Using digital technologies and tools to tackle complex inquiries into cultural and social problems.

Working group members: Thomas Hodgson and Chris Johanson

Publication, performance, archiving, and other scholarly and creative work that fundamentally rely on digital technology are now pervasive. Moreover, projects that involve innovation in publication, access, and the transformation of digital media are necessarily collaborative, involving individual researchers, research teams (sometimes extramural), libraries and archives, university presses, and campus IT resources, including both hardware and specialized software. The work of digital scholarship and creative activities can include developing, supporting, or implementing interfaces to archival materials, interactive digital arguments and data visualizations, 3D virtual worlds, digital cartography and GIS, virtual and augmented performances, digital museums, AI-generated art, textual and image analysis at scale, digital teaching resources, game-development in the service of disabled communities, and the like. 

The objectives of this working group are to 1) Improve the infrastructure and communities to support development of and access to digital holdings, code, born-digital publications, exhibitions, performances, and IT resources, which remain inchoate and under-supported; 2) Lower barriers to the world’s knowledge and archival collections, including UCLA holdings, much of which have yet to be digitized and made usable through contemporary means;  3)  Encourage and support the acquisition, creation and operation of research-specific systems and instrumentation for the arts and humanities, which are increasingly critical to the creative practice and scholarship of UCLA faculty, but lack (largely) the government support mechanisms available to the sciences. We seek to build a community of practice through which UCLA-based researchers–including scholars, media-makers, performers, and other creative artists–can discuss current projects, plan collaborative endeavors, and advocate for, engage with, and amplify existing digital infrastructure in support of a broad range of research and creative activities.