Participate!

GCDI brings together the work of leading scholars and technologists at the CUNY Graduate Center to pioneer new modes of inquiry that integrate digital tools and methods into the research, teaching, and service missions of the University.

The best way to connect with GCDI’s interdisciplinary community of students, faculty, scholars, and technologists is to participate in any of our initiatives:

Regardless of your level of comfort or familiarity with technology, GCDI’s activities provide a wide range of opportunities, and cultivate a community of practice that revolves around a multitude of voices and ideas.

Below are a few ways to get involved, but if you can’t find what you’re looking for, let us know.

Join us for an event!

Consult the calendar to see upcoming events and sign up online to save your seat! Each year, we sponsor a wide range of events that include internationally-recognized speakers, local artists and creators, and CUNY faculty and students. Past speakers have included Nicole Starosielski, Wendy Chun, and Doug Boyd and covered topics including Oral History and Digital Archiving, Social Media in Theory & Praxis, Musical Performance Analysis, and Activism and the Intersectional Internet.

Our events are always free and usually open to the public.

Subscribe to our calendar to follow along with all our events.

Add the following annual events to your calendar to learn more about the #DigitalGC:

  • CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative (CUNY DHI) Lightning Talks: an annual event where CUNY students, faculty, and staff share their digital projects in three minute “speed” presentations.
  • GC Digital Showcase: Each May, students from the Digital Praxis Seminar, along with recipients of the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants, and others introduce their digital scholarship. We also recap our themed series of speakers and workshops–like the GCDI Sound Series–connecting theory-driven conversation to hands-on learning.

Sign up for a workshop!

GCDI offers workshops designed to meet the needs of a broad range of interests. We offer some workshops regularly, such as “The Lexicon of Digital Humanities”–designed for those interested in a brief introduction to digital humanities–through “Introduction to Python”–a short course designed to familiarize participants with a popular programming language. Other workshops may be developed and offered in response to student interests. For a current listing of our workshops,  check out the upcoming workshops on our calendar–or better yet, subscribe to it to get future updates!

Faculty and Students, Schedule a Consultation!

Faculty and students at the Graduate Center are invited to request a consultation with the Digital Fellows to seek conceptual direction and technical advice for their digital research and pedagogy projects. Each consultation meeting typically lasts 30 to 40 minutes and is conducted via video or phone call. Request a consultation by filling out this form!

Become a member of a digital community of scholars!

An important pillar of the ethos of the GCDI community is collective, collaborative inquiry. With this in mind, we support a number of different working groups and digital communities. Join any of the specialized communities of interest in the CUNY Academic Commons and be in touch directly with peers, to help each other out in using digital tools and to share relevant information and events. Don’t have a Commons account? No problem! Signup today!

Join the GIS/Mapping Working Group, a network of CUNY students, faculty and staff who are interested in sharing methods and techniques, and finding support from others about ways GIS can be used to further research and teaching.

This semester the GIS working group will be holding co-working sessions biweekly on Thursdays. Sign up here!

Join the Python User’s Group, an open and informal collaborative space for experimentation and exploration with the Python programming language, where all interested in Python – from complete beginners to advanced users – can come to work together and find support for their projects, learn skills, tools, or just hang around.

Join the GC Humanidades Digitales, a collaboration between the Mina Rees Library and GC Digital Initiatives, this working group aims to improve the resources, information, and community around Humanidades Digitales at the CUNY Graduate Center and beyond. The group provides a space for open discussion of Humanidades Digitales (translated: Digital Humanities, DH) in Spanish-language contexts, both written in Spanish and/or in Spanish-speaking countries; and the geopolitics of DH and genealogies of DH in Spanish-language contexts. View their library guide, created by Sivia Cho of the Mina Rees Library at The GC, and Kelsey Chatlosh and Javier Otero Peña.

GC Digital Initiatives is a group on the Commons that accompanies this website and #DigitalGC initiative at the Graduate Center. Here, members of the GC community can share news of recent and upcoming events, new projects, collaborative or job opportunities and begin to build connections with each other and between projects related to digital humanities, broadly conceived.

NYCDH brings together New York City scholars and members of the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) community to talk about, experiment with, collaborate on, teach and learn about, and just generally commune around the digital humanities.

CUNY DHI aims to build connections and community among those at CUNY who are applying digital technologies to scholarship and pedagogy in the humanities. All are welcome: faculty, students, and technologists, experienced practitioners and beginning DHers, enthusiasts and skeptics. We meet regularly on- and offline to explore key topics in the Digital Humanities, and share our work, questions, and concerns.

The following groups are currently in hibernation for Spring 2024!

Join the R User’s Group, a place for newbies and experts alike to learn and work together on projects using the statistical programming language, R. Do you want to learn the best practices for creating a reproducible workflow but don’t know where to begin? Struggling to figure out the best methods for wrangling a messy data set? Want to build a clean and professional website using free and open-source tools? We can do all this and more using R! Join us to learn how to unlock the full potential of the R ecosystem.

Join the Digital Archives Research Collective (DARC), a platform that aims to address the needs of students, faculty, and communities working on archival research at The Graduate Center. Our primary goal is to assist in the creation of digital archives and exhibitions. We also provide resources (in the form of tutorials, best practices, and workshops) on the archival research process itself. We foster community building among digital archivists and researchers at The Graduate Center, by promoting projects and facilitating communication across disciplines and institutional settings. In the 2020-2021 academic year, GCDI has tailored its programming based on the needs of students who have seen their research plans disrupted by the pandemic. We will be hosting monthly meetings to help students strategize and address some of the issues they are facing, check out our calendar!

Join the Sound Studies and Methods Working Group is a network of CUNY students, faculty, and staff who are interested in sharing theories, methods, and techniques related to doing qualitative and quantitative research, teaching, storytelling, and creating art with sounds and audio files, and finding resources and support from others to do so. The group is open to scholars from all disciplines to explore ways that we as researchers and makers can study and use sound in our scholarship and pedagogy.

Join the Digital Dissertations Group, an open and informal collaborative space for folx interested in doing a digital dissertation or creating a digital component to the more “traditional” dissertation project. Beyond a working group and a collaborative space, we hope to also design and support events, resources, and guidelines that are related to digital dissertations. Whether you’re thinking about your proposal or depositing your digital dissertation, we would love to have you join our group! 

Can’t find the community you were looking for? Check the CUNY Academic Commons – a group may already exist! If it doesn’t exist, create it yourself! We’d be happy to promote it and help it grow, so be sure to contact us afterwards to include it in this list.

Attend an Institute!

Hosted by the GC Digital Fellows and part of the GC Digital Initiatives, the GC Digital Research Institute (GC DRI) is a week-long intensive training course where participants learn core digital research skills and tools (including command line, GitHub, python and more) while connecting with peers in an interdisciplinary environment.

Want to review or practice the curriculum on your own? We’ve made our workshops self-navigable and have shared them on the institute’s website.

Apply for Grants & Fellowships!

Doctoral students are eligible for small grants to support travel, training and developments of digital inflected scholarship and projects. Calls for participation are circulated in the Fall semester for Spring semester funding. Learn more about past projects and start preparing your application!

GCDI has three fellowship programs: GC Digital Fellows, Program Social Media Fellows and Videography Fellows. Applications are circulated in Spring for Fall, year-long appointments. Learn more about our fellowship programs and apply in the next round!

Join one of our Academic Programs!

There are a number of academic programs associated with or spawned from GCDI. These programs combine digital training with disciplinary learning to provide specialized skills for emerging fields of study.

Learn more on our Degrees & Certificates page.