building. 

DH at SUNY Oswego

To contextualize the institutional conditions in which we currently work, we offer a brief biography of SUNY Oswego. The State University of New York at Oswego began its existence in 1861 as the Oswego Normal School. The college became a founding member of the State University of New York (SUNY) public education system in 1948 and now counts itself as one of thirteen liberal arts institutions in the SUNY system, the largest affiliation of public higher education institutions in the U.S. (“Sustaining Strength,” “History of SUNY”). SUNY Oswego enrolled a total of 8,026 full- and part-time students at the undergraduate and Master’s levels in the 2017-2018 academic year. In Fall 2017, the college employed 377 full-time and 196 part-time faculty; the average class size in that same year was 24.3 students. SUNY Oswego’s origins as a teaching college are evident in its current institutional priorities: the institution remains dedicated to providing student-centred, “minds-on, hands-on” learning experiences (“Sustaining Strength” 23). In its size and focus on undergraduate teaching, then, SUNY Oswego is typical of the SLACs described by Alexander and Davis. 

The story of DH at SUNY Oswego begins with the efforts of a single, motivated individual who drove and sustained interest in the concept for a considerable period of time before more widespread institutional support became available. Unusually, this DH impetus originated in the Computer Science department, rather than in a humanities one: in 2009, Computer Science faculty member David Vampola first mooted the idea of bringing DH to Oswego with a colleague in Psychology. Unusually, too, DH at Oswego began as a pedagogical initiative, rather than a project- or research-based one: Vampola proposed a DH-focused undergraduate course in 2011, arguing for the course’s value in promoting a new dimension of computer and information science literacy among Oswego students. The course, ISC 105: Introduction to Digital Humanities,5 was taught for the first time in Fall 2013, and Vampola leveraged its immediate popularity to advocate for expanded DH offerings for students (Vampola). 

Vampola’s early advocacy coincided with DH’s growing profile in higher education,6 the outcome of which was a gradual growth of administrative buy-in from SUNY Oswego administrators and chairs of departments such as Computer Science, History, English and Creative Writing, and Communication Studies. Beginning in 2013, SUNY Oswego made several strategic hires of faculty and staff with DH experience, including the authors of this paper. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) hired a new dean who was a strong supporter of DH’s interdisciplinary, collaborative orientation. A new director of SUNY Oswego’s Penfield Library oversaw the development and roll-out of the Oswego Digital Library (Oswego DL), an institutional repository for campus resources, including digital artifacts produced by faculty, staff, and students. Together, these developments comprise a series of what Vampola has called “happy coincidences” that contributed to both a critical mass of DH practitioners and supporters on campus and an institutional environment that was primed and ready for a more formal DH presence. 

In 2017, what had been an individual-driven, ad hoc approach to developing an on-campus DH community—extemporary hallway meetings, conversation scattered among various email threads, stolen moments over coffee—was transformed with two major institutional commitments. First, SUNY Oswego launched its DH minor in Fall 2017, the first of its kind for any of SUNY’s 64 campuses. Currently, the minor requires 18 credits, nine of which make up the program’s core, and nine of which are chosen by students from a list of third- and fourth-year electives. The nine core credits include two required courses, Introduction to Digital Humanities and Seminar in Digital Humanities, and one required programing class that students choose from three possibilities: Introduction to Scripting and Markup Languages, Principles of Programming, and Programming and Problem Solving. The higher-level elective courses include those taught by faculty from English and Creative Writing, History, Computer Science, Human-Computer Interaction, Sociology, and Communication Studies. 

