Category: Conference

EVENT: SHARP 2013 Digital Projects and Tools Showcase

In July, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing (SHARP) held its twenty-first annual conference in Philadelphia. In addition to the conference program, SHARP also held a digital showcase to share updates from various projects from the United States Canada and Europe.

Below are examples of some of the projects:

The Book History BiblioGraph
Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford University, USA), Tom Mole (McGill University, Canada)

Expanding the Republic of Letters: India and the Circulation of Ideas in the Late Eighteenth Century
Mitch Fraas (University of Pennsylvania, USA)

Mapping Sheila Watson’s Paris: Using a Geo-Location Smartphone App to Retrace Walks the Canadian Modernist Records in Her Journal
Paul Hjartarson (University of Alberta, Canada), Harvey Quamen (University of Alberta, Canada)

Book History and the Early Modern OCR Project
Jacob Heil (Texas A&M University, USA)

END: The Early Novels Database 
[not yet public]
Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College, USA)

For a write-up of the showcase, see Eleanor Shevlin’s post on the Early Modern Online Bibliography site.

dh+lib Guide to ALA Annual 2013

To aid in navigating the behemoth that is the ALA Annual Conference, we’ve compiled a list of sessions that intersect in some way with the digital humanities. Thanks to all who responded to our call for suggestions. Have a session you’d like us to add? Shoot us an email or find us on twitter @dhandlib.

Update, June 21: Added two Sunday sessions, “What’s New at the NEH?” and “Transformations in Performing Arts Librarianship.”

Update, June 24: Added one Friday preconference session, “Innovative Library Services and Programs in Digital Era: An International Perspective”

Jump to: Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Monday

And, of course, be sure to join us at the ACRL Digital Humanities Discussion Group Meeting on Sunday at 4:30pm in the convention center, room N227a.

 

Friday, June 28th

Introductory Python Workshop [$] [preconference]
WHEN: Friday, June 28, 2013 – 8:30am to 4:00pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S103bc
PRESENTERS: Andromeda Yelton, Carli Spina, Shana McDanold
COST: $235, LITA member; $350, ALA member; $495 non-member (n.b. This is a day-long preconference session and therefore has a cost associated with attendance.)
DESCRIPTION: Attendees at this pre-conference workshop will learn the basics of the Python programming language with ample opportunities for hands-on, project-based practice. Attendees will learn the syntax and key features of Python while working through practice exercises and completing a short project in Python. Experienced teaching staff will be on hand to provide support and feedback throughout the workshop.

This workshop will be geared towards individuals with limited or no programming experience and will aim to create a supportive and enjoyable environment for those who want to learn a new programming language. Please note: Attendees will be asked to set up a Python development environment on the computer they plan to bring to the pre-conference in advance. The teaching staff will offer support throughout this process, including virtual office hours.

Innovative Library Services and Programs in Digital Era: An International Perspective (International Relations Round Table) [$] [preconference]
WHEN: Friday, June 28, 2013 – 8:30am to 12pm, followed by lunch until 1pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S401bc
PRESENTERS: Constantia Constantinou, Nancy E. Gwinn, Martin R. Kalfatovic, Valerie Hill, Anton DuPlessis
COST: $90 (n.b. This is a half-day preconference session and therefore has a cost associated with attendance.)
DESCRIPTION: International Relations Round Table Preconference addresses important issues, trends, and strategies that contribute to the understanding of the transformation of 21th century libraries along with the emerging technology. This year’s preconference program features case studies related to digital library development and the preservation of local culture and historical heritages. The panel presentations highlight the interrelationships among digital preservation, digital resource development and management, as well as their presentation and dissemination to the global community. Learn about and discuss six interesting case studies, addressing global perspectives on issues, trends, and strategies that contribute to the understanding of the transformation of 21th century libraries along with emerging technology.

 

Saturday, June 29th

Data, E-Data, Data Curation: Our New Frontier [program]
WHEN: Saturday, June 29, 2013 – 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S501bcd
PRESENTERS: Abigail Goben, Sarah Sheehan, Dorothea Salo, James Mullins, Joan Starr, Robert Sandusky
DESCRIPTION: Data management and curation may be a great new opportunity but how are libraries tackling it? We already know how to archive traditional materials but what do we do with terabytes of faculty research data? How do we manage that data set for our students’ research? Join us for a big picture view of the issues surrounding e-data collection and access from Joan Starr, Jim Mullins, Dorothea Salo, and Robert Sandusky. Bring questions to help you identify opportunities and challenges already happening on your campus.

