Domain of One’s Own 1(DoOO) is a project organized and operated by Reclaim Hosting2. Reclaim Hosting provides hosting support for both students and faculty who would like to build and control digital spaces for personal portfolios and digital projects. A Domain of One’s Own enables an individual or a group to create a stand-alone and autonomous “domain”, which allows for direct control over their scholarship, data, and digital identity. Beyond Wordpress, DoOO provides full engagement with one’s digital footprint and, as such, it is a necessary scholarly and pedagogical resource that enables the cultivation of deep digital literacy skills. The University of Edinburgh would be one of the first institutions in the UK to take the lead on providing this digital architecture to students and faculty. 

The department of sociology envisions a two-fold use for a DoOO, as both students and faculty would take to the platform. DoOO would be used as a hub for undergraduate and postgraduate student work. As the sociology department is launching a taught Masters in Digital Society, DoOO would be a foundational platform for all incoming programme students, who will use the space to conduct digital research, host digital work and multi-media, and develop professional, public-facing portfolios materials. DoOO will be taught in both MSc core courses (Issues and Concepts in Digital Society and Digital Research Methods) and will be as a teaching tool in those courses. Rather than simply make the platform available to students, it will be taught as a tool, which means students and faculty will use DoOO to take up issues of digital identity, digital mobility, labor in the digital economy, data and privacy, networked community, and the role of scholarship in a digital age. Work done in the MSc programme will be used as a model for digital work and this work will be translated to undergraduate courses, such as the existing Digital Culture honours course. 

Additionally, the service would be embraced by other MA programmes in the department, such as the MSc in Global Social Change, where students regularly work with visual and digital methods and materials. For example, students in this programme have been learning the basics of network analysis in relation to larger issues of migration and globalization. DoOO would provide students with a digital space to conduct such analysis,

as well for such research to produce a public-facing, civic-minded contribution on the Internet. 

DoOO would also be of use to post-graduate students who are interested in cultivating a personalized web portfolio or who are currently engaged in public-facing, digital research projects that require a web presence. DoOO provides the optimal digital environment within which to teach students, both undergraduate and post-graduate, about the possibilities of digital scholarship, as well as about the ethical obligations and challenges of producing scholarly work in public, civic spaces.  

Finally, DoOO would be embraced by faculty in the sociology department who would like to operate their own domains, for either research purposes or for the production of a digital portfolio. 

The Digital Education team at the School of education will make use of DoOO as the central platform for the course ‘Education and Digital Cultures’, part of the fully online Masters programme in Digital Education. This course has pioneered methods of open, public teaching and learning, and DoOO will enhance the provision of innovative services in this area. Students will use DoOO to host and share coursework, network and communicate with peers, collect and display automated web feeds, and enhance their skills in cultivating a public-facing portfolio of work. The innovative structure of DoOO will allow this to function in ways not possible with existing tools, and will demonstrate the programme’s continued engagement with inventive and experimental approaches to online education.