Fall 2017 also saw the inauguration of SUNY Oswego’s Humanities Collaboratory, an initiative designed “to enable faculty members to pursue increased interdisciplinary collaborations in research and teaching that bridge the humanities to STEM, the arts and social sciences fields of inquiry” (“Sustaining Strength” 11). At a retreat to set priorities for the Collaboratory, it became clear that a number of faculty and staff were already involved in digital scholarship, without necessarily knowing about each other’s efforts, and that there existed enormous support among faculty from a wide variety of disciplines for an on-campus lab space dedicated to DH teaching and research. This unambiguous support for a physical DH space was both unremarkable, as it followed Zorich’s evolutionary trajectory of increasing institutional formalization of DH efforts over time, and surprising in terms of the lack of consensus among participants about what kinds of work might happen in such a space. Should such a space be a dedicated teaching lab? A place in which to foment faculty collaboration? An experimental project space? Some combination of all of the above? The general desire for a visible, tangible, on-campus community base for DH practitioners was obvious, even if the specifics of that desire were not.7 

Following the retreat, the dean of CLAS invited interested faculty and staff to participate in three working groups that would tackle the organizational and infrastructural objectives laid out at the retreat. The Institutional Commitment and Enhanced Collaboration Team was tasked with finding ways of supporting faculty working with DH tools or for the DH minor. The Applied Humanities Projects and Initiatives Team was placed in charge of identifying and supporting existing and emerging interdisciplinary projects on campus, including those with a DH component. Lastly, the Labs and Artifacts Team was assigned to researching possibilities for the creation of a lab space that could support DH teaching and project development while also identifying how SUNY Oswego could best structure institutional repositories for the artifacts created by DH faculty and students. 

We were part of the Labs and Artefacts Team, composed of nine faculty and staff from six different departments and from the Penfield library. We saw in our remit an opportunity to pull together the ad hoc threads of conversation, individual “pockets of expertise,” and disparate DH-related efforts on campus into a cohesive dialog (Davis and Dombrowski 3). In order to learn more about the current and future DH work that might be engendered and enhanced by the existence of a dedicated lab space at SUNY Oswego, we decided to administer a campus-wide survey that would measure faculty perceptions of DH research and teaching. 

Survey Aims

Surveys of DH happenings within and across activity centres have been influential, generative nodes of information that spur theorizing and discussion, and have played a significant role in the consolidation of DH as a discipline. Zurich’s 2008 survey of DH centres, Maron et al.’s 2009 study of financial sustainability in DH projects, and Davis and Dombrowski’s overview of DH isolation as a phenomenon are just a few examples of efforts to achieve more expansive views of the DH landscape in a US context.8 We imagined our survey as serving a similar, if scaled-down, purpose: we wanted to spur theorization and discussion about the role a physical lab space could play in reducing multivarious isolation among DH practitioners at SUNY Oswego. Ultimately, we intended to identify the nature and scope of DH research and teaching on campus and to assess the kinds of support needed to sustain and expand this research and teaching, particularly in terms of what a new lab space could offer. We also envisioned the launch of the survey as a broader announcement of SUNY Oswego’s new commitment to DH. We searched for models of surveys aimed at establishing this kind of baseline knowledge among the examples of shared survey instruments in DH-related literature, but we found few that suited our case: a preliminary, exploratory appraisal of DH work at a small liberal arts institution. Existing instruments such as ITHAKA S&R’s well-known “Survey of Faculty Creation of Digital Content, Tools, and Infrastructure” tended to offer sets of questions related to DH research and support issues for larger, research-oriented institutions at which DH projects, programs, and infrastructure were already in place (Maron and Pickle).9 As a result, we decided to write our own survey questions. 

We grappled with the exclusionary nature of the term “digital humanities” as we designed the survey. The debate over how DH activities intersect with the activities designated by the terms digital scholarship, transformative scholarship, e-scholarship or e-research, open scholarship, and networked scholarship is a complex one.10 Furthermore, as Ryan Cordell points out, “‘humanities’ is not itself a self-evident signifier.”11 Although the Labs and Artefacts team emerged out of the Humanities Collaboratory initiative in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, we were hoping to discover, rather than dictate, how digital scholarship was defined by faculty and staff across the entire SUNY Oswego campus. We, therefore, opted to emphasize the use of digital tools in the survey’s language so as to include faculty and staff beyond CLAS who might not ordinarily consider themselves to be digital humanists.12 We deliberately left the concept of digital tools undefined in the survey, in order to learn how survey users responded to the term. 

