Features – Page 3

Designing a Digital Humanities Strategy Using Data-Driven Assessment Methods

In this post, Thea Lindquist, Holley Long, and Alexander Watkins (University of Colorado Boulder) detail the multi-modal work that the University Libraries’ Digital Humanities Task Force undertook to actively assess digital humanities interest and needs on their campus, and to recommend models for library engagement.

Digital modes of teaching and research are steadily gaining ground in the higher education environment. Libraries, as central, interdisciplinary spaces on campus dedicated to advancing the research and teaching mission of the university, are playing a key role in many of the digital humanities initiatives that have been started at universities around the world. In recognition of the strength of this trend, a variety of initiatives are underway in the library world to meet this demand, acquire skills, and share expertise, for example, ACRL’s Digital Humanities Interest Group and the dh+lib blog you are reading right now. The many new position listings for librarians with digital humanities and digital scholarship responsibilities are a further indication of libraries’ commitment to partnering in this movement on their campuses. But how do we know what type and level of involvement might be most impactful for our own libraries and campuses?

The Impetus

In 2012, a group of librarians at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) were becoming increasingly aware that, while digital humanities was gaining ground on our campus, little in the way of centralized coordination and support for this work was available to the campus community. A handful of prominent scholars with well-publicized projects had been involved longer-term, for example, Lori Emerson and her Media Archaeology Laboratory; however, questions about incorporating digital modalities into research, teaching, and learning had started to emerge from graduate students, new faculty members, and established faculty members who had been hearing about them at disciplinary conferences. A previous campus Digital Humanities Initiative, which had participated in Project Bamboo meetings, unfortunately had failed to take root several years before.

[pullquote]Questions about incorporating digital modalities into research, teaching, and learning had started to emerge from graduate students, new faculty members, and established faculty members who had been hearing about them at disciplinary conferences.[/pullquote]

Though the library was a lead partner in the earlier initiative, little had been done after that group’s dissolution. The interest that surfaced recently was different in that it came from the grassroots – both from librarians and from campus researchers. The task force was formed at the prompting of a small group of interested librarians, History Librarian Thea Lindquist, Digital Initiatives Librarian Holley Long, and Art & Art History Librarian Alexander Watkins. In late January 2013, the Libraries Administration officially formed a Digital Humanities Task Force, which was charged with investigating and reporting on digital humanities activities and needs on campus and formulating recommendations for how librarians might partner with scholars and other units on campus to further digital humanities work. We initiated the task force by sending an open call for volunteers to the Libraries’ faculty and staff. Leo Arellano, Michael Dulock, Eric Harbeson, Erika Klein, and Esta Tovstiadi joined us on the task force, bringing expertise and perspectives from metadata, research desk services, acquisitions and collection development, and archives and special collections. To serve our goal of forging partnerships with other technology-related campus units, we asked two academic technology consultants from the Office of Information Technology (OIT), Viktoriya Oliynyk from the humanities and Jacie Moriyama from the social sciences, and the director of the Visual Resources Center in the Department of Art & Art History, Elaine Paul, to join the task force, as well.

Our Goals

The objectives of the task force were three-fold:

to investigate the current state of digital humanities at CU-Boulder and develop a profile that elucidates researcher demographics; methodologies, services, and resources of interest; and barriers to undertaking digital work.
to assess the need for a campus-wide digital humanities initiative at CU-Boulder.
to evaluate models for funding, structuring, and staffing library-based initiatives at peer institutions.

In order to achieve these objectives, the task force collected a variety of data using multi-modal research methods upon which to base sound, evidence-based recommendations. Using this type of approach, researchers “collect and analyze data, integrate the findings, and draw inferences using both qualitative and quantitative approaches or methods in a single study.”[1. Abbas Tashakkori and John W. Creswell, “Editorial: the New Era of Mixed Methods”, Journal of Mixed Methods Research 1, no. 1 (2007): 4.] Fidel Raya’s 2008 investigation found that only five percent of a sample of five hundred articles in library and information studies utilized mixed methods research, suggesting that it is not a very common approach in our field. This finding is certainly understandable considering the amount of work involved, but we found the benefits to be well worth the effort. Mixed methods research is ideal for complex and multi-faceted questions like those we were exploring and result in a richer data set. Additionally, triangulating results from the different methodologies created a consistency check that ensured our conclusions were well-founded.[2. Raya Fidel, “Are We There Yet?: Mixed Methods Research in Library and Information Science”, Library & Information Science Research 30 (2008): 266-267.]

