Information for Social Scientists - Issue 41  Tags: iss social_sciences info_for_social_scientists  

More on Connie Moon Sehat:

Sehat has a background in German history and holds a doctorate in history from Rice University. Her dissertation looked at science museums in East and West Germany and how they expressed ideas about freedom and technology. As an undergrad at the University of California in Berkeley, Connie pursued both art history and computer science. As a software designer, Sehat held positions at NASA and Lockheed Martin, designing applications for the International Space Station and Mission Control. At the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Sehat worked on the Zotero software system and the digital archive of oral histories and images from the 9/11 terrorism attacks.

For more information on Connie Moon Sehat read her profile in a recent Emory Report.

Information for Social Scientists has frequently highlighted various issues under the umbrella of "scholarly communication," including the rising costs of journals, open-access initiatives, and issues of copyright for audiovisual materials.  The recent hire of Dr. Connie Moon Sehat (pictured right) as the Director of Digital Initiatives provides a good opportunity to briefly revisit some related issues, particularly as the relate to the social sciences in the area of digital scholarship.

Digital Scholarship

What is digital scholarship, exactly?  The term digital scholarship has become a sort of umbrella for a number of inter-related concepts and practices, including the preservation, organization and access to existing and/or undiscovered or inaccessible information.  The term also refers to opportunities provided by new technologies to transform traditional research and pedagogy.

Although the field of digital scholarship has primarily focused upon the humanities, there are an abundance of applications to and opportunities for the social sciences.  For example, issues of replication and the preservation and dissemination of data are becoming more pervasive in the social sciences.  How much data is being stored on individual servers out there?  How is the data preserved and disseminated?  How is such data built upon collaboratively?  What is the role of digital repositories (currently under construction here at Emory) and elsewhere (e.g., the ICPSR) in this process?    In addition, there is the overarching question of how digital scholarship will be evaluated  in the traditional peer-review process (Ellison, 2007)* including how it will fit  into citation tools.

Library & Digital Scholarship

The role of the library in providing new tools for facilitating digital scholarship will be an essential focus of Connie Moon Sehat as the new Director of  Digital Initiatives. In Connie's short time at Emory, she has already brought an exciting new open source bibliographic management program called Zotero to campus. Sehat was one of the developers of Zotero at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Emory has now become a central partner in future Zotero development. The web-based Zotero software allows scholars to organize and view their own personal databases of research within a browser rather than offline. It saves citation information on an article being viewed and can save the item itself, as well as provide space for the researcher to make notes.

Beyond Zotero, Connie will be instrumental in the start-up of the Digital Scholarship Commons, a center for digital scholarship housed in the Emory libraries, which will provide a meeting place for faculty, graduate students and library professions to discuss and pursue digital research projects and pedagogical tools.  Connie is also in the process of developing a certificate program in digital scholarship (which will be housed in the Institute of Liberal Arts, but will be open to any graduate student). 

*Ellison, Glenn (2007) "Is Peer Review in Decline?"  NBER Working Paper No. 13272.