About the Centre for Digital Scholarship

The Centre for Digital Scholarship is a hub for translating innovative digital technologies into multidisciplinary academic practice and public engagement. Building on the singularity of the University of Oxford’s world-leading researchers, collections, and technologies, the centre engages academics, students, staff and the public with digital methods.

The centre works through diverse partnerships across the Bodleian Libraries, the wider University collections, the sciences, medical sciences, social sciences, humanities, and with the community to subvert and transform scholarship and provide international leadership in the field.

• Defining and disseminating emergent digital scholarship
• Inspiring digital curiosity
• Opening imaginations

Our remit reaches all members of the University at every career stage, from undergraduate to emeritus, and across all academic disciplines, the University's collections and support services, and the people beyond the University.

If you are curious about the digital and keen to explore the possibilities digital technologies afford, come and join us!

Activity

Research

• Focus for multi-disciplinary innovation through workshops with University and visiting scholars and practitioners
• Engaging colleagues with curation to improve discovery, access, reuse, analysis, and transformation
• Showcasing new applied technologies with collections and data, providing a space to explore and experiment
• Co-design, advise, and apply digital scholarship to specific domains, with library and academic colleagues

Teaching and learning

• Focus for disseminating research, and a digital studio for recording and observing social knowledge creation
• Digitally equipped Centre for technical and scholarly engagement with collections and heritage science
• Hosted studentships undertaking and communicating research into collections with digital methods

Training

• Hosting and leading masterclasses, methods training, project development workshops, drop-ins, and code sprints
• Training in discovering, working with, and creating digitized and born-digital collections
• Complementary training for academics, tutors, students at all levels, and professional colleagues

Public engagement

• Fostering a creative and entrepreneurial community through events and citizen engagement
• Hosted and co-hosted public events: project and collection showcases, hack days, and Wikipedia editathons
• Complementing other departments’ work, bringing together physical and digital library resources

Context

Digital technologies are transforming the ways we teach, learn, and research, and communicate and create knowledge in and across all disciplines. These new approaches in digital scholarship emerge from the application of innovative digital thinking in partnership with scholars, creatively appropriating technology to address research questions in new ways and to tackle new questions. With sustainable funding, the centre will become an instantly recognizable leader in digital excellence, acting as shopfront for current and potential digital research, teaching, training, and working with collections. It offers a space and a focus for the community engaged in creative research and professional development across the University.

With its generative intersection of advanced technology, extraordinary content throughout the University collections, and deep expertise drawn from across the University, the centre provides a vital hub of innovation and engagement, defining and disseminating emergent digital scholarship. This distinctive combination is unique to the University of Oxford. The centre complements the research, teaching, and training provision and support across the Bodleian Libraries, and the wider University, working particularly closely with the Oxford e-Research Centre, the Oxford Internet Institute, and IT Services.