The Graduate Center Digital Initiatives (GCDI) and GC Digital Fellows have been hard at work developing resources, events, workshops, and opportunities to help you continue to learn and develop your digital scholarly projects. This post includes a recap of January and a glimpse of GCDI and the GC Digital Fellows’ upcoming programming and services.
January’s Successful GC Digital Research Institute
We began 2025 gathering (virtually) at the GC Digital Research Institute (DRI). For four cold days from January 21 to January 24, we made our favorite warm drinks, wrapped ourselves around our laptops, and supported each other on our annual digital skills adventure. We taught and learned skills like HMTL/CSS, Python, command line, digital mapping, data literacies, and more alongside more than 30 attendees. The DRI curriculum is hosted on DRIFT and is available openly to everyone to learn, review, and improve your skills!
Where to find us
This semester, we are updating and revising some of our programs and services to better meet the needs of the GC Community. Join us at one of our virtual or in-person workshops, request a one-on-one consultation with a GC Digital Fellow, and visit us during our weekly virtual digital scholarship drop-in hours.
Are you interested in finding communities of scholars working on a specific platform or digital scholarship methodology? Check out our GC Digital Fellow supported working groups on the CUNY Academic Commons.
Want to keep up to date on all the GCDI happenings? Be sure to join our GCDI Group on the Commons, subscribe to our calendar, follow us on LinkedIn, check out our Linktr.ee, and be on the lookout for regular updates about our programs shared through your program’s listserv. It’s always good to know what’s going on with the GCDI, because you, yes you, are the #digitalGC.
Spring 2025 Opportunities
Workshops
This semester, GCDI will offer hands-on in-person and remote online workshops on digital research tools for people of all skill levels. Workshops are free and open to any member of the Graduate Center community. (Learn how to get the most out of our workshops.) Registration is required, you can select the workshop on the calendar and complete the workshop RSVP.
Workshops will run from February to April. They include:
Introduction to TEI (Text Encoding Initiative)
Wed. Feb. 19 | Online | 5 pm – 7 pm.
Mapping 1: Beginners intro to ArcGIS Storymaps
Wed. Feb. 26 | Online | 2 pm – 4 pm.
Thurs. Feb. 27 | Online| 5 pm – 7 pm
Thurs. March 6 | In Person | 4 pm – 5:30 pm
Multimodal storytelling with Knight Lab tools
Tues. March 11 | Online | 4 pm – 5:30 pm
Wed. March 19 | Online | 2 pm – 4 pm
Data About Data: Best Practices for Metadata
Mon. March 24 | Online | 12 pm – 2 pm
Mapping 2: Advanced GIS–Visualizations
Wed. April 9 | In Person | 12 pm – 2 pm
In order to be as responsive as possible (workshop space is limited), please:
1) Be sure to RSVP to the workshops.
2) If you realize you can’t make it, please RSVP again with the “Can’t go” option.
Digital Scholarship Drop-in Hour
Are you working on learning a digital skill? Having trouble with some code? Do you have questions regarding a digital project, or are you seeking reviews about using a digital tool? This semester, drop-in (virtually) on Mondays from 11 am to 1 pm to engage your curiosity, troubleshoot challenges, and grow our community. Look at our calendar and follow our website news page for updates on in-person drop in hours in the future!
One-on-one Consultations
Have a question about your digital project? Thinking of including digital tools in your scholarship or teaching? GCDI staff are available to meet in-person at the GC and/or remotely with GC students, faculty, and staff to talk through technical challenges, digital skills, or simply brainstorm. Sign up for a 30-minute consultation through this form.
Looking for a community to learn with?
We have several working groups that focus on specific interests. Working groups are composed of students, faculty, and staff who are looking for other scholars with similar interests to share resources, advice, and opportunities. These interdisciplinary groups connect through the CUNY Academic Commons.
These groups include the Python User’s Group (PUG), the GIS/Mapping Working Group, the R User’s Group (RUG), the Digital Archives Research Collective (DARC), Humanidades Digitales (DH in Spanish), the Digital Dissertations Group and the Sound Studies and Methods Working Group. No experience is needed to join; only an interest in the central topic and community. Do also check out our blog post on how to get the most out of our working groups.
