Although the Williams Digital Studio does offer student consultation with their digital projects, that is not the Studio’s only function. In addition to serving students, the Digital Studio also provides resources and support for faculty and graduate student research. Bret’s dissertation project is a vivid example of Digital Studio-supported research.

Bret writes:

Throughout the Spring 2014 semester, I have been using the FSU Digital Studio as the site for my dissertation research on knowledge transfer and materiality. I’ve been most interested in identifying connections between individuals’ tacit and explicit knowledge of the material affordances provided by the space in which they compose and the limitations of genre and media. It’s been a challenging process getting the protocols scheduled and set up, but the Studio has provided the perfect space, with available resources to help students compose on and off the screen, supporting the many diverse ways of approaching multimodal composing.

The eventual goal of my research is to articulate a better understanding of how material awareness influences the composing processes that students engage with when they compose across the contexts of print, screen, and network. Using the Mac and PC workstations along with the recording tools available in the Studio, I’ve been recording student think-aloud protocols as students work on completing remediation assignments for ENC3416: Writing and Editing in Print and Online, paying close attention to the tools, technologies, and strategies they use while writing. Using a multi-camera setup and screen recording technology, I’ve gotten to watch students work on some very smart projects and observe their writing processes in depth.

The three texts included in this section — a book chapter, a digital archive, and a journal article — speak to different aspects of digital scholarship. Namely, each text is an interesting enactment of what we mean when we say digital scholarship. This particular sample suggests that digital scholarship can mean combinations of the following activities: digital publishing, theorizing digital practices, digital methodologies, and digital composing.

As the work that ‘counts’ as scholarship moves into the digital realm,
spaces like the Digital Studio will become more integral to scholarly
life–as collaborative zones, as constituents of the technological
infrastructure, and as nodes on networks of production. These
collaborative scholarly projects were produced entirely or in part in
the Digital Studio.

Chapter in Digital Writing: Assessment and Evaluation

Included in Digital Writing, a book published through the Computers and Composition Digital Press, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Stephen J.
McElroy, and Elizabeth Powers’ “Composing, Networks, and Electronic Portfolios: Notes toward a Theory
of Assessing ePortfolios,” traces both the affordances of
electronic portfolios and the contexts in which eportfolios are
produced and viewed/read. Much of the PDF version of the chapter was produced in the Digital Studio.

FSU Card Archive

The FSU Digital Postcard Archive is a long-term project here at FSU. This project has engaged faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students in several activities: acquiring postcards; scanning, uploading, and coding postcards along the standards of the Dublin Core; developing exhibits; and writing about their work.

While the archive is administrated by Michael Neal and doctoral students Katie Bridgman and Stephen McElroy, a number of undergraduate graduate interns have also worked on the archive. They are showcased here.

As part of this project, Michael, Stephen, and Katie are also sharing their efforts at various conferences and in publications. One of those publication is the Kairos article. Through this article, Neal, Bridgman, and McElroy discuss the conception, construction, and production of the FSU Card Archive.