Map and Geospatial Information Round Table (MAGIRT)/GODORT GIS Discussion Group [discussion group]
WHEN: Saturday, June 29, 2013 – 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S504a
PRESENTERS: Angela Lee, Tracey Hughes
DESCRIPTION: The GIS Discussion Group begins at 8:30 am and focuses on topics related to geographic information systems (GIS). In addition to discussion topics brought forward by session attendees, there will also be a focused topic discussion on education for geospatial librarians.

The Research Footprint: Libraries Tracking and Enhancing Scholarly and Scientific Impact [program]
WHEN: Saturday, June 29, 2013 – 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center N427bc
PRESENTERS: Cathy Sarli, Jason Priem, Kristi Holmes, Rush G. Miller
DESCRIPTION:
Increasingly, libraries are building services designed to assess and improve the impact of their institutions’ research activities. This is an increasingly important, but complex task as more and more scholarship is digitally shared and accessed through traditional and non-traditional pathways.
HASHTAG: #alctsac13

Open Folklore: Improving Open Access [poster]
Saturday, June 29, 2013 – 10:30am to 12:00pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center, Hall A, Exhibit Floor
PRESENTERS: Garett Montanez, Juliet Hardesty
DESCRIPTION: Open Folklore, from the American Folklore Society and Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, is an Open Access scholarly resource. It brings together feeds of freely available online scholarly materials from collections as diverse as HathiTrust, institutional repositories, and online journals that focus specifically on materials relevant to the study of folklore. The next step for Open Folklore is to make the search and discovery of these materials as user-friendly as possible. Gathering the harvested collection feeds into Drupal, an open-source content management system, and creating Drupal-specific Biblio records allows Open Folklore to index and provide tailored access for the folklore researcher – creating faceted searching on indexes of date ranges, subjects, authors, sources, and collections specific to the field of folklore. Contextual help also provides educational information to folklore researchers on what types of sources are being used and how Open Access resources benefit folklorists and open the scholarship of folklore to new venues, audiences, and ideas.

This poster will showcase the plans and progress of Open Folklore’s new faceted searching interface and report feedback from the folklore community on ease of use and educational impact.

Visualizing Digital Collections: Creating User-Friendly Search and Browse Tools [poster]
WHEN: Saturday, June 29, 2013 – 10:30am to 12:00pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center, Hall A, Exhibit Floor
PRESENTERS: Laura Deal
DESCRIPTION: This poster will discuss the process of creating fun and informative data visualization tools for digital collections, drawing on the experiences of the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) Digital Archive and survey data from CWIHP’s users. (New beta website: http://cwihp-live.secondstory.net, permanent address: http://digitalarchive.org). One of the main goals of the re-designed CWIHP Digital Archive was to develop a user-friendly way of visualizing the project’s complex set of historical documents. CWIHP’s previous website made it very difficult for new researchers to orient themselves to the collections and get a good understanding of the site’s content. CWIHP has a very complex collection of archival documents which have been translated from 25 different languages and drawn from over 100 different archives around the world. The website’s new “browse” tool attempts to give users an easy and fun way to explore the documents. An interactive map allows users to zoom in on the specific region of the world or a country in which they are interested, while below a constantly-updated graph displays the number of documents available by year, as well as the most common subject headings for that location. Although CWIHP worked with a dedicated web design firm, other institutions could build similar interactive data visualizations using freely available tools such as elastic lists (http://moritz.stefaner.eu/projects/elastic-lists/) and Viewshare (http://viewshare.org). Such tools leverage the detailed metadata digital collections already contain, creating exciting new ways of visualizing and interacting with existing online collections.

Literary Texts and the Library in the Digital Age: New Collaborations for European and American Studies [program]
WHEN: Saturday, June 29, 2013 – 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S105d
PRESENTERS: Patricia Thurston, Glen Worthey, Laura Mandell, Paula Kaufman
DESCRIPTION: Digital technologies are opening up new possibilities for the investigation of literary and historic texts. They are also changing library spaces and reconfiguring relationships between librarians and researchers. This program investigates new roles for European and American Studies librarians in this emerging physical and virtual environment. What old skills remain relevant and what new skills are needed? What new forms of collaboration are developing between librarians, scholars, and IT personnel?

Scholarly Communications Interest Group [interest group]
WHEN: Saturday, June 29, 2013 – 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center N128
PRESENTERS: Rebecca Bryant, Charles Watkinson
DESCRIPTION: There will be two presentations: Rebecca Bryant will discuss the ORCID project, and Charles Watkinson will discuss the The Library Publishing Coalition Project. The presentations will be followed by a brief business meeting.

