The Best Practices Exchange is accepting session proposals for their next (un)conference, The Digital Life Cycle, to be held at California State University, Sacramento on June 10-12, 2024.
Proposed sessions can be in a variety of formats and will ideally focus on any aspect of the digital life cycle, but proposals on topics not related to the theme are also welcome. Visit the call for proposals website to learn more about the theme and the organizers’ recommendations for creating a strong proposal.
Proposals should be submitted via online form no later than Monday, February 16, 2024 at midnight.
This year’s Digital Library Federation Forum will once again host a DH and Libraries THATCamp: “After a first successful DH & Libraries THATCamp event last year at the DLF Forum in Denver, we are hoping to continue the conversation this year.” Organized as a post-conference event, it will take place in Austin on November 7 from 9AM–5PM. Registration details are available at THATCamp: Digital Humanities & Libraries 2013.
THATCamp CNHM 2013 took place at George Mason University last weekend and included a Maker Challenge, which resulted in some great tangibles. Some of the notable projects include:
Publishing Contract Repository: “This site aims to enable honest negotiations between authors and publishers by sharing information about contracts. Authors are encouraged to contribute copies of their contracts and to browse the site to see what others have agreed to.”
Digital Historians: Somehow, there was not yet a site for digital historians, so http://www.digitalhistorians.org/ was created. The site was built using Commons in a Box, and is intended to be a hub for activity and collaboration. In the words of site founder Sheila Brennan, “Lots of active historians do digital work, and we should be doing more to connect with one another so that we know about ongoing work and can foster collaboration.” Register for an account if you’re interested in digital history.
DPLA WordPress Plugin: Winner of the THATCamp Prime Maker Challenge, Boone Gorges’ plugin displays related content from the Digital Public Library of America to an author’s WordPress blog content.
Moby Schtick Bot: Mark Sample introduced “Introducing my entry into the THATCamp Maker Challenge: Moby Schtick, a Twitter bot that randomly mashes up tweets from comedian Rob Delaney (“the funniest person on Twitter”) with passages from his favorite novel, Moby-Dick (“the funniest book about sperm whales”).” Sample gives us fair warning: “this bot is not NSFW (NOT SAFE FOR WHALING)”
In this report on the Digital Humanities & Libraries THATCamp, held in conjunction with the 2012 Digital Library Federation Forum meeting in Denver, Michelle Dalmau, Acting Head of Digital Collections Services at the Indiana University Libraries, draws out and discusses six broad themes that emerged from the sessions. As an organizer and attendee, Dalmau also invites fellow campers to respond with their own versions of camp stories.
Largely inspired by a lively thread on the ACRL Digital Humanities and Discussion Group (ACRL DH DG) concerning how libraries and library professionals can support digital humanities (DH) scholarship, the DH & Libraries and THATCamp came to be. On November 2, 2012, in conjunction with the Digital Library Federation Forum, seventy-two participants convened to explore just that question.
Background
The organizers — colleagues from Indiana University, New York University, Temple University, Ohio State University, University of Houston, the Digital Library Federation, and THATCamp — recognized that academic libraries have a long history of supporting DH initiatives. Often these initiatives are concerned with digital representation of content, discovery, preservation, and analysis — activities essential to a library’s mission. DH & Libraries THATCamp was conceived to provide a venue to further explore ongoing conversations about strategic partnerships and services libraries are uniquely situated to offer to the DH arena, moving away from a support model to a truly collaborative framework in which library professionals foster and contribute to DH as experts and scholars in their own right.
Around the time that the ACRL DH group was exploring the implications of this question, many librarians who play (or want to play) an active role in cultivating DH initiatives were fired up by another conversation taking place on blogs and on Twitter. Blog posts from Micah Vandegrift, Miriam Posner, and Trevor Munoz championed the role of librarians as partners in DH endeavors, building upon the ideas presented in Bethany Nowviskie’s June 2011 talk, “A Skunk in the Library.” All of these discussions provided further impetus for the DH & Libraries THATCamp.
