Introduction and Definitions

Hello, my name is Andrew Weymouth and I have worked with the University of Idaho Library as the Digital Initiatives Librarian in the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL) department since the fall of 2023. My work generally consists of creating and maintaining our digital collections, working with CDIL fellows, helping to rethink processes and introducing new digital scholarship tools to the department.

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Definition / Terms

You may have noticed I used the term ‘digital scholarship’ instead of ‘digital humanities’. The terms are used somewhat interchangeably and their definitions have changed since the discipline really took shape in academia around the late 1990s.

If I were to define what digital scholarship means, I would say it is “analyzing and presenting the pre-existing data of a collection in ways that make it more intuitive, accessible and interactive while being mindful of the user experience.” There are countless ways we can look at the same set of data – geographically, chronologically, biographically, focusing on specific elements and ignoring others to draw insights into sharper relief.

When I refer to data, I am using it in the sense of “a piece of information.” These could be people’s names, location coordinates or descriptions. An item contains data and a collection contains items.

The platform we host our collections on at the U of I is called CollectionBuilder, an “open source framework for creating digital collections and exhibit websites that are driven by metadata and modern static web technology”. This is also the platform we host our Taylor Wilderness Research Station (or Taylor) Archive collection, which I will be focusing on for our talk today as an example of the multiple ways you can use digital scholarship methods to highlight different historical aspects of your research.