Category: blogpost

POST: The Digital Campaigns Project

Writing for the Archive-It blog, Joshua Meyer-Gutbrod (University of South Carolina, Department of Political Science) describes the context and creation of the Digital Campaigns Project, a database of U.S. state legislative campaign websites from 2016-2022 that enables researchers to examine variation in state partisan agendas and rhetoric.

The project, initially begun in 2016, is led by Meyer-Gutbrod and co-created with undergraduate students from the University of South Carolina, with the goal of establishing a long-running data source on state campaign rhetoric by archiving campaign websites for state-level elected officials.

The blog post describes the process of finding local campaign websites and partnering with the Archive-It team to create a public repository of the website data. On the research potential of this database, Meyer-Gutbrod writes, “From a research perspective, both the text and image data stored through these archives provides a unique, expansive, and holistic look at state political rhetoric, which has historically been understudied due to the lack of availability of similar data.”

POST: Respect Des Bits: Archival Theory Encounters Digital Objects and Media

In his latest post for The Signal, Trevor Owens explores digital objects through the lens of archival theory, such as respect des fonds, or the archival imperative to maintain original order. He explains:

While the representations of digital objects often appear non-linear it is critical to not be seduced by the flickering and transitory view of digital objects provided by our screens. At the end of the day, every digital object is encoded on some medium and that encoding is an ordered sequence of bits.

 

POST: Of Fences and Defenses

Kevin Smith (Duke University) has written a post exploring what it means to recognize fair use as a “postitive right” as opposed to an “affirmative defense.” Inspired by the language used in one of the amicus briefs filed in the Authors Guild, Inc. v. Hathi Trust case, Smith concludes:

If we understand fair use as a positive right that creates a boundary limiting the control of rights holders, we ought to be less afraid of exercising it.  After all, we do not fear to walk on a public sidewalk just because some landowner might scream “trespass;” we recognize that rights over land have boundaries and do not shirk from exercising our positive right to use public land.  The argument in this amicus brief points us to a similar confidence when exercising our fair use right.

 

POST: Weekend Reading: The DH Summer Edition

Over on the ProfHacker blog, Adeline Koh, Director of the Digital Humanities Center at Richard Stockton College, lines up weekend readings that “focus on some interesting developments in race, ethnicity and literary studies within the digital humanities, social media, and some literary inspiration for beginning your new summer project.” Links include a summary of last week’s #DHPoco Open Thread (as Recommended in dh+lib review). Click on over to ProfHacker for the full list.

RESOURCE: Media Studies and DH

How does media studies inform DH– and vice versa? MediaCommons is currently hosting a series on “the differentiations and intersections of media studies and the digital humanities.” Twenty “digital humanists and media scholars” have been invited to comment on “the intersections of these two disciplines, how they use them, and how these intersections expand and/or complicate these two fields of study.” Posts have been scheduled April 15-May 10. They include, thus far:

As Rhody writes in his post (a DHNow Editors’ Choice), which looks at how DH has emerged and been refined:

The messy histories remind us that DH is a term in its relative infancy deployed — yes, strategically, tactically, rhetorically — to encompass a broader set of traditions that themselves have complex backstories threaded through a host of disciplinary backgrounds and, importantly, institutional types: not just universities, but galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (the GLAM quartet), small historic homes and historical societies.

Login to the MediaCommons site to post comments on these posts, several of which are hosting lively comment discussions!

 

 

POST: The Limitations of GitHub for Writers

On ProfHacker, Konrad Lawson reports on the limitations of GitHub for writers, the last in a series of posts introducing and reviewing GitHub (with a posting on alternatives to GitHub in the works). He writes:

GitHub, in its current form, can serve the needs of writers and scholars, just as it currently serves programmers, and more recently, groups adding laws and government regulations as repositories on the site. For many reasons, however, both GitHub, and the broader approach to collaboration that it has promoted in the world of coding, is not ideal for writers and there are good reasons to support the development of alternative services more suited to our academic or other writing needs.

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.

POST: Patchwork Libraries

In a new post on his Sapping Attention blog, Ben Schmidt offers a visualization of the library sources of books included in Bookworm. Bookworm, a project that “explores new means of library data visualization,” takes books and metadata included in the Internet Archive’s Open Library as its source material. The visualization, beyond drawing attention to the number of books contributed to the Internet Archive by particular libraries over time, points to “temporal patterns” around the 1923 copyright cutoff or particular concentrations of institutional book collections. His lesson is that one must know the source material making up the aggregate and understand where and why shifts in the overall collection have occurred:

The digital libraries we’re building are immense patchworks. That means they have seams. It’s possible to tell stories that rest lightly across the many elements. But push too hard in the wrong direction, and conclusions can unravel.

This attention to the source library materials is reflected in other visualizations and tools with possible application in the Digital Public Library of America. A dh+lib review post last week described Harvard metaLab’s Data Artifacts project, “which seeks to understand the collections data of libraries and other institutions as cultural objects.” This week’s dh+lib review of Matthew Jockers and Julia Flanders’ keynote from the Boston Area Days of DH 2013 looks at the question of scale and the artificial divide between macro and micro reading in DH.

Is aggregation spurring a return to close examination, and, in the language of metaLab (“artifacts, things assembled by human hands and minds, with stories to tell and values to express”), to an almost artisanal sense of the small, handwrought particulars of the sources themselves? Critiquing some of the aggregate-data-driven claims of other scholars, Schmidt has commented: “The explanations for patterns like this might be solved by algorithmic firepower, but just as often they’ll be solved by arcane knowledge from history, literature, or library science.” Might algorithmic firepower and arcane knowledge be complementary?

POST: Irreconcilable differences? Name authority control & humanities scholarship

A jointly-written post from OCLC Research describes an area of potential overlap for librarians and humanities scholars: names.

Writing on hanging together, Karen Smith-Yoshimura, OCLC Research program officer, and David Michelson, Assistant Professor of early Christianity at Vanderbilt and director of The Syriac Reference Portal, describe a collaboration between OCLC Research and Syriac studies scholars to improve Syriac coverage in the OCLC-hosted Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). Recognizing that VIAF can function as a stable, persistent, and linked authority control, DH scholars have been integrating it into projects. But, as Smith-Yoshimura and Michelson describe, “fundamental differences between library and scholarly practice” keep VIAF from being as useful to scholars as it might be. They identify:

two keys issues important to scholars that just don’t mesh well with the library practices represented in name authority files… due to differences in intended audiences, disciplinary norms, and metadata needs: Scholars eschew a ‘preferred name.’ … Scholars need to know the provenance of each form of name.

The collaboration between OCLC Research and Syriac scholars aims to overcome these distinct requirements and sources by developing a dedicated database for Syriac scholars that provides naming information tailored to their needs. This database will be crosswalked to enhance VIAF data.

RESOURCE: How to Git

Over on the ACRL TechConnect Blog, Eric Phetteplace has provided an introduction to Git and its potential relevance, along with instructions on tackling it, promising: “If you are generally afraid of anything that reminds you of the DOS Prompt, you’re not alone and you’re also totally capable of learning Git.”

In an earlier post on TechConnect, Josh Fink introduced the concept of version control:

In programming, a version control system is a program that, at a very basic level, records the state of a project and has functionality to view past states, commonly called arepository and allows people to collaborate on that repository. Modern version control systems have the ability to incorporate changes to that state from multiple contributors, keep all revisions of a project indefinitely, have as many backups as the project as there are people with copies of the repository, and make it easy to collaborate with others.

Phetteplace points readers to a range of resources on Git, including the LITA/ALCTS Library Code Year’s GitHub Project as a source for collaborating on Git repositories.