Looking for an easy way to use maps in your web project? Check out Stately, a simple way to make state-level choropleth maps of the United States using HTML and CSS. Ben Markowitz of Intridea developed this symbol font, wherein each state functions as a glyph within the font. Use HTML list items for states and CSS to color each state – it’s that straightforward.
Category: Resource
RESOURCE: Your Local DH
Last week we mentioned the Boston DH Consortium’s new site. Since then, local DH groups have popped up in NYC and Chicago. Here’s our running list, let us know if we’ve missed your town.
New York City: https://twitter.com/nycdh
Chicago: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/chicago-dh
Philadelphia: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/phillydigitalhumanities
Washington DC: http://www.meetup.com/Digital-Cultural-Heritage-DC/
Boston: http://bostondh.org/
Southern California: http://dhsocal.blogspot.com/
RESOURCE: Linking Things on the Web: A Pragmatic Examination of Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums
A new paper by Ed Summers (Library of Congress) on linked data for cultural heritage organizations. Here’s the abstract:
The Web publishing paradigm of Linked Data has been gaining traction in the cultural heritage sector: libraries, archives and museums. At first glance, the principles of Linked Data seem simple enough. However experienced Web developers, designers and architects who attempt to put these ideas into practice often find themselves having to digest and understand debates about Web architecture, the semantic web, artificial intelligence and the philosophical nature of identity. In this paper I will discuss some of the reasons why Linked Data is of interest to the cultural heritage community, what some of the pain points are for deploying it, and characterize some pragmatic ways for cultural heritage organizations to realize the goals of Linked Data with examples from the Web we have today.
RESOURCE: Appraising our Digital Investment: Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries
A new report from the Association of Research Libraries and Ithaka S+R investigates the financial and technological longevity of digital special collections:
While many research libraries have begun to digitize their collections and share best practices around the steps required to create digital content, much less is known about what happens post-launch…[this study] offers a first look at the practices, attitudes, costs, and revenues associated with caring for digitized special collections. [excerpt]
RESOURCE: code4lib 2013 Conference
code4lib’s 2013 conference, held February 12-14 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, included sessions dedicated to open source projects, crowd transcription, metadata, HathiTrust relevance ranking, REST APIs, born digital special collections, and many other topics of interest to dh+lib readers. While event organizers finalize the transfer and load of video files from the event, the livestream captured is still accessible.
RESOURCE: Boston-Area Digital Humanities Consortium website
The Boston DH Consortium, formed in August 2012 “to pursue shared funding opportunities; organize a series of events; network with digital humanities centers, organizations, and societies worldwide; and encourage local discussion of digital humanities and related topics,” has launched a new site. The Consortium describes itself as:
“an information association of educational and cultural institutions in New England committed to the collaborative development of teaching, learning, and scholarship in the digital humanities and computational social sciences.”
The site currently includes a calendar featuring upcoming events in the area, a list of consortial members, and information about joining the BostonDH mailing list. And– good news for DHers outside of New England– the group plans to extend membership beyond the Greater Boston area in Spring 2014.
RESOURCE: The Lib Pub blog
Lib Pub, a new group blog on library publishing, launched in January 2013. As blog founder Melanie Schlosser, the Digital Publishing Librarian at Ohio State University Libraries, writes in an introductory post:
“Publishing efforts in libraries are becoming more and more common, but there aren’t yet a lot of venues for those involved to come together and share their thoughts and experiences. The Lib Pub is meant to be one.”
This week, Schlosser issued a call for those whose work involves both DH and library publishing to contact her. She writes:
“I’m curious about how many of you have both publishing and DH in your job description, or have a humanities focus in your publishing program, or work with a DH center in some way.”
RESOURCE: MLA Commons, The Early Modern Digital Collaboratory
A new public group, EMDC: The Early Modern Digital Collaboratory, has launched on MLA Commons. Billed as “a venue for digital humanists studying early modern texts and culture (roughly 1450-1700), principally in the English language,” the EMDC “fulfills an idea that circulated at MLA 2013: what if early modernists using digital humanities tools and methods had a venue for our research collaborations?”
Other MLA public groups of potential interest to dh+lib readers include:
+Libraries and Research in Languages and Literatures
+Digital Humanities
RESOURCE: Digital Literacy and Digital Citizenship
Elijah Meeks (Digital Humanities Specialist, Stanford University Libraries) has shared notes from his presentation on the digital humanities to the Bay Area Teacher Development Collaborative, in which he makes a case for its importance at the high school level. The talk not only gives a useful introduction to key tools and projects in GIS, text analysis, and network analysis, but also raises some interesting points of intersection between librarianship and the digital humanities. Part of his discussion addresses the role of DH in improving information literacy:
When a student learns how to use a spatial or text or network analysis technique in a computer science course, they don’t dwell upon the ethical and social ramifications of its use. By bringing the digital into the humanities, we provide a space to question the effect of these pervasive techniques and tools on culture and society.
As librarians, do you use digital humanities methods, tools, or projects in your instruction sessions? Are there any information literacy instructors out there who incorporate DH into their curriculum?
RESOURCE: National Digital Stewardship Alliance Glossary
Checksum? Bagger? Ingest?
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance has released a glossary of digital stewardship terms.
NDSA members have been working on a “Levels of Digital Preservation” activity to provide basic digital preservation guidance on how an organization should prioritize its resource allocation. This glossary provides a common language for NDSA members to communicate about the levels work and should also be useful as a general digital stewardship glossary.
RESOURCE: Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content
JISC and Ithaka S+R have released a report investigating how digital projects can thrive. “Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content” features case studies of three different types of cultural institutions in the UK that have been successful – University College London, the Imperial War Museums and the National Library of Wales.
The report also includes a sustainability health check tool and a series of action steps and questions for digital project leaders to help identify what tools or resources could help projects be even more successful.
This study is the first phase of a larger project, to be followed by “Sustaining Digital Content in Cultural Institutions,” funded by the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), and “Sustaining the Digital Humanities,” funded by the NEH.