Category: Library

Intertwingularity with Digital Humanities at the University of Florida

Laurie N. Taylor (Digital Scholarship Librarian) and Blake Landor (Classics, Philosophy, and Religion Librarian) profile recent DH developments at the University of Florida. These interconnected developments, including the formation of a dedicated library group, the development of a training course for librarians, and the launch of the Scott Nygren Scholars Studio, draw on related and distributed expertise across the campus.

Background

The University of Florida is a comprehensive, public, land-grant, research university, among the largest and most academically diverse public universities in the US. The UF Libraries form the largest information resource system in the state of Florida (the third most populous state).

Part of the history of digital humanities at UF is deeply connected with the UF Digital Collections at the George A. Smathers Libraries at UF. The UF Libraries have a long history of collaboration using technologies for preservation and access, including international collaboration for microfilming. In the 1990s, the UF Libraries began experimenting with digitization to preserve materials held in the Latin American & Caribbean Collections—collections that were built over many decades, through much collaboration with partner institutions—and in 1999, the UF Libraries formalized ongoing support for digitization by creating the Digital Library Center.

Bodhisattva CAT Scan
Gilt Wood Seated Bodhisattva CAT Scan, for UF’s Korean Art: Collecting Treasures online exhibit.

In 2006, the UF Libraries launched the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) using the open source SobekCM content management system. UF and partners collaboratively developed the SobekCM software to meet shared needs, including a robust socio-technical (people, policies, and technologies) infrastructure for:

  • Digitization and digital curation (e.g., workflows, integrated tracking and reporting, integrated digital preservation); shared documentation; collaborative training programs; online tools for workflow needs including item creation, quality control, and metadata editing;
  • Hosting for online access for all material types; integrated and separately aggregated per curatorial needs; specialized viewers for materials; branding; specialized supports for patron, scholar, librarian/curator, and other external and internal user groups; integrated online mySOBEK tools designed for general users, internal production users, and curators and scholars;
  • Ongoing growth and development for needs related to institutions, collections, technologies, collaboration for growing capacity among all partners for new activities and for growing the collaborative community, new activities as with digital scholarship and data curation.

[pullquote]dLOC now has 38 international partner institutions, many scholar contributors, over a million user views each month, and is one of the largest Open Access collections for the Caribbean.[/pullquote]

SobekCM also powers the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), for which the UF Libraries are one of the founding partners and the technical host partner. Started in 2004, dLOC now has 38 international partner institutions, many scholar contributors, over a million user views each month, and is one of the largest Open Access collections for the Caribbean. dLOC partners digitize materials, curate collections, and collaborate with scholars on intellectual infrastructure, context, growing and supporting Caribbean Studies, and new research initiatives.

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By 2011, thanks in large part to the community and collaboration with programs like dLOC, the UF Digital Collections boasted rich content and rich repository features supporting direct library needs and DH projects.[1] With the UF Libraries’s robust technical infrastructure, experience with collaborative projects, and a critical mass of digital library content, the UF Libraries recognized that the next steps required additional support to enable the UF Libraries, UF faculty and students, and others to grapple with ways of answering what do you do with it? and what next?

Answering these questions required changes in the socio-technical infrastructure for the human infrastructure in terms of positions, responsibilities, and organization. Within the existing structure, more steps were needed to build towards a comprehensive approach to address the place of subject and liaison librarians with data and DH.  It was at this point that the UF Libraries created the Digital Humanities Librarian position from a Digital Projects Librarian position within the Digital Library Center. In 2012, the DH Librarian position moved to the Scholarly Resources & Research group, reflecting the growth and changed focus from curation as part of production to part of research services, with a closer alignment with Subject Specialist/Liaison Librarians. The past and unfolding history of the UF Libraries in supporting DH continues to grow and connect with digital library activities and related work, including in data curation.

In 2013, dedicated and specific supports for all UF librarians for DH were not in place. The Digital Humanities Library Group began in 2014 as a direct outgrowth of UF’s Data Management/Data Curation Task Force (hereafter, DMCTF), a group with many campus representatives and a campus-wide scope.

Data Curation Task Force and Digital Humanities Library Group: Subject/Liaison Librarian Roles

The DMCTF was established in 2012 to address the needs of researchers on the UF campus for a coordinated approach and culture of support for data curation and management across disciplines (DMCTF Charge). The DMCTF has been responsible for sponsoring data-related events, making policy and procedure recommendations for developing human and technical infrastructures, providing information resources for the university community, and fostering collaborations and developing a full culture of support.

One of the DMCTF’s first recommendations was that Subject or Liaison Librarians develop a basic level of data literacy involving the skills necessary to effectively locate, analyze, manage, and interpret datasets, including (at a basic level) knowledge of data lifecycles; local and long-term storage options; knowledge of the DMPTool; awareness of data usage and practices in assigned subject areas; and awareness of tools and experts on campus to assist with data management for making appropriate referrals. At a more advanced level, the DMCTF recommended that Subject or Liaison Librarians have familiarity with analytical, statistical and visualization techniques and software.[pullquote]One of the DMCTF’s first recommendations was that Subject or Liaison Librarians develop a basic level of data literacy.[/pullquote]

The DMCTF was designed as an integrated group connecting other data activities and groups to enable full, campus-wide support in part by fostering a culture of radical collaboration. Although the DMCTF was somewhat too blunt an instrument to address the specific needs of digital humanists, especially in the development of training programs that centered on digital humanities, it was designed to be able to incubate new groups if appropriate. Two representatives from humanities disciplines sit on DMCTF: Laurie Taylor, Digital Scholarship Librarian (formerly called the “Digital Humanities Librarian”) and Blake Landor, the Classics, Philosophy, and Religion Librarian. Laurie is co-chair of DMCTF.

Laurie and Blake, authors of this post, discussed forming a separate, library-based group which focused on skills that library faculty and staff (especially Subject or Liaison Librarians) require to be effective supporters of digital humanities programs on campus as well as potentially involved themselves in digital humanities projects. We agreed that this group should function independently of DMCTF, while reporting back to DMCTF as input to policy recommendations. That conception was the origin of UF Libraries’ Digital Humanities Library Group (DHLG). Over the Winter Break this idea was developed into a proposal and submitted to the Library Administration; it was approved on January 29, 2014.

The DHLG was created without a specific charge other than to address/discuss issues in digital humanities and to schedule training in support of the group’s members. While the formation of the group was approved by Library Administration (with Blake in the role of Chair), it is very much a grass roots cohort of primarily Subject or Liaison Librarians brought together by a common interest. Laurie’s role has been as the administration liaison to the group as well as co-coordinator.

Shortly after the proposal was approved, an invitation to join the group went to the UF Libraries’s “All Librarians” email list and other email lists. Between 15 and 20 librarians and staff members responded to this invitation with the strong support of their supervisors to take the time off their normal schedules. The group participants include librarians and staff from various departments, including Special & Area Studies Collections, Humanities and Social Sciences, Fine Arts, Cataloging, and Administration. Since February, the group has met approximately every three weeks to discuss issues in digital humanities librarianship and define/plan a training course that would focus on digital humanities. As a model for our group to consider, Laurie developed a series of training modules or units that comprised the basic skill sets that our group agreed would give us a start on becoming well-rounded digital humanities Subject Librarians.

