Archive Journal, an open access and peer-reviewed online journal, has issued a call for projects and essay proposals for its fourth issue under the theme, “Publishing the Archive.” This issue is guest edited by Anvil Academic, “a scholarly publisher of born-digital and born-again-digital research in the humanities.”
We invite proposals that investigate the possibilities and limits of “publishing the archive.” Projects might include, but are not limited to:
Development of a specific archive-oriented API along with a narrative account of what the application seeks to achieve.
Textual and/or multimedia explorations of the challenges and promises of linked data with regard to specific archives, collections, or databases.
Examinations of the history of archival interoperability (for instance, thinking critically about how the evolution of metadata schemas has led to new archival structures and new ways of linking across archives).
Analysis, modeling, or development of new modes of presenting archives on the web, including new kinds of searchability, visualizations of data, and capacity for user-driven contributions.
Analysis, modeling, or development of new tools and platforms for working in archives and collections (e.g., an application that allows scholars to produce research–annotations, essays, or experimentations–in the same space as the cultural artifact).
Specific discussions not only about what can be published, but about what shouldbe published. That is, in an environment where wholesale digital access is possible, do we need specific parameters for authoritative “editions” of the archive?
Discussions of how to effectively address copyright restrictions preventing archival material from being published.
Discussions about what happens to analog archives that do not have a digital presence. Or, related to this: what are the effects of the digital surrogate becoming increasingly de rigueur?
This past week, centerNet announced a new initiative around starting and sustaining DH Centers. A resources page, featuring “talks, articles, sample DH proposals, and other sources of information about ways to start and sustain DH centers,” has been added to the centerNet website. Additionally, a new centerNet listserv has been launched around the topic: DHCenterStartUp.
Lynne Siemens, centerNet’s Coordinator for Center Start Ups and an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria (BC), compiled the resources list. As Siemens wrote in an email to Humanist: “I am also putting in a call for other resources to supplement this page. If you have proposals, talks, articles and other resources that talk about strategies, partnership models and other information needed to start a centre, please direct them my way.” Siemens can be contacted @lynnelynne53.
The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas has issued a CFP for their 2013 Digital Humanities Forum: Return to the Material.
We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers, posters or panel sessions on topics from your own research that focus on the relationship between the digital and the material, such as:
How the digital deforms, reforms, and transforms the material, and vice-versa;
Innovative computational approaches to the close reading of text, map, image or audio;
The implications for humanities scholarship and pedagogy of digital-to-physical conversion tools, wearable computers, and augmented reality technologies (e.g. 3-D printing, electronic textiles, Google Glass)
The future of physical objects and collections in a digital world;
The materiality of music, art, or film in the digital age;
Digital humanities as a key mode of addressing technological change;
The recognition of craft in building, creating and accessing electronic materials;
How the apparent wild experimentation of DH reveals substantial and tangible insights;
and other related topics.
Proposals, in the form of 500-word abstracts, are due June 1, 2013.
The organizers of Digital Diplomatics 2013 have issued a call for papers for the conference taking place at the Archives Nationales de France, November 14-16, 2013.
Following the two conferences on Digital Diplomatics that took place in 2007 in Munich and 2011 in Naples, this conference has the goal to further the scholarly reflection on the way in which diplomatics has developed as a result of both the opportunities offered by digital tools to study historical documents and the challenges presented by born digital documents and by the need to understand their structure and of the complex digital environments in which they reside.
Potential topics for discussion as listed in the CFP include:
Changes in scholarly editing of documents when using digital methods
Diplomatics as a hard science, a social science or a humanisties discipline
Measuring versus understanding as the main method of diplomatics of the documents (e.g. automatic author identification versus ‘Diktatvergleich’)
The focus of diplomatics: a single documents or aggregations (corpora, files, series, fonds)?
Digitized charters as images, texts, or meaning?
Can the whole meaning of a charter be represented digitally?