[pullquote]Mixed methods research is ideal for complex and multi-faceted questions like those we were exploring and result in a richer data set.[/pullquote]

Our Multi-Modal Approach

Our research entailed six months of intensive work, including conducting internal and external environmental scans, a campus-wide survey, and one-on-one interviews. During this time, we also organized a symposium for CU researchers to showcase their digital humanities projects. We planned the work in three phases so that each would feed synergistically into the next. The campus scan and survey, for example, helped us to identify potential participants for the interviews.

Figure 1. Phased activity of the task force as well as representations of the flow of the research studies.

In the early planning stages, the task force discussed its working definition of digital humanities at length and made a conscious effort to be as inclusive as possible. The definition was shared with interview and survey respondents to establish a common understanding of the nature of our inquiry. Our decision to take a broader view of digital humanities influenced the outcomes of our investigation in beneficial ways by encouraging us to make connections with researchers in all disciplines and opening up the possibility to envision a more comprehensive digital scholarship initiative.

In the first phase of our work, the task force divided into two subgroups to conduct external and internal environmental scans. The external scan subgroup consulted sources like the Association of Research Libraries’ (ARL) SPEC Kit 326: Digital Humanities and CenterNet’s International Directory of Digital Humanities Centers to create a list of institutions that host library-affiliated digital humanities initiatives. We reviewed these initiatives’ websites to collect data on offerings, staffing models, representative projects, funding, date of establishment, and usage statistics; however, information on the last three data points was scarce. The group identified more than twenty-five different types of support for research, teaching, and professional development. The five most common were lectures and symposia, workshops and training, collaborative work spaces, digital collections, and project management and consultation. Though data on staffing was incomplete, we noticed that all of the initiatives were staffed by more than one person and included a mix of librarians, teaching faculty, technologists, and student assistants. An advisory board including members from a variety of campus units often guided the initiative.

The group also collected statistics on budgets, staffing, collections, and size of institution from sources such as the ARL Statistics and LibQual. Interestingly, we found CU-Boulder was below average in staffing and total library expenditures, yet slightly above average in terms of the population served based on student enrollment numbers. Despite this, we noted that two of the institutions scanned had very similar statistical profiles and still managed to support robust digital humanities initiatives.

Working in parallel with the external scan, a second task force subgroup undertook an initial scan of digital humanities activities at CU-Boulder, with the goal of identifying associated people and projects as well as campus resources that were currently available for digital humanities work. Using a variety of keywords, we searched campus faculty profiles (powered by VIVO open-source software) to find individuals involved or potentially involved in broad range of digital humanities activities. The subgroup also investigated the websites of likely departments for digital humanities projects and for resources for conducting digital humanities work, such as specialized computer labs. We analyzed campus-wide offerings such as those provided by OIT (e.g., software, academic technology consultants, limited server space) to identify which could be of potential use to digital scholars. The information we gathered was intended to serve as the foundation for a centralized knowledge base of resources and services that could later be expanded and made available to the campus community.

After the internal and external scans were completed, at the end of April 2014, we went about directly querying our study populations through individual interviews and a campus-wide survey. Using these methods, we wanted both to talk in depth with digital humanists on campus and to capture information about emerging needs and interests. A task force subgroup interviewed seventeen faculty and three graduate students who were already incorporating digital humanities into their teaching or research.