The Scott Nygren Scholars Studio

While this was taking place, two exciting, related developments occurred that reinforced the importance of what we were doing. The first was that UF Libraries’ Dean Judy Russell encouraged the group to explore the implementation of a Scholars Studio in our Social Sciences and Humanities Library (Library West). Dean Russell suggested that our newly-formed DHLG look into this idea and work up a proposal.  We called an outside expert, Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University Libraries, who provided recommendations and suggestions, including recommending a Scholars Studio model with a BYOD (“bring your own device”) environment that would offer wall paint, projector, and tables forming a collaborative space for instructional activities and collaborative projects, and a staging area for digital humanities-related presentations and events.

With strong internal support and sponsorship, DHLG participants organized a subgroup to develop the proposal. The subgroup added to the basic design, identifying use cases that demonstrated the value of a LED multi-touch screen, a “smart” podium, and inviting furniture, in addition to the updates to transform what is currently a rather traditional classroom into a flexible studio space. In response to input from academic departments, we added three computers with dual monitors to the proposal, and by April our completed proposal for a Scholars Studio was approved by the Library Administration, and named as the Scott Nygren Scholars Studio.

DH Library Group and Developing Librarian Program: DH and Subject/Liaison Librarians

In addition to giving us advice about UF’s Scholars Studio, Alex Gil also shared some of his experience coordinating Columbia University’s Developing Librarian Project, which turned out to be the inspiration for the training program that the DHLG decided upon. The DHLG was especially convinced by the idea that training should not take place in a vacuum, but should rather be part of a collaborative project designed to improve library resources. The “learning by doing” motif has now formed the basis for the training program that DHLG devised. After much discussion, we decided to work on the curation of the Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales digital collection, a sub-collection of UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature collection.

Little brother & little sister and other tales, illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1917)
Little brother & little sister and other tales, illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1917)

In order to implement the Developing Librarian model, we drew on internal as well as external trainers, and applied for a library Mini-Grant in support of bringing in external trainers. The title of this one-year funding proposal, which references the Columbia University project, is “Developing Librarian Digital Humanities Pilot Training Project.” The proposed training schedule draws heavily on the training units that Laurie devised for our group and is centered on the curation of the Grimm Brothers’ digital collection as our specific focus. The grant proposal has been funded, with a funding period that will extend through June 2015.

The skill sets DHLG members hope to acquire with this pilot training project include, but are not limited to, project management and charters, content management systems (e.g. WordPress, SobekCM), TEI and metadata training, GIS, data mining and visualization, linked data, and online exhibit design and development. The overall program is being designed for participants to gain skills, experience, methodological knowledge, and confidence for learning new tools and for taking on leadership roles in initiating and collaborating on projects, developing training sessions for students and scholars, and addressing new needs as they emerge. Because DH is a growth area which potentially impacts a number of functional units in the library, and many departments outside the library, the wide interest in the DHLG’s training program is not totally surprising. However, not everyone who is interested in the training has time for the whole program, and so we are trying to make allowances to accommodate different needs.

From “Just in Case” to “Just in Time”

While the DHLG was getting started, planning was also underway for a graduate certification program in digital humanities. This idea started when Elizabeth Dale, Professor of History and Law, began working with the History Librarian, Shelley Arlen, on developing a digital humanities course for the fall of 2014, which includes a certificate upon completion of the course. A proposal to expand this idea to a graduate certification program in digital humanities is being worked on collaboratively by faculty members of the Departments of English and History, Laurie, Blake, and Shelley from the Libraries, and Sophia Acord, Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities & the Public Sphere. As a starting point, this program is leveraging courses currently being taught or in development. It has been instructive to learn during the early stage in the planning of this program the number (over 25) and variety of courses in numerous academic departments that offer digital humanities content. This is a fairly recent development and speaks to the timeliness of the new Scott Nygren Scholars Studio and developing librarian training program. When the DHLG proposal was submitted last January, to some extent we were in a “just in case” frame of mind (we need these skills just in case user demand for Subject Librarians with these skills ticks up). This has now turned into a “just in time” orientation; our training will be in full tilt just as the new DH graduate certificate program and the new Scott Nygren Scholars Studio are unveiled in the fall.

Thus, three separate concurrent developments at UF have been serendipitously dovetailing. Additionally, other work that builds from, informs, and connects to these developments includes activities to better formalize and support collaboration with Scholars Councils, across Florida with the nascent Florida Digital Humanities Consortium, integration and collaboration for teaching and research with the “Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Migration, Money, and the Making of the Modern” DOCC or Distributed Online Collaborative Course, and more.[2]

Being at the epicenter of several developments at their very inception and being closely connected and collaborating with many groups and individuals is an exciting place to be. We look forward to reporting back to this group in a few months, after these developments have had a chance to progress further.

[1] Other examples of digital humanities collaborations by UF Libraries

  • Diaries of a Prolific Professor: Undergraduate Research from the James Haskins Manuscript Collection online and print on demand edited collection by teaching faculty librarians, archivists, and student researchers; written based on the experience of processing and working in the archival collection; the book represents a new scholarly contribution and serves as an artifact of the collaboration.
  • Online exhibits, new Exhibits Coordinator, and Exhibitions Program: librarians have collaboratively created online exhibits with teaching faculty, students, and others from UF and beyond. In 2011, the UF Libraries created a new Exhibits Coordinator position to implement a full exhibitions program, which was necessary in part because of the consistently increasing in demand for collaboratively creating online exhibits as digital humanities scholarship.
  • UF Digital Humanities Librarian and DH Program: In 2011, the existing Digital Librarian position title was changed to reflect the transformed position focus, from building digital collections to taking digital collections—including new digital collections—as foundations and critical components in the larger work of digital humanities, digital scholarship, data curation, and scholarly cyberinfrastructure. In 2012, the Digital Humanities Librarian position moved from the Digital Library Center, aligned more with digital production, to report through the Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources & Services which includes collections, positioning the DH Librarian and DH activities with Subject and Liaison Librarians.
  • UF’s Digital Humanities Working Group (DHWG): UF’s DHWG began in 2011 when Sophia Acord, Center for the Humanities & the Public Sphere, and Laurie Taylor, Digital Humanities Librarian, jointly convened the inaugural meeting to discuss activities designed to build a community of practice at UF for exploring the humanities in and for a digital age. UF’s DHWG includes members from across campus, with many from within and outside of the UF Libraries.
  • UF Annual Digital Humanities Day: UF’s DHWG hosted the 1st  and 2nd annual UF DH Days in 2012 and 2013 saw over 120 people at each event, gathered enormously positive feedback from the post-conference attendee surveys, and abundant, positive anecdotes of new collaborations, projects, and practices from participants (2012 introductory slides and 2013 program materials) as well as several new DH projects like the collaborative grant with Museum Studies and Library faculty for “Archiving the Photographs of the First Transcontinental Railroad.” Perhaps most importantly, these events help support development of the DH community at UF.
  • THATCamp-Gainesville: the 3rd UF DH Day event was THATCamp-Gainesville, the first THATCamp for UF and Gainesville in April 2014, which received positive post-event participant evaluations and positive anecdotes across such a great variety of areas (program materials). We don’t yet have clear examples of new projects or initiatives that can be directly traced to THATCamp-Gainesville, but the event brought together attendees from across Florida and allowed for the next-step discussions on creating the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium, with that creation underway.

