Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship
Leading Practitioners Explore and Present Recommendations on Improving Support, Access, and Sustainability of Digital Scholarship Related to Social and Racial Justice
Beginning in November 2021, the ACLS Digital Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship, chaired by Professor Marisa Parham (University of Maryland, College Park) convened both virtually and in person to discuss questions of equitable access in the creation of, access to, and sustainability of digital resources and projects related to social and racial justice. Funded by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, this assembly of leading scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and university administrators have worked with ACLS Vice President James Shulman and Carol Mandel, Dean Emerita of the NYU Libraries and with participants in 23 focus groups. The Commission’s report includes a wide-ranging series of recommendations for change within the ecosystem of institutions and infrastructures in which digital resources and scholarship are created, shared, and maintained over time.
Rather than keeping to the notion of infrastructure as limited to the hardware and software that determines the form of digital scholarship, infrastructure has instead been discussed as intersecting sets of dependencies and capacities. The Commission acknowledges an ecosystem where work is distributed and decentralized; where initiatives are independent, entrepreneurial, and often cocreated with communities outside of a campus. Providing recommendations for building resilient infrastructures—financial, technological, institutional, relational, and more—that support scholarship, research, cultural memory, accessibility, archiving, and preservation is one of the Commission’s most pressing charges. Most importantly, everyone involved in sustaining digital work needs to grapple with those historical legacies that have marginalized some fields of study both within and outside of the digital realm.
ACLS staff are excited to continue to work with colleagues and organizations across the sector to advance this work and to follow the first steps of the Commission’s recommendations.
Download the full report
Members of the Commission
Edward Ayers
University Professor of the Humanities and Executive Director of New American History, University of Richmond
Lisa Brooks
Henry S. Poler ‘59 Presidential Teaching Professor of English and American Studies, Amherst College
Kimberly Christen
Professor and Director, Digital Technology and Culture Program & Director, Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, Washington State University
Dan Cohen
Vice Provost/Dean of the Library and Professor of History, Northeastern University
Maria Eugenia Cotera
Associate Professor of Mexican American and Latino Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
Meredith Evans
74th President of the Society of American Archivists
Maryemma Graham
Founding Director of Project on the History of Black Writing and BBIP Lead & Distinguished Professor of English, University of Kansas
Joshua Greenberg
Program Director, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Charles J. (Chuck) Henry
President, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)
May Hong HaDuong
Director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, University of California – Los Angeles
Bergis Jules
Archivist, Shift Collective & Project Director, Documenting the Now
Marisa Parham (Chair)
Visiting Professor of English & Director of the African American Digital Humanities Initiatives (AADHUM), University of Maryland – College Park
Kenton Rambsy
Associate Professor of African American Literature and Digital Humanities, Howard University
K.J. Rawson
Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies & Coordinator of Digital Integration Teaching Initiative, Northeastern University
Roopika Risam
Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College
Claire Stewart
Dean of Libraries and University Librarian, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Gabriela Baeza Ventura
Professor of Hispanic Literature and Spanish, University of Houston; Executive Editor, Arte Público Press and co-founder, US Latino Digital Humanities
Ben Vinson III
President, Howard University
Charles Watkinson
Associate University Librarian for Publishing, University of Michigan Library & Director, University of Michigan Press
Stacie Williams
Archives and Libraries
Jewon Woo
Associate Professor of English, Lorain County Community College