Preserving History: Establishing a National Latino Digital Archive [affiliate event]
WHEN: Saturday, June 29, 2013 – 4:30pm to 5:30pm
LOCATION: Palmer House Hilton, Chicago Room
PRESENTERS: Lillian Castillo-Speed, Lizette Guerra, Romelia Salinas
DESCRIPTION: With the advent of digital content we continue to see a pattern of certain information being privileged over another. To ensure that communities are represented in this environment in a manner that is respectful and equitable, it is imperative that targeted efforts be carried out. It is this backdrop that has informed the work of the Latino Digital Archive Group which is setting the stage for the development of a national Latino Digital Archive.

Attendees will be engaged in a dialog regarding the complexities of developing a national Latino Digital Archive. The presenters would like to highlight the progress of this project as well as the range of content the archive will contain. This digital resource will include digitized and digital born materials reflecting the Latino community’s own diverse voices as well as content that is not generally considered “Latino” but nonetheless represents issues that have shaped our experiences both individually and collectively – women’s movement, labor, immigration, education, law, policy, environmentalism, health, language, culture, music, and the arts. Realistically, this list could go on and on, but the point being that this new resource will attempt to narrow if not erase the information gap that exists between users and information. Attendees are invited to join this emerging community of practice that will continue to present us with the responsibility of documenting, preserving, and providing access to our communities’ stories.
HASHTAG: #reforma

Digital Special Collections Discussion Group (ACRL RBMS) [discussion group]
WHEN: Saturday, June 29, 2013 – 4:30pm to 5:30pm
LOCATION: Hyatt Regency Chicago, Grand D South

 

Sunday, June 30th

Digital Preservation Interest Group [interest group]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center N138

Makerspaces: Creating, Exploring, Pitfalls [program]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S106b
PRESENTERS: Jason Griffey, Tod Colegrove
DESCRIPTION: Separate of the preconference, this will be an opportunity for regular conference attendees to discuss and discover maker spaces. They will be able to try out a few machines (pending what speakers can fit in suitcases) and find ways to incorporate maker spaces into their libraries.

What’s New at the NEH? [program]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 10:30am to 11:30am
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S501bcd
PRESENTERS: Karen Kenton, Karen Mittleman
DESCRIPTION: An NEH initiative, “Created Equal: America’s Civil Rights Struggle,” will encourage public conversations about the changing meanings of freedom and equality in U.S. history. Launching in 2013 to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, this program will offer a packaged set of NEH-funded films on Civil Rights history to 500 communities across the nation over three years.

Four powerful documentary films (The Abolitionists, Slavery by Another Name, Freedom Riders and The Loving Story) are the centerpiece of this project. Taken together, these films tell a remarkable story– about grassroots activism, about the power of individuals to effect change, and about the changing contexts in which Americans have understood and struggled with concepts of freedom and equality. We hope that this film set will prompt reflection and discussion of these issues.

NEH is exploring many options for community programming, including an innovative online film screening and discussion platform developed by ITVS. We invite participants to share ideas, propose partnerships, and help give shape to this initiative in ways that will make it meaningful to your communities.

[Editor’s note: This session will also include brief updates from Perry Collins and Leah Weinryb Grohsgal on the Office of Digital Humanities and the Division of Preservation and Access. Attendees interested in NEH funding for digital projects are welcome to chat with the Program Officers in attendance.]

Ignite Sunday Session: Creating Geospatial Data Services – Needs and Challenges [program]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 11:30am to 12:00pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S102d
PRESENTERS: Nicole Kong
DESCRIPTION: As part of the data services in libraries, geospatial data service has some unique characteristics comparing to data in other disciplines. For example, most of geospatial data could be visualized on an on-line map, which gives data providers additional options for data sharing. In this presentation, several topics about geospatial data services will be discussed. These topics include: 1) the nature of geospatial data; 2) spatial data in different disciplines; 3) different expectations in spatial data sharing; 4) challenges of creating geospatial data services to address different requirements; 5) possible strategies and models.

Digital History: New Methodologies Facilitated by New Technologies [program]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S402a
PRESENTERS: Nancy A. Bunker, Josh Honn, Michael Kramer, Rachel Rooney
DESCRIPTION: Digital History is providing new pathways to traditional historical research methodologies. Helping students and faculty members utilize the myriad of historical research options is becoming a major task for reference and instructional librarians. Panelists will address the opportunities in researching with digital history and the problems they have encountered in using these sources.

