Between October 4-6, 2018, 100+ participants gathered at Bucknell University's Elaine Langone Center for the fifth annual digital scholarship conference.
In the opening keynote address, Kelley Kreitz, Assistant Professor of English at Pace University, engaged with the challenges facing creators and maintainers of digital scholarship archives. She used her background as the co-founder of Babble Lab, a digital humanities center at Pace, and extensive teaching experience to ask each of us to question our assumptions about access and availability for digital materials.
Whitney Quesenbery, co-founder at the Center for Civic Design, shared her experiences working on human computer interaction and design over the past 30 years. She described the lengthy history and activism by previous technologists to make accessibility a key part of computer design. Her message was that accessibility is achievable in digital projects, we just have to devote the necessary resources to accomplish our goals.
#BUDSC18 brought together a community of practitioners–faculty, researchers, librarians, artists, educational technologists, students, administrators, and others–committed to promoting access to and through digital scholarship. We considered “access” in the broadest possible terms: accessible formats and technologies, access through universal design for learning, access to a mode of expression, access to stories that might not otherwise be heard or that might be lost over time, access to understanding and knowledge once considered beyond reach.