Category: Project

The Commons in a Box (CBOX) group at the Graduate Center, CUNY and the OpenLab at New York City College of Technology, CUNY have released CBOX OpenLab:

CBOX OpenLab provides a powerful and flexible open alternative to costly proprietary educational platforms, allowing individual faculty members, departments, and entire institutions to easily set up an online community space designed for open learning.

Its name brings together two important ideas: openness and collaboration. Unlike closed online teaching systems, CBOX OpenLab allows members to share their work openly with one another and the world. Like a lab, it provides a space where students, faculty, and staff can work together, experiment, and innovate.

Like CBOX, the project is based on WordPress and is open source and free to use.

Manan Ahmed (Columbia University, xpMethod), Maira E. Álvarez (University of Houston), Sylvia A. Fernández (University of Houston), Alex Gil (Columbia University, xpMethod), Rachel Hendery (Western Sydney University), Moacir P. de Sá Pereira (xpMethod), and Roopika Risam (Salem State University) have released Volume 2 of Torn Apart / Separados, building on the work in Volume 1, which visualized “the USA’s 2018 ‘Zero Tolerance Policy’ for asylum seekers at the US Ports of Entry and the humanitarian crisis that has followed” (and which was subsequently covered by Wired in June).

The latest volume “is a deep and radically new look at the territory and infrastructure of ICE’s financial regime in the USA. This data & visualization intervention peels back layers of culpability behind the humanitarian crisis of 2018.”

A full list of credits, contributors, and associated technologies is available on the Torn Apart / Separados website.

Katie Carline (Michigan State University) has just launched a mapping project that visualizes “all the people whose names and addresses appear in testimonial advertisements and prize competitions in two black South African newspapers, Bantu World and Umlindi we Nyanga, between 1932 and 1937.” In a post on the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative blog, Carline explains why these testimonials are useful to scholars:

The 1930s were an important period in the history of South African newspaper, advertising, and consumer culture. This was the period when white-owned consumer products companies began sustained advertising campaigns in newspapers for black South African readers. Testimonial advertisements in these papers offer a window onto who the consumers of these products were, how they imagined themselves as consumers, and how advertisers wanted to represent the ideal, “modern” African consumer.

The project will be useful for readers with an interest in how geospatial technologies can be used to understand historical media culture.

In a new post on its digital scholarship blog, The British Library has announced a collaborative transcription project that will help “to create a freely available ground truth datataset for anyone wishing to advance the state-of-the-art in optical character recognition (OCR) technology for handwriting.”

This project is a proof of concept exploring whether the creation of such a dataset can be done collaboratively at scale, using the collective expertise of volunteers around the world. At the heart of this approach is the Library’s enduring commitment to creating new and interesting ways to connect diverse communities of interest and expertise, be it scholars, the general public, computer scientists, students, and curators, around our collections. For this we are utilising a free and open-source platform, From the Page, which allows anyone with an interest in historical Arabic manuscripts to experience them up close, many for the first time, to discuss, learn and share expertise in their transcription.

Funding to develop the open-source platform (which supports right-to-left transcription) was provided by the library’s Digital Scholarship Department.

Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University has just announced Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade, a “constellation of software and services built to address the challenges of connecting archives, databases, and collections that record the histories of slavery and enslaved peoples.” Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the project’s objectives are to:

1. Build an interconnected system of services and tools that would (1) Allow individuals involved in the slave trade to be identified and recognized across all participating project databases; (2) Allow those identified and recognized individuals to be searched, explored and visualized in the Enslaved Hub; (3) Connect those individuals to particular events and places with a Disambiguation Tool and Authoritative Name Service in the Enslaved Hub; and (4) Create at least 25 interactive biographies of people of the slave trade as exemplary models.
2. To accomplish the focus on people, we are using Linked Open Data (LOD) to interconnect individual projects and databases.  A LOD-based approach facilitates federated searching and browsing across all linked project data on the Hub. It also creates a network and community framework that supports the preservation of current and future slave data projects.
3. For online database projects, which are proliferating at a rapid pace, scholars have not agreed on best practices. The Hub would be the space for disseminating best practices for data collection, metadata standards, ontologies, and workflows.  It would also provide guidance for participating in the Hub.
4. The project will institute an editorial board to review datasets and projects to be included in the Hub. Having an editorial board will ensure the quality of the data, and emphasize that the database or project has been published and is worthy of consideration for scholarly credit in review processes.
5. The Hub will provide a space for preservation of datasets and help identify projects in danger of going offline. All facets will be open source and contribute to developing a wide community to support the sustainability of the project.

The project includes a number of partners who have worked on large-scale histories of enslavement.

A story at the UCLA Daily Bruin details the development and release of Early African American Film: Reconstructing the History of Silent Race Films, 1909-1930.

Seven digital humanities students found 759 entertainment industry professionals involved in early silent race films and compiled them into a centralized database for the first time.

