Submitted by Erin Gentry Lamb on Jul 07, 2008, 06:14 PM

You will soon be seeing many new faces -- and hearing from many new voices -- on this HASTAC blog. (In fact, you'll soon be seeing a very different sight/site when you log on to hastac.org, thanks to the hard work of the wonderful IT staff at Duke's John Hope Franklin Center.)

So whose will these faces and voices be? Those of our inaugural group of HASTAC Scholars!

The HASTAC Scholars Program was created (in conjunction with the website upgrade) to help HASTAC develop into a more dynamic and interactive virtual institution. As HASTAC itself was created to look toward the future of higher education in a digital age, it is in keeping with that vision that we turn to students today -- those who are most engaged in participatory learning -- to be our eyes and ears, our national "citizen journalists" on matters digital.

So who are HASTAC Scholars and what do they do?

HASTAC Scholars are students, both graduate and undergraduate, working across the areas of technology, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. They are nominated by those at institutions who have contributed to the leadership of HASTAC, and receive a minimal monetary award from their home institutions (since HASTAC itself has no centralized funding structures). Participating alongside dozens of their peers from institutions across the U.S. (and with some scholars reporting in from abroad), the Scholars will bring the work that is happening in their centers, campuses and beyond to the attention of the larger HASTAC community -- that is, to you -- by posting to this blog and by listing events on Needle. The Scholars will also be leading a weekly discussion forum; this might be on their own HASTAC-related work, or perhaps a virtual book discussion of something like Chris Kelty's Two Bits or the most recent issue of Vectors.

I'd like to take a moment to reaffirm that anyone who is registered to the site is welcome to blog, post events, and will be welcome to participate in the discussion forum once we have it up and running. In fact, we very much hope you will!

In conjunction with the discussion forum, we'll be featuring a HASTAC Scholar on the homepage each week. What the designation "HASTAC Scholar" may lack in financial capital, we aim to make up with cultural capital! Our intention is to help these Scholars get the sort of publicity and visibility that will help them with future job-seeking, graduate school applications, etc. We also hope we may be able to develop some conference opportunities for these students.

The nominating institutions, for their part, will be gaining national visibility for the digital learning and other HASTAC-related projects they have in the works.

And as for all of you, we hope you will enjoy the greater activity on the blog and site (and will want to participate yourselves!). You'll certainly be getting insider access to events and work happening in diverse places of which you may want to be a part.

At the moment, we are still gathering Scholar nominations, but here is a little teaser of some of the fascinating scholars you'll be hearing from in the year ahead:

James J. Brown, Jr., a graduate student in English (Computers & Writing) at UT-Austin who has helped design and develop projects like Blogging Pedagogy and Viz.
Travis Brown, a graduate student in English at the UT-Austin who was the lead developer of eComma, a collaborative annotation project.
Madeleine Casad, a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Cornell University, who is Assistant Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art.
Ian Benjamin Chapp, a graduate student in Library & Information Science at Wayne State University interested in integrating digital technology into the classroom and preserving and standardizing the digital delivery of cultural institutional holdings.
Mechelle De Craene, a special education instructor who started HASTAC on Ning and is interested in the uses of digital media for LPCE (Learning & Physically Challenged Education).
Kevin Murray Gallego, a senior in the Natural Sciences at National University studying conservation biology.
Stefanie Hirsch, a dual BA & BFA student in Art History and Fine Arts at Cornell University, whose interests include installation and media-based contemporary art.
Patrick Jagoda, a graduate student in English at Duke University whose interests include aesthetic representations of contemporary terrorism in literary, electronic, and media texts.
John Jones, a graduate student in English (Computers & Writing) at UT-Austin, who is interested in the means by which people create and distribute texts in digital environments.
Deborah Kimmey, a graduate student in English at the University of Washington who is the Program Coordinator for Keywords for American Cultural Studies at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.
Nicholas Knouf, a graduate student in Information Science at Cornell University, whose interests include the uses of mobile phones in political activism.
Eric Meyers, a graduate student in Information Science at the University of Washington whose recent work examines how preteens (ages 6-12) interact in shared virtual environments (SVEs) online.
Claudia Costa Pederson, a graduate student in the History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, whose interests include digital games for countercultural and interventionist practices.
Ryan Platt, a graduate student in Theatre Arts at Cornell University, whose interests include the use of new media in contemporary theatre, dance and performance art.
Angela Rounsaville, a graduate student in Language & Rhetoric from the University of Washington whose interests include social justice and civil rights in relation to digital and multi-media access and literacy.
Jentery Sayers, a gradute student in English from the University of Washington whose work focuses on the intermediations of sound reproduction technologies with Anglo-American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Ramsey Tesdell, a graduate student in Technical Communications and the Middle East at the University of Washington whose work explores the role of technology in social movements in the Middle East and who runs an independent media website from Jordan, 7iber.com.
Chaoting Ting, an Interdisciplinary Studies Research Assistant at the National University Community Research Institute interested in the uses of technology for community research.
Michael Widner, a graduate student in Medieval English at UT-Austin who is part of the Global Middle Ages Project.
Matthew Wilson, a graduate student in Geography at the University of Washington who investigates how geographic information technologies enable neighborhood assessment endeavors.

If you would like more information about the HASTAC Scholars Program, or if your institution might be interested in sponsoring a HASTAC Scholar, please contact me, Erin Gentry Lamb, at erin.gentry@duke.edu.

Here's looking forward to the changes ahead!

[Special thanks to Norma Desmond for this beautiful image, posted on her Flickr photostream. Please click on the image for more photos and full documentation.]