We developed 52 survey questions that would be answered using a binary yes/no response, a selection from a multiple-choice list, a point on a Likert scale, or an open-ended text entry. The survey was adaptive in that respondents’ paths through the survey were determined by their answers to certain questions. For example, the first question—“Do you currently use digital tools a) in your research? b) in your teaching?”—served as a branch that divided digital-tool users from non-users. By creating this branch, we aimed to measure both existing digital scholarship on campus and interest in digital scholarship among those who were not yet incorporating digital tools in their research and teaching. Separating questions about research from questions about teaching would generate information about areas of overlap and of disconnect in these different domains of faculty work. Finally, we anticipated collecting ideas that individual faculty might have for using a potential DH lab space on campus. 

Survey Results

The survey was built in Qualtrics and received approval through SUNY Oswego’s Human Subjects Committee. It was sent to approximately 450 adjunct, contract, tenure-track, and tenured faculty at SUNY Oswego and had a response rate of 15.5% (n=70). Of the 48 respondents who answered a question that asked about their employment status, 42 self-identified as full-time faculty and six self-identified as part-time faculty. All four major academic divisions at SUNY Oswego were represented in the survey: 46 respondents offered information about their home faculty, including 30 from CLAS, nine from the School of Education, six from the School of Communication, Media and the Arts, and one from the School of Business. 

The majority of survey respondents reported using digital tools in both research (81.4%, see Figure 1) and teaching (83.3%, see Figure 2). 18.6% of respondents indicated they did not use digital tools in their research, and 16.7% indicated they did not use digital tools in their teaching. The survey asked respondents in these groups to clarify why they chose not to use digital tools. A number of these respondents cited a lack of knowledge about the benefits of digital tools as the reason for their digital reticence: “Unsure how beneficial they would be,” “lack of education as to options,” “I do not know for certain what ‘digital tools’ are….” One mentioned a lack of time and resources: “Lack of time to dig into everything I’d like to dig into; lack of money to purchase (subscriptions to) software.” Alongside this lack of knowledge about the pedagogical usefulness of digital tools, 30.8% of respondents indicated that a lack of training prevented them from using digital tools.

Figure 1: 81% of faculty use digital tools in their research.

Figure 2: 83% of faculty use digital tools in their teaching.

The survey questions invited respondents to provide specific details about the types of digital tools they used in teaching and research. Responses varied from the most basic of tools—at least 11 respondents indicated that they used a computer in their research and teaching—to more common tools like the graphical visualizer Tableau, the audio editor Audacity, and the programming language Python; to discipline-specific resources like HEARTH, MAX/MSP, and CANTAB; to hardware including clickers, scanners, electroencephalography monitors, and virtual reality headsets.13 More than 120 different kinds of software and hardware were mentioned in this poll of digital tools, which spoke to both the diversity of digitally-oriented work happening on campus and the challenge we faced in envisioning a single lab space that could usefully address such a wide technological constituency. The survey did offer several approaches to tackling this challenge, however. First, respondents reported using a different, more general set of digital tools for teaching; these included tools for basic data collection, interpretation, and presentation that comprised a smaller resource footprint than did the list of research-related tools. Second, a considerable number of respondents described digital tools that they didn’t currently use for reasons related to cost, time, or opportunity. These pedagogical and experimental use-cases suggest possible starting-points for a discussion about the specific needs our DH lab could serve. 

Training was also a large concern for those who use digital tools (see Figure 3). Survey questions asked faculty what resources they most needed to engage in creating, teaching, and researching digital projects. The largest need identified by 36.5% of the respondents was training; the second largest, at 28.1%, was staff support, closely followed by release time at 22.9%. These results point to ways in which teaching-focused colleges can meet the self-identified needs of training faculty in digital tools and where this training should come from—the library, outside consultants, or additional funding for faculty to attend DH-focused workshops and conferences.

Figure 3: Responses to “Besides space, equipment, software, or other digital tools you might use, what are other resources you might need?”

