Scheduled for 2:30-3:20 in Room 601, 66 W 12th Street

In 2013, the American Historical Association put out a statement encouraging graduate programs and university libraries to allow students to embargo their dissertations for up to 6 years. They wrote, “History has been and remains a book-based discipline, and the requirement that dissertations be published online poses a tangible threat to the interests and careers of junior scholars in particular.” I propose a session where we talk about open access and the history dissertation. I’d like the conversation to include many different voices, from grad students to librarians to professors. Some potential questions I’m interested in exploring include:

Why might graduate students want to make their dissertation open access?

How can history departments and libraries work together to ensure that graduate students know and understand the different options for distributing their work?

What’s the main purpose of a history dissertation anyways?

Scheduled for 3:30-4:20 in Room 601, 66 W 12th Street

In this session, I’m interested in exploring Tumblr as an introductory platform for digital scholarship. This session will provide an overview of the platform, strong examples of use rooted in scholarship and access, and finally select and post sample content to our own test blog using open access materials.

This session will take a closer look at a popular social media powerhouse made for the presentation of multimedia materials, and how the DH community can take full advantage of the platform. Flexible, intuitive, and familiar to many new users, this platform supports clear opportunities for scholarship through design, display, discovery, and description. This session aims to provide an overview of the key features of this platform, as well as outline the opportunities presented by the platform for scholarship and creation within the DH community.