Want to get involved beyond the Graduate Center? Visit our Participate page to learn more about each of these groups and groups across CUNY and NYC!
CUNY and GC Resources
Manifold Scholarship
As CUNY students, you have free use of the open source, digital publishing platform, Manifold. Manifold is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded collaboration between the GC, University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding. On CUNY’s instance of Manifold you can publish your own scholarship (searching for mami & abuelita – dissertation, Queer and Trans Prison Voices – capstone), journals (Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy JITP), Open Education Resources (OER) such as: archival projects (Let My People Know, Realizing the Dream of a Black University), class projects & course materials (Black Diasporic Visions, Modern Art and OER Writing Seminar, Archives Unbound) teaching editions of public domain texts (The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass), teaching handbooks (Teach@CUNY Handbook), and creative work such as poetry or personal essays (When We Had Cancer).
Manifold projects are multimedia friendly and texts built in Manifold may be annotated using Manifold’s built-in social annotation tool. To learn about the project, its development, and the institutions using it, follow Manifold on GitHub, join the Manifold Users group on the CAC, and check out our Quick Guides, documentation and walkthroughs to get started using Manifold! If you have questions about using Manifold please contact Robin Miller or Manifold Graduate Fellows Cen Liu and Maura McCreight.
CUNY Academic Commons
As a CUNY student, you are eligible to register for an account on the CUNY Academic Commons. The Commons is a CUNY-created and run platform for building websites, collaborating with groups, and connecting with peers across the university. Faculty, staff, and students at CUNY use the Commons to teach and take courses, create academic portfolios, host websites for their research projects or academic departments, and more! To learn more, check out the Commons’ About page, read the latest Commons News releases, browse featured groups and sites, and visit the Commons’ HELP pages for support with getting started.
GCDI Online Resources
If you find yourself unable to attend a particular workshop, there are a number of asynchronous GCDI resources you can use! Our resources include tutorials, handouts, and reflections that cover topics such as tools, methods as data and databases, research design, mapping, programming (including python and R), project management, sound recording, sharing, and analysis, text analysis, and web development.
- Please visit the Digital Resource Guide for materials by current and former Digital Fellows.
- Check out the Digital Fellows’ Tagging the Tower blog for posts like:
- Racialized Aspects of Data Collection & Data Use by Peyton Cordero
- What is metadata, and why does it matter? by Maggie Schreiner
- Tidying Data Using tidyverse in R by Chen Zhou
- AI is everywhere; is it in qualitative research, too? Potentials, Pitfalls, and Open-Source Solutions (Part 1) by Parisa Setayesh
- 6 Tools for Digital Safety in the Age of Surveillance by Anna Corbett
- 10 Useful Extensions for VSCode by Zachary Lloyd
- WordPress: How to create content by Silvia Rivera Alfaro
- A Conceptual Guide to Digital Academic Identity by Stefano Morello
- Additional resources include the Digital Archive Research Collective, the Digital Dissertations Resource Guide, the entire curriculum of the GC Digital Research Institute AND the Digital Humanities Research Institute.
Stay in touch!
The best way to stay connected is to check the GCDI website regularly. There, you will find all of our workshops, events, and grant opportunities on our calendar, as well as a slew of online resources to support your work this semester.
Please don’t hesitate to contact the Digital Fellows [email protected] with questions!
With best wishes for a productive and smooth semester,
your Digital Fellows,
Anna, Chen, Maggie, Parisa, Peyton, Silvia, Tuka, and Zach
Note: This post by GC Digital Fellow Tuka Al-Sahlani is revised and updated from the post by GC Digital Fellows Rebecca Krisel in 2023, Zachary Lloyd in 2022, Param Ajmera in 2021 and Stefano Morello and Olivia Ildefonso for fall 2020. Previous versions were written or updated by Jojo Karlin for spring 2018, Kelsey Chatlosh in fall 2018, Javier Otero Peña in the spring of 2019, and Kristen Hackett in fall of 2019.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
