2020-2023 Strategic Plan

IDAH abbr. /ai-dʌ/ n. The Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities supports the critical appropriation and critique of technologies and digitally-inflected methods as they INTERSECT with and ALTER humanities endeavors, artistic creation, and scholarly communication.

ABOUT OUR STRATEGIC PLAN

Our current iteration of our strategic plan maps out a path for IDAH's growth and development over the next three years. This document was developed by IDAH staff, with input from OVPR leadership and an external review committee as part of our Fall 2020 external review. In the interest of transparency and collaborative scholarship, we are publishing our plan here for public viewing. If you'd like, you can also view the original PDF version of our strategic plan through Google Drive.

OUR VISION

Foster digitally-inflected creative pursuits, research, and teaching for faculty and students who represent a broadly inclusive constituency across the arts and humanities, whether they are experimenting for the first time with digital methods or advancing a project for public or scholarly audiences, through thoughtful critique and inclusive approaches.

OUR VALUES

As the boundaries between technology and lived experience increasingly blur, arts and humanities are an integral part of understanding and shaping this blended world. As such we value:

CONNECTION, COMMUNICATION, AND COLLABORATION

We prioritize people, and the connections between people and partners at the heart of digital arts and humanities pursuits, with a focus that aims to connect our primary audience at IU to the larger digital arts & humanities fields. We commit to communication modesthat support our faculty and students as they explore digital methods, whether novice or expert, through knowledge-sharing, constructive discourse, and intentional listening.  We promote reciprocal collaborations as a way of acknowledging and mutually benefitting from shared expertise and intellectual labor as our faculty and students execute new or pursue existing digital projects.

  • Provide a campus-wide front door, both physical and virtual, for faculty and students who seek support, consulting, and publicity in their digital arts and humanities pedagogy and research efforts

  • Build and maintain pipelines that support IDAH infrastructure in four key areas: outreach programming, collaborative research, digital pedagogy and digital publishing

  • Advance IDAH’s role beyond IU by supporting affiliate research and creative activity at the local, regional, national, and international level.

  • Focus IDAH outreach to digital arts and humanities communities outside IU on our local strengths of community-building and scholar empowerment, research consultation, and pedagogy.

  • Adopt engaging and multi-modal forms of outreach through in-person and online channels as a way to expand our affiliates and partnerships

  • Invite other campus administrative units like the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, Jacobs School of Music, and the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education to directly support IDAH programs focused on digital arts and digital pedagogy 

  • Continue to build on existing programs such as consultations, fellowships and scholarships in closer partnership with other centers on campus

  • Continue to offer responsive professional development opportunities as part of IDAH’s speaker series and workshop programming

  • Extend the reach of our local collaborations by participating in state, regional, national and international networks of digital arts and humanities consortia or partnerships. 

  • Encourage our affiliates to extend the reach of their work to digital arts & humanities communities outside of IU by promoting and collaborating in outward-facing opportunities

EXPLORATION, EXPERTISE, AND ENACTMENT

We encourage multifaceted artistic and humanistic exploration, centering creative aspirations and research inquiry as a way to determine technologically-driven modes of analysis and discovery. We support the appropriation of digital arts and humanities methods at ALL LEVELS of expertisethrough an agile, guided approach to digitally-inflected artistic creation and humanistic inquiry. We help our faculty and students achieve their vision through staged enactments of their projects with an eye toward future resources for ongoing project development.

  • Create curriculum-building conduits for undergraduates, graduates, and faculty that advances digital teaching, research, and creative practices

  • Grow digital arts and humanities expertise by seeding departments with experts and enthusiasts through degree specializations and certifications, networking, grantmaking, and skill-building.

  • Encourage responsive sustainability by acknowledging the role IDAH plays in making space at IU for scholarly and creative activities in established, emerging and exploratory digital research methods, pedagogy, and creative production. Support these endeavors through innovative publishing and communication solutions in digital arts and humanities.

