Uncategorized – dh+lib

dh+lib Review on Hiatus, Call for Review Editors

Review on Hiatus – October 2024

The dh+lib website has continued to experience technical challenges due to the WordPress hosting infrastructure we utilize. For this reason, the Review editorial team has made the decision to take a hiatus from posting Review content until we are able to address these technical issues.

Call for Review Editors

Are you a dh+lib community member with interest and experience in web content management systems? We are actively seeking a Technical Editor to join the Review editorial team! Please submit an expression of interest by filling out the following form: Review Editors and Technical Editor Application Form.

We are also seeking 3-4 new Review Editors! Are you a current Editor-at-Large (EAL) or dh+lib community member interested in getting more involved? Submit an expression of interest here: Review Editors and Technical Editor Application Form.

Read more about this call here: 2025 Call for Applications. Feel free to email the current editorial team at dhandlib.acrl [at] gmail [dot] com with questions about what it means to become a Review Editor!

RECOMMENDED: Training Information Professionals in the Digital Humanities

“Training Information Professionals in the Digital Humanities: An Analysis of DH Courses in LIS Education,” by Chris Alen Sula (Pratt Institute) and Claudia Berger (Sarah Lawrence College), provides a look at DH courses offered in LIS programs in light of the growth DH has seen since 2014 when it was identified as one of the top trends in academic libraries.

From the abstract:

The digital humanities (DH) remain a growing area of interest among researchers and a locus of new positions within libraries, especially academic libraries, as well as archives, museums, and cultural heritage organizations. In response to this demand, many programs that train information professionals have developed specific curricula around DH. This paper analyzes courses offered within two overlapping contexts: American Library Association (ALA) accredited programs and iSchools. In addition to documenting the scope and extent of DH courses in these settings, we also analyze their contents, relating our findings to previous research, including analysis of job ads and interviews with professionals.

Data was collected from Spring 2020, from institutional course catalogs and program webpages, and syllabi and course descriptions were obtained from 69 percent of the courses identified. Researchers discuss their findings with a focus on course offerings, course descriptions and key concepts, learning outcomes, technologies, and sources.

RESOURCE: Text on Maps Help Guide

Text on Maps has collected pieces of text from 57,000 georeferenced maps from the David Rumsey Map Collection and made them searchable with mapKurator, allowing users to search within the contents of text on maps, rather than just the metadata. From the site:

“While library patrons have become used to searching books via their content as well as their titles and authors, such technology has not yet been applied to visual media like maps. Exposing text on maps alongside traditional catalog record metadata transforms how people search maps and why people might be interested in historical maps altogether: now the content of large sets of maps can be examined as data that tells us not only about the history or cultural context of specific places, or of regional mapping traditions, but also about broader social and cultural developments.”

Text on Maps Help Guide provides documentation for searching, viewing, and becoming a contributor through transcription, georeferencing, and annotating.

CFP: dh+lib Review Editors-at-Large for Fall 2021

Dear friends and colleagues,

The dh+lib Review team sends you well-wishes as our fall semesters are underway. We’re inviting librarians, archivists, students, and anyone interested in the intersections of digital humanities and librarianship, to volunteer weekly shifts for the journal. Editors-at-Large play an essential role in discovering and highlighting new ideas, opportunities and projects that intersect with Libraries and Digital Humanities, and sharing them with the dh+lib community. For your 1-week shift, we hope that you spend ~20 minutes per workday, or 1.5 hours total, to read and nominate content for publication using PressForward. We understand that folks are contributing unpaid labor, so we are grateful for any amount of time contributed.

If you would like to join the team this semester, the next step is for you to tell us you would like to serve as an Editor-at-Large by filling out our form at https://dhandlib.org/eal-sign-up/. We will acknowledge your contributions in our posts, emails, and on twitter when we publish, which will be every two weeks this fall as we pilot a different publication cycle. We are able to offer letters of support for this tremendous service provided upon request, as well as our super cool holographic dh+lib stickers (get them here! https://forms.gle/3Z4GpcUYc1CwW4967).

Always feel free to reach us at dhandlib.acrl@gmail.com or through twitter at @DHandLib. We look forward to collaborating with you!

Cheers,

The dh+lib Review Editors
Caitlin Christian-Lamb, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Linsey Ford, and Pam Lach

PROJECT: Japan Disasters Digital Archive Project

The Japan Disasters Digital Archive (JDA) is an advanced search engine for materials “from all over the web, individuals’ testimonials, tweets, prominently including content from international partners who are building digital repositories about the disasters” of 2011. In addition to facilitating searching through the archive’s materials, users can also use the site to create their own curated collections and interactive presentations. These collections can be shared with other users of the site, contributing to the collaborative, user-powered aspect of the site and its resources.