DH & Libraries THATCamp inspired by series of blog posts, musings and published articles. Featuring Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library.
Libraries have long contributed to digital humanities research and pedagogical initiatives. More recently, it seems that DH is gaining a more formal presence in academic libraries, especially in the way of targeted services. We are also witnessing library professionals moving beyond “support” roles to “partner” roles as they foster digital humanities initiatives within the libraries and across campus. The ACRL discussion thread identified two important and related questions:
How do we establish a model in which library professionals contribute to DH research and pedagogy as experts, scholars, and peers?
How can we attain administrative and organizational support in achieving sweeping partnerships across library units and staff, and the cultural change that such a shift would suggest?
Motivated by questions like these, session proposals for the DH & Libraries THATCamp ranged from training/cross-training library professionals and staff and information science students to starting and maintaining sustainable digital humanities programs and projects. Other proposals focused on tools and techniques used for digital humanities research (geo-spatial tools; re-purposing data), while others explored open-access and open-source publishing models and philosophies. A quick and dirty analysis of the seventy-two participants, based on their THATCamp profile pages, reveals two particular points of interest as summarized below with respect to the motivations stated earlier:
13% of the participants were high-level administrators– director-level and higher, though not all were librarians by training
57% of the participants were librarians (no surprise), but a significant percentage of those were at the department head-level
30% of the participants represented IT professionals, graduate students, digital media professionals, teaching faculty, and post-docs
Nearly half the campers present held higher-level administrative positions in libraries, which seem to indicate that the decision-makers are aware of the importance of digital humanities work and research, and that they are interested in formalizing digital humanities partnerships and initiatives within the library. Secondly, we see that non-librarians play a major role in fostering digital humanities initiatives, and this speaks to the sweeping cultural changes that need to transpire within and across libraries that stem beyond “librarian-as-partner.”
Quick and dirty breakdown of participants based on their roles.
Themes
Now that the stage has been set, it is time to explore the themes that emerged. I should disclose that I, of course, did not attend every session, so I relied on the notes and the Twitter archive to piece together the themes presented below. I should also say that I did not have access to notes for every session, and my memory generally stinks. I look forward to comments from the other organizers and the attendees to fill the gaps or set me straight.
Theme 1: Sanctioned Cultural Change
Many of us are familiar with the scenario in which a handful of library professionals partner with faculty despite limited resources, ambiguous departmental purviews, or without a pragmatic or philosophical sense of the library’s overall priorities. Many of us foster and embark on valuable digital humanities collaborations without a formal framework in place for not just cultivating, but also sustaining these partnerships. Some of us may go near-rogue, but we believe it is for a good cause, and often for the greater good, by bringing together a cross-section of library professionals as active collaborators.
[pullquote]Grassroots initiatives are probably the most infectious for inspiring cultural changes across academic libraries, but ultimately administrative and organizational support is crucial to effectively mobilize and garner the resources often needed when effecting change.[/pullquote]Grassroots initiatives are probably the most infectious for inspiring cultural changes across academic libraries, but ultimately administrative and organizational support is crucial to effectively mobilize and garner the resources often needed when effecting change. As Vinopal and McCormick state in their article, “Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability,” published in the Journal of Library Administration: “This requires not just a one-time organizational change, but also the development of an organizational culture that is inquisitive, adaptable, responsive, and that welcomes change, one that is willing to try new things, assess their success, and sometimes simply move on” (p. 40).
Enacting theme 1, sanctioned cultural change, is essential for the traction of the remaining themes that emerged.
Theme 2: Exposure to Meaningful Learning
Our THATCamp community was concerned with ways to achieve meaningful learning experiences for both library professionals (through “ongoing” or continuing education) and LIS graduate students. We considered various models of professional development with the consensus that to be successful they ultimately require full administrative support (see theme 1).
