Mission & History
The mission of the Centers for Digital Scholarship is to support a thriving research ecology in digital arts and humanities at Northeastern, by creating a collaborative working space for project teams, research groups, and graduate students.
The CDS was launched in 2024 after a long and thoughtful design process that considered many options and goals. How might we create a generative physical space for encounter and collaboration, while also maintaining the hybrid element that is so essential to Northeastern’s global campus community? How might we provide working spaces for projects that avoid isolation and encourage conversation? What resources would best support projects throughout their life cycles?
The history of the CDS begins further back, with the founding of the Digital Scholarship Group and the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science in 2014. Both of these groups were created to support digital scholarship in its many forms at Northeastern. As a research and development unit in the library, the DSG develops platforms for digital research, publishing, and teaching and provides expertise and mentorship to Northeastern’s digital projects throughout their life cycle. The NULab is a collaborative research center with a focus on the complex challenges of digital research in the humanities and social sciences, bringing together faculty and student members from many different colleges at Northeastern, and providing seedling grants to early-stage projects. These two research centers have worked closely together and have supported both new and long-standing digital projects, but neither one had space where project teams could have a stable presence and access to important things like meeting spaces and coffee.
The launch of the CDS in 2024 opens a new chapter in this history, and brings together Northeastern’s major digital projects and research groups in a space that is welcoming, spacious, and full of possibility. In addition to space for the DSG and the NULab, the CDS has offices for members of the Humanities Center, the Public Humanities program, the Digital Humanities graduate certificate program, research groups from CAMD’s programs in data journalism and data visualization, and numerous digital projects. While no space can fully anticipate and meet the needs of such a fast-growing community, the CDS is designed as much as possible to be flexible and adaptable as our community evolves. We welcome input and ideas for how to make the CDS more useful and welcoming—please contact us and join us!