Digital Curation Interest Group (ACRL) [discussion group]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center N135

PRESENTER: Bradley Daigle
DESCRIPTION: Presentation (45 minutes, followed by 10-15 minutes Q&A): “Where the Wild Things Aren’t: How Digital Curation Can Tame Even the Most Persnickety Content.” Business meeting to follow.
HASHTAG: #dcig13

Bridging the Digital Divide: Technology and Information Access in Africa [program]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S103bc
PRESENTERS: Graziano Kratli, Innocent Rumgambwa, Jane Meyers, Olubukola Olatise, Yetunde Zaid
DESCRIPTION: Technology has brought changes in library service delivery, and the Internet has become the dominant mode of information exchange in libraries. New opportunities for collecting, organizing, disseminating local content and providing access to remotely distributed resources have emerged. In Africa this transformation has been slow due to the digital divide. There are some efforts ongoing to close the gap. This panel presentation will describe technology initiatives in African libraries and provide insights to the challenges encountered in efforts to utilize technology to enhance services. Panelists will discuss digitization projects, institutional repositories, resource sharing, Internet connectivity and other technologies.

Map and Geospatial Information Round Table (MAGIRT) GeoTech Committee Meeting [committee meeting]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center N136
DESCRIPTION: Please join us for our committee meeting regarding geographic information and geospatial technologies. Discussion is wide-ranging and lively.

The GeoPolitical Web: Chronicling Social Media Discourse through Archiving and Analytics [poster]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 2:30pm to 4:00pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center, Hall A, Exhibit Floor
PRESENTERS: Catherine Larson, Hsinchun Chen
DESCRIPTION: By collecting international web forums and creating a user-friendly interface, the University of Arizona Artificial Intelligence Lab has created the GeoPolitical Web archive and portal (aka, GeoWeb). Users may search the archive, retrieve, and translate postings of interest. Text mining tools have also been used for topical analysis and teasing out major conversational themes.
social media archives.

Transformations in Performing Arts Librarianship (ACRL Arts) [program}
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 3:00pm to 4:00pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center N427a
PRESENTERS: Judith Thomas, Doug Reside, Susan Wiesner
DESCRIPTION: The study of the performing arts is being transformed by new methods and technologies, presenting challenges and opportunities to librarians. This session features two panelists, Doug Reside, Digital Curator for the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, and Susan Wiesner, 2011 Innovation Fellow for the Council of Learned Societies, who will discuss their own groundbreaking work and suggest ways that librarians can engage with new initiatives in the performing arts.

ALA President’s Program with Dan Cohen of DPLA [president’s program]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 3:30pm to 5:30pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S100a
PRESENTERS: Dan Cohen
DESCRIPTION: Dan Cohen, Founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) will be the featured speaker in the ALA President’s Program & Awards Presentation at the 2013 ALA Annual Conference on Sunday, June 30, 3:30-5:30 p.m. Cohen will focus on the role and contribution of the DPLA to ALA President Maureen Sullivan’s ongoing initiative, “The Promise of Libraries Transforming Communities.”

After Cohen’s presentation, Sullivan will conduct an interview and moderate a Q&A with the audience.

Digital Humanities Discussion Group [discussion group]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 4:30pm to 5:30pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center N227a
DESCRIPTION: The Digital Humanities Discussion Group will cover DH space in libraries; DH and data management; DH training for librarians; and the demographics of DH librarians.
HASHTAG: #acrldhdg

DH Happy Hour [drinks]
WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013 – 5:30am to 7:30pm
LOCATION: La Cantina Grill, 1911 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60616
DESCRIPTION: Join us for drinks and rousing conversation after the Digital Humanities Discussion Group. We’ll walk to the bar after the meeting, or join us there.

Monday, July 1st

Conversation Starters: Altmetrics, the Decoupled Journal, and the future of scholarly publishing [program]
WHEN: Monday, July 1, 2013 – 4:00pm to 4:45pm
LOCATION: McCormick Place Convention Center S102d
PRESENTERS: Jason Priem
DESCRIPTION: In growing numbers, scholars are moving their workflows online. As that happens, important, once-invisible parts of the scientific process–conversations, arguments, recommendations, reads, bookmarks, and more–are leaving online traces.

Mining these traces or “altmetrics” can give us faster, more diverse, and more accurate data of scholarly impact. What is more, this information could inform powerful, network-aware filters that supplement and even replace the increasingly overwhelmed peer-review system. We’ll discuss the current research and practice of altmetrics, as well as their long-term implications: the potential to power a fast, open, and truly web-native scholarly communication ecosystem.

EVENT: Digital Preservation 2013

Registration is now open for Digital Preservation 2013, the annual meeting of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA). Taking place on July 23-25 in Alexandria, VA, the conference is free but seats are limited.

The first two days feature a great lineup of speakers, including Emily Gore, (Digital Public Library of America) Sarah Werner (Folger Shakespeare Library), Jason Scott (Archive Team), Aaron Straup Cope (Cooper-Hewitt Museum Labs) and more .

There will also be a CURATECamp (an unconference for people involved with digital curation) as part of the conference.

As always, if you can’t make the conference you can follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #digpres13.