  • Support exploratory and emerging digital arts and humanities projects via residencies, exhibition- and grant-making opportunities, and targeted programming

  • Further develop our digital-pedagogy-as-research program, providing paths from classrooms to publications or public digital humanities projects

  • Expand promotion of the Digital Arts & Humanities graduate certificate and minor; provide greater curricular opportunities for undergraduates in IDAH through internships, independent studies and the HASTAC program

  • Invest in the professional development of IDAH staff, with a focus on understanding the needs of graduate assistants who will continue their careers beyond IU and using those lessons to inform other graduate and undergraduate formal and informal curricular initiatives

  • Continue to fund research programs at the graduate and undergraduate level such as the HASTAC Scholarships and the IDAH Graduate Fellowship; expand opportunities for both of these audiences

EQUITY, INCLUSIVITY, AND JUSTICE

We elevate voices that are historically marginalized while being mindful of intentional silences. We will prioritize opportunities for just and equitable partnerships with underrepresented communities to amplify these stories. We advocate for inclusivity at multiple levels, from facilitating access to computing resources that are traditionally circumscribed to engaging in recovery and reparative work with our faculty and students. We aim to create an environment in which methods core to the arts and humanities—argumentation, critique, storytelling—can shape or reshape computing systems and practices in support of justice.

  • Understand the digital-methods needs of partners in public and cultural heritage spaces to amplify voices that inform our scholarly record

  • Consider minimal- and alternate-computing approaches that allow for greater participation by and expand the work of all communities

  • Acknowledge the intellectual value of collaborative practices of digital arts and humanities and the corresponding labor at all levels of contribution

  • Promote the work and values associated with public-facing projects with equal emphasis on process and product contributed by undergraduate, graduate, contingent, and non-academic partners

  • Advocate for digitally-inflected public humanities projects as a way to engage with questions surrounding social justice 

  • Support open-access projects to raise awareness, increase impact, and expand our audiences though not at the expense of ethical concerns

  • Increase partnerships with memory-making, cultural heritage, and non-profit centers outside of the academy

  • Introduce lightweight tools and technologies, in phases, in order to support the growth of people and their projects at pace

OUR MISSION

TO WELCOME

We welcome all who are interested in applying digital methods as part of humanistic and artistic creation and inquiry.

  • We provide a safe space for ideation, exploration and implementation for a variety of academic and non-academic partners whose experience with digital arts and humanities varies widely. 

  • We empower community members—faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students, and local citizens—to ask and answer their own research questions or to imagine and enact their own artistic vision.

  • We recognize a wide range of complementary digital arts and humanities expertise across campus, and encourage collaboration across staff, faculty, and student communities. 

  • We appreciate that digitally-inflected arts and humanities instruction and public engagement has an impact on our local communities—the city of Bloomington and the state of Indiana—and we welcome partnership opportunities with cultural heritage organizations and advocates outside of campus. 

  • In all of these partnerships, we will model and encourage generosity, embrace differences, share knowledge, acknowledge contributions, accept failures, advocate for iteration, and maintain respect and transparency as we together build expertise, establish funding opportunities, and publish and promote digital arts and humanities projects. 

TO ENGAGE

We encourage engagement with digital arts and humanities methods at all levels of experience, from novice to expert, and at all levels of project development, from conception to execution.

  • We prioritize research questions, teaching goals and creative pursuits over technology, mapping disciplinary methods to digital methods often using accessible tools like whiteboards and post-it notes!

  • We foster engagement with digital arts and humanities methods through scaffolded approaches that range from speaker series that spark curiosity and inspiration to faculty fellowships that channel dedicated resources toward project development. 

  • We promote flexible approaches to digital arts and humanities project development that consider disciplinary expertise and emerging, evolving and established digital competencies. 

  • We actively pursue public-facing digital arts and humanities projectsand the broader culture of publics in which digital arts and humanities theory and praxis is embedded.

TO LEARN

We are dedicated to shared mentoring, to learning from each other and our partners, and to hands-on approaches that recognize all voices and labor that contribute to digital arts and humanities projects.

  • We encourage exploratory learning through formal and informal means, through trial and error, and through iteration, while accepting that our roadblocks and failures are part of the learning process. 
  • We appreciate and learn from our differences—disciplinary, cultural, technological—and seek learning opportunities that value these differences in ways that lead to new knowledge and understandings.   

  • We commit to regular reassessments of research and pedagogy trends—in digital arts and humanities on our campus, the broader academy, and the technological world—knowing that we will be learning alongside our faculty and students.