Category: Resource

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) has published a new site for the Blackwell Companions to Digital Humanities. This new site for A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004) and A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (2008) is aimed towards long term preservation and a full text search has been added. According to the project’s GitHub repository,

The content here is a conversion of the Companion to Digital Humanities XTF installation formerly available at http://digitalhumanities.org/companion/. The content has been extracted from XTF and rebuilt as a static site with a very minimal hand-rolled Javascript SPA framework. The intention was to recreate the interface and functionality offered by the XTF site (warts and all) in the most direct and unembellished fashion possible. There is a client-side full-text search functionality which is slightly more sophisticated than the previous offering (XTF could, presumably, have been configured to do the same, but the previous site had only very limited search capabilities).

The primary motivation for the conversion was to reduce the maintenance, security, and resource requirements of hosting what is ultimately static content.

Toolkits for Equity has released their latest toolkit, Antiracism Toolkit for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Hosted on PubPub in collaboration with Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications (C4DISC), the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP), and the Knowledge Futures Group, this toolkit is aimed towards BIPOC as a resource to navigate the scholarly publishing ecosystem.

The Toolkits for Equity project emerges as one such mechanism to work toward a more equitable, affirming, and just industry. In the larger scope of an increasingly unequal world where racialized people suffer in many different ways, this particular toolkit, the Antiracism Toolkit for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), is a small yet specific contribution, and one that we hope will be meaningful and useful to BIPOC-identifying individuals navigating an industry that can be wonderful, but also hostile.

While this resource isn’t explicitly related to digital humanities, the toolkit contains resources for conversations on scholarly publishing that are relevant within the wider digital humanities and library world.

The new Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship released its first issue of its first volume. The journal is an open source, open peer review journal focusing on critical approaches to the field of digital librarianship.

The journal “publishes, promotes, and builds community around cultural heritage digital library work, especially critical approaches to these and similar topics: Selection for Digitization, Metadata Remediation / Context for Harm Reduction, Digital Humanities / Digital Scholarship, Collections as Data, and Digital Library Technology”

This first issue features pieces:

• It Matters Who Does This Work: An Interview with Tonia Sutherland by Sophia Ziegler
• Centering the Margins in Digital Project Planning by Dorothy Berry
• Listening, Care, and Collections as Data by Jacqueline Wernimont
• Using Digital Libraries to Engage the Whole Student: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies, Trauma-Informed Classrooms, and Project-Based Learning by Alejandra Torres

Learn more about the journal and its process.

UCLA Library Special Collections strives to develop ethical and inclusive descriptive practices. In this brief piece, they share their motivation and approach to creating/remediating “inclusive, humanizing, and anti-oppressive” object description, as well as resources that informed their approach. Informed by recent scholarship, their process has evolved from an act of discovery, with its assumptions of unbiased neutrality, to a political act that eschews “tacit complicity” in favor of “remediating harmful description by creating and implementing an anti-oppressive approach to discovery and access. To sustain this approach, we will center people in all of our metadata practices and adapt our strategies for doing so over time.” To do this, they commit to being “clear about what we know, how we know it, and what we don’t know,” embracing “baseline description as a tool to improve the discoverability of all our materials,” and demonstrating “an understanding that description is a continuous and necessarily iterative endeavor.” They strive for greater transparency and an ongoing process of review and revision.

In addition to works cited, this piece includes resources for Bias, Standpoint, and Positionality; Legacy Harmful Description Practices; Inclusive and Ethical Description Practices; and Ethical Description Practices and Levels of Description.

This set of resources helps make transparent the ethical choices and decisions that go into object description. Such metadata are foundational to digital humanities library work, as many of the projects we undertake–whether for teaching or scholarship–rely on digitized materials. Working with objects that are thoughtfully and complexly described creates an ideal starting point for creating ethical and anti-oppressive digital humanities projects.

Violet B. Fox (World Intellectual Property Organization) has published the Disorientation Guide to Librarianship on her website. The zine is:

… a compilation zine created by 23 contributors and published in October 2021. The zine is designed to be an accessible resource for people who are unfamiliar with structural oppression and injustice in librarianship. It is intended to be a critique of library values and a guide for people fighting injustice in librarianship. The target audience is LIS students and those new to librarianship, with or without degrees, but all are welcome to the conversation.

The book is essential reading for digital scholarship and decolonial digital humanities practices.

Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities is a “peer-reviewed, curated collection of reusable and remixable resources for teaching and research.” The articles are organized by keywords that include a curatorial statement and artifacts that illustrate it, and they are browsable by type or subject matter or read like a printed collection. A helpful feature of the collection is that the annotated artifacts can be saved in collections to be more easily viewed at a later time. If users create an account, they can also create their own collections. “For other ideas about using this collection, see the introduction, Curating Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities.

Editors of the collection are Rebecca Frost Davis (St. Edward’s University), Matthew Gold (Graduate Center, City University of New York), Katherine Harris (San José State University), and Jentery Sayers (University of Victoria).

Sarah Lippincott’s ARL-CNI report, “Mapping the Current Landscape of Research Library Engagement with Emerging Technologies in Research and Learning” has been released. In it, she identifies strategic opportunities for research libraries to adopt and engage with emerging technologies, with a roughly five-year time horizon, such as utilizing “machine learning to improve research, learning, and scholarly communication” in libraries. Lippincott also considers the ways in librarian and practitioner roles will be reconceptualized to support data science research and education, data curation services, and Collections-As-Data initiatives. In all of these, she encourages a “values based decisions making” approach for adapting, adopting, and experimenting with emergent technologies, balancing “agility and sustainability, convenience and privacy, transformation and persistence.”

