Category: Resource

The Critical Digital Humanities Network at the University of Toronto recently released a video of Jennifer Wemigwans’s keynote for Critical Digital Humanities International Conference, “Digital Bundles: Creating Cultural Space for Indigenous Knowledge through New Technologies.” From the video description:

Earlier this fall, we were thrilled to welcome Jennifer Wemigwans as a Keynote Speaker at our Critical Digital Humanities International Conference. Professor Wemigwans shared her compelling talk, Digital Bundles: Creating Cultural Space for Indigenous Knowledge through New Technologies, on September 30, 2022, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Jennifer Wemigwans, PhD, is from Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island, Ontario. She is a new media producer, writer and scholar specializing in the convergence between education, Indigenous knowledge and new media technologies. Her book A Digital Bundle: Protecting and Promoting Indigenous Knowledge Online (2018) explores the prospects of Indigenous Knowledge education and digital projects in a networked world. Dr. Wemigwans takes pride in working to invert the conventional use of media by revealing the potential for Indigenous cultural expression and Indigenous knowledge through new technologies, education and the arts. She is an Assistant Professor in the Adult Education and Community Development Program at OISE University of Toronto.

 

Source: Auto Draft

The Living with Machines Project recently announced the publication of its first book, Collaborative Historical Research in the Age of Big Data: Lessons from an Interdisciplinary Project. Written by Ruth Ahnert, Emma Griffin, Mia Ridge and Giorgia Tolfo, this book describes the work of the overall project, which is “the largest digital humanities project ever funded in the UK. The project brought together a team of twenty-three researchers to leverage more than twenty-years’ worth of digitisation projects in order to deepen our understanding of the impact of mechanisation on nineteenth-century Britain. In contrast to many previous digital humanities projects which have sought to create resources, the project was concerned to work with what was already there, which whilst straightforward in theory is complex in practice.”

The book “outlines the challenges of establishing and managing a truly multidisciplinary digital humanities project in the complex landscape of cultural data in the UK and share what other projects seeking to undertake digital history projects can learn from the experience.”

The book is available open access.

Source: Auto Draft

Princeton University presents the South Asian Ephemera Collection. It is an open access repository of materials to support research, teaching, and private study with the goal “to provide a diverse selection of resources that span a variety of subjects and languages and support interdisciplinary scholarship in South Asian Studies.”

From the About page:

At present, the collection is primarily composed of contemporary ephemera and items from the latter half of the twentieth century, though users will also find items originating from earlier dates. Common genres in the collection include booklets, pamphlets, leaflets, and flyers. These items were produced by a variety of individuals and organizations including political parties, non-governmental organizations, public policy think tanks, activists, and others and were meant to promote their views, positions, agendas, policies, events, and activities.

There are two highlighted collections within the project:

• Dissidents and Activists in Sri Lanka, 1960s to 1990s
• Hindu Nationalist Ephemera: Collection of Arvind Rajagopal, 1960s to 2000s

Source: Auto Draft

Digital Humanities Workshops: Lessons Learned, a new open access book, was just published. Edited by Laura Estill and Jennifer Guiliano, this book “is the first volume to focus explicitly on the most common and accessible kind of training in digital humanities (DH): workshops.”

From the abstract:

Drawing together the experiences and expertise of dozens of scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and geographical contexts, the chapters in this collection examine the development, deployment, and assessment of a workshop or workshop series. In the first section, “Where?”, the authors seek to situate digital humanities workshops within local, regional, and national contexts. The second section, “Who?”, guides readers through questions of audience in relation to digital humanities workshops. In the third and final section, “How?”, authors explore the mechanics of such workshops. Taken together, the chapters in this volume answer the important question: why are digital humanities workshops so important and what is their present and future role?

Digital Humanities Workshops examines a range of digital humanities workshops and highlights audiences, resources, and impact. This volume will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students, as well as professionals working in the DH field.

The book features essays that explore the where, who, and how of running digital humanities workshops. It will be of particular interest to DH library professionals who develop and run workshops for their communities.

Source: Auto Draft

The Smithsonian recently launched Smithsonian Open Access, featuring “more than 4.5 million 2D and 3D digital items” from their collection. The open access content includes “images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 21 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.”

All content is available for download and reuse, and will surely prove to be a treasure trove of OA content that can be used in a range of digital humanities instruction and research settings.

