Category: Publication

PROJECT: Postcolonial Digital Humanities

Adeline Koh, a visiting faculty fellow at Duke and assistant professor of literature at Richard Stockton College, and Roopika Risam, a PhD candidate at Emory, have launched a new site dedicated to “Global explorations of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability within cultures of technology.” The site includes Founding Principles (including alt genealogies of DH), a call for submissions, and a Mission Statement.

What is postcolonial DH? As Koh and Risam outline in the site’s mission statement:

Grounded in the literary, philosophical, and historical heritage of postcolonial studies and invested in the possibilities offered by digital humanities, we position postcolonial digital humanities as an emergent field of study invested in decolonizing the digital, foregrounding anti-colonial thought, and disrupting salutatory narratives of globalization and technological progress. We have three major goals: to define the postcolonial digital humanities, to locate ways postcolonial studies can and should shift in response to digital changes and challenges, and to write alternative genealogies of the digital humanities.

We note that defining the digital humanities is highly contested (Kirschenbaum, Fitzpatrick, Spiro, Svensson, Alvarado, Scheinfeldt, Gavin and Smith in Debates in the Digital Humanities; also see a community definition of the digital humanities in the Day of Digital Humanities 2012). For our purposes, our working definition of the digital humanities is a set of methodologies engaged by humanists to use, produce, teach, and analyze culture and technology.

Beyond the new Postcolonial Digital Humanities site, Koh and Risam administer the #DHPoco tumblr and can be found on Twitter @dhpoco.

 

RESOURCE: Appraising our Digital Investment: Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries

A new report from the Association of Research Libraries and Ithaka S+R investigates the financial and technological longevity of digital special collections:

While many research libraries have begun to digitize their collections and share best practices around the steps required to create digital content, much less is known about what happens post-launch…[this study] offers a first look at the practices, attitudes, costs, and revenues associated with caring for digitized special collections. [excerpt]

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: Boston-Area Digital Humanities Consortium website

The Boston DH Consortium, formed in August 2012 “to pursue shared funding opportunities; organize a series of events; network with digital humanities centers, organizations, and societies worldwide; and encourage local discussion of digital humanities and related topics,” has launched a new site. The Consortium describes itself as:

“an information association of educational and cultural institutions in New England committed to the collaborative development of teaching, learning, and scholarship in the digital humanities and computational social sciences.”

The site currently includes a calendar featuring upcoming events in the area, a list of consortial members, and information about joining the BostonDH mailing list. And– good news for DHers outside of New England– the group plans to extend membership beyond the Greater Boston area in Spring 2014.

 

RESOURCE: The Lib Pub blog

Lib Pub, a new group blog on library publishing, launched in January 2013. As blog founder Melanie Schlosser, the Digital Publishing Librarian at Ohio State University Libraries, writes in an introductory post:

“Publishing efforts in libraries are becoming more and more common, but there aren’t yet a lot of venues for those involved to come together and share their thoughts and experiences. The Lib Pub is meant to be one.”

This week, Schlosser issued a call for those whose work involves both DH and library publishing to contact her. She writes:

“I’m curious about how many  of you have both publishing and DH in your job description, or have a humanities focus in your publishing program, or work with a DH center in some way.”

 

RESOURCE: MLA Commons, The Early Modern Digital Collaboratory

A new public group, EMDC: The Early Modern Digital Collaboratory, has launched on MLA Commons. Billed as “a venue for digital humanists studying early modern texts and culture (roughly 1450-1700), principally in the English language,” the EMDC “fulfills an idea that circulated at MLA 2013: what if early modernists using digital humanities tools and methods had a venue for our research collaborations?”

Other MLA public groups of potential interest to dh+lib readers include:

+Libraries and Research in Languages and Literatures
+Digital Humanities

POST: Learning By Doing: Labs As Pedagogy

Cameron Blevins writes here about the challenges of teaching digital methods in a history classroom. Some of the experiences might ring true with librarians tasked with teaching information literacy, such as this:

My first lab, for instance, spelled out instructions in excruciating detail. Unfortunately, this led to exactly the kind of passive learning I wanted to avoid. I liken it to the “tutorial glaze” – focusing so much on getting through individual tasks that you lose track of how they all fit together or how you would apply them beyond the dataset at hand. The ability to teach early-stage technical skills involves a litany of pedagogical challenges that humanities instructors are simply not used to tackling.

How might librarians partner with faculty to avoid this scenario? What techniques have you discovered to help students from a variety of skill levels remain engaged throughout an instruction session?

RESOURCE: Digital Literacy and Digital Citizenship

Elijah Meeks (Digital Humanities Specialist, Stanford University Libraries) has shared notes from his presentation on the digital humanities to the Bay Area Teacher Development Collaborative, in which he makes a case for its importance at the high school level. The talk not only gives a useful introduction to key tools and projects in GIS, text analysis, and network analysis, but also raises some interesting points of intersection between librarianship and the digital humanities. Part of his discussion addresses the role of DH in improving information literacy:

When a student learns how to use a spatial or text or network analysis technique in a computer science course, they don’t dwell upon the ethical and social ramifications of its use. By bringing the digital into the humanities, we provide a space to question the effect of these pervasive techniques and tools on culture and society.

As librarians, do you use digital humanities methods, tools, or projects in your instruction sessions? Are there any information literacy instructors out there who incorporate DH into their curriculum?

 

RESOURCE: National Digital Stewardship Alliance Glossary

Checksum? Bagger? Ingest?

The National Digital Stewardship Alliance has released a glossary of digital stewardship terms.

NDSA members have been working on a “Levels of Digital Preservation” activity to provide basic digital preservation guidance on how an organization should prioritize its resource allocation. This glossary provides a common language for NDSA members to communicate about the levels work and should also be useful as a general digital stewardship glossary.

 

RECOMMENDED: Digital Humanities in Libraries: New Models For Scholarly Engagement

In January, the Journal of Library Administration published a special issue devoted entirely to DH in libraries. Digital Humanities in Libraries: New Models for Scholarly Engagement features six articles that address both the theoretical and practical aspects of how libraries and librarians can engage in DH work. The issue was guest edited by Barbara Rockenbach, Director of the Humanities and History Libraries at Columbia University, who has been working to rejuvenate that institution’s Digital Humanities Center. [Our readers may recall that Ms. Rockenbach recently led a session at THATCamp Digital Humanities and Libraries focused on re-skilling librarians.]

Micah Vandegrift, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Florida State University and a co-author of one of the issue’s articles, has assembled links to the open access versions of the articles. He also describes his experience negotiating his contract with the publisher to allow such access.

With contributions from Chris Alen Sula, Jennifer Vinopal and Monica McCormick, Miriam Posner, Bethany Nowviskie, Micah Vandegrift and Steward Varner, and Ben Vershbow, this special issue is an important addition to the conversation about DH and libraries that we hope to develop here at dh+lib.