We designed questions to gather information about the services, resources, and methodologies they utilize, as well as about barriers they encounter in undertaking digital work. We also asked how they monitor developments in digital humanities and about their cross- and intra-institutional collaborations. In addition to learning about digital scholars’ habits, we elicited their help in designing a support infrastructure by employing participatory design techniques. We asked questions about the single biggest problem that they would like to solve and what their ideal support network would look like. They also engaged in a drawing exercise to represent graphically their most recent digital project and mark areas where support would have been useful.[3. The interview questions are available in Appendix A of the task force’s report, “dh+CU: Future Directions for Digital Humanities at CU-Boulder”, which is available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_p_AH2mS1xFnAXxpPbG9N0xDHmvBjaNSAKrNQKVFOgU/edit?usp=sharing] Finally, in order to facilitate the identification of themes and trends in the data, we coded and analyzed notes and audio files from the interviews in NVIVO qualitative data analysis software.

In parallel with the interviews, another subgroup created a survey in Qualtrics, distributed in June 2013 to CU-Boulder faculty, graduate students, and post-doctoral researchers regarding their interest and involvement in digital humanities.[4. The survey instrument is available in Appendix B of the task force’s report. Please note there are three different tracks for those who are involved, interested, and not interested in digital humanities.] In keeping with the broad view of digital humanities activities that we intended to capture, we invited all members of these groups to respond, regardless of departmental or disciplinary affiliation. The survey went out to approximately 8,000 affiliates, and we received 345 responses from participants in programs, institutes, departments, schools, and colleges across campus. The greatest percentages of interested faculty were from the Libraries (16%), Journalism (12%), and Music and Education (both 10%). Among graduate students, Journalism registered the highest percentage of interest (12%). Survey responses proved an extremely rich and broad data source to inform our report and recommendations.[pullquote]We collected feedback from those who said they were not interested in digital humanities; the majority of these respondents explained that digital humanities work required too much time or was not applicable to their research.[/pullquote]

Through the survey, we collected a broad array of easily collatable and analyzable data directly from users, and reached a key group that other methods did not – those who were interested but not yet involved in digital humanities. We learned, among other things, in which campus departments, colleges, and schools respondents were rostered; in which digital humanities methods they were interested; what existing internal and external services and resources they use; and which they wish were available. Further, we collected feedback from those who said they were not interested in digital humanities. The majority of these respondents explained that digital humanities work required too much time or was not applicable to their research. From the data, we were able to generate customized reports for different audiences – for instance, a report on graduate students for the Dean of the Graduate School.

The Results

Multidisciplinary interest in digital humanities came across strongly in our survey data. While, as might be expected, scholars in the College of Arts & Sciences constituted the largest number of those who were interested or already involved in digital humanities, a significant number of scholars in the College of Engineering, College of Music, and School of Education also self-identified in these categories.

Chart 1. Number of those who are interested in DH or are already involved in DH by College of Arts & Sciences divisions. — Chart 1. Number of those who are interested in digital humanities or are already involved in digital humanities by College of Arts & Sciences divisions.

Digging deeper into results from the College of Arts & Sciences, Chart 1 shows that involvement and interest in digital humanities was strongest in the Division of Arts & Humanities, where 17% of faculty responded positively. The highest percentages were in the departments of History, French and Italian, Philosophy, Asian Languages and Civilizations, English, and Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures. However, faculty in departments across the divisions of Social Sciences and Natural Sciences were also interested in investigating humanities-related digital modalities. Disciplines that stood out overall for both faculty and student interest were History, Philosophy, English, languages and literatures, and Linguistics.

The demographics of the survey and interview data suggest that partnerships to support digital humanities across campus departments are needed and that siloing support networks — making resources available only to a limited constituency — could inhibit interdisciplinary collaboration. Community is especially vital to connect digital scholars who are rostered in disparate departments and colleges. Additionally, though interest on campus is high, more support and collaboration is needed to enable interested graduate students and faculty to become active digital scholars. The need is particularly great among graduate students, who may need these skills as they enter challenging job markets. Graduate students regularly contact us to provide experiential learning opportunities in this area.

