Category: Resource

The Scholarly API Cookbook is an open online book containing short scholarly API code examples (i.e., “recipes”) that demonstrate how to work with various scholarly web service APIs. It is part of the University of Alabama Libraries efforts to support Research Data Services and covers a variety of APIs, like Wikidata, Chronicaling America, and U.S. Census Data, in multiple programming languages. 

Jupyter notebooks for digital humanities is a list compiled by Quinn Dombrowski of Jupyter notebooks covering research, course materials, learning python, as well as specific forms of analysis. There are notebooks available in English, German, Spanish and French. The list was started in 2019, but was most recently updated in April 2023, making this a valuable resource for folks looking to learn new skills or find teaching materials to utilize in classes, workshops, and more.

The Library of Congress By The People project has released two new datasets from its crowdsourced transcription campaigns, the correspondence of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz and the notebooks of Frederick Hockley. The O’Keeffe/Stieglitz dataset includes over 500 letters they wrote between 1929-1947 to their friend Henwar Rodakiewicz, a documentary filmmaker. The digital collection of these letters is also available. The Hockley dataset contains the transcription of his 11 notebooks where he recorded his supernatural visions, which make up volumes 4-5 and 7-15 of The Crystal, his manuscript about his crystal and mirror-gazing experiments.

 

 

This semester, Dr. Miriam Posner (UCLA) is teaching a digital humanities undergraduate course, DH150: “Digital Labor.” Her open syllabus offers a thoughtful response to current issues and conversations at the intersections of technology, power, gender, and race, and leveraging video storytelling, to explore ways in which we as workers can regain agency in the ever shifting digital labor landscape.

Today, the world of work looks dramatically different than it did a generation ago. Where our parents or grandparents might have anticipated a steady paycheck and a stable job, we see a job market that abounds in gig work, influence marketing, hustling, and freelancing.

As we speak, artists wonder if AI has eliminated their livelihood—as do marketers, video producers, and even software developers. Meanwhile, Uber drivers, Mechanical Turkers, baristas, and healthcare workers do daily combat with the mysterious algorithms that apportion and pay for their labor.

Where do these changes come from? Why do they happen in the way they do? How do they interact with existing axes of power, like gender and race? Who benefits from these changes to the labor market? And what can we as workers do to gain some control over our livelihoods?

Posner’s syllabus includes topics such as generative AI and hustle and influencer cultures, and is an educational resource on the conversations around digital labor and for assignment examples of digital storytelling through video creation.

Digital Holocaust Memory has recently co-created a collection of recommendations for digital interventions in Holocaust memory and education. They have “worked with more than 80 representatives from a diverse range of academic disciplines, Holocaust institutions across the world, and wider GLAM, creative and technical professionals” to create the collection, presented in multiple reports.

From the project description:

We are really pleased to be able to share with you the reports developed through the first four of these series (the next two will be published here later this year). Each report lists a number of recommendations directed towards a range of different stakeholders. Please do feel free to circulate these widely and most importantly, do get in touch via our contact form if you would like to work towards any of the recommendations. We are keen to support this work and may also be able to put you in contact with others trying to do similar work. Perhaps the most important lesson to be learnt from this project is that collaboration is key.

We are especially grateful to the number of project partners who have worked with us to co-host these workshops: The University of Bern; iRights.Lab, Germany; The Centre of Life Writing and Life History, University of Sussex; The Hebrew University; Future Memory Foundation; and the Historical Games Network.

Full reports are openly available for download.

The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion, and Cultural Heritage at the Rare Book School is launching “Counter Narratives in Practice,” a podcast series about multicultural heritage collections, storytelling, and representation in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums, and beyond. The Mellon fellows worked in three groups: the Pacific Time Zone Group, Central Time Zone Group, and the Eastern Time Zone Group, producing a total of 6 episodes.

Descriptions of the episodes created by each group, from an email from the fellows:

The Pacific Time Zone Group produced the podcast episodes “Archiving Political Histories that Shape Education” and “Disconnection and Accessibility in the Archive.” Guests highlight the roles of Indigenous advocacy, settler colonialism, disability, and accessibility in archival collections.