As the discussion came to a close, we were reminded that instructional scaffolding (self-directed learning with guides) and “trial and error” are probably the two most commons methods for learning the ins and outs of technology and libraries. In fact, many of us learned by doing, failing, and re-doing, and will continue learning in this manner. This speaks to the skill-gap analysis conducted by the Research Libraries UK for their Re-skilling for Research report in which self-direction, leadership abilities, and interpersonal skills are deemed most important in order to keep up with the diverse and evolutionary nature of technology in libraries.
[pullquote]A mantra seemed to emerge: exposure is key, we must remain conversant, not necessarily fluent, in the domain areas necessary to foster and sustain digital research projects and practices.[/pullquote]A mantra seemed to emerge: exposure is key, we must remain conversant, not necessarily fluent, in the domain areas necessary to foster and sustain digital research projects and practices.
Theme 3: Engagement
Engagement, as opposed to mere outreach, was another hot topic, and participants explored different ways that librarians might achieve this. Liaison librarians could collaboratively lead digital research projects with faculty and graduate students in order to channel the service ethos that permeates library culture toward research initiatives. Instead of relegating library professionals to the windowless expanse of beige cubicle farms, why not embed them in academic departments, or public services alongside the subject and reference librarians? [pullquote]Instead of relegating library professionals to the windowless expanse of beige cubicle farms, why not embed them in academic departments, or public services alongside the subject and reference librarians? [/pullquote]Embedding affords the building of direct relationships with faculty and graduate students and inter-personal knowledge transfer across library colleagues. What if libraries could incentivize faculty partnerships by allowing research to drive digital content conversion: For example, by matching funds for digitization of personal, local, or special collections, and initiating on-demand collection development to increase special holdings in direct response to teaching and research needs?
Theme 4: Experimentation
Notions of experimentation were explored in all sorts of library contexts, from spaces to services. Brian Mathews, Associate Dean for Learning & Outreach at Virginia Tech, sums up this idea quite well in his 2012 white paper: to stay relevant, libraries need to take risks and think like a start-up. When campers uttered, “experimentation,” it was often said with hands up in the air, and eager acknowledgement in the way of feverish head nods. Yet despite how often our call for experimentation is uttered, praised, or desired, we haven’t as a whole implemented a roadmap for experimentation or even gotten “permission” to experiment (see theme 1).
Libraries are perfectly situated for experimentation, and we should view the fostering of digital research in libraries as an opportunity to leverage existing technical infrastructure, and expand technical infrastructure (aka evolving “core” operations). Where else can one proceed experimentally in such a way that also takes into account long-term sustainability and scalability? Where else can one challenge the emphasis on sustainability in favor of more ephemeral instantiations of digital research projects, as a way to keep research fresh and forward-moving? [pullquote]Where else can one proceed experimentally in such a way that also takes into account long-term sustainability and scalability? Where else can one challenge the emphasis on sustainability in favor of more ephemeral instantiations of digital research projects, as a way to keep research fresh and forward-moving?[/pullquote]
Happily, models for experimentation do exist, so we don’t have to go at this blindly. One is the highly-regarded 80/20 Google model, which University of Virginia Library Scholars’ Lab (SLab) adheres to for all SLab employees, not just librarians, and which gave birth to the well-known Blacklight Project, an open-source, faceted discovery framework for library catalogs and other library content. Incubators are increasingly on our minds, from incubator spaces to more formal, library-led incubator programs for digital research, like the University of Maryland’s Digital Humanities Incubator. And we are thinking of incubators often beyond igniting digital scholarship, as a way to support this work through the various stages of the research cycle via meaningful collaborations and connections.