The survey and interviews together revealed that faculty and graduate students are either engaged in or interested in employing a wide range of digital humanities methodologies in research and teaching. The most common were multimedia and digital publication (66%); image, audio, and video editing (53%); text mining (43%); digital writing and storytelling (35%); analysis of new or social media (34%); geospatial analysis (25%); machine learning and computational linguistics (23%); and gaming (15%). Of course the popularity of these methodologies varied by discipline. History, for instance, had the greatest proportion of respondents interested in geospatial analysis.[pullquote]Many faculty conflated digital humanities with the broader topic of educational technology.[/pullquote]

It was also clear that faculty and graduate student teachers were considering the possibilities that digital humanities holds for pedagogy. Sixteen of twenty interviewees indicated that they incorporate it into their teaching. However, many faculty conflated digital humanities with the broader topic of educational technology and discussed tools such as Google apps and Prezi, social media platforms, and the incorporation of online digital collections into lectures and assignments. Yet some were using technology in truly transformative ways, more consistent with digital humanities practice. For example, one English instructor incorporated the text analysis tool Voyant into her course discussions and assignments, and an Art instructor gave a sample assignment for which students were required to find sounds online, remix them for inclusion in a live performance in class, and then write a blog post about the performance process.

Analysis of the data indicated that graduate students are among the most ardent supporters of digital humanities and would very much like to see it integrated more fully into all aspects of academic life, including the classroom. Faculty perceptions of student interest in these methods and tools, however, were more evenly distributed on the spectrum from very interested to not interested. Faculty also observed that new technologies require a good deal of scaffolding to incorporate effectively into instruction, and that students can be ambivalent about expending the effort to learn them. In multiple contexts, faculty and graduate students both remarked that undergraduate students are less likely to draw a distinction between digital and traditional methods.

One of the task force’s main goals was to better understand digital scholars’ needs and the barriers that they encounter in their work. We also wanted to discover what support they desired in order to begin or advance their digital humanities work. What we found was that in many cases barriers and desires were closely aligned (see Charts 2-4 for representations of barriers as well as desired services and resources). The goal was to formulate recommendations that would mitigate or eliminate these obstacles and gaps. Thus both the interviews and survey asked digital humanities-involved respondents to describe the barriers that they face.

Chart 2. After coding, we found that the interviews contained 224 different instances of “gaps and barriers”-related comments, this chart illustrated the most commons categories. — Chart 2. After coding, we found that the interviews contained 224 different instances of “gaps and barriers”-related comments. This chart illustrates the most common categories.

Chart 3. The survey asked participants to select from a list of potential barriers with a write-in option for “lack of other resources.” — Chart 3. The survey asked participants to select from a list of potential barriers, with a write-in option for “lack of other resources.”

Respondents to the survey and interviews cited lack of technology skills and demonstrated a desire for technology training. This evidence strongly informed the task force’s recommendations. Unsurprisingly, digital humanities-involved respondents identified lack of time as a significant barrier. Interviewees pointed out that a significant time investment is required to become competent in the methodologies, conduct their investigation, and then perhaps integrate them into the classroom. Competing demands, such as traditional modes of scholarship, do not leave much time to explore, and narrow expectations about what types of research count in hiring, tenure, and promotion keep digital humanities on the back burner for many researchers. Our research suggests that scholars highly desire a framework for evaluating digital humanities activities for promotion and tenure.[pullquote]Digital humanities-involved respondents identified lack of time as a significant barrier.[/pullquote]

Survey respondents also pinpointed lack of funding as a major concern, and more in-depth comments from interviewees about funding proved useful for delving deeper into the issue. The most frequently mentioned theme was that they did not have access to adequate funds to initiate the many interesting ideas they had for digital research projects. They especially requested student assistants, course releases, and technology (whether programming, software, or server space). Secondly, for those initiatives fortunate enough to acquire grant funding, respondents noted that reliance on soft money is not sustainable. Our research suggested support such as fellowships, technology infrastructure, grants, and other funding sources are in high demand.

Ch4 — Chart 4. Survey respondents who were interested but not yet involved in digital humanities were asked what resources and services would make them more likely to begin work in the field.

