Digital Services

By Sean LisSean is a student assistant at the Digital Scholarship Centre and a graduate student in the Digital Humanities. If you’ve ever been on Cameron Library’s second floor, you’ll have doubtlessly encountered the glowing sign and glass walls of the Digital Scholarship Centre (DSC). If the doors are open, come take a look and maybe chat with staff; take it from me, the DSC is the place to be! Whether you…

By Amina Mohamed Amina is a student assistant at the Digital Scholarship and an undergraduate student studying the History of Art and Visual Culture. At the Digital Scholarship Centre, we often get asked: what is digital scholarship? This is a challenging question, as the definition of digital scholarship is a fluid, much-debated topic. We define Digital Scholarship as any type of research and academic learning that includes an aspect of technology. One…

In the fall of 2019, just before the pandemic disruptions began, the library opened a new area on the 2nd floor of Cameron Library called the Digital Scholarship Centre (DSC). The mission of the DSC is to advance research and learning using technology. The DSC is an official research centre and supports the University community by providing expertise, tools and space for the use of technology.  After working on an appointment basis…

The library is traditionally known as the go-to place for information and help with resources. It’s true, helping to find information is our passion, but something not as commonly known is how much teaching our librarians and staff do. This includes instruction in many free library workshops offered over the course of the academic year. During the 2020 fall term librarians taught 233 individual sessions to over 10,321 participants!  Having been a…

We get it. Navigating the intricacies of the library isn’t easy. Finding information and making use of the library’s resources is a skill that takes time to develop, but we’re here to help support you on your academic journey. On top of general assistance you can access through chat and email reference, and foundational library skill tutorials that you can access online at your leisure, the Library offers workshops throughout the school…

It has now been well over five months since a group of us University of Alberta Library staff began a data physicalization project to stitch Covid-19 data in Canada. It’s a project that we called “Stitching the Curve”. This is a little update on this data physicalization project’s progress.  To quickly recap the project, members of our team have all selected provinces to either knit or crochet. Our colleague and fellow knitter,…

By Kaia MacLeod My name is Kaia and I’m a member of the James Smith Cree Nation. When I tell people that I work as an Indigenous Intern at University of Alberta Library, not a lot of people know exactly what that means. Here is a little crash course of what my job is: I get to work on the desk in the library and work on several Indigenous themed projects. During…

By Abbie Schenk Imagine a programming workshop: students sitting behind monitors and laptops, quietly  typing line after line of code to make their computers spit out words, solve math problems, and manipulate pixels on those same screens. Their education is almost entirely contained to the virtual realm.  But a different form of computer science education has emerged in the last few years: physical computing. “A recent growth area in computer science education…

Written By Abbie Schenk When we think of data visualizations, we often think of charts, maps and other forms of expressing data in digital ways. But humans have visualized data for thousands of years, long before computer screens were invented. Some of the earliest data visualizations go back to 5500 BC when Mesopotamians used clay tokens to visualize data. Today, representing data in a physical manner is called data physicalization. The Digital…