#SmithsonianOpenAccess

Source: RESOURCE: Smithsonian Open Access

Several new editions in the Debates in Digital Humanities series are now open access in Manifold. Most recently added volumes include Debates in the Global Digital Humanities and People, Practice, and Power: Digital Humanities Outside the Center.

The Debates in Digital Humanities series, which began with the first Debates book in 2011, has grown into a comprehensive series of books covering a range of critical themes in DH, including gender, race, labor, power dynamics, pedagogy, and DH library work.

All of the open access books are free to read online through Manifold, the OA publishing platform developed by the University of Minnesota Press and the CUNY Graduate Center with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Source: RESOURCE: Debates in the Digital Humanities: New OA Editions

Deen Freelon (UNC Chapel Hill) has developed pyktok, a python module that enables collection of video, text, and metadata from TikTok. R users may be interested in traktok, which is ported from pyktok. Both programs note: “This program may stop working suddenly if TikTok changes how it stores its data.” These open-source packages may be useful for instructing how to scrape social media data and for teaching issues around ethics and privacy, as well as the limitations of social media platforms due to shifting policies and access.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture has announced the launch of the Freedmen’s Bureau Search Portal – a comprehensive search platform allowing users to search over 1.7 million pages of Freedmen’s Bureau records.

From the announcement:

The portal allows users to search records from the United States Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau. Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War to assist in the political and social reconstruction of post-war Southern states and to help formerly enslaved African Americans transition from slavery to freedom and citizenship. From 1865 to 1872, the Freedmen’s Bureau created and collected over 1.7 million handwritten records containing the names and information of hundreds of thousands of formerly enslaved individuals and Southern white refugees.

The platform makes records available that have been undergoing digitization and crowdsourced transcription since 2015. The project’s announcement calls for additional volunteers to contribute to the Freedmen’s Bureau Transcription Project:

The museum is leading a volunteer effort to transcribe the digitized records of the Freedmen’s Bureau so they can be more useful for scholars and genealogists researching the Reconstruction era. To learn more about the Freedmen’s Bureau Project, the public can visit the Robert Frederick Smith Explore Your Family History Center on the museum’s second floor or the Smithsonian Transcription Center webpage to volunteer.

 

The Data Literacy Cookbook is now available. Edited by Kelly Getz (Associate Professor and S.T.E.M. Librarian at Eastern Michigan University) and Meryl Brodsky (Liaison Librarian for the School of Information and the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas – Austin), the cookbook helps librarians prepare to teach a broad range of data literacy topics:

Sixty-five recipes are organized into nine sections based on learning outcomes:

1. Interpreting Polls and Surveys
2. Finding and Evaluating Data
3. Data Manipulation and Transformation
4. Data Visualization
5. Data Management and Sharing
6. Geospatial Data
7. Data in the Disciplines
8. Data Literacy Outreach and Engagement
9. Data Literacy Programs and Curricula

This collection of lesson plans, activities, and self-paced modules prepares “students and researchers to access, interpret, critically assess, manage, handle, and ethically use data.”

Ithaka S+R has published, “Fostering Data Literacy: Teaching with Quantitative Data in the Social Sciences,” a qualitative study in which librarians from 20 campuses in the United States conducted 219 interviews with social science faculty, to explore “why and how instructors teach with data, identifies the most important challenges they face,” and to address “how faculty and students utilize relevant campus and external resources.” Key findings include:

• Career skills are emphasized across the curriculum and are important factors in the software and methods that many instructors teach.
• Instructors focus on the critical interrogation of quantitative information in introductory classes, while teaching students to conduct their own research and analysis in upper division courses.
• Teaching students to use analytical software is a hands-on process requiring a significant amount of valuable instructional time, sometimes at the cost of teaching discipline-specific perspectives.
• Instructors generally avoid asking students to locate data on their own because most students struggle to find appropriate datasets. Even instructors find it difficult to locate datasets of the right size and complexity for use in middle and upper division courses.
• Faculty rely heavily on teaching assistants and liaison librarians for support when teaching with data. Teaching assistants play a critical role in teaching students to clean data and use software, and librarians help students with data discovery as well as information and data literacy.
• Both faculty and staff rely more heavily on web tutorials and other informal instructional resources than on workshops and other services offered by campus units to learn new information.

These all offer considerations for digital and data humanities library professionals for their own partnerships in data literacy pedagogy and creating curricular resources.