[2] Related, Connected, and Intertwingled Activities
Some of the related current work, with more details, includes:

  • “Forging a Collaborative Structure for Sustaining Scholarly Access to the Baldwin Library for Historical Children’s Literature,” a project by Suzan Alteri, Curator of the Baldwin Library, to develop a Scholars Council for the Baldwin to formalize support to growth collaboration among the Baldwin Library and its scholarly community.
  • dLOC Scholarly Advisory Board Expansion, where UF is participating with the dLOC partners in developing plans for expanding the Scholarly Advisory Board (perhaps also having it become a Scholars Council) to best support and provide credit for the rich and abundant work already being done, and to support future growth.
  • “Florida Digital Humanities Consortium,” with many institutions in Florida collaboratively planning the prototype or draft of the operational model to support the broad, rich, and deep collaboration and DH work in Florida. Discussions on statewide collaboration began at THATCamp-Florida hosted by the University of Central Florida and continued at THATCamp-Gainesville at UF. Now, UCF teaching faculty and UF teaching and librarian faculty are serving as core organizers for facilitating and launching the new initiative with the statewide community.
  • “Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Migration, Money, and the Making of the Modern,” DOCC or Distributed Online Collaborative Course taught in fall 2013 by Rhonda Cobham-Sander with librarian Missy Roser at Amherst College, Donette Francis with librarians Beatrice Skokan and Vanessa Rodriguez at the University of Miami, and Leah Rosenberg with librarians Margarita Vargas-Betancourt and Laurie N. Taylor at the University of Florida. In designing the course, the scholars deliberately created the syllabus, modules, and teaching resources such that other teachers could easily use the materials to teach the full course or select specific lessons in the future with the clearly articulated goal to build intellectual infrastructure for Caribbean Studies by creating course materials, identifying materials for digitization, and creating new scholarly works with all added to dLOC (materials for teaching and research resulting from the course).
  • “Piloting a Peer-to-Peer Process for becoming a Trusted Digital Repository:” the libraries of the University of North Texas and UF are collaboratively creating a pilot peer-to-peer process for TRAC to build towards becoming a Trusted Digital Repository, including using the process to build even stronger capacity locally and as a community for supporting collaborative needs related to preservation, governance, auditing, reporting, and other concerns.

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

 

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[wp_biographia user=”lntaylor”]

 

What if we do, in fact, know best?: A Response to the OCLC Report on DH and Research Libraries

In this post, Dot Porter (University of Pennsylvania) critiques a recently-published OCLC report (“Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?”), drawing attention to the range of backgrounds and stations occupied by those who practice DH, inside or outside of the library.

Reading through the OCLC report authored by Jennifer Schaffner and Ricky Erway, Does Every Research Library Need A Digital Humanities Center?, my initial responses were:

  1. “Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?” sounds like a loaded question to me; and
  2. “DH academics.” What the heck is a “DH academic”?

The OCLC report has a lot of good in it. The sections on metadata and the long-term preservation of digital objects are particularly apt. But the language used throughout the report sets up an unnecessary and unhelpful “us/them,” differentiating between “DH academics” and “librarians.” This language and the assumptions inherent in it simplify what is a truly complicated landscape. Almost any major research university will include faculty new to DH, faculty who have been practicing DH for many years, librarians new to DH, librarians who are long-time practitioners of DH, and non-librarians working in libraries who support digital work (including but not limited to DH).

The OCLC report uses a variety of terms that appear to refer to “faculty who do (or who wish to do) Digital Humanities,” although these terms are never defined, and seem to be used interchangeably. In the Executive Summary itself, we find “DH scholars,” “DH researchers,” and “DH academics.” Further in the report we find added to the mix “digital humanists” and “scholars engaged in DH.” Although all these terms remain undefined, it’s pretty clear from context that these scholars, researchers, and academics are not librarians – they are something else, another class of people who exist to be served by libraries and, by extension, by librarians. Librarians who know something about DH do get a mention, at the top of page 9. But they are “DH-skilled librarians,” or “DH librarian” – not “digital humanists” themselves.

[pullquote]The reality is more complicated than “DH academic” on one hand and “DH librarian” on another.[/pullquote]

The reality is more complicated than “DH academic” on one hand and “DH librarian” on another. Librarians who practice DH are not a coherent group. Some have PhDs. Some have MLS or MIS degrees. Some have subject MA or MS degrees. Many have some combination of these. Some of them have worked their entire careers in the library. Others (such as myself) started elsewhere and at some point were hired into a library. These librarians are professionals, who present alongside faculty at the annual Digital Humanities Conference (the annual international DH conference, co-organized by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations) and at more traditional subject conferences. They present on collaborations, and they present on their own work. Some of these librarians have been doing DH for years, although in more recent years many are new to the field, and some of them (both the newbies and the silverbacks) work at institutions where the only digital humanities work happening is in the library, and it is happening because they are doing it.

It is galling for these professionals to be told, as they are in the OCLC report, that “the best decision is to observe what the DH academics are already doing and then set out to address gaps,” and “What are the DH research practices at your institution, and what is an appropriate role for the library? What are the needs and desires of scholars, and which might your library address?” and especially “DH researchers don’t expect librarians to know everything about DH, and librarians should not presume to know best [my italics].” What if the librarians are the DH researchers? What if we do, in fact, know best? Not because we are brilliant, and not because we are presumptuous, but because we have been digital humanists for a while ourselves so we know what it entails?

[pullquote]What if the librarians are the DH researchers?[/pullquote]

I’m not entirely sure where the “DH academics” / “DH librarians” dichotomy in the OCLC report comes from. I’ve known incredibly competent digital humanists who work in libraries, and traditional humanities departments, and digital humanities centers (and quite a few who work in engineering departments, too). To be honest, I’ve known less competent digital humanists from all these areas as well. It doesn’t make sense to measure the digital humanist-ness of someone based on their current post (especially as digital humanists tend to be fairly fluid, moving between posts inside and outside of the library; you can’t just guess someone’s competence based on their job title).

Also absent from the report is a definition of what a “DH Center” entails, striking given the motivating question of the title (“Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?”). Diane M. Zorich’s 2009 piece “Digital Humanities Centers: Loci for Digital Scholarship” (and its accompanying 2008 CLIR report “A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States“) does an excellent job of describing DH, and investigating how it was practiced on the ground at that time. Her working definition of “Center,” used within the report is fairly broad, to wit:

A “center” implies a central (physical or virtual, or both) area where a suite of activities is conducted by individuals dedicated to a common mission. (Zorich, Survey, p. 4)

Depending on the definition you are using, a DH Center could include a room in a department or library where people gather to learn new technologies, explore research questions, or undertake scholarly projects. Such a thing does not necessarily require major investments.