The Central Time Zone Group produced the podcast episodes “We Were Never Silent: Immigrant Narratives & Caribbean Print Culture as Counter Narrative” and “We Were Never Silent: Bilingual Text in the Ottoman Empire & Pidgin English in Chinese Text as Counter Narratives.” Discussants explore immigration, oral history, and music as they relate to formal and informal institutions of memory.

The Eastern Time Zone Group produced the podcast episodes “Hidden Histories: African American, Asian American, and Afro-Asian Relationality” and “Hidden Histories: Immigrant Farm Workers and Black Intellectual Histories.” Guests discuss Florida Farmworkers, Covid-19, and the importance of documenting marginalized stories.

Making Sense of Digital Humanities by Julian Chambliss and Ellen Moll (both Michigan State University) is now available in a multitude of formats (an online Pressbooks edition, as an eBook, PDF, XML, or ODF).

From the introduction:

Our experience as teacher-scholars engaged with DH in and out of the classroom affords us some sense of the importance of the many works classified as digital humanities, but also the ways discussions so central to our colleagues may be difficult for students to grasp fully. This textbook has two purposes: First, it will bring together materials necessary for undergraduates to explore ethical ramifications, equity issues, and cultural or historical contexts of digital technologies and how this knowledge can shape real world decisions. Second, this reader will serve as an essential resource for the faculty teaching courses about these questions. It will be a living archive of evolving ideas connected to technology and cultural discussion supported by teaching and research activities.

Of particular interest to dh+lib readers will be the Teaching and Learning section of the book, which features several pieces that more close align with librarians, archivists, and other information workers roles with DH.

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) has shared a talk from Sara Palmer and Lois Overbeck (both Emory University), entitled “Poised at the Crossroads: Preservation and Public Access to Humanities Research.”

From the video description:

Large, long-term humanities projects leave a wake of research that may become inaccessible or lost when publication is complete. Following publication of the final volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge University Press, 2009-2016), came the big question: How can thirty years of essential primary research be preserved for future scholarship? By focusing on assembling metadata, the project could respect literary rights, describe and index the letters, integrate decades of interviews and research, and model humanities methods for new and public inquiry. Through a partnership with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the project is now poised to launch a website that provides a wealth of information about the nearly 10,000 letters written by Beckett that are held in public archives. In this overview, the speakers discuss both the importance of the research presented as well as the logistical and technical pathways for the production of a richly nuanced dataset.

23 Linked Data Things is a resource developed by Minitex, a collaboration between the Minnesota Office of Higher Education and the University of Minnesota Libraries. It is a self-paced program, with each “thing” (from “Defining Linked Data” to “SPARQL Basics” to “Ethics of Linked Data”) containing readings, activities, and the option for a certificate of completion. There are also guided questions geared to direct the participant toward implementing linked data projects within their own institution. The origins of the project, from the website, are:

23 Linked Data Things grew out of Wikidata Book Club, a group of interested staff from several libraries in the Upper Midwest who started meeting monthly to learn more about that resource and how libraries were utilizing it as an on-ramp to linked data creation and experimentation. We author the Things, though we occasionally seek out colleagues who are actively working in a particular area to edit or co-author a Thing. If you need to reach us, contact us at wikidata@umn.edu. Regular authors include:

• Greta Bahnemann, Metadata Librarian, Minitex
• Lizzy Baus, Metadata Librarian, Macalester College
• Kristi Bergland, Music Metadata Librarian, University of Minnesota Libraries
• Violet Fox, Cataloging and Metadata Librarian, Northwestern University
• Cecilia Genereux, Continuing Resources Metadata Librarian, University of Minnesota Libraries
• Hsianghui Liu-Spencer, Cataloging & Digital Services Librarian, Carleton College
• Sara Ring, Continuing Education Librarian, Minitex

Though there are currently 15 “Things,” new Things will be released throughout 2023.

Eric Willey (Illinois State University) shares a summary of some new historical recordings, books, and datasets that the Library of Congress has added to their online collections thus far in 2023. They also call attention to the LoC’s newly published digitization strategy for 2023-2027.

Read more about how librarians at ISU’s Milner Library are spotlighting these recent LoC activities in the full post.