The Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) has recently updated and published the 2020 ECDS Dashboard, which showcases projects, publications, pedagogy, consultations, and events from the 2020 calendar year. The inaugural dashboard published last year highlighted work from the center’s 2017-2019 biennial report, but this year we switched to an annual format. Although most of our staff worked remotely for the majority of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic (as the Dashboard attests) ECDS nonetheless remained incredibly productive as we conducted 770 consultations/class visits, presented 31 workshops with over 700 attendees, completed and worked on 24 projects and media productions, and continued our partnerships with 15 external organizations. In addition to shining a spotlight on selected projects and platforms, journal publications, and more, the 2020 ECDS Dashboard also includes new sections that highlight how the center responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and issues of race, equity, and social justice raised by the Black Lives Matter movement and other events. ECDS Digital Project Specialist Adam P. Newman compiled these project highlights and statistics and built the Dashboard with help from Yang Li, Senior Software Engineer, and Amy Li, Communications Specialist.
- 2020 ECDS Dashboard: ecdsdashboard.webflow.io
As Newman notes, ECDS is “always engaged in so many different kinds of work, [such] that it can honestly be hard to keep up with it all. The idea behind the Dashboard is to provide those interested in our center with a quick overview of efforts from the past year in one convenient place.”
ECDS responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by seamlessly transitioning our operations and offerings to virtual platforms (including online workshops and consultations via Zoom) as well as engaging with the topic of the pandemic itself through select projects and publications. For example, as the reality of the pandemic became clear in March 2020, ECDS Senior Video Producer Steve Bransford collaborated with the Emory University School of Medicine’s Visual Medical Education (VME) team and Emory’s Serious Communicable Diseases Program (SCDP) to create a set of videos instructing medical personnel on the conservation and use of personal protective equipment (PPE).
We also continued our long-standing partnership with the National Emerging Special Pathogens Training and Education Center (NETEC). ECDS Digital Projects Specialist Joanna Mundy and other staff members assisted in adding new COVID-19 resources to NETEC’s online resource repository that ECDS previously helped develop. These educational and training materials are intended to help health care workers, public health professionals, and U.S. health care facilities deal with emerging special pathogens.
ECDS-supported journals continued to publish insightful and timely articles and multimedia work throughout 2020. For example, the Journal of Humanities in Rehabilitation (JHR) Fall 2020 issue debuted a themed series dedicated to the lived experiences of people caught in the COVID-19 pandemic. They also published and announced the creation of a themed series dedicated to anti-racism and social justice in each JHR issue moving forward. Both Atlanta Studies and Southern Spaces continued to confront issues of race and social justice in Atlanta and the U.S. South, which you can read about in a section of the ECDS Dashboard titled “Race, Equity and Social Justice.”
In 2020, ECDS offered 31 workshops that were attended by 706 members of the Emory community. Those workshops covered topics ranging from the use of specific software (R, Tableau, ArcGIS) to the design of effective infographics. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of these workshops were offered virtually. A number of these workshops were offered via our continuing partnerships with the Institute for Quantitative Theory and Methods (QTM) at the Emory College of Arts and Sciences.
We also continued to offer graduate student pedagogy training through the popular Emory Foundations of Online Teaching (EFOT) program. EFOT is a partnership between ECDS and the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence (ECDS), supported by the Laney Graduate School’s Office of Professional Development and Career Planning. The five-week long course has provided hundreds of graduate students with training in online teaching since 2014, and we saw an increased demand for EFOT in Summer 2020 in the wake of COVID-19 and the sudden switch to online teaching. Thanks to EFOT, many students were better equipped to teach their courses virtually in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021.
You can learn about even more ECDS projects, initiatives, and partnerships on the ECDS Dashboard at: ecdsdashboard.webflow.io