I’d like to close with some suggestions for further reading for those (faculty, librarians, library directors, college deans) coming new to digital humanities in the context of libraries. There has been a lot of really good writing on the intersection of digital humanities and the libraries in recent years. Miriam Posner (former Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University Library, currently Coordinator and Core Faculty in the Digital Humanities Program at UCLA) has a bibliography on her blog. It was last updated in April 2013, so it is not completely up-to-date but it does include a lot of important pieces of writing. Read them. Finally, it would be great to see another full survey of the DH support structures currently active and in development, along the lines of the 2008 CLIR survey but including less formal non-centers. Such a survey would be valuable for educating university deans and library directors about the variety of approaches that might be taken to support DH throughout their institutions, and how to best involve all digital humanists on the university payroll, whatever their job titles, who have expertise to contribute.

Pedal to the Metal: Our Year of DH

How did Virginia Commonwealth University librarians John Glover, Humanities Research Librarian, and Kristina Keogh, formerly the Visual Arts Research Librarian, build a DH initiative from the ground up? In this post, they detail their process for dreaming up, planning, developing, deploying, and evaluating Digital Pragmata over the course of its first year. 

Impetus

ALA Annual in 2012 featured the first meeting of the ACRL Digital Humanities Discussion Group and a preconference entitled “Digital Humanities in Theory and Practice: Tools and Methods for Librarians.” The former contributed to the creation of dh+lib, and the general interest in both demonstrated the demand for things DH-related within ALA. They also inspired the two of us to create Digital Pragmata, an ongoing digital arts and humanities initiative at Virginia Commonwealth University, based primarily at VCU Libraries, which kicked off with an event series. We did this within an academic year, without a formal structure to accommodate the work, no local past initiatives to draw on as examples, and minimal visible on-campus DA/DH community. Digital Pragmata has grown VCU Libraries’ DH profile on campus, reached hundreds of VCU faculty and students interested in digital scholarship, and paved the way for us to offer new kinds of outreach and support.

First Steps

Early in July of 2012, the two of us met to review our recent liaison activities and plans for the coming academic year. Not for the first time, we noted that we were continuing to encounter faculty and graduate students at VCU interested in the digital arts or digital humanities, whether in scholarly, pedagogical, or creative capacities, many of whom weren’t prepared to “do” DH, and who seemed to be looking for community.

Multiple developments relevant to the digital arts and humanities are moving forward at VCU, but no unit on campus is currently devoted solely to the digital arts or humanities. This is somewhat surprising, as Virginia Commonwealth University is a large urban research institution, with an FTE around 31,752 and various departments, programs, and interdisciplinary centers working in these areas–including top-ranking arts programs. On the other hand, as is often observed, libraries occupy a neutral ground, and finding the right blend of people, place, and resources takes time.

Based on what John had learned at ALA in Anaheim, he broached the subject of collaborating to create a digital arts and humanities initiative based out of VCU Libraries, and Kristina enthusiastically agreed. After a brief discussion, we decided that we wanted a real shot at creating something sustainable that would dovetail with library and university strategic goals: not just a workshop, lecture, or online presence, but a combination of all three, with growth potential. We decided provisionally, at John’s suggestion, to name it “Digital Pragmata,” reflecting the drive toward usefulness at the core of “more hack, less yack,” as well as the general concept of “digital things.”

Our interest in the project was strong, but we faced various potential hurdles. In our time at VCU, no liaison librarians had run, let alone started, a project on the scale we planned. Initiatives from our division, Public Services (since renamed “Research and Learning”), had not by and large previously been characterized by agile project management. We didn’t know how many people we would have to convince or collaborate with, or whom to seek out as partners. We had never attempted a project requiring substantial financial support from our library’s leadership. Perhaps our biggest hurdle was overcoming our own preconceived notions, both of what constituted feasible projects for librarians at our level and what kind of support we could expect from our institution.

The Landscape

As part of our initial planning process, we studied other institutions’ approaches. We learned, for instance, that the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota has established Digital Humanities 2.0, a collaborative working group “to investigate and create ways of advancing artistic creation and scholarly research in the humanities by exploring digitization and Web 2.0 technologies.” We also looked at SUNY Buffalo’s Humanities Institute (HI) Research Workshops, which sponsors guest lectures and hosts presentations of research in progress by faculty and graduate students from diverse disciplines.

We were particularly interested in initiatives based out of university libraries. A good model is the Digital Arts & Humanities Lecture Series developed and hosted by the Brown University Library and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. This series closely aligned with our own goals of bringing together faculty and students from different disciplines engaged in digital projects.

We also looked at developing projects in the digital humanities at VCU. Though there are a growing number of DH projects based in various departments, at our institution there has been no one central place or structure where scholars and students that work on digital arts and humanities projects can come together. VCU has, however, been working toward a number of initiatives that would offer the possibility of likely partnerships if we were to successfully establish a DH initiative. These include the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) and the Center for Advanced Research in the Humanities, which is currently recruiting for a Director. In addition, at the time, VCU Libraries was in the process of recruiting a Head for the newly conceived Innovative Media Studio, which will become part of the new addition to the James Branch Cabell Library set to open in Fall 2015. In the meantime, the continuing lack of one (or any) zone of interaction for those interested in this type of activity was becoming an increasing issue.

Stakeholders and Speakers

While we were waiting for final approval from the Libraries’ Administration, we set up meetings with people and groups inside and outside the library in order to begin laying our groundwork. We knew there would be many moving parts, but getting buy-in on campus was important. Our first meetings were with two targeted units outside the library – the Office of Research and the Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE). By bringing these units on board as named co-sponsors, we knew we could – from the start – increase our network of contacts. Their connections would also offer another venue for promotion.

After we received final approval, we met with stakeholders inside the library, including other research and collections librarians and department heads from Special Collections & Archives to discuss Digital Pragmata. Our colleagues offered many suggestions for potential speakers and knowledge of relevant projects around the country. Our web presence would not have been possible without the work of Erin White and Joey Figaro, members of the web team from our Digital Technologies department. Finally, we contacted and met with likely faculty and department heads around campus to publicize the events and our reasons for starting the initiative.

The speakers developed from a list we populated, as well as suggestions from others we spoke with during this initial process. We received one piece of advice that shifted our initial thinking about our first two panel sessions. It was suggested that outside speakers (i.e. non-VCU people) were more likely to elicit interest from faculty and students as we worked to establish Digital Pragmata. We decided to refocus our two panels to feature outside speakers, with VCU faculty acting as moderators for each event. Based on the initial advice, we felt this would garner interest in the concept, so that we could focus more on VCU projects down the road.

