Jacob Heil, Digital Scholarship Librarian and Director of CoRE at The College of Wooster, will assume leadership of the Five Colleges of Ohio’s Collaborative for Digital Engagement and Experience (CODEX) project, beginning in June 2021. While maintaining his current position at Wooster, Jacob will lead the CODEX project during its first phase funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation through June 2024.
The Project Director leads CODEX faculty development activities designed to promote the integration of digital practices and projects into the curricula at Ohio Five colleges. These include an annual summer institute for teams of faculty, librarians, technologists and students to consult with national experts and collaborate on designing new or revising existing courses, a minigrant program to support course development, skills development workshops, and funding of faculty participation in external digital scholarship summer workshops. A five-college CODEX committee of deans, faculty members, librarians and technologists advise on the program’s progress, reporting to the Ohio Five Academic and Library Committees. In its first year, seven new CODEX courses were added to the curricula of Ohio Five colleges, with an additional seven headed for development at the July 2021 Summer Institute.
As the College of Wooster's Digital Scholarship Librarian and the Director of its Collaborative Research Environment (CoRE), Jacob Heil partners with library colleagues, faculty, and students to explore digital technologies and resources for teaching and research. As the Director of CoRE, he collaborates with campus stakeholders to build CoRE into an environment for students to publicly practice their process-based projects and also teaches a course in Digital Humanities meanings and methods. Previously, Jacob was the Mellon Digital Scholar for the Ohio Five, working with librarians and faculty across the five colleges to help small, often interdepartmental teams to imagine, plan, and develop digital pedagogical projects. He is a graduate from the University of Virginia, where he also received a master’s degree in English Literature. He earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from Texas A & M, where he also served as Project Manager for Texas A & M’s Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP). Jacob’s work on digital projects and communities of practice has extended nationally as well, as he helped to establish and develop the Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS).
“Jacob’s leadership in digital scholarship and pedagogy, within the Ohio Five and nationally, coupled with his experience as a scholar and Wooster faculty member, makes him an ideal director for CODEX’s curricular development work,” commented Ohio Five Executive Director Sarah Stone. “He is an experienced and effective facilitator of collaboration – the heart of our Institute work – building on his earlier work as Mellon Digital Scholar with the Ohio Five. We’re lucky to have him joining in this exciting project.”