 

 

EVENT: DH2013

The program for Digital Humanities 2013, the annual international conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, is live, with listings for tutorials, workshops, keynotes, short papers, long papers, and panels. Forthcoming are links to individual abstracts and poster listings.

Held this summer, July 16-19, in Lincoln, Nebraska, the conference features keynote speakers David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States; Isabel Galina, researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas at the National University of Mexico; and Willard McCarty, winner of the Busa Award and a Professor both in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London and in the Digital Humanities Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. The conference will be preceded by two days (July 15-16) of workshops and tutorials.

Early registration ends May 31, with online registration open until July 12.

PROJECT: Museums and the Web

The 17th annual Museums and the Web, an “annual conference featuring advanced research and exemplary applications of digital practice for cultural, natural and scientific heritage,” was held in Portland, Oregon, April 17-20, 2013.

The winners of the MW2013 Best of the Web contest are posted, and feature an excellent selection of sites and applications that make use of narrative, animation, audio or video, and complex interaction with content that “move museum experiences out of the institution and into the realm of the user.”

Proceedings are forthcoming, and videos from the conference are being posted to the MW YouTube channel, including the Opening Plenary by Larry Friedlander, “When the Rare Becomes Commonplace: Challenges for Museums in a Digital Age.”

POST: Women’s History, and … Metadata?!

Reflecting on the recent Women’s History in the Digital World conference, held March 22-23 at Bryn Mawr, Arden Kikland provides an overview of sessions attended and considers Laura Mandell‘s conference keynote, “Feminist Critique vs. Feminist Production in Digital Humanities.” Kirkland describes the reaction to Mandell’s discussion of the TEI’s coding for gender– 1 for male, 2 for female. (An encoding that TEI adjusted following the conference.) She writes:

Mandell’s … slide served as an example of how to perform subversive encoding to simultaneously work within current systems and create new systems. Her example pointed out that predominant name authorities, such as the Library of Congress (LOC), sometimes define a woman’s preferred name in the format “Mrs. (insert husband’s name here).” Her slide provided an example of double/triple subversive encoding, including the ISO 5218 and LOC standard terms, but only as alternate terms, following terms and ontologies more appropriate to the given project and to the representation of women as primary figures. It is inspiring to imagine how our projects can meet current standards and interact with other existing projects, yet simultaneously set new standards for like-minded work which could gain traction and someday overtake our current hegemonic standards.

Kirkland points to Michelle Moravec’s coverage of the conference, which includes specific reference to archivists. She writes:

I heard so many amazing talks by archivists seeking to subvert the silences I hardly know where to begin.  Joanna Di Pasquale and Laura Streett presentations on Vassar’s student diary project provided some fascinating and sober insights into the hidden histories buried within.  Bethany Anderson’s talk highlighted the theoretical issues and possible solutions for the silences/absences.

A Report on SXSW 2013

Interactive LED public art at Republic Square Park

Interactive LED public art at Republic Square Park.

In this post, dh+lib Editor Zach Coble (Gettysburg College) shares his experience as a librarian at South By Southwest.

What were librarians doing at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive this year? In a nutshell, we were displaying the innovative ideas driving libraries today and busting outdated perceptions about what librarians do.

Butch Lazorchak (Library of Congress) kicked off the week with a great post on why libraries need to have a presence at South by Southwest. This was my second year at SXSW, and I can attest to Lazorchak’s argument that librarians need to attend both to spread word to people outside libraries about what we really do and to learn fresh ideas from these same people on how we can improve library services. Butch expanded on this idea in his session, Why Digital Maps Can Reboot Cultural History, noting that it’s important that cultural heritage organizations demonstrate that we are engaging current technology, and that we are not just following these conversations but, in many cases, driving them.

The Ideadrop house, sponsored by Electronic Resources & Libraries, ProQuest, and the Digital Library Federation (DLF), hosted sessions during the week from influential speakers within and outside the library world. As a salon-style gathering place, the Ideadrop house offered a place to recharge, catch a great speaker in informal space, and a home base for librarians in the midst of the SXSW chaos. All of the sessions were streamed and archived, so check them out (I’d recommend Alistair Croll’s and Henry Jenkins & Sam Ford’s).

In their session, Culture Hack: Libraries & Museums Open for Making, Emily Gore (DPLA), Sam Leon (Open Knowledge Foundation), Antoine Isaac (Europeana), and Rachel Frick (DLF) discussed sharing cultural heritage data. Providing open access to data – both data sets and metadata – is critical for fostering digital humanities projects because, as is often said in various ways, the best use of your data will come from someone outside your organization. Frick mentioned that in a linked data world, licensing metadata under a CC BY license simply doesn’t scale. Rather, CC0 licenses are preferable. Gore discussed her work at DPLA, which takes the stance that metadata cannot be copyrighted and requires content partners to share metadata under a CC0 license. Some organizations, however, are hesitant because of the level of intellectual work required for good metadata, and Gore has had to convince them that one of the ideas behind DPLA is that such work should be shared. This idea was exemplified by putting DPLA data sets on LibraryBoxes.