Survey results indicated a wide interest in digital collaboration, which fell into three key categories: spotlighting and sharing student work, collaborating with students on research, and engaging the local public community in projects. How faculty viewed student collaboration was further detailed later in the survey. For example, one question asked respondents to indicate whether they saw student research produced in class as ephemeral (48.8%) or something to be saved for the long term (52.2%). Such a split in viewpoints on the longevity of student labor is perhaps indicative of disciplinary differences, but it may also point to a lack of awareness about the repositories available to house student projects and feature exemplary student work, such as Oswego DL and an interdisciplinary, collaborative program called Digital Oz. Respondents also indicated that they would like to use digital tools to actually navigate the process of collaboration with students. Many respondents referenced Google Docs, for example, as a tool that helped facilitate the mechanics of student collaboration. Finally, respondents indicated that the digital products they created with students and through personal research might incorporate wider engagement from the public, although unfortunately the survey did not ask questions that further prompted respondents to detail how they envisioned their digital work interfacing with public audiences. 

Because one of the survey’s primary goals was to assess how a dedicated DH lab would be used at SUNY Oswego, we were especially interested in responses to direct questions about this possibility (see Figure 4). The survey asked whether faculty would use a teaching computer lab space available to be booked for semester-length courses and outfitted with computers and digital scholarship software like GIS and other proprietary software. 47.7% indicated they would. Further questions asked if faculty would be interested in dropping into the lab on an occasional basis: 44% of respondents indicated they would drop in occasionally, 25% indicated they would schedule an already existing class to be held in the lab, and 27.8% expressed an interest in developing a new course to be held in the lab. When the question about lab space shifted from an interest in using the lab for teaching to using the lab for drop-in access, including faculty research, 83.7% respondents indicated interest, with 28.8% checking “Faculty research/use/experimentation” as a primary reason for using the computer lab. While roughly half the faculty who answered the survey could imagine using the lab to offer a semester-length course, a much larger percentage envisioned using the lab for drop-in class space, and an even larger percentage indicated their desire to use such a lab for their personal research. These results underscore at an institutional level the necessity for a dedicated digital humanities lab space, and we proceeded to put the information we gathered through the survey into a plan for lab development. 

Figure 4: Interest in potential DH lab space and DH tools.

Future Directions for DH at SUNY Oswego

In her analysis of DH centres, Diane Zorich describes a general, if “unstructured,” progression of institutional formalization that begins with “[a] grant, a strategic discussion, or an entrepreneurial individual” and that “is fueled and sustained through continual fund-raising, wider efforts to solicit buy-in around campus, and greater reaches that move the idea in a stepwise progression from project (singular activity) to program (long-term activity) to center (multiple activities)” (9-10). Until this point, the formalization of DH efforts on the SUNY Oswego campus seemed to be following Zorich’s trajectory: Vampola’s “entrepreneurial” efforts provided an initial impetus, the instantiation of the DH minor represented a long-term commitment, and our plans for a dedicated DH lab space promised a smaller version of the activities associated with a stand-alone DH centre. Based on our survey results, we drew up a proposal for equipping a space with hardware and software that addressed DH-related teaching needs, and we applied for a start-up grant through our Campus Technology Service’s Technology Initiative Project (TIP) funding. It was then that we were thrown into what Alexander and Davis call “a fork in the digital humanities development path”: not only was our application for this funding unsuccessful, but at the end of the 2017-18 academic year, the dean of CLAS, a primary administrative champion of DH at Oswego, left that decanal position (383). 

We found ourselves, therefore, with fresh, first-hand knowledge of just how precarious a DH initiative can be, especially in its formative stages, and especially when that initiative is closely tied to single individuals or funding sources. While general support for DH initiatives on campus remained strong, including from the interim dean for CLAS, our Campus Technology Services (CTS), the staff of our Penfield Library, and a number of academic units, we did not have a lab to call our own, nor did we have any sense that the space and funding needed for a dedicated lab would be forthcoming. At the same time, the work we had put in to developing and administering our survey delivered more than just answers to those questions. In discussing and debating what we wanted to ask in the survey, we learned an extraordinary amount about each other’s individual visions of, and disciplinary angles on, DH as a research and pedagogical practice. As a relatively new group of faculty and staff at SUNY Oswego, we bonded over the process of brainstorming, articulating, clarifying, interpreting, and presenting on the questions we asked in the survey and the significance of the answers we received. Perhaps most importantly, our documentation of the survey and its results constitute a significant boundary object that will help to sustain DH-related momentum at SUNY Oswego across changes in administration.14 Through the survey, in other words, we had begun to chip away at the “multifarious isolation” that attended individual DH practitioners on campus, and in our efforts to agitate for something like a tangible product—a dedicated DH lab space—we had also discovered a robust process of communication, collaboration, and advocacy.15 