Lippincott, Sarah. Mapping the Current Landscape of Research Library Engagement with Emerging Technologies in Research and Learning. Edited by Mary Lee Kennedy, Clifford Lynch, and Scout Calvert. Association of Research Libraries, Born-Digital, Coalition for Networked Information, and EDUCAUSE, 2021. https://doi.org/10.29242/report.emergingtech2020.landscape.

OCLC Research has released a report, “Total Cost of Stewardship: Responsible Collection Building in Archives and Special Collections,” authored by Chela Scott Weber (OCLC Research), Martha O’Hara Conway (University of Michigan), Nicholas Martin (NYU), Gioia Stevens (NYU), and Brigette Kamsler (George Washington University).

From the report description:

Developed by the OCLC Research Library Partnership’s (RLP) Collection Building and Operational Impacts Working Group, Total Cost of Stewardship is a framework that proposes a holistic approach to understanding the resources needed to responsibly acquire and steward archives and special collections. The Total Cost of Stewardship Framework responds to the ongoing challenge of descriptive backlogs in archives and special collections by connecting collection development decisions with stewardship responsibilities.

This OCLC Research report is a collection of resources designed to support archives and special collections in making informed, shared collection building decisions; bring together collection management and collection development considerations; and support communication between colleagues in curatorial, administrative, and technical services roles.

The collection of materials published includes:

1. An OCLC Research report: Total Cost of Stewardship: Responsible Collection Building in Archives and Special Collections
2. An annotated bibliography of related resources
3. The Total Cost of Stewardship Tool Suite, comprising of a set of Communication Tools, Cost Estimation Tools, and a Manual to guide end users in implementing the Tool Suite.

This report will be of interest and use to dh+lib folks whose work intersects with archives and special collections, particularly digital collections.

Trevor Owens (Library of Congress) and Angelina Wong (University of Maryland) have shared a preprint of Collaboration, Empathy & Change: Perspectives on Leadership in Libraries and Archives in 2020 on SocArXiv.

From the book introduction, Owens describes the impetus and process behind the book:

…the students in the organizational theory and leadership course I taught at the University of Maryland’s iSchool worked together to produce this book. Every student in the University of Maryland’s iSchool MLIS program is required to take Achieving Organizational Excellence, a course focused on “the principles, practices, and techniques required for effective leadership and management.” I’m really proud of the work that we did together over the semester. This book distills, documents, and communicates much of what we have learned together… Each chapter of this book was written for the course in the Fall of 2020. With some support from me, each student connected with an individual working in a leadership role in an information organization relevant to their career interests. Each student interviewed their subject to learn about that person’s approach to leadership and organizations. Students then drew from those interviews to develop essays connecting their subject’s perspectives to literature on organizational theory and leadership. Inclusion of essays in this book was optional. Some students preferred not to publish their work here. Some interview subjects preferred that their perspectives not be widely shared. As a result, the scope of this book is intentionally non-comprehensive. This is not a survey of various areas and roles in the field. Instead, the book brings together voices and perspectives anchored in these particular students. The book is itself part of the pedagogical approach of the course. It’s one thing to read about leadership and organizational theory. It’s another to see how ideas from books and journal articles connect to the real-world experiences of leaders in the field. It’s still a whole other level of learning to synthesize perspectives from leaders in the field with the literature and publish it. Library and archives practitioners working in the field wrote most of our course readings. A key part of joining that professional community of practice is developing the ability to contribute to the professional dialog in our scholarship and writing.

For dh+lib readers, this volume can serve not only as an exploration into library leadership in 2020, but also as an example of pedagogical innovation in library and information science education.

Season 2 of Reframing Digital Humanities, a podcast by Julian Chambliss (Michigan State University), is now available as an open access text. Season one drew Chambliss’ attention to the challenge of definition around digital humanities, so season two became a series of conversations with scholars about digital humanities. According to Chambliss,

to create the list of interviewees, I relied on my own digital past and present. As such, I cannot argue that the conversations are encyclopedic or vital actors that might define digital humanities in meaningful ways were not omitted. If you are coming to this project searching for certainty, you will be disappointed. What I can say is, within the confines of the limitations of my knowledge and experience with digital humanities practice, this set of conversations touched on many of the issues I find to be crucial to understanding the values of digital humanities.

As librarian Laurie Taylor (University of Florida) noted in her post on this resource, this new volume is ideal for “folks teaching and researching in DH, with accessible chapters representing different interview discussions and projects that speak to the diversity of the field and specific projects and perspectives.”

In a recent blog post, HASTAC Scholar and PhD candidate at the University of Kansas Rebekah Jo Aycock shared her experiences exploring Queer DH Projects. Relying on Twitter, Aycock (@AycockRebekah) compiled a set of Queer DH projects and resources. These resources include:

#QueerDH Projects and Resources

#QueerDH Projects and Resources was started by Corey Clawson. It was inspired by the project Black Digital Humanities Projects & Resources.

LGBTQ+ Archive Project

The LGBTQ+ Archive Project was started by Charles O’Malley.

The post shares featured projects, including mapping projects, archival and invisible histories projects, oral history collections, and websites and exhibits. This compilation is a valuable collection of resources for DH library folks looking to incorporate Queer DH into their pedagogy and scholarship, or who are looking to provide a broad and inclusive set of projects to share with faculty and students.