Image courtesy of DPLA.
Image courtesy of DPLA.

LibraryBoxes are an open source, portable digital file distribution tool based on inexpensive hardware. In other words, they are mobile libraries that anyone can tap into via wifi. Ten LibraryBoxes made it to Austin for SXSW (placed in pedicabs or carried around by librarians), and they were a hit. LibraryBox is a project started by Jason Griffey (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga), and the SXSW boxes were sponsored by EveryLibrary, DPLA, and individual donations. They featured content from a variety of places, including Unglue.it, MIT Press, and DPLA. This was my favorite contribution from librarians to SXSW because it embodies the forward-thinking weaving of technology and content that we were aiming to display.

Are you interested in joining the growing number of librarians who attend SXSW? We are close to reaching a critical mass, and strength in numbers helps us to better shape the conversations taking place at SXSW. Plus, we need your help (and ideas) with all of the fun projects we do during the conference. Look for #sxswlam in most social media outlets (especially Facebook and Twitter). And be thinking about what you want to present in 2014 – submissions will be due in July!

POST: The CODATA Mission: Preserving Scientific Data for the Future

At Spellbound Blog, Jeanne Kramer-Smith has posted on a session from The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation conference, sponsored by UNESCO in cooperation with the University of British Columbia and held in September 2012 in Vancouver. Untangling the acronyms, Kramer-Smith identifies the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) as part of the International Council for Science. CODATA hosts the Data at Risk Task Group (DARTG), which seeks “to preserve scientific data that is in danger of loss because they are not in modern electronic formats, or have particularly short shelf-life.”

In summarizing talks included in the session and helpfully linking out to presenters’ slides, Kramer-Smith also provides an opportunity to consider the implications of data preservation and loss– including for DH and libraries. As she notes in her summary of a presentation by D. R. Fraser Taylor and Tracey Lauriault, of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University, on “The Map as Fundamental Source in the Memory of the World”:

“The 1986 BBC Domesday Book [sic] was created in celebration of 900 years after William the Conqueror’s original Domesday Book. It was obsolete by the 1990s. A huge amount of social and economic information was collected for this project. In order to rescue it they needed an Acorn computer and needed to be able to read the optical disks. The platform was emulated in 2002-2003. It cost 600,000 British pounds to reverse engineer and put online in 2004. New discs were made in 2003 at the UK Archive.

“It is easier to get Ptolomy’s maps from 15th century than it is to get a map 10 years old.”

RESOURCE: code4lib 2013 Conference

code4lib’s 2013 conference, held February 12-14 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, included sessions dedicated to open source projects, crowd transcription, metadata, HathiTrust relevance ranking, REST APIs, born digital special collections, and many other topics of interest to dh+lib readers. While event organizers finalize the transfer and load of video files from the event, the livestream captured is still accessible.

 

Pushing the Boundaries: DH and Libraries at MLA13

Boston, Massachusetts - cathedral

Boston, Masssachussetts – cathedral by diggin90650, on Flickr

Amanda Rust (English + Theatre Librarian at Northeastern University Libraries) writes here about her experience at MLA13, demonstrating the value of librarians venturing to conferences beyond our professional borders. Amanda also attended the THATCamp MLA unconference; her reflections on that are here.

It is, of course, impossible to summarize a meeting as large as the MLA in a single blog post. Instead, I’d like to focus just on the presence of the Digital Humanities at the MLA Convention 2013, link out to some of the copious coverage elsewhere on the Internet, and offer a few takeaways from one librarian’s perspective. (I should note that librarians may also have a lot of interest in sessions in Composition and Rhetoric, Teaching of Writing, and Pedagogy, but I won’t touch on those much here.)

As readers of dh+lib probably already know, the MLA is rapidly becoming one of the major conferences for DH. See, for example, Mark Sample’s pre-convention list of DH sessions for a sense of the robust offerings, especially as they have changed over time. In addition, my librarian audience should note that the newly-formed Libraries and Research in Languages and Literatures Discussion Group is well-populated by fellow librarians interested in DH, although the discussion group certainly focuses on topics beyond DH. Librarians may also be interested in this report at ACRLog,  A Librarian at the MLA.

Worth mentioning at the start is the major convention focus on the conditions of academic labor. This was one of the most discussed topics, with good attention and reporting outside of the convention, notably:

Howard’s last article in particular shows how larger discussions about “Alt-Ac” careers often focus on the opportunities in DH; the two topics, though not synonymous, are often deeply intertwined.

