The DSG was founded in 2015 by Gabriel Pizzorno, faculty in the Department of History, and Jeffrey P. Emanuel, Associate Director of Academic Technology, with charter members also representing the Harvard Library and Arts & Humanities Research Computing. Initially conceived as a way to formalize work that had coalesced around a series of digital initiatives in History and Academic Technology, the DSG developed more or less organically as a means to address the lack of generalized, accessible, consistent, and discoverable support for Digital Scholarship at Harvard, particularly for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Since 2015, the Digital Scholarship Group has brought together faculty and staff representing over a dozen units from across the University to coordinate, design, and support digital methods and instruction, innovative research methods, and world-class technical infrastructure at Harvard.
The DSG draws from an extensive network of in-house expertise to increase the impact of digital scholarship initiatives in research, teaching, and learning. Over its first four years, DSG members have pooled their resources to kickstart a number of new initiatives, including offering a series of introductory and advanced Digital Scholarship workshops, providing research support via drop-in office hours, and organizing and hosting the inaugural edition of a regional symposium highlighting multidisciplinary research and teaching.
The DSG also partners with the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning to coordinate the Digital Teaching Fellows program, which trains graduate students and pairs them with faculty members. This program facilitates the integration of digital tools and methods into FAS courses, sparking innovative digital active learning projects, and fostering new models for faculty-student interaction.
Finally, the group serves as a single point of entry to a broad network of individuals who are transforming the landscape of digital scholarship at Harvard.
The report linked below, Digital Scholarship at Harvard: The First Four Years of the Digital Scholarship Support Group, documents the DSG's growth and impact from 2015 to 2019, outlines its ongoing activities, and envisions a future for digital scholarship at Harvard.
