Category: Project

In the New York Times, Joe Karaganis (Columbia University) and David McClure (Stanford University Library), announced the Open Syllabus Project, an open platform that aggregates more than 1 million syllabi and allows users to explore them via its Syllabus Explorer tool.

At present, the Syllabus Explorer is mostly a tool for counting how often texts are assigned over the past decade. There is something for everyone here. The traditional Western canon dominates the top 100, with Plato’s “Republic” at No. 2, “The Communist Manifesto” at No. 3, and “Frankenstein” at No. 5, followed by Aristotle’s “Ethics,” Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” “Oedipus” and “Hamlet.”

Top articles? Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History.” And so on. Altogether, the Syllabus Explorer tracks about 933,000 works. Nearly half of these are assigned only once.

[…]

Many academics are uncomfortable with this sort of numerical reduction of intellectual work. Taken in isolation, we share this concern. But there is a broader context here: At present, publication metrics basically involve counting the citations of a given academic work in other academic publications. And since it can take years for an influential work to accumulate citations, shortcuts have become popular, such as the “journal impact factor,” which scores journal articles based on journal rankings that are determined by the journals’ own frequency of citation in other journals.

Note from dh+lib Review editors: A previous version of this post referred to a blog post by David Weinberger. The post was updated to point to the OSP team’s announcement of the project in the New York Times and to clarify and recognize the project’s origin. Our apologies to the core OSP team, Joe Karaganis, David McClure, Dennis Tenen, Jonathan Stray, Alex Gil, and Ted Byfield for failing to acknowledge them in the original post.

Note from the dh+lib Review editors: Please see the updated version of this post.

David Weinberger (Harvard Library Innovation Lab) announced the launch of the Open Syllabus Project (OSP) and its Syllabus Explorer in a recent blog post:

The OSP is an open platform that so far has aggregated over a million syllabi. At the beta version of their search site you can do plain old searches, or filter by a number of factors… The project is computing what it calls a “Teaching Score” for each work, a number from 1-100. This is along the same lines of the StackScore I’ve been pushing for, a metric we use in Harvard’s LibraryCloud Project and that will be used in the Linked Data for Libraries project.

Bernard C. Moore (Michigan State University) has published a post on MSU’s Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative blog, detailing the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) Truth and Reconciliation Commission website. Moore opens by describing the impetus behind the project and its construction. Launched in coordination with the South African History Archive in 2013, in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s submission to the government, the site is “Based largely on digitization of the Special Report television series” and “seeks to make the Truth and Reconciliation Commission proceedings and accompanying transcripts and documentation available to the public.” Moore also comments on the technical capabilities and limitations of the site, which relies on embedded YouTube videos hosted on the SABC YouTube page. He writes: “The website is complete and will not be added to…. Therefore, we must use the archive knowing that it is a final product.” As the Introduction hosted on the SABC TRC website explains:

Broadcast by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) every week between 21 April 1996 and 29 March 1998, the eighty seven part television series covered the first two of five years of the TRC hearings, which were concluded at the end of 2000.

…

The weekly reviews of the Truth Commission Special Report team offer invaluable insights into the processes and content of the TRC’s work during this period. Presented in an accessible manner – by providing context to public hearings through historic audio-visual material and exclusive interviews with victims, perpetrators, witnesses, specialists in a given field, and more – the series contributed to the TRC’s pursuit of revealing the truth about, and engendering a deeper engagement with, South Africa’s past conflicts.

The Mississippi State University History Department and Libraries have launched a digital history project entitled ‘A Shaky Truce’: Starkville Civil Rights Struggles, 1960-1980. Developed by a cross-disciplinary team of faculty, librarians, graduate and undergraduate students, the project documents two decades of civil rights struggles in Starkville, MS.

The purpose of this project is to tell a story of local activism in Starkville, Mississippi. The fight for African American equal rights was not just relegated to Little Rock, Arkansas, Birmingham, Alabama, or Oxford, Mississippi, but was also fought on the streets and in the schools of every southern town during the Jim Crow era. Local individuals organized and protested against inequality and fought for integration, equal employment, and their right to vote. Their voices deserve to be heard, and their contributions to the larger civil rights narrative demands recognition.