In terms of reporting outside the convention, DH seems to be the other theme that received the most attention:

To find the online traces of a particular session, you could search for presenters’ papers, attendees’ blog notes and reactions, or a Storify compilation of the Twitter discussion. Luckily, many folks have already done the work of wrangling online coverage into place. Two of the most extensive compilations that I’ve seen are from DHNow and the Alabama Digital Humanities Center:

My own reflections from the convention, particularly on what DH means for libraries, are largely centered on the new prominence DH is bringing to both collections and data. I wonder if even five years ago I would have heard the word “metadata” used so frequently, or at all, at an MLA Convention. Yet now, as new techniques allow easier analysis and visualization of large datasets, scholars of all stripes seem hungry for not just primary sources but data about those sources, their format, material, use, and change over time. While imperfect, the rich stores of book metadata in our union catalogs seem ripe for re-use. (For example, I wonder if there are interesting stories in the data analysis of Library of Congress Subject Headings changes over time — LCSH encodes an understanding of the world as surely as any other vocabulary.)

[pullquote]This focus on both the theory and practice of library and archival work gives us a new chance to invite scholars into our decision making, to be more open and transparent about the hard choices we make and have been making all along.[/pullquote]The richness of existing digital archives seems to have renewed scholarly interest in how collections and archives are created for the future: how material is selected or ignored, well-described and discoverable or lost on the shelves, elegantly usable or hidden behind poor interfaces, carefully preserved or left to decay or simply thrown away. This focus on both the theory and practice of library and archival work gives us a new chance to invite scholars into our decision making, to be more open and transparent about the hard choices we make and have been making all along. Scholars sometimes seem shocked that archivists, librarians and curators have been making so many decisions all these years, and affecting the historical record so very much. Scholars may have a bone to pick with the decisions we’ve made, and it is very easy, I think — at least, I’ve certainly done it — to be overly defensive when your longstanding professional practices are questioned.

Bethany Nowviskie’s formulation of DH work as inter-professional as well as inter-disciplinary resonates well with me here; she refers to DH as “a brand of scholarly communication that places less premium on argument and narrow, expert discourse, and more on the implicit embodiment of humanities interpretation in public production and open-source, inter-professional practice.” (That quote is just one small part of her MLA paper “Resistance in the Materials”, which is definitely worth a complete read.) In the library and the archive, we will surely have hidebound practices that will benefit from inter-professional examination by those outside or new to our day-to-day workings. However, those in other professions will perhaps be surprised at the amount of thought that librarians and archivists (and other cultural heritage folks) have already given to issues around preservation, organization, access, and education.

In other words, working with other professionals not only means opening up my own practice to constructive criticism, but also learning to take a humble approach when observing others’ practice. It means asking the question (“Why do you do it this way?”) rather than making the assumption (“You must know doing it this way is wrong!”) This is, of course, a good approach within the library as well — just think of arguments between public and technical services folks — but the Digital Humanities seem to open up discussions about collecting practices and the historical record in newer, wider ways.

So I left the MLA thinking deeply about embodiment, what I live through my own practice and work with other professionals, and what values we live as a profession. The humanities are the source of some of the most elegant and incisive criticisms of society that exist — if these critical approaches help inform my attitude to the world, how do I exhibit such an approach through my work? What do we express through our purchasing and collections decisions, approaches to student learning, relationships with other institutions, or outreach to the public? I take the “implicit embodiment of humanities interpretation” as an excellent challenge.

TEI and Libraries: New Avenues for Digital Literacy?

In this post, Harriett Green looks at how libraries can use TEI to advance digital literacy. For further reading, the author has also provided a list of recommended resources.

A prominent theme of the TEI 2012 Annual Members Meeting and Conference was how to make TEI an even more viable tool for scholarly discourse and analysis. This theme was quite fortuitous, because this was the focus on my paper presentation at the conference: I am exploring how libraries should expand their involvement in TEI beyond applying it in their digitized collections, and I proposed that libraries can approach the TEI as a method of promoting digital literacy.

The Text Encoding Initiative, better known as TEI, is one of the longest enduring and core sub-specialties of digital humanities scholarship, and was first developed in 1987 by scholars who sought to make their digitized texts more flexible for computational analysis and mining.[1] Since the mid-1990s, the presence of TEI in academic libraries has largely been found in digital collections. There is a long and complex history of libraries creating rich digital collections with extensive TEI mark-up, contributing to research initiatives, and developing best practices on the use of TEI.[2]

But I believe that the current and future potential for the TEI in humanities research and scholarship can only be fully realized if TEI mark-up skills are continually taught in order to build a growing base of users. As such, I presented a paper at the TEI Annual Meeting that explored the questions: How have libraries and information professionals helped to sustain the TEI user community, and what are the possibilities for the future?