In the third week of December, we met with our supervisor, Bettina Peacemaker, and the Associate University Librarian for Public Services, Dennis Clark, to discuss Digital Pragmata. Administrative Council had met, discussed, and endorsed our proposal for two panels and a digital projects funding workshop, all of which would be designed to appeal to faculty and graduate students across the range of arts and humanities disciplines. We were given the go-ahead to begin planning in earnest, empowered to work with those colleagues we thought could contribute time or expertise, with the knowledge that we had financial support to make the event a success.

There was to be no task force, working group, or standing committee. In addition to this vote of confidence, we were simply asked to check in when we had questions or there were developments (e.g. speakers confirmed). This was simultaneously liberating and nerve-wracking: we had been entrusted with a high-profile project, the success or failure of which could affect the library and its perception on campus, students and faculty in our disciplines, and our own work life and careers.

Into the Weeds

Figure 1 - Digital Pragmata Mailer
Mailer

Our initial proposed budget was $600-$800. This, we argued, would be satisfactory to pay for light refreshments as well as travel, parking, and lunch to bring one speaker to each event from outside the Richmond metropolitan area. As our proposal’s parameters expanded, however, we were lucky to be approved for a much larger and more flexible budget, allowing us to offer honoraria for six outside speakers, travel and hotel accommodation for our out-of-town speakers, lunches for the speakers and university and library administration, receptions following two events, and gift bags for our speakers and moderators. Our process was heavily influenced by Gregory Kimbrell, VCU Libraries’ Membership and Events Coordinator, who both guided us and did or oversaw much of the events coordination work himself.

We spent a substantial amount of time trying to determine how best to publicize Digital Pragmata. One of the most important meetings in January was with our Director of Communication and Public Relations, Sue Robinson, with whom we discussed our overall publicity strategy and online presence. She helped us to think more effectively about our message and audience, and to target our promotion.

Facebook Page
Facebook Page

Sue, in turn, worked with a graphic designer on design concepts, one of which eventually led to the image that currently illustrates print materials like posters and mailers, and is the header image for Digital Pragmata’s blog, Facebook page, and Twitter feed (hashtag #digprag). Throughout the spring, colleagues, students, and faculty spoke effusively about the image’s eye-catching nature.

Showtime, and After

The March 26 and April 25 events each unfolded in similar fashion, on similar schedules. Library facilities and events colleagues ensured that our location, a multipurpose room seating around 65 people, was clean, with chairs set. Colleagues in library systems helped ensure that our technology was ready, and (see below) were indispensable when a travel debacle prevented one panelist from presenting in person. Colleagues from library events and administration helped to direct traffic, check attendees in, and keep everything running smoothly.

Our first panel, on March 26, had 49 attendees and focused on the “front ends” of digital projects, with speakers including Ed Ayers of the University of Richmond, Amanda French of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and Emily Smith of 1708 Gallery. Each represented very different aspects of “front ends,” including Ed’s award-winning work creating many high-profile DH projects over the years, Amanda’s introduction to tools  for DH newcomers, and Emily’s experience with large-scale art projects involving image projection. The panel began with comments from multiple people, starting with John Ulmschneider, VCU’s University Librarian, and it ended with a Q&A session led by moderator Roy McKelvey, of VCU’s Department of Graphic Design.

Our second panel, on April 25, had 54 attendees and focused on the “back ends” of digital projects, with speakers including Ben Fino-Radin of Rhizome and MoMA, Francesca Fiorani of the University of Virginia, and Mike Poston of the Folger Shakespeare Library. These speakers took different approaches to the topic, including Ben’s work recreating and emulating defunct BBSes, Francesca’s process in building Leonardo and His Treatise on Painting, and Mike’s hands-on experience creating Folger Digital Texts. The panel began with comments from several people, starting with Dennis Clark, our administrator and advocate, and it ended with a Q&A session led by moderator Joshua Eckhardt, of VCU’s Department of English.

The funding workshop, held on May 2, had 20 attendees and ran somewhat differently. We chose not to film it, so that attendees might feel more free to speak about their own projects, though this wound up not being the case. Our presenters were Jessica Venable, from VCU’s Office of Research, and David Holland, from VCU’s School of the Arts, each of whom have expertise in grantsmanship and funding. Attendance for this workshop was lower than the panels, which was initially somewhat disappointing, but at twenty people, it was a tremendous turnout compared to most other VCU Libraries open workshops, particularly as it occurred during final exams.

Stumbles, Challenges, and Surprises

The main problems we experienced were those associated with the planning and execution of almost any event. These include issues such as when during the semester, day of the week, and time of day to schedule programming to allow for maximum attendance. Similarly, finding rooms on campus large enough to hold as many attendees as possible, without being too large for the number that do show up, proved a challenge. We also grappled with travel issues for our speakers, specifically a canceled flight that made it necessary for one of our panelists to present virtually from the Philadelphia International Airport.

Perhaps more unique to this type of endeavor were the problems we faced with audience expectations. If your proposed DH initiative is something completely new, the audience may be happy with almost any level or type of programming provided, having no real expectations. Later on, as our post-event surveys revealed, our audience attended with some expectations about the nature of the programming.

Attendee Survey
Attendee Survey

Different people want different things or all things – including lectures, conversational and networking events, and active learning opportunities. There was also some tension between an interest in the opportunity to learn something potentially new and innovative from outside speakers and an interest in (and even a demand for) Digital Pragmata’s role and perceived mandate to highlight VCU projects.

Various other results were unexpected. Many attendees were attracted to the topic of “digital scholarship” and “digital objects,” but came from departments outside the arts or humanities. Likewise, while we expected a positive response overall based on early conversations with stakeholders, only one survey respondent felt that the panel they attended did not meet their expectations. It was a pleasure to succeed, by and large, but the margin by which we passed expectations and the level of intensity of interest across the university was remarkable.

The Road Ahead

Attendees’ response to Digital Pragmata was overwhelmingly positive, and the year ended with the initiative counted a success by stakeholders inside and outside of the library. Survey comments heavily influenced our plans for 2013-2014, which gradually took shape over the summer. Upcoming programming will feature a blend of events, from a brown bag series to multiple large events, at and beyond the scale of Spring 2013.

The complexion of the project has changed with Kristina’s move from VCU Libraries to Indiana University, where she is Head of their Fine Arts Library, though she retains an interest in and hopes to continue to contribute to Digital Pragmata. John is now working with new partners at VCU Libraries, both to enlarge the initiative’s base of expertise and to accommodate a more ambitious schedule of programming for the new year. The project was time-consuming and sometimes exhausting, but it allowed us to engage with hundreds of faculty and students in the arts and humanities, as well as the broader VCU and local communities, teaching us about events planning, programming, publicity, outreach, and more about the digital arts and humanities in the process.

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Teaching Digital Scholarship in the Library: Course Evaluation

John Russell, of the University of Oregon Libraries, recently taught a new, graduate-level course in digital scholarship, which he introduced earlier on dh+lib. In this post, he reviews how the class went.