The site also contains a mapping feature, visualizing all materials tagged with geographic metadata in real time. The site’s documentation and tutorials are all very detailed, and provide solid background for anyone interested in taking advantage of the archive’s capabilities. All content on the site is available in both English and Japanese.

The archive provides an important digital space to collect materials from around the web on the disasters of 2011 in Japan, and will hopefully allow for the creation of additional content through its user-centered features.

RESOURCE: Startwords

Startwords, an online publication from Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities, recently published its debut issue. From the issue’s announcement:

With an emphasis on exploration and creativity in both content and presentation, Startwords is “a forum for experimental humanities scholarship” that invites a broad audience to think about new or underexplored aspects of DH work. The title has three meanings: it references a computer science term for the words used to start a programming sequence, a literary term for the first time a genre appears in print, and a cheeky alternative to “stop words,” words discarded in the course of natural language processing.

Startwords aims to be “more experimental than an academic journal but more formal than a blog,” with the site open to content ranging from creative nonfiction, essays, and data journalism to writing that on new approaches to code and documentation, according to editor and CDH digital humanities strategist Grant Wythoff.

In addition to the site’s broad range of content–which currently includes items such as 3D models and a high-resolution interactive photo–it also features contextual note feature, which “showcases the interaction of development, design, and content creativity that is at the heart of the Startwords mission.” The publication will be of interest to the digital humanities community, both for its articles and its innovative design and supplementary materials.

EVENT: Medical Heritage Library 10th Anniversary Conference

The Medical Heritage Library is pleased to announce its 10th Anniversary Virtual Conference, to be held this Friday, November 13th from 11 – 5 EDT. The conference features a broad range of presentations of interest to the digital humanities community, and is entirely free to attend. Presentations will be made via Zoom.

Registration for the conference is available at this link. The link to the event will be distributed to registered attendees on Thursday, November 12th.

PROJECT: Machine Learning Jim Crow

On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance, a digital project from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, uses collections as data and machine learning approaches to discover Jim Crow and racially-based legislation signed into law in North Carolina between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement. The project is in honor of Dr. Pauli Murray, a lawyer, Episcopal priest, and human rights activist who was also the co-founder for the National Organization for Women and author of States’ Laws on Race and Color (1951), a groundbreaking work for the civil rights movement.

From the project description:

On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance uses text mining and machine learning to identify racist language in legal documents, helping expose the wide-ranging effects of Jim/Jane Crow on the American South. We have coined the phrase “algorithms of resistance” in reference to Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018). If algorithms can reinforce racism, could we also use algorithms to fight racism? Instead of proliferating racist ideas, can algorithms help us better study the history of race and advocate for justice?

Project outputs include two publicly accessible, plain-text corpora, a git repository, a short white paper, the website linked above, and presentations to local and national audiences. An Association of Southeast Research LibrASERL webinar about the project can be viewed at this link.

EVENT: Spectrums of DH at McGill University

Digital Humanities at McGill has announced a virtual speaker series, Spectrums of DH. Inspired by Professor Stéfan Sinclair’s legacy of DH Initiatives, the series features talks from renowned DH scholars and researchers from around the world. All events are free and open to the public via Zoom.

The series will run from September 17th, 2020 through April 22nd, 2021. The first talk in the series features Dr. Roopika Risam (Associate Professor of Secondary and Higher Education and English at Salem State University), “Abolitionist Digital Pedagogies: Beyond ‘Decolonizing’ the Classroom.” It will be held Thursday, September 17 at 1pm-2pm EST.

Additional details may be found on the official McGill Digital Humanities Facebook page (linked above) or on Twitter @mcgilldigihum. The poster featuring dates and speakers of events in the series may be viewed at this link.

EVENT: Silences in the LAMS: Digital Surrogacy in the Time of Pandemic

The Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, in conjunction with the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries and the University of Pennsylvania, will host a virtual symposium, Silences in the LAMS: Digital Surrogacy in the Time of Pandemic, on Monday, October 12, 2020 from 1-4pm EDT. The event will be held via Zoom, and the access link will be distributed to registered attendees on October 11th.

Registration and full event details, including the speaker lineup and session titles, are available at the link above.

JOB: Digital Scholarship Librarian, Marquette University Libraries (Milwaukee, WI)

From the announcement:

Marquette University Raynor Memorial Libraries seeks a Digital Scholarship Librarian. The library’s Digital Scholarship Lab supports the growing number of Marquette faculty and student research projects involving web development, digital posters, mapping, data analysis, text visualization, open scholarship, and other means of digital knowledge production and communication. This person will play a key role in supporting digital scholarship needs on campus and serve as the liaison librarian to departments in the Humanities. This position reports to the Assistant Dean for Digital Scholarship.