In more practical terms, we held discussions around:
transforming scholarship by permitting faculty and grad students unfettered access to technical infrastructure at the level necessary, including root access (gasp!) to servers (See projects from Tufts or UNC)
aligning more closely with grad students, through whom we have an eager and ready audience to create tailored opportunities for extending technology expertise and digital literacy across campus and within libraries
minimizing the focus on physical spaces to facilitate partnerships … space is nice and good, but more important is bringing the cross-section of people together from across the organization, campus, etc., which often happens virtually, as much if not more than physically
In sum, librarians and library professionals invested in promoting digital scholarship initiatives need to be able to implement new ideas and pursue projects without nth degrees of barriers. We need to be as swift as we are deliberate about access and preservation.
Theme 5: Liberate Data
Along with, or perhaps inspired by, a hands-on session on liberating data proposed by Trevor Muñoz, themes about releasing data for scholarly inquiry beyond their native interfaces resonated throughout. Here are just a few ways in which the notion of liberating data was bantered about:
Create shareable (meta)data to allow scholars to re-use and re-mix data by providing easy-access to the data (APIs, batch downloads); be bold about data-sharing
Champion open-access in open ways; disclose human understandable guidelines and policies
Fearlessly and ferociously negotiate with vendors, and partner with other vendors willing to provide a transparent, open access model like Reveal Digital
Limit embargo periods
Share the virtues of open access without undermining the fear of negatively impacting scholarly societies
Appreciate that research drives content as much as content drives research
Grapple with the humanities corollary to the “data management” plan in the sciences
Become active in shaping the direction of altmetrics especially as content is shared beyond your control
Theme 6: Broaden the Scope
In creating positions specifically labeled “digital humanities” librarians some of our colleagues in the library may feel that they are absolved from participating in the collective goal of cultivating digital scholarship. The library by its very nature is brimming with people and expertise in all the areas that have an impact on digital humanities initiatives:
Subject expertise (via Subject Librarians, but really all librarians)
Copyright/IP
Open access publishing
Data curation/management
Metadata
Information technology
Materiality (analog and digital)
Collection development / Special Collections
Project management
The question is: how to effectively move between and across these areas in ways that defeat hierarchical constraints or trappings of the organizational chart? How do we flatten the hierarchy, operationally speaking, so that we can both cultivate knowledge transfer and exact domain expertise in our usual collaborative ways?[pullquote]How do we flatten the hierarchy, operationally speaking, so that we can both cultivate knowledge transfer and exact domain expertise in our usual collaborative ways? [/pullquote]Rather than foster unique areas of experiences and knowledge, we should consider growing overlapping areas of expertise.
In Conclusion
Many other themes emerged, but this already unwieldy blog post is unable to cover:
Digital Humanities pedagogy
Scalability, or the tension between production-level services and R & D
So, what now DH & Libraries campers? The outcome of these vibrant discussions resulted, I hope, in ways that would equip us — through anecdotes, new collaborations and partnerships, and shining examples — to better define and promote our unique roles as information professionals. Since November 2, 2012, when we met, what has changed? What progress have you made with your respective endeavors, either individually, as part of a unit, or as the library as a whole? Any camper collaborations currently cooking to address any of the themes listed here? To those campers, who we admired to the point of envy (you know who you are) – any words of encouragement, battle cries, or tools or rubrics you can share to help with the greater cause?
The University of Michigan Library will be hosting a Copyright Camp 2013, on the afternoon of June 20, with a theme of Copyright and Data. Registration is free. From the announcement:
We’ll kick off with a keynote from Michael Carroll, Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University’s Washington College of Law and founding board member of Creative Commons. His talk will be about “Sharing and Hoarding Research Data: Copyright, New Federal Funding Requirements and More.” Carroll will discuss the copyright framework that applies automatically to research data as it is generated, compiled or visualized, new requirements likely to emerge from federal funding agencies in response to a new directive from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the role of informal expectations in scientific disciplines about annotating and sharing or hoarding research data.
In this post, Amanda Rust (English + Theatre Librarian at Northeastern University Libraries) shares her notes and reflections from THATCamp MLA, and offers advice for those considering THATCamp attendance.