…This website is designed to tell that story and provide information for scholars and tools for teachers interested in exploring these local conversations about race, equality, and human rights.

The content you see in this website is a result of over a year’s worth of research. The oral history interviews are ongoing.  Photos and documents are from Mississippi State University Libraries’ Special Collections, Digital Collections, or Circulating Collections; others come from other online archives; still other items were generously donated or shared by those we interviewed.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has announced a new project to develop open source software to help researchers organize digital photographs, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The tool, which will be called Tropy, is a response to the challenges of managing large collections of images accumulated during the research process—a problem that is evident in this thread on DH Answers and this storify from Miriam Posner.

Now under development, Tropy will ultimately let you import photographs, adjust them to ensure they are of adequate quality for your purposes, and attach metadata to those images, using a template. After import, you will also be able to batch-edit the metadata across multiple images, as well as edit individual images. In Tropy, images will be able to be organized via collections and/or tags, and accessed in a variety of ways: by browsing image collections and tags via list and thumbnail modes; by sorting these views using all available metadata, such as date, source archive, and title; and by searching across all available metadata, including notes.

Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing introduced the Generative Literature Project, “which is producing a crowdsourced, gamified digital novel about a murder.” The post also helps define the genre:

…a specific form of literature which challenges some aspects of classical literature.  Frequently associated with the power of the machine (read computer), generative literature is often understood as the production of continuously changing literary texts by means of some set of rules and/or the use of algorithms.

Hybrid Pedagogy publishing will share dispatches from their experiment with this emerging genre.

Around DH in 80 Days has begun introducing a new DH project from around the globe, one on each day beginning June 20, 2014 (follow #arounddh on Twitter or subscribe to the RSS feed). The project “seeks to introduce new and veteran audiences to the global field of DH scholarly practice” as a way to both discover current and developing projects and to delve into the “critical work of DH beyond the familiar by continuing to engage with these and other projects beyond our platform.”

Around DH is led by Alex Gil (Columbia University) and sponsored by ADHO’s Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH) special interest group. Many others contributed to the development of the project; initial research and design was conducted by students in Ryan Cordell’s “Doing Digital Humanities” graduate seminar at Northeastern University.

The 80 sites were chosen based on four editorial categories – scholarship, humanities technology, pedagogy, and design and user experience – with additional editorial oversight to ensure fair geographic representation and inclusion of projects with smaller budgets. The GO::DH group also maintains welcomes contributions to its “master list,” a Google Doc containing a more comprehensive listing of global DH projects.

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) released several videos recently from their spring membership meeting, including video of a talk by Eric J. Johnson (Ohio State University) about a digital humanities initiative called Manuscriptlink.

Together with a tools and metadata, Manuscriptlink “provides a worldwide ‘collective collection’ of virtual manuscripts from ca. 800 to ca. 1600, drawn from thousands of individual manuscript constituents.” As CNI’s description notes: “The project will foster active interdisciplinary cooperation across the humanities as well as collaboration among numerous international institutions.” Johnson co-directs the project, with Scott Gwara (University of South Carolina).

Katy Myers (Michigan State University) announced that ieldran, the Early Anglo-Saxon Cemetery Mapping Project built as part of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative (a partnership between Michigan State’s Department of Anthropology and Matrix), is live.

The Early Anglo-Saxon Cemetery Mapping Project provides locations, summaries, and information about citation and collections for numerous cemeteries from the mid-5th to early 7th century in England. Each site can be clicked on to reveal more information about the cemetery, the burials, associated artifacts, references for books and journal articles written about the cemetery, and where the original excavation materials, human remains, and artifacts are kept.

According to project documentation, Myers created the map and framework for the ieldran (an Old English term for “ancestors”), while Matthew Austin (Department of Archaeology, University of Reading) provided the data. Myers celebrated the team’s accomplishment in providing open access archaeology, but shared that there are two major, forthcoming features to the site: user submissions and downloadable spatial data.