The students, as well as the digital humanities program coordinator Miriam Posner used the information they collected at the Charles E. Young Research Library to create what is now the only online database on the topic of early race films. Students Marika Cifor, Shanya Norman, Hanna Girma, Monica Berry, Karla Contreras, William Lam and Aya Grace Yoshioka started the project this spring as their digital humanities capstone project and finished it in June.

The database, titled “Early African American Film: Reconstructing the History of Silent Race Films, 1909-1930,” also includes relational data and is accessible to the public, including students, archives and scholars. Members of the group hope the site will be a way for people to learn more about a part of film history that ordinarily has little to no coverage, graduate student Cifor said.

The data is available for download and reuse under a CC-BY 4.0 license, and the project team has provided background information on Race Films and tutorials for using and visualizing that dataset.

Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta) wrote about the launch of The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CSÉC), describing CWRC / CSÉC’s support for various digital scholarly editing projects and acknowledging CWRC Project Leader Susan Brown’s role in conceptualizing and managing the effort:

The Collaboratory is a distributed editing environment that allows projects to edit scholarly electronic texts (using CWRC Writer), manage editorial workflows, and publish collections. There are also links to other tools like CWRC Catalogue and Voyant (that I am involved in.) There is an impressive set of projects already featured in CWRC, but it is open to new projects and designed to help them…

One important component in CWRC is CWRC-Writer, an in-browser XML editor that can be hooked into content management systems like the CWRC back-end. It allows for stand-off markup and connects to entity databases for tagging entities in standardized ways.

CWRC / CSÉC can provide a possible model for librarians and archivists interested in starting and supporting collaborative digital humanities initiatives.

In a post on the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled “History Through the Eyes of College Women,” Mariam Abdullah features College Women, a project of the division of preservation and access.

… a searchable collection of diaries, letters, scrapbooks, and photography from the archives of the earliest women’s college in the United States, the Seven Sisters. This project demonstrates how higher education impacts the trajectory of women’s lives and highlights historic moments in American women’s rights history.

Beyond this large scale digitization project, College Women brings these collections into conversation with one another, which “enables a circulation of new knowledge in women’s history.” Future stages of this project will include the “inclusion of materials from schools outside of the Seven Sisters group, including from HBCUs and other institutions that are underrepresented in online collections.”

In “The Book Biography Machine at the Medieval Academy of America,” the authors of the metaLAB (at) Harvard blog discuss the development of The Book Biography Machine, an “interface that permits humanities scholars to map the diffusion of written works across geographic space and time in order to ask new questions about the history of literature”:

Written works are organized into collections of bibliographic information that are differentiated by color. Time is represented on the vertical axis, while space is represented across the horizontal plane. Information may either be initially downloaded via the WorldCat API over the Machine’s interface and iteratively edited for accuracy and scholarly intent, or it may be independently collected, curated and organized into a spreadsheet by the scholar. The latter was the case with the work presented at the MAA, since both Matthew and Marco rigorously constructed and verified their own very large data sets.

The interface was used by Dante scholars Matthew Collins (Harvard University) and Francesco Marco Aresu (Wesleyan University) to visualize printed publications and written manuscripts of Divine Comedy, work which was presented at the 2016 conference for the Medieval Academy of America. A short video is available to demonstrate the project.

In a post at the Library of Congress Blog, Erin Allen announced the online launch of the Rosa Parks Papers. The website includes nearly 2,500 digitized photographs, letters, and documents from the collection, which was opened to researchers in 2015. From the collection description:

The papers of Rosa Parks (1913-2005) span the years 1866-2006, with the bulk of the material dating from 1955 to 2000… The collection documents many aspects of Parks’s private life and public activism on behalf of civil rights for African Americans.  Family papers include correspondence with her husband Raymond A. Parks; her mother, Leona Edwards McCauley; and her brother, Sylvester McCauley.  Correspondence with her husband and mother contains the largest number of letters written by Parks in the collection. Letters by Sylvester McCauley largely concern his efforts to convince his sister to move to Detroit.  Events surrounding Parks’s arrest in 1955 for disorderly conduct after she refused to give her seat to a white passenger, as well as the subsequent Montgomery Bus Boycott, are described in many of her writings, notes, and correspondence from 1955 to 1956. Other subjects covered in the collection include Parks’s work in Congressman John Conyers’s Detroit office; her participation in major civil rights events such as the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in 1957, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, Mississippi Freedom Project in 1964, and the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968; and Parks’s Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal along with material concerning other honors received by Parks.

…The vast majority of items in the Parks Collection have been digitized in their entirety and may be viewed in this online collection. Other material is available to researchers through the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs reading rooms. A small percentage (approximately 6 percent) of the manuscript items, consisting largely of newspapers, magazines, and other publications still under copyright along with some materials for which rights clearance is still pending, may be viewed onsite only at this time. Among the visual materials, all items were digitized except the children’s greeting cards for which a representative sample is included in this online collection.