This libguide was created in 2024 by Resident Librarians: Amelia Costello and Natasha Griffin.
Digital scholarship, also called digital research here at AU, is a mode of scholarship that involves using a wide range of digital tools and methods to conduct research. Digital scholarship is interdisciplinary, creating the opportunity for a wide range of digital research project formats including podcasts, videos, websites, data visualization, mapping, text mining, and more.
With an understanding that digital research can be completed in any area of study, this guide aims to help you navigate your project options and provide the necessary tools to succeed. It will cover ways to choose what type of digital publication to use, resources that will help you create those types of projects, and citation and copyright information for digital research projects.
Digital Humanities is a form of digital research that encourages combining research, teaching, and specifically the promotion of humanities in digital spaces.
For example, let's say you are interested in the historical impacts of fast fashion. Creating a digital project like a podcast or video essay to engage others in your research is illustrating the "Digital Humanities" approach. You are participating in "Digital Scholarship" by creating your product (podcast, video essay, etc.) while also conducting your research through humanities lens of fast fashion.
Below are more examples of project types that fall within the realm of digital humanities.
Image from Edinburgh University Press
Image from Great Visual Arguments
Visual Rhetoric is a part of the larger concept of Visual Literacy and refers to the use of images and other visual elements. Visual rhetoric goes beyond just looking at images themselves and analyzing design choices, it looks at how these images are used to convey meaning, build an argument, work in specific contexts, etc.
Here is an example of visual rhetoric for an advertisement that says "Destroying nature is destroying life." Think about this image and the design choices of it, what are they trying to convey?