Category: Project

PROJECT: Telling Data: Artifacts and the Digital Humanities

At last week’s DH: The Next Generation symposium at Simmons College, a group from Harvard’s metaLAB presented on Data Artifacts. The research initiative:

seeks to understand the collections data of libraries and other institutions as cultural objects—as artifacts, things assembled by human hands and minds, with stories to tell and values to express. In particular, we’re looking for phenomena that are frequently treated as problems—errors in cataloging data caused by typographical, vernacular, disciplinary, and technological clashes—and seeing them as interpretable, story-full phenomena that lend insight into the cultural roles of libraries and their collections in different times and places.

Participants in the session also contributed to a tumblr dubbed, “Library Observatory.”

PROJECT: Announcing the Praxis Network

Last week the University of Virginia’s Scholar’s Lab announced the launch of the Praxis Network, featuring graduate programs at the University of Virginia, Michigan State University, CUNY Graduate Center, University College London, and Duke University, and undergraduate programs at Hope College and Brock University. The network is:

a new partnership of innovative graduate and undergraduate programs that are making effective interventions in the traditional models of humanities pedagogy and research.

Visit the beautifully-designed project website to learn more about the network, which forms part of the Scholarly Communication Institute’s work on graduate education. Also, keep an eye out for the results of SCI’s study on #altac career preparation in the humanities.

In addition to the project announcement, The Scholars Lab has posted a job opportunity for Head of Graduate Programs, whose duties include overseeing the Praxis Program and the Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities program. Note: a PhD is preferred but not required.

DIGITAL PROJECT: Lincoln Logarithms: Finding Meaning in Sermons

Lincoln Logarithms, a new project from the Digital Scholarship Commons at Emory University, uses four text analysis tools, MALLET, Voyant, Paper Machines, and Viewshare, to examine 57 full text sermons given on the occasion of Lincoln’s assassination. Interesting enough in its own right, the project also explicitly addresses some the major obstacles in DH projects:

  • Can digital tools always make our research more innovative–or sometimes, do they just get in the way?
  • Would the digital programs offer new insights and save us time? Or would they clutter up an otherwise straighforward textual analysis?
  • Digital tools can help us hone in on what questions to ask. They are a way to help us arrive at questions and results, but they aren’t results.

PROJECT: transcribe.unl.edu: Collaborative transcription at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has unveiled the first project in its effort to transcribe digitized documents through crowd-sourcing. UNL “alumni, students, and friends” are invited to volunteer to transcribe the collection of UNL’s historical Cornhusker yearbooks. The transcription project arose through a collaboration between the Archives & Special Collections, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH), Computer Operations and Research Services, and Development and Outreach at UNL.

The site for yearbook transcription, which extends the Transcribr Drupal distribution, marks progress for the overall project as well as individual yearbooks.

A complete run of the yearbooks is currently available online (but not yet full-text searchable… pending transcription!).