CERES Call for Proposals 2017

January 31, 2017

 

 

Call for General CERES Proposals

The Digital Scholarship Group (DSG) invites Northeastern faculty, staff, and students to submit project proposals for the next round of CERES: Exhibit Toolkit development. We welcome proposals that explore new and interesting ways to create thematic collections of digital materials and research, published as website exhibits.

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. Digital materials may be drawn from Northeastern’s Digital Repository Service (DRS) or the Digital Public Library of America, and potentially from other open repositories as well. Accepted projects will partner with the DSG and DRS teams to use CERES to securely store their project materials in the DRS and create a customized WordPress site to publish those materials on the web.

In 2017 the DSG will be extending and refining many of our existing Toolkit features, based on the proposals we accept. Projects especially suited to this call for this year’s proposals may:

 

Call for CERES Classroom proposals

We are excited to announce a new program of support for classroom use of the CERES: Exhibit Toolkit. We invite proposals from faculty for courses to be held in Fall 2017 and Spring 2018. The deadline for proposals is March 31.

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 or the Early Caribbean Digital Archive

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 April 30, 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, contact us at dsg@northeastern.edu. We look forward to working with you!

 

Application Details

If you have a project idea, we’d love to hear from you! Please take a few minutes to apply by answering some questions about your project on our application form.

The deadline for project proposals is March 31.

We will give special consideration to projects whose materials are already digitized, and to smaller-scale projects with simpler requirements.

We will schedule meetings with applicants to discuss proposals in more detail and we will make the final selection by mid-April. Projects will be typically be completed by June 2018 or sooner.

Project Development

For selected projects, we will schedule planning meetings in April and May to discuss scope and to do initial training and orientation. Work on these projects will start in summer 2017, with specific schedules to be worked out in discussion with each project. Project participants will work actively with the DSG on project development; the DSG will provide training, consultation, design assistance, and coordination as needed with Archives and Special Collections and with the Digital Repository Service.

 

Past Projects

Since the creation of the CERES: Exhibit Toolkit in 2015, we have had several successful project implementations, including:

In addition to fully launched projects, we have several works in progress and pilots sites, which have been used as pedagogical tools, to help seek grant funding, present research at conferences, and to showcase materials held by the library. These include:

  • Dragon Prayer Book (Erika Boeckeler, Department of English)
  • Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (NULawLab, School of Law)
  • Early Black Boston Digital Almanac (Nicole Aljoe, Department of English)
  • Early Caribbean Digital Archive (NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks.)
  • Holocaust Awareness Week Programming (Holocaust Awareness Committee)
  • Spectrum Literary Magazine Archive

 

Contact Us and Apply!

The application form can be found here.

If you have questions, the DSG staff are glad to meet and discuss project proposals before the deadline; please contact us at DSG@northeastern.edu to set up a meeting.

Please visit the DRS Resources page for more information about the DRS. If you don’t think the CERES: Exhibit Toolkit is right for your project, but you are still interested in securely storing project files in the DRS, please contact Sarah Sweeney.

 

About CERES

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.