My Issues in Digital Scholarship class ended in March (we’re on the quarter system in Oregon). This class was designed to introduce graduate students in the Humanities and Social Sciences to digital methodologies. Hence, digital scholarship rather than digital humanities: I needed to appeal to an interdisciplinary audience. My focus was not so much on tools or technical skills, but on how scholars were applying these tools in different contexts, framed such that students could understand why and how they might apply these approaches to their own research or teaching. I also introduced students to metadata, digital preservation, and changes in scholarly communication in relation to the expansion of digital methods. As I argued in my post introducing the course: “This is an inversion of the digital scholarship ethos which has emphasized tools and making things, and very intentionally so.”

Among the DH-inclined faculty on campus, there was considerable interest in the course and its role in supporting (and encouraging) graduate student digital scholarship. Because of this faculty attention, I decided to ask the students for supplemental feedback in addition to the regular, university-sponsored instructor/course evaluation. The questions were designed quickly and without considerable planning, with the hope of obtaining results that would inform a broader conversation about digital humanities on campus and in the library. [pullquote]The questions were designed quickly and without considerable planning, with the hope of obtaining results that would inform a broader conversation about digital humanities on campus and in the library.[/pullquote]I wanted to find out whether students thought that a digital scholarship course should be offered regularly, perceived any special value to having it in the library, and preferred any particular topics (which were of most and least interest). Information about students’ preferred topics would also help me think about what parts of the syllabus were worth keeping and what might be jettisoned.

The students – in their evaluations and in their comments to me – were generally positive. The first part of the supplemental evaluation asked for responses to specific questions, scaling from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree):

  1. This course helped me understand current approaches to digital scholarship.
  2. This course helped me understand how to use tools for doing digital scholarship.
  3. This course made me want to integrate digital scholarship into my own research projects.
  4. There should be a course on digital scholarship offered at least once/year.
  5. The UO Libraries should offer a course on digital scholarship at least once/year.

Six out of the eleven students filled out the evaluation; most of the responses were in the agree-strongly agree range, with two tepid responses to question 2 (I learned how to use DH tools) and one shrug to question 3 (this course makes me want to do digital scholarship). Since the course was designed to emphasize approaches to digital scholarship over learning specific tools, the responses to the first three questions make sense. Additionally, all of the respondents strongly agreed that a similar course should be offered every year, and they mostly strongly agreed that the library was a good place to do it.

I also asked the students to select the most and least important topics covered in the course (click to enlarge):

Important/Not Important Topics

The big favorites were metadata, text analysis, and visual analysis. The evaluation also included an open-ended question about topics students would like to see spun off as a standalone course or workshop. Of the three responses, two indicated an interest in text analysis, and one asked for digital preservation. The repeated mention of metadata surprised me and I’ll have to do more with it next time (it was covered in a session along with copyright and digital preservation, just a bit of discussion without any work on examples). It is possible that the pro-metadata contingent was thinking specifically about TEI, as three of the students from this class went on to do a readings course with me on TEI in the Spring term (we worked through the TEI Guidelines by encoding examples of different types of text: prose, verse, drama, manuscript).

None of the above is particularly scientific (nor is it intended to be). But the responses do suggest areas to tweak in future versions of the course. I’ve already decided to focus more explicitly on texts and digital humanities. Covering lots of bases was good from a survey perspective, but I got the feeling that students wanted to dig into things more deeply and realized that I, too, would benefit from sustained attention to a coherent set of tools and scholarly discussions. [pullquote]Covering lots of bases was good from a survey perspective, but I got the feeling that students wanted to dig into things more deeply and realized that I, too, would benefit from sustained attention to a coherent set of tools and scholarly discussions.[/pullquote]

Also, while I initially spun the course as digital scholarship and as a broad survey to appeal to those students from non-Humanities disciplines, doing so meant trying to make every topic as relevant to a Journalism student as it was to a Literature student. This created a lot of extra work for me as I tried to be all things to all people, but also stunted conversation: for example, if the Lit students wanted to take discussion in one direction, some of the other students would withdraw because it wasn’t an avenue that was meaningful to their scholarly situation.

Clearly, the experience of teaching the course and mulling over the student evaluations have tempered my original antipathy toward a digital humanities pedagogy centered on tools and making things. While I still believe that sustained attention to current scholarly practice is an important part of graduate training, I recognize that students also wanted, at the very least, some guided play so that they could develop their own sense of what the tools can and cannot do, something akin to the practical context that Columbia’s Developing Librarian Project made central to their program. I am working on adding a lab component to the course so that there would be dedicated class time for engaging tools, with the labs organized to develop a project (like mapping newspaper coverage of Modernist poetry).

My goal is to rework the syllabus over the Summer and when I’ve gotten to a good place with it, I’d love to share it here.

Digital Humanities & Libraries: More of THAT!

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

thatcamp_stickers

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.

Inspired by series of blog posts, musings and published articles. Featuring Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library.
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?

thatcamp_proposalsMotivated 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.”

Screen Shot 2013-04-30 at 10.33.59 PM
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.

thatcamp_hashtags

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).

We spent a great deal of time exploring project-based learning, discussing in particular the Praxis Program and Columbia University’s hands-on training of their subject librarians in support of their DH center. We also explored intensive and series-based workshops, as illustrated by DHSI/DWSI immersion, fondly known as summer /winter “camp” for digital humanists, and the Savvy Researcher series.

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 MuĂąoz, 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
  • Sustainability (or anti-sustainability)
  • Crowdsourcing
  • Centralized v. distributed DH happenings
  • Libraries IT, university IT, and the Scholar-Programmer

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?

thatcamp_mdalmau

 

 

CFP: ACRL Preconferences at 2014 ALA Annual Conference

ACRL is looking for applications for half-day or full-day preconferences for the 2014 ALA Annual Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. ACRL is looking for programs that focus on interactive learning using a variety of presentation styles and offer practical tips. Deadline is March 27, 2013. Who’s doing the session on DH and libraries?

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.”

 

Teaching Digital Scholarship in the Library

John Russell is currently teaching a graduate-level course in digital scholarship. In this post, he introduces the course and discusses the decisions he made in its design. For more DH syllabi, visit the CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide.

The University of Oregon Libraries recently established a Digital Scholarship Center; one of our first new activities is offering a graduate course called Issues in Digital Scholarship, which I am teaching this term. The course was designed to give graduate students a chance to meet like-minded peers from other departments, a space to critically engage aspects of digital scholarship, and an opportunity to play around with some of the tools of the trade.

[A note on the course title: we chose digital scholarship rather than digital humanities because we knew that some of our potential students do not associate with the humanities. The course has students from Communication Studies (including Public Relations), Geography, and Literature.]

As part of the process of setting up the Center, we had a number of conversations with faculty and graduate students across campus about what kinds of digital scholarship were already happening, what they wish they could do, and what kinds of services would be most beneficial. Graduate students frequently mentioned a need to know what different forms of digital scholarship were going on and a desire to interact with other students interested in digital scholarship; they also expressed a desire to be pointed to tools or software which they would then learn about on their own. I used these discussions to shape the organization of the course, putting the focus on methodological issues rather than on the tools themselves.