For the initial study presented in the paper, I interviewed five librarians from research libraries at the University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and Indiana University who have been extensively involved in supporting and teaching the TEI at their libraries.  From their responses, I outlined three particular facets of library support of the TEI: Teaching, tutorials, and tools. In the interviews, I learned that librarians teach TEI encoding and XML to their campus faculty and students in environments ranging from graduate seminars to campus-wide workshops. Other librarians have created online tutorials that provide widely-accessible portals to self-directed learning of the TEI for their campus community and the larger scholarly community. And other libraries are developing databases and tools that facilitate text mining with TEI.

[pullquote]The teaching of XML and TEI can be a crucial way for libraries to make new inroads with their constituents in digital and information literacies.[/pullquote]In my analysis, these interviews began to reveal that through these research services for the TEI, libraries can promote digital literacy: The dissemination of TEI through instruction and research services can be critically linked to concepts of digital literacy. The librarian interviewed from Virginia strongly felt that “I feel that TEI is still an important thing for faculty and students to know, and I still continue to support it.” The librarian from Indiana University also noted that in the English graduate course she taught on applying TEI for the Victorian Women Writers Project, the way that students read texts was transformed: “It changed the way they read,” she said. “You could see it when they were encoding that they were reading every single word and noting every punctuation mark, and that they were reading in a way they hadn’t before.”  As such, faculty and students’ ability to translate texts into a format for digital use could be construed as a skill falling within the tenets of digital literacy.

Two definitions for digital literacy, drawn from among several working definitions, are most appropriate for this discussion. Education researchers Aharon Aviram and Yoram Eshet-Alkalai created a now widely-adopted 5-part holistic frame for digital literacy that contains the sub-areas of photo-visual literacy, reproduction literacy, information literacy, branching literacy, and socio-emotional literacy.[3] The other definition is a comprehensive framework proposed by the DigEuLit Project, which defines digital literacy as:

The awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesize digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others, in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process.

In this light, the TEI is well positioned to be considered as a partner in outcomes for digital literacy. As more and more texts are digitized, TEI is a critical tool for digital publishing initiatives and facilitating the text mining research and distant reading of a corpus of thousands of digitized texts.  The teaching initiatives, learning objects, and educational tools for TEI profiled in this paper as well as other existing ones, all empower students and faculty to build digital literacy skills in creating, analyzing, and preserving digital manifestations of texts and textual data they study in their research.  As Jones-Kavalier and Flannigan articulate in an EduCAUSE Quarterly editorial, “Using the same skills used for centuries—analysis, synthesis and evaluation—we must look at digital literacy as another realm within which to apply elements of critical thinking”[4].

SGML, the initial mark-up language used for the TEI, was recognized early on as a critical tool for education and an 1996 Computers in Libraries article notes that “TEI gives students in today’s educational system access to historical and current information.” TEI, the article states, was among the types of SGML mark-up that “provide steppingstones to address issues of information access and reuse in education and research”[5]. Digital literacy strives to create learners who are critically thinking about the ways in which they engage and manipulate digital resources.

Melissa Terras notes in her study of the TEI By Example tutorials that “It is understood that much intellectual and temporal effort goes into marking up textual material with suitable granularity to facilitate in depth analysis and manipulation of textual material”[6]. Libraries are institutions that are committed to the promotion and teaching of information literacy, and the teaching of XML and TEI can be a crucial way for libraries to make new inroads with their constituents in digital and information literacies. Ultimately, I see libraries do have a role in helping educate users in the digital tools used for DH research, and ultimately, I believe we can help more and more scholars revise their research methodologies to adapt to digital scholarship.

[1] Richard Giordano, “The Documentation of Electronic Texts Using Text Encoding Initiative Headers: An Introduction,” Library Resources & Technical Services 38, no. 4 (1994): 389-402.

[2] See the recently-updated “Best Practices for TEI in Libraries,” Version 3.0, October 2011.

[3] Aharon Aviram and Yoram Eshet-Alkalai, “Towards a Theory of Digital Literacy: Three Scenarios for Next Steps.” European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning (2006).

[4] Barbara Jones-Kavalier and Suzanne L. Flannigan, “Connecting the Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century,” EduCAUSE Quarterly 2 (2006): 8-10.

[5] SGML Open Staff, “SGML in Education: the TEI and ICADD Initiatives,” Computers in Libraries 16, no. 3 (1996): 26-28.

[6] Melissa Terras, Ron Van den Branden, and Edward Vanhoutte, “Teaching TEI: The Need for TEI by Example,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 24, no. 3 (2009): 297-306.