Deep South Digital Humanities: Sharing Your Digital Collections

Deep South Digital Humanities invites you to participate in "Sharing Your Digital Collections," an online workshop for the digitally curious, on October 21st, 2022.

This workshop is free and open to the public, and no prior experience or institutional affiliation is required. If you have old family papers, letters, photographs, journals, art works, or other materials, and if you want to learn how you can build a home for them on the web, this workshop is for you.

Moreover, we have organized the workshop to make it easy to come and go. Join us for the morning, the afternoon, or the whole day, as your schedule permits. See below for more information, and feel free to share this invitation widely. To register, go here.

We much hope that you will join us, and we would be happy to answer any questions you have about this workshop or the Deep South Digital Humanities initiative.

Organizers: Hillary Richardson (Coordinator of Undergraduate Research, MUW) and Michael Pickard (Eudora Welty Chair of Southern Literature, Millsaps College)

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"Sharing Your Digital Collections"

This hands-on workshop will consist of two sessions. In the first, which will begin at 9:00am and end at noon, we'll discuss the big picture questions that drive work of this kind: among others, why should we create digital versions of paper documents in our possessions? What do or can digital archives look like, and what are the best practices for building them? How can we build them without getting (too) lost in the technological weeds? We will also discuss more practical questions: what factors should we consider when we scan a document? What kinds of equipment do we need? What is metadata and what does it help us do, once we have scanned the items in our collections? 

The second session will run from 1:00pm to 4:00pm. It will feature Devin Becker, Olivia Wikle, and Evan Williamson: a team of librarians based at the University of Idaho who have developed a project called CollectionBuilder. Put briefly, CollectionBuilder gives you everything you need to build a website for your digital collection. In this session, Becker, Wikle, and Williamson will tell you what you need to know to begin using this platform on your own. In the weeks following the workshop, they will hold three "office hours" sessions for anyone who needs additional help or consultation.