 Since we administered the survey, we have moved forward in a manner that hews more closely to Alexander and Davis’s “unbundling” model: we are teaching DH concepts and skills to students in several different labs across campus, we are working to articulate overlapping  use-cases with the library as they renovate their own space this year, and we are negotiating for co-teaching or team-teaching opportunities that might allow students to see DH collaboration at work in the classroom. We have also turned outside the campus to find and develop a DH community: we partnered with other SUNY faculty and graduate students to create New York Digital Humanities (NYDH), a communication network of DH practitioners across the SUNY system and other institutions of higher education in upstate New York. NYDH organized its first conference in December 2018, at which members came together to address pressing issues they faced as researchers and educators; the second NYDH conference is scheduled for October 2019.16 We are discovering our “separate path worth identifying, understanding, and encouraging,” and we hope that by sharing our experiences, other paths through the DH world will ramify (Alexander and Davis 369). 

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Appendix 1: Survey Instrument

SUNY Oswego

Survey of Faculty Perceptions of Digital Humanities

Survey instrument created by: Fiona Coll, Caglar Yildirim, Sarah Weisman, Candis Haak, Serenity Sutherland, David Vampola, and Murat Yaşar

The following is an adaptive survey instrument used in Spring 2018 to gauge SUNY Oswego faculty use (current and future) of digital tools for research/teaching; their interest in using a classroom lab and a project lab; resources needed to use digital tools; the digital artifacts they/their students are creating; where those artifacts are being housed; the importance of digital innovations in their field; and their interest in collaborating with others on digital projects. Based on how faculty answered the first questions about their current use of digital tools, they were given different survey questions, for either current users of digital tools, or non-users of digital tools.

1) The following questions will ask about your research activities. Subsequent questions will ask about your teaching. Do you currently use digital tools in your research? [Y/N]

Current Users of Digital Tools

2)  In what ways do you use digital tools in your research? Please specify what software/hardware tools you use in your research: [text box entry]

3)  Do you currently use digital tools in your teaching? [Y/N]

4)  In what ways do you use digital tools in your teaching? Please specify what software/hardware tools you use in your teaching: [text box entry]

5)  Do you have future plans to use other tools in your research/teaching? [Y/N]

6)  In what ways do you envision using other digital tools in your research/teaching? [text entry box]

7)  Besides space, equipment, software, or other digital tools you might use, what other resources might you need? Select all that apply.

a) Staff support
b) Training
c) Release time
d) Other [text entry box]

8)  If teaching computer lab space (outfitted with computers and digital scholarship software like GIS, Leaflet, Tableau, Sketchup, etc.) was available and able to be booked for semester-length courses, would you use it? [Y/N]

9)  How would you use this teaching computer lab space? Select all that apply.

a) Drop in with an existing class on an occasional basis
b) Schedule an existing class to be held regularly in the lab
c) Develop a new class to be taught regularly in the lab
d) Other [with text entry box]

10)  If a drop-in project lab space (outfitted with a computer and digital scholarship software, 3D printers/scanners, multimedia production rooms, analog-to-digital equipment, etc.) was available, would you use it? [Y/N]

11)  How would you use this drop-in project lab space? Select all that apply.

a) Occasional drop-in of an existing class
b) Student assignments
c) Faculty research/use/experimentation
d) Other [with text entry box]

12)  What scholarly/creative work are you/your students creating? [Allow multiple selections]

a) Publications (books, articles, papers, poems, etc.)
b) Presentations
c) Performances
d) Artwork
e) Exhibitions
f) Digital-born project
g) Invention (technique, tool, etc.)
h) Experiential Learning

13)  To what extent are you interested in sharing your/your students’ scholarly/creative output with the world? [Likert scale]

