The future I had envisioned as I walked through the sci common poster session is now a reality for the students and faculty at Middlebury College. Since 2013, Middlebury has been transforming the academy in the digital era through its Clifford Symposiums, where students and faculty share their works through digital poster sessions and guest speakers and panelists come to discuss the how such technological shifts are transforming the world of higher education today. Noted  speakers from the 2014 panel include USC professor Tara McPherson, composer and artist DJ Spooky, and professor Siva Vaidhyanathan from UVA.  

Contents of the symposium range from Film and Media studies to the Natural and Social Sciences. Video-graphic Criticism, the first peer-reviewed academic journal videographic film and moving image studies was presented by Prof. Christian Keathley. While Professor of Geography, Anne Knowles, explored Holocaust history by overlaying the key Holocaust sites with historical movements in her project Holocaust Geographies, which uses layers the timeline of concentration camps using Google Maps. A similar project, shown below, has also been done for the turmoils in Darfur.

These examples illustrate the wide range of academic writing that can be generated through digital creation, and more importantly the fact that institutions of higher education currently possesses the necessary technology and hardware to implement these project. Thus eliminating a common misconception that there is a technological barrier in implementing large scale digital creation in Academia, especially in the Social and Natural Sciences.