This past year an informal group of librarians began meeting to discuss the intricate relationships between digital humanities (DH) and literacies—information literacy, visual literacy, digital literacy, data literacy, and the like—with the intention of fostering a larger conversation around the topic and learn more about what’s actually happening “on the ground.” The group was motivated by the desire to help librarians striving to incorporate digital pedagogy into their teaching and those seeking to engage more critically with digital forms of scholarship. To contribute to this conversation, this dh+lib special issue is seeking submissions that explore DH work, be it research, digital project creation and evaluation, or digital pedagogy, through the lens of literacies.
The aim of this special issue is to provide readers from all areas of librarianship with greater insight into the intersection of DH and literacies, therefore, please keep the audience in mind and make choices such as defining DH-specific terms or linking out to resources that provide further explanation of DH methods and concepts.
New voices and submissions from graduate students, junior scholars, instructional technologists, and others who work on the frontlines of DH and literacy work are encouraged. Perspectives from outside of the U.S. are particularly welcome. Submissions may take the form of short essays (between 750 and 1500 words long) or responses in other media that are of comparable length. Possible topics include:
- How can digital humanities tools/methods inform teaching information literacy concepts? Or vice versa?
- How do aspects of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, such as the constructed and contextual nature of authority, fit in with digital humanities work? How do digital humanities methods and scholarship create challenges for the ACRL Framework?
- How might the ACRL Framework (or other frameworks and literacies) serve as a basis for evaluating digital humanities scholarship?
- What are the threshold concepts for digital humanities?
- How might our professional literacies inform our collection practices, especially around collections as data?
- How might DH literacies inform other areas of professional practice?
- Conduct an analysis of a digital humanities project that explores the literacies and competencies necessary for its creation.
- Discuss criticisms of literacies as a concept or issues with applying a literacy framework to DH work.
Please send your proposals in the form of a 250-word abstract and a brief biographical statement for each author to the editors at dhandlib.acrl@gmail.com usi
Copyright notice: Material published on dh+lib will be covered by the CC BY-4.0 International license unless otherwise arranged with the Editors-in-Chief.