Comparing creation of trusted documents in the traditional and the digital environment
Signatures and seals in the traditional and the digital environment: are they comparable?
Are digital forensics and its tools related to diplomatics? How?
Diplomatic tools for analyzing digital and non-digital documents
Teaching diplomatics in the digital environment (both in traditional classroom and through eLearning)
Using diplomatics to build a virtual archives
The deadline is March 15, 2013. **Update: Deadline Extended to April 15, 2013**
dh+lib has received some excellent proposals in response to our call to address the recent Journal of Library Administration special issue dedicated to DH and Libraries. By request, we’ve extended the deadline to allow submissions through Friday, March 15, 2013. We’re looking for:
500-1500 word posts, to be featured on dh+lib, responding to the overall issue or particular articles or themes;
proposals to engage the dh+lib community in conversation in response to the issue, in a form or forum of your choosing (moderated Twitter chat, blog roundtable with appointed participants, etc).
Please submit a one-paragraph pitch to dhandlib.acrl@gmail.com by March 15, 2013. Accepted submissions will be included in a special series to be published in April.
It’s a THATCamp at ACRL – need we say more? Ok, a few words – THATCamps are informal, collaborative, productive, and spontaneous. This particular one will be held on Friday, April 12 from 8am-5pm, which is during ACRL – i.e. not a preconference. This is an excellent way to get involved in the dh+lib community, whether you’re new and just want to check it out and meet people, if you have a particular idea you’d like to develop, or if you have a project that you need help with. Drop by for a few minutes and say hi or stay all day. Registration is open – come one, come all!
The issue was guest edited by Barbara Rockenbach, Director of the Humanities and History Libraries at Columbia University, and featured contributions from Chris Alen Sula (“Digital Humanities and Libraries: A Conceptual Model”), Jennifer Vinopal and Monica McCormick (“Supporting Digital Scholarship in Research Libraries: Scalability and Sustainability”), Miriam Posner (“No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in the Library”), Bethany Nowviskie (“Skunks in the Library: A Path to Production for Scholarly R&D”), Micah Vandegrift and Steward Varner (“Evolving in Common: Creating Mutually Supportive Relationships Between Libraries and the Digital Humanities”), and Ben Vershbow (“NYPL Labs: Hacking the Library”).
As Rockenbach writes:
The authors of these articles come from a range of institutions, medium to large public research universities, large private research institutions and a public library. This diversity of voices illustrates the varied landscape of DH in libraries and the great number of opportunities for supporting this emerging trend in scholarship. The collection moves from the theoretical to the practical.
This special issue is an important addition to the conversation about DH and libraries that we hope to develop here at dh+lib. To that end, we are issuing a CFP for:
500-1500 word posts, to be featured on dh+lib, responding to the overall issue or particular articles or themes;
proposals to engage the dh+lib community in conversation in response to the issue, in a form or forum of your choosing (moderated Twitter chat, blog roundtable with appointed participants, etc).
Please submit a one-paragraph pitch to dhandlib.acrl@gmail.com. Deadline for proposals is March 11, 2013. Accepted submissions will be included in a special series to be published in April.
UPDATE: Deadline has been extended to Friday, March 15, 2013; publication date has been pushed back to May/June.
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?
The Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative at Michigan State University invites essays (8000 words) and case studies (3000 words) for a digital, OA edition that will examine, among other topics:
How are we theorizing digital archives?
How are we drawing from the work of digital archivists as we build our own archives and conduct digital archival research?
How do digital archives mediate how we write?
How do we differentiate between digital archives/repositories/libraries? Why are these distinctions important?
Day of DH 2013 is April 8. The project brings together scholars interested in the digital humanities from around the world to document what they do on one day, answering the question, “Just what do digital humanists really do?” We’d love to see a strong turnout from librarians!
The process is simple: before April 8, register at the Day of DH blog, answer the question, “How do you define DH,” and write an About Me post. On April 8, document your activities through text and images, and be sure to take a minute to look at the interesting things your colleagues are doing.
