This summer, Library and Information Technology Services (LITS) hosted the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS). The one-week gathering brought teams of students, faculty, and staff from nine colleges and universities to build upon established digital pedagogy or scholarship projects and/or launch new ones. ILiADS emphasizes collaboration among faculty, students, and staff by providing space for deep work and skill-building as well as mentorship for each project team to help with goal-setting for the week.
Five student interns managed the event, and two Digital Bryn Mawr grant teams participated.
Associate Professor of Russian José Vergara's project examining the films of Paul Thomas Anderson benefitted from having a week to connect with a multi-institution team: in addition to his co-PI Jennifer Alpert (Stanford) who joined for the week, the project team includes student researchers Naveah Diaz '26, Olivia Flores '26, and Hilde Nelson (HART graduate student), and LITS staff members Cameron Boucher '23 and Alice McGrath. During the week of ILiADS, the team made headway researching and developing annotations and got crucial feedback on the website design through user-testing. Team members also attended a special screening of Phantom Thread at Bryn Mawr Film Institute and hosted a lunchtime discussion of the film.
Faculty members Margaret Strair and Irina Walsh presented their project, in which they’re creating a 3D map of Berlin before the fall of the wall to be used in future German and Russian courses. Working on the project with Strair and Walsh are: McGrath, Tessa Eisen '23, Jeff Hopkins, and Bronwen Densmore from LITS; Ph.D. candidate Alexis White; Mads Muller '25, Margaret Schedler '27, Yunisha Neupane '28, Eman Rasool '28, and Chloe Stephenson-Brown '26. While Muller and Schedler spent the week scanning historical maps and curating content for the digital map, other team members began prototyping 3D printed buildings and tracing out maps for the laser cutter.
The steering committee included Digital Technology Interns Fatma Ayad '28, Linh Nguyen '28, Maryam Siddiqui '27, Grace Tsai '26, and Purity Wanjiku '27, as well as Ph.D. candidate Stella Fritzell and Chris Boyland, Cameron Boucher, and Alice McGrath from LITS.
“It was delightful to bring together so many brilliant, generous people and see the collaborative sparks fly,” McGrath says. “I am so appreciative of the supportive community of ILiADS, and I think both projects really benefitted from the experience, and we enjoyed sharing them with colleagues.”