The course is divided into three parts:

  1. The first two sessions were designed to provide an overview of criticism in digital scholarship. Because I wanted students to assess a digital project, I needed to make sure they understood that there are considerations for digital work that are different than, say, a book review – issues of usability and reusability, copyright, or accessibility, for example. The second session surveys theoretical debates in digital humanities and how hardware and software mediate our digital experiences and thus are objects of study in their own right.
  2. The middle four sessions are devoted to digital analysis, covering what seems to me to be the four-fold core of digital scholarship: networks, texts, visual material (still & moving), and spatial relations. My approach to these topics is not tool-driven; I was looking for readings that could serve as introductions to why scholars are engaging with these approaches and how they are making use of them. Personally, I think such an approach is essential to communicating the significance of digital scholarship to graduate students (and to faculty) and is far more important than teaching tools.
  3. The last part of the course is devoted to what we might consider “library” issues: metadata, preservation, copyright, scholarly communication. This is in part a justification for having this course taught in the library: we can address these infrastructural matters much better than other units on campus (and we are probably more concerned about them than most faculty). However, this is not a bit of tokenism: metadata, preservation, and especially copyright are central to the successful production and dissemination of digital scholarship. One of the underlying themes to the readings is the ways in which digital scholarship is presented in new forms of scholarly communication – I deliberately chose a mix of blog posts, open access journals, pre-prints, and gated scholarly articles to expose students to these forms – so it seemed natural to come around near the end to explicitly talk about the relationship between new modes of scholarship and the best ways to disseminate that scholarship.

The course assignments were likewise designed around the what and why of digital scholarship. The core assignments are written: a critical review of an example of digital scholarship and a literature review; the students are also required to present a digital tool to the class. This is an inversion of the digital scholarship ethos which has emphasized tools and making things, and very intentionally so. I actually don’t care if the students can (or will) make things – I want them to understand what is going on with digital scholarship in different fields in order to enable them to understand in what ways these approaches might be useful to their own research and teaching or to their discipline as a whole. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll be sure to follow up with a post after the course is over, if not sooner.

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.

Digital Humanities & Cultural Heritage, or, The Opposite of Argumentation

An attempt to storify the Twitter feed from the DH Topic Modeling Workshop (at least the second half of it)

Back in August, Miriam Posner’s post “What are some challenges to doing DH in the library?” initiated a wide-ranging conversation in the blogosphere examining the relationship between DH and libraries. As the dh+lib blog gets a’rolling, it seems useful both to revisit Miriam’s post, but also remind ourselves of the potential DH holds to enable new modes of discovery, knowledge, and interpretation, both for those in the academy and those in the broader field of cultural heritage.

Miriam cited a host of challenges to doing DH in libraries, including insufficient training, lack of authority, organizational stasis, overcautiousness, and lack of professional incentive. Along with a wealth of comments, the post also elicited responses by Michael Furlough, The Library Loon, and by Trevor MuĂąoz. As the Loon noted, many of the challenges described in these posts and the comments are issues applicable to any creative or forward-looking initiative within a library. Many readers here can no doubt attest to that truth.

The post that resonated most with me, however, was Trevor MuĂąoz’s assertion that DH is not just something librarians support through instruction or as liaisons or project managers, but is something that librarians themselves should be actively undertaking. As Trevor acknowledges, he has a unique occupational role straddling both a traditional academic library and a DH center; and as DH becomes more prevalent within academia, I imagine we will see more of his type of dual-appointment roles.

At the same time, I think Trevor’s point can be extrapolated even further to encompass how DH tools, methods, and technologies have the potential to help enhance and evolve a wealth of professional practices beyond academia and across all of cultural heritage. It is this ability to reinvigorate the work of non-academics, such as librarians, archivists, and collection managers, that has many of us in cultural heritage excited about DH as an emerging idiom within memory institutions. As the work of DH centers like CHNM and MITH gain more exposure outside the confines of academia, the broader cultural heritage community will better understand how DH can, as the recent book Digital_Humanities asserts, “open up important new spaces for exploring humanity’s cultural heritage and for imagining future possibilities using the transmeta methods and genres of the digital present.”

But that’s the gauzy version — some examples please! The attendance of a number of librarians, archivists, and other cultural heritage workers at the recent Topic Modeling workshop at MITH (#dhtopic for the twitterati; GDoc of notes) was a good example of this community’s interest in the promise of topic modeling as a tool to enhance discovery and rethink many fundamental practices around collection management and accessibility.  As one of the non-academics in attendance, I was there to better understand how the enviable work of the talented DHers in the crowd can be adapted or transplanted (or, hell, brick-through-window’ed) into everyday practices in libraries, archives, and museums.

What galvanizes many of us working in cultural heritage is how DH tools and practices will enable us to move beyond the traditional methodologies of description of, and access to, archival or cultural collections. These traditional practices, holdovers from a world of physical materials and all the attendant requirements of arrangement, bulk, and storage, have also been fundamentally subjective. Catalogs, finding aids, LCSH — all are products of interpretive biases. That inherent subjectivity engendered a minor, if ongoing, crisis of conscience once contemporary criticism called into question the façade of objectivity in the management of cultural and historical materials (see, for instance, in archival studies, the work of Terry Cook, Heather MacNeil, and David Bearman). But tools like topic modeling, text mining, data visualization, and other methods of distant reading have the power to obviate (or at least largely reduce) the interpretive imposition of the cultural heritage professional at the point of access. They will allow collection stewards to refocus their efforts on providing the tools necessary for users to interpret and understand materials instead of focusing on the descriptions and classifications that group or arrange them.

Because of this, when discussing topic modeling and its promise for cultural heritage at the workshop, I was less fretful of the fallibility of the algorithmic presumptions of Latent Dirichlet allocation and more interested in what I’ll call DH’s confrontational potential — something similar to Mark Sample’s declaration of “an insurgent humanities.” Trevor Owens, in his cogent post about the tweets from #dhtopic, captured something of this seeming divide, noting the assumed disjunction between the exploratory and the evidentiary and how DH dialogues often run on two parallel tracks, one focusing on the freewheeling use of DH tools for discovery and the other on the use of DH tools to validate a specific argument. Here, the “generative discovery” possible with computational tools (akin to Stephen Ramsay’s “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around“) is merely prologue to the overall process of building an evidence-based defense “against alternative explanations.”

But for librarians, archivists, and collection managers, there is no need to take that next step — enabling alternative explanations is entirely the goal of supporting accessibility and building or providing discovery tools. Argumentation or justification, while essential to scholarly knowledge production, is counter to the goals of the collection manager in describing and making available records. Our traditional methods of making materials available (taxonomic, ontological — the finding aid, the OPAC) are complicated by all sorts of logical or illogical interpretations and subjectivity. Tools like topic modeling offer the ability to bypass that interpolation, that annotative interruption, and hand users and researchers the tools to construct their own topics, queries, pathways, and meanings.

While subjectivity may be inescapable when it comes to archival appraisal and collection acquisition policies, librarians and archivists strive for anonymity and objectivity when creating systems of discovery. We strive for something beyond the influence of the idiographic. But even more than that it is the ability to enable simultaneous and, especially, contradictory means of discovery and interpretation. The more context we can provide the better; the more contradiction and interpretation we can enable, the stronger are our discovery tools. This is the opposite of argumentation. DH tools and methods offer, then, if not an antidote to the immutability of traditional descriptive and discovery methods, then at least a confrontational alternative and a substantive corrective.