14)  Is your/your students’ output ephemeral or something you would like to save for the long term? [Ephemeral/Longer-lasting]

15)  Do you currently have a digital repository for your/your students’ scholarly work? [Y/N]

16)  Where is your digital repository?

a) Oswego Digital Library
b) DigitalOZ
c) The Hub (Creative Writing Department’s digital space)
d) Blackboard
e) Google sites
f) Photo sharing site (like Flikr) - specify
g) Blog platform (like WordPress) - specify
h) Public digital repository (like Omeka) - specify
i) Other – specify

17)  How do you find out about digital innovations in your field? [text entry box]

18)  How important are digital innovations in your field/discipline? [Likert scale]

19)  To what extent would you be interested in collaborating on digital projects with other faculty? [Likert scale]

20)  Please specify what kind of digital projects. [text entry box]

21)  Are you a full-time or part-time faculty member? [Full-time Faculty/Part-time Faculty]

22)  Your school affiliation:

a) College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
b) School of Business
c) School of Communication, Media and the Arts
d) School of Education

Non-Users of Digital Tools

2)  To what extent would you be interested in using digital tools? [Likert scale] 

3)  Do you have future plans to use digital tools? [Y/N]

4)  In what ways do you envision using digital tools in your research/teaching? [text entry box]

5)  What are the factors preventing you from using digital tools? [Allow multiple selections]

a) Lack of training
b) Lack of interest
c) Irrelevant to field
d) Other [text entry box]

6)  To what extent would you be interested in incorporating digital tools if you had an outside expert to present to/work with your class? [Likert scale]

7)  Please specify what type of expert/activity you would want. [text entry box]

8)  Besides space, equipment, software, or other digital tools you might use, what other resources might you need? Select all that apply.

a) Staff support
b) Training
c) Release time
d) Other [text entry box]
e) I’m really not interested

9)  If teaching computer lab space (outfitted with computers and digital scholarship software like GIS, Leaflet, Tableau, Sketchup, etc.) was available and able to be booked for semester-length courses, would you use it? [Y/N]

10)  How would you use this teaching computer lab space? Select all that apply.

a) Drop in with an existing class on an occasional basis
b) Schedule an existing class to be held regularly in the lab
c) Develop a new class to be taught regularly in the lab
d) Other [text entry box]

11)  If a drop-in project lab space (outfitted with a computer and digital scholarship software, 3D printers/scanners, multimedia production rooms, analog-to-digital equipment, etc.) was available, would you use it? [Y/N]

12)  How would you use this drop-in project lab space? Select all that apply.

a) Occasional drop-in of an existing class
b) Student assignments
c) Faculty research/use/experimentation
d) Other [text entry box]

13)  What scholarly/creative work are you/your students creating? [Allow multiple selections]

a) Publications (books, articles, papers, poems, etc.)
b) Presentations
c) Performances
d) Artwork
e) Exhibitions
f) Digital-born project
g) Invention (technique, tool, etc.)
h) Experiential Learning

14)  To what extent are you interested in sharing your/your students’ scholarly/creative output with the world? [Likert scale]

15)  Is your/your students’ output ephemeral or something you would like to save for the long term? [Ephemeral/Longer-lasting]

16)  Do you currently have a digital repository for your/your students’ scholarly work? [Y/N]

17)  Where is your digital repository?

a) Oswego Digital Library
b) DigitalOZ
c) The Hub (Creative Writing Department’s digital space)
d) Blackboard
e) Google sites
f) Photo sharing site (like Flikr) - specify
g) Blog platform (like WordPress) - specify
h) Public digital repository (like Omeka) - specify
i) Other – specify

18)  How do you find out about digital innovations in your field? [text entry box]

19)  How important are digital innovations in your field/discipline? [Likert scale]

20)  To what extent would you be interested in collaborating on digital projects with other faculty? [Likert scale]

21)  Please specify what kind of digital projects. [text entry box]

22)  Are you a full-time or part-time faculty member? [Full-time Faculty/Part-time Faculty]

22)  Your school affiliation:

a) College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
b) School of Business
c) School of Communication, Media and the Arts
d) School of Education

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