DHCommons

In 2010, Scripps College took over management and maintenance of the Ella Strong Denison library, which includes significant collections of suffragette ephemera, 19th century women’s work, book arts from antiquity to the present, and an extensive interdisciplinary teaching collection. This collection is central to the Scripps community, both physically and in terms of pedagogy and research. As such, it is the basis for several innovative initiatives on campus. Among them is an effort to develop a program that utilizes the archive as an opportunity to explore a range of questions within digital humanities. In particular, we are interested in developing a specifically feminist encoding paradigm that will allow us to integrate feminist theoretical insights on archival formation, digital technology, and user interfaces. We also plan to develop a digital archive that maximizes the pedagogical impact of digitizing the Denison materials. Our goal is to create the kind of digital archive and access that embodies the Scripps commitment to advancing innovative research that places women at the center as researchers, students, and historical subjects.

We are currently at the planning stage of this program. We are particularly interested in developing relationships with large digital humanities projects that may help us source expert consultants for a planning grant and those in which the subject area may enable us to work as part of a larger initiative. We face several challenges as a small liberal arts college and we hope that developing more robust relationships within the Digital Humanities community can help us identify the best ways to address these challenges. Current issues under consideration include expanding our expertise for the project.