The Northeastern University Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) invites Northeastern faculty to submit project proposals for classroom use of the CERES Exhibit Toolkit.

CERES enables the creation of complex digital exhibits based on materials stored in Northeastern’s Digital Repository Service (DRS) and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and potentially from other open repositories as well. We invite proposals from faculty who want to incorporate a digital exhibit assignment into courses in Fall 2018 and Spring 2019. The deadline for proposals is April 30, 2018.

The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is a WordPress plugin and theme developed by DSG staff. CERES is used to create websites that dynamically integrate images, text, video, and other digital materials into complex scholarly narratives and exhibits, while keeping those base digital materials preserved in a long-lasting archive. Visit our projects page for a full list of sites and exhibits that have been built using CERES.

Classroom use of CERES might take many forms, including:

• ~ Having students contribute exhibits (singly or in groups) to a long-term cumulative project that might persist from year to year: for example, focusing on a particular set of archival materials
• ~ Having students work on curating a set of archival materials relating to an existing CERES project: for instance, adding georeferencing information to enable the creation of dynamic maps
• ~ Having students contribute exhibits to one of the existing CERES projects that invites contributions, such as the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac

To support classroom use of CERES, DSG offers training for faculty and teaching assistants in using CERES, and can visit the class and provide instruction or lead discussion about the exhibit-building process and tools. We have an extensive set of supporting materials including step-by-step instructions, how-to guides, and sample assignments. We are also happy to work with faculty on planning out syllabi and lesson plans that make imaginative use of these digital tools, at whatever scale works best for the learning objectives of the course.

Applicants will be notified by May 31, 2018, and we will schedule planning meetings in early summer. We are happy to meet with anyone interested in submitting a proposal to talk about possibilities. For more information, please contact us at dsg@neu.edu.

Apply here. We look forward to working with you!

The DSG is currently engaged in a long-term strategy to build a repository infrastructure that supports community engagement with digital materials: the Community Enhanced Repository for Engaged Scholarship (CERES). This new repository will support what we have identified as the most common tasks in the digital humanities workspace: annotating, cataloging, text encoding, proofreading, transcribing, translating, and publishing. The end result will be a contributory and collaborative repository environment for many types of users, which ideally will encourage community engagement with digital objects. The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is one component of this new repository infrastructure that will allow CERES project teams to easily publish their materials on the web.