That one collection of resources can give different users different outcomes and support contradictory arguments may sound too post-structuralist or relativist for some. But I think it signals a healthy reassessment for cultural heritage institutions who for too long have placed the collection manager — the librarian, the archivist, the collection manager — at the gate of discovery and access. The digital humanities have the potential to change the nature of that equation, to upset established methods of description and access, and to reaffirm the role of the cultural heritage professional as essential to preservation, accessibility, and usability of information and the cultural record. Here’s to making this blog and the dh+lib discussion group a place to explore how that affirmation is happening.

Evaluating DH Work: Guidelines for Librarians

In this post, Zach Coble explores the benefits of creating guidelines for the evaluation of librarians’ digital humanities work for the purposes of hiring, appointment, tenure, and promotion, and offers a basic framework for what those guidelines might look like.

This post was published in the Journal of Digital Humanities, volume 1, issue 4.

Digital humanities (DH), as well as related fields such digital media studies and digital libraries, have presented many opportunities for libraries. These include the establishment of DH centers, the development of new data standards, new forms of scholarly communication, the creation of new resources (and novel ways of asking questions of those resources), and the development of new tools for scholarship and accessing collections.[1] However, traditional modes of evaluation do not address many of the key aspects of DH work. As librarians become more involved in DH and begin to take on the title of “Digital Humanities Librarian,” how can we ensure that their work will be appropriately reviewed? While some librarians work individually on personal DH projects or scholarship, most collaborate with faculty, fellow librarians, and information technologists across campus and across institutions. The collaborative nature of DH work often blurs the lines when it comes to defining individual’s responsibilities and contributions. Similarly, new forms of scholarly output, such as a website rather than a paper or presentation, present additional challenges for those tasked with evaluating DH work.

Written guidelines for evaluation ensure that projects are reviewed fairly and provide a clear path for job hiring and advancement. Libraries clearly understand the importance of assessment and evaluation. The ACRL has guidelines for the evaluation of tenure track librarians and for those without faculty status. In 2010, Megan Oakleaf made waves with her Value of Academic Libraries report, which utilized existing assessment measures, such as college students’ information literacy skills, to demonstrate the positive impact of libraries. As the field of DH continues to grow, libraries will increasingly be called upon to dedicate time and resources to supporting this work. In order to encourage more libraries to support DH, to provide a framework that will encourage individual librarians to participate in DH, and to acknowledge and reward excellent work, libraries should develop guidelines for evaluation of librarians engaging in DH work.

Although librarians are often cited as important collaborators in DH projects, librarianship as a profession lacks a coordinated approach to DH. There are many reasons for this, such as the broad interdisciplinarity and rapidly evolving nature of DH, which makes it difficult to articulate a large-scale response. Yet it also stems from the fact that library involvement in DH varies across institutions: some libraries at large research-intensive universities host active DH centers while many small schools (as well as public libraries, special libraries, and so forth) are only vaguely aware of DH, if at all. [pullquote]A framework for evaluating DH work performed by librarians would ideally be one piece of a program to address DH from libraries.[/pullquote]In a recent survey by the Association of College and Research Libraries Digital Humanities Discussion Group, most of the librarians who responded did not have DH in their job title or description. Equally diverse are the types of work that librarians contribute to DH projects. A 2011 report on DH in libraries by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) noted that DH projects often call upon librarians for consultation and project management, technical and metadata support, instructional services, and resource identification.

A framework for evaluating DH work performed by librarians would ideally be one piece of a program to address DH from libraries. Such a program, possibly from the Association of College and Research Libraries, might also include criteria for undertaking digital projects and best practices for doing DH work. As the 2011 ARL report notes, “The general lack of policies, protocols, and procedures has resulted in a slow and, at times, frustrating experience for both library staff and scholars. This points toward the need for libraries to coordinate their efforts as demand for such collaborative projects increases.” Without an organized response, librarians lack the incentives, resource support, institutional backing, and network of colleagues necessary to be successful.[2] On the other hand, a coordinated approach could encourage more librarians to get involved in DH, motivate individual libraries to adopt related policies specific to their local needs, foster greater participation among libraries in the DH community, and create the demand for increased training opportunities–both as continuing education for professionals and in library schools.

Other organizations, such as the Modern Language Association, NINES, and 18thConnect, have recognized the distinct nature of DH work and adopted separate guidelines for the evaluation of digital projects.[3] Libraries would benefit from having a similar set of guidelines. Of course, every institution is different and no one set of guidelines will work for everyone. Also, the context and scope of a librarian’s contribution should be taken into account–a librarian asked to consult on metadata standards should not be faulted if the project fails to follow web design best practices. While acknowledging such nuances, there are certain baseline ideas that should be addressed. The following list draws upon existing guidelines for the evaluation of DH work and incorporates additional elements specific to libraries. It is intended to help generate conversation and is not meant to be comprehensive.

Peer Review
  • Traditional concepts of peer review still apply: review projects for impact, intended audience, originality, and excellence based on content, form, interpretation.
  • There are peer review groups specifically for DH projects (e.g. NINES, 18thConnect, MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions); qualified librarians could seek to join these groups or possibly to create a similar group comprised of librarians.
Nature of Digital Projects
  • How does the digital component contribute something that couldn’t otherwise be communicated?
  • The project should be evaluated in the medium in which it was created.
  • Reviewers should acknowledge the ongoing nature of digital projects (i.e. lack of a “finished product”).
Collaboration
  • Did the project consult outside experts to assess the project’s content and technical structure?
  • How does the project relate with other digital scholarship projects?
Usability
  • Is there an intentional and appropriate organization of information?
  • Does the project use accepted standards for web design, metadata, and encoding?
  • Is there interoperability with other sites, such as OAI-PMH?
  • Is there a thoughtful balance between design, content, and medium?
Sustainability
  • How does the project address issues of digital preservation?
  • Is there documentation or is the site code made available?
Other Considerations
  • Was the project grant funded?
  • Did the project result in any conference presentations or print publications?
References and Further Reading

[1]      See Association of Research Libraries, Digital Humanities, SPEC Kit 326; Micah Vandegrift, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in the Library?“; Miriam Posner, “Digital Humanities and the Library: A Bibliography“; Matthew Gold, Debates in the Digital Humanities.
[2]     For a discussion of barriers to DH in libraries, see Miriam Posner, “What are some challenges to doing DH in the library?” ; Trevor Munoz, “Digital humanities in the library isn’t a service“; Mike Furlough, “Some Institutional Challenges to Supporting DH in the Library“; The Library Loon, “Additional hurdles to novel library services.”
[3]     See also University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries, Facilitated Peer Review Committee; Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Zotero | Groups > Digital Humanities > Library > Assessment and Evaluation; Modern Language Association, Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions; University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, Promotion & Tenure Criteria for Assessing Digital Research in the Humanities.