THATCamp MLA, held in Boston on January 2, 2013, just before the annual MLA Convention, had a rich selection of session proposals (the final schedule is here). While I’ll report more deeply on two sessions below, I’d encourage you to see the complete session notes and Twitter stream for more. My notes are (obviously) shaped around personal interests, so I can’t suggest them as a complete recap of any session, but rather as an introduction to the kinds of conversations you might encounter at a THATCamp.
For those unfamiliar with the THATCamp model: THATCamp is a digital humanities “unconference,” as well as a great time. I’ve heard THATCamps described as “the best part of a conference,” the excellent conversations you have with people interested in the same subjects you are. THATCamp discussions are often unstructured and wide-ranging, and I’ve found my attendance most productive when I bring my own set of questions I want to think about during the day, and view it as an opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion rather than a single, in-depth exploration of one particular subject.
Morning Session: Aesthetics and DH
The first session I attended was Aesthetics and DH. I’m interested in interactive design (particularly around interfaces for serendipity and uncertainty in the research process), and ways that a design approach offers a chance to consider formal/aesthetic elements in research and DH projects. Which is a long way of saying: I was totally looking forward to this session. The session organizer, Amanda French, has good notes here, to which I can add some additional personal reflections.
[pullquote] One of the exciting aspects of DH, for me, is that it brings the art and design disciplines more into discussion with the humanities.[/pullquote]Session attendees were a typically THATCamp interdisciplinary mix: literary, media, and game scholars, librarians from several universities around Boston, education technologists, humanities grad students, and other campus staff interested in DH. Simply during introductions we ranged over poetry and the material, translating into digital; aesthetic analogs to neurological mechanisms; aesthetics of scholarly production; multimodal production; and 10 PRINT and cultural and/or metaphorical aspects of translation (e.g., code as a language in need of translation).
The session facilitator opened with an intriguing question: What do new media folks wish old media folks understood? The broadest and simplest answer seemed to be: understand that it exists as a discipline, with its own history and robust vocabulary and approaches. This theme of interdisciplinarity comes up quite a bit in DH – when working with other disciplines and professions, how do you collaborate in ways that respect the expertise and history of those other areas? There were a few good suggestions for further reading on new media aesthetics (see French’s notes).
The discussion moved into critical code studies, which again seemed to touch on issues of translation and design:
Platform port as translation, generation of remarkably different aesthetic objects (e.g., differences in aesthetic experiences with games translated from the NES to PC emulators to iPad touch versions).
Understanding code as designed, as a series of choices resulting in constraints. (See A Tower of Languages / Paul Swartz)
Being sure not to fetishize code as the objective “real real,” programmers make subjective choices as we all do.
Control was another big theme: as an artist, how can you / can you at all control the aesthetic experience of your viewer? Possibly, in the 19th century, we could assume that a painting hung in a museum with a certain environment, lighting, quietude, but what does an artist assume now?
Many digital current artists have no expectation of continuity, and incorporate lack of control into the experience, embracing ephemerality. There is an illusion of control with physical media and some technology, e.g. we once used Flash to control screen presentation, but Flash is now out of date and hard to play.
The ability to interact with aesthetics is affective: create your own blog template, feel more connected and in control.
Translations can be violent. Apps provide a new arena of control – rather than translation, more of a palimpsest, piling on code without changing the underlying?
As a GLAM professional, I was also fascinated by a mini-discussion of the Smithsonian’s The Art of Video Games:
Exhibit focus on nostalgia vs. art. How is the exhibit different if approached from historical vs. aesthetic organizing principles?
Disembodied game consoles can be a problem — no chance to consider design process and code, not enough aesthetic experience through play.
If including the aesthetic experience and context, how much do GLAMs need to select, preserve, and curate? (See my earlier comments on feeling simultaneously excited and exhausted.)
Interactivity was another sub-theme: do new digital aesthetics lead us to a baseline expectation of interactivity?
As always, don’t want to draw too sharp a distinction with the “old”: readers were interactive just perhaps more slowly. See Pamela/Shamela as fan fiction before the era of broadcast.
