I'm Mike Nutt, the lead principal investigator for this “Visualizing Digital Scholarship in Libraries and Learning Spaces” grant. Or, as we like to call it, the Immersive Scholar project.
One of the key problems that our Visualizing Digital Scholarship grant seeks to address is that there is an "absence of a community of practice of scholars and librarians who work in large-scale multimedia prevents visually immersive scholarly work from entering the research lifecycle." While this will be a problem that we continue to tackle over the three years of the grant's activities, there are two things we're going to do right out of the gate to grow that community:
- blog about this project
- launch an email discussion list
We hope to make this grant inclusive and transparent, and these two communication channels will be an important component of that.
As we go along, we'll be blogging about our experiments and projects. It's actually part of our assessment plan: We want our work to be helpful to those outside the formal group of participants, so we're eager to receive your comments on the blog. Hopefully we can learn from each other to improve and build this nascent community of practice. Why don't you give it a try and comment below?
You can also—at this very moment!-join the Immersive Scholar Discussion List. Simply request to join here. About once a week for the last couple years, I have talked to someone at a library who is beginning the tasks of planning or operating a new visualization space. It is clear to me that we need a place where the practitioners of these spaces can talk shop with others. Done. Let's talk!
Very soon we'll be making announcements about the recipients of our subawards. We're very excited to begin work and we're happy to have you along for this journey.