Linked data leads to new possibilities for mashup, see Small Demons. Mashups can be both invitation and form of pedagogy.
We wrapped up the discussion with consideration of market forces on design/aesthetic choices:
Market forces – cheap manufacture – were impulse behind now famous Leaves of Grass first edition design.
Incidental aesthetics: we associate emotions with designs made for market reasons (e.g., recall with fondness our intimacy with cheap paperbacks).
Through monetization of ebooks, remove aesthetics from print books to create electronic versions as quickly and cheaply as possible.
I’m often struck by how much work on aesthetics and form requires the creation of cultural and material data that just doesn’t exist yet. One discipline mentioned in the session introductions, fashion history, could be helped by a database of hemlines, textiles used, color, etc. for clothing over the centuries. How will we create this? As a librarian, I am simultaneously excited and exhausted just thinking about it.
I enjoyed this session as a good start to the day, spurring thoughts about some of the more theoretical aspects of DH, as well as how different disciplines approach the same theoretical problems. One of the exciting aspects of DH, for me, is that it brings the art and design disciplines more into discussion with the humanities. While the analysis of art and design have often been a part of the humanities – art and design held apart as objects to be considered – the actual processes and methods of art and design can serve as working models to be emulated rather than simply analyzed. User centered design, for example, is a deeply humanistic approach to the world.
Afternoon Session: Teaching Digital Archives
The afternoon session I attended, Teaching Digital Archives, was an excellent and practical discussion on working with primary sources. Our facilitator, Paul Jaussen, started with some general food for thought: in literature, how do you use the digital archive not just in one’s own work but as a teaching tool?
Process of creating literary history encourages close reading as well as historicization – how to make those two aspects coherent in one class? The literary text and contextual primary sources make each other more valuable as they are connected.
Specific example: students annotated historical maps in David Ramsey collection to give historical context to early American republic. 120 annotations by the end of class, resulting in a visualized transatlantic.
We discussed what features a digital archive needs in order to facilitate teaching and research. (For librarians, these sessions provide quick and easy user research.) To start, platforms need easy annotation tools, portable annotations, levels of openness and privacy, and easy ways to publish.
We shared some specific project examples like Neatline and Omeka (Omeka bonus: in the background libraries can easily archive what’s produced) and Historypin’s integration with mobile technology. Increasing connections between scholars and archivists was a theme, one model is outreach via making faculty members curators of archival collections, and thereby encouraging building classes around those collections.
Digital archives also carry questions of access. With all the great online archives focused around single authors, using manuscripts and primary sources should be part of teaching canonical figures. However, if archival work becomes a new standard in education, unless archival resources are open access, it will only further increase the digital divide: some schools will be able to afford the necessary archives, some won’t.
Individual teachers also have to choose between output: should students to create an online exhibit or write a long-form paper?
Rather than an either/or, address both: making a good web argument is an additional skill, not a replacement for the long-form paper. Grade analytic and synthetic skills in the online medium, too.
Can a department design curriculum to embrace online arguments in one class and the five thousand word essay in another?
Archive Fever can serve as an inspirational intro for undergrads.
We ended with a brief discussion of online tools for browsing, to enhance the serendipity of the research process; see Harvard Shelf Life, with book size based on circulation. (My own later research reminded me of CommonsExplorer, additional work done with browsing large archival sets.)
Again, these are just a few notes from two sessions, to give a sense of both the theoretical and practical conversations you can have at a THATCamp. THATCamp offers the chance to see how your research project might be viewed by an instructional designer, an historian, an IT professional. You may be just starting out and in a learning mode, or you may be deeply involved in a particular project and want detailed feedback — I’ve found that there’s room for both, but you should be ready to introduce yourself and drive some conversations. THATCamp challenges attendees to be active in their participation, and learn the art of asking good questions and sharing good ideas. If this sounds appealing, THATCamp ACRL happens soon!