One of the major barriers to a full-fledged digital humanities ecosystem at CU-Boulder is the lack of a coherent community of practitioners. For those already involved in collaborative digital humanities projects, the majority were working with colleagues across departments at CU-Boulder, while about a third of partnerships were with colleagues at other institutions. These partnerships were very often interdisciplinary endeavors. Our interviewees desired a local community to link digital humanities researchers, particularly those with subject knowledge to those with technological expertise. The overwhelmingly positive response to the symposium as a networking event further underscored the desire for community.

While the lack of resources and support discussed so far is certainly a valid issue, the task force noted that in many cases respondents were not aware of existing resources and services on campus that might be helpful to their work. Thus referrals play a vital role in our recommendations.

Conclusion

By taking a multi-modal approach, the members of the Digital Humanities Task Force were able to present well-justified recommendations to the CU-Boulder Libraries and campus based on a holistic view of the practices of digital scholars as well as the challenges they face. In addition to our research activities, conversations we had with outside experts and campus administrators as a part of a campus-wide digital humanities symposium and workshop organized in August 2013 were influential in the task force’s final report and recommendations.[5. The experts – Trevor Muñoz (University of Maryland), John Unsworth (Brandeis University), and Katherine Walter (University of Nebraska–Lincoln) – delivered keynote addresses on the future of digital humanities in higher education, followed by CU-Boulder presenters showcasing their own projects. More information about the presentations is available here.] The connections we made during this process not only created momentum for digital scholarship activities on campus, but also sparked new collaborations between librarians, colleagues from other campus units, and researchers across disciplines. Lindquist, for instance, co-taught a graduate-level digital history course with a faculty member from the History Department. The department also recently hired an instructor whose job duties include acting as its digital liaison. Together with the incoming director of our Institute for Behavioral Sciences, we have organized a grant-funded digital humanities speaker and workshop series in 2015 that campus units across the disciplinary spectrum are supporting financially. All of these collaborations have resulted either directly or indirectly from the task force’s high level of engagement with the campus community in the process of its work.[pullquote]The connections we made during this process not only created momentum for digital scholarship activities on campus, but also sparked new collaborations between librarians, colleagues from other campus units, and researchers across disciplines.[/pullquote]

Before the task force started, a handful of individual librarians at CU-Boulder had expressed interest in partnering with digital scholars in their work, but no one group had stepped forward to lead the effort. The Libraries, therefore, was not able to leverage its substantial expertise – in areas such as metadata, research data management, preservation and archiving, digitization and digital content, and scholarly communication – to promote digital humanities on campus.

Our work has resulted in several significant outcomes. It has improved organizational coordination around digital humanities, increased the Libraries’ visibility as a potential partner is this endeavor, and catalyzed discussions with campus partners around a campus-wide center for digital scholarship. Further, it has highlighted the importance of our librarians not simply supporting other researchers’ work, but partnering with them on digital projects and being recognized for the intellectual contributions they make. The Libraries’ faculty, in fact, could prove an effective springboard for discussions about evaluating digital scholarly outputs for the purposes of tenure and promotion on campus. We continue to make progress as an organization though many of our suggestions have yet to be implemented. The Libraries’ Scholarly Initiatives Working Group, for instance, recently collaborated with us on a proposal and budget for a campus-wide digital scholarship center. Only time will tell how this initiative will take shape, but the findings from the task force’s multi-modal investigation have firmly established the need for a campus digital humanities initiative, and the recommendations offer a road map for getting there.

Image credit: “Needle and Thread Hi Rez” by Flickr user mikeyphillips and shared under a CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.
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Digital Libraries + Hybridity: An Interview with Clifford Wulfman

Clifford Wulfman is the Coordinator of Library Digital Initiatives at the Firestone Library at Princeton University and consultant to Princeton’s new Center for Digital Humanities. He has been involved with the Perseus Digital Library, the Modernist Journals Project, and is currently Director of the Blue Mountain Project, an NEH-funded project to digitize European and North American avant-garde art periodicals from 1848-1923. Roxanne Shirazi corresponded with Dr. Wulfman about his work and training, to talk about digital libraries, DH, alt-ac, and the future of digital collections.

Roxanne: You have an interesting combination of disciplinary training that spans both literature and computer science. Tell us about your background, and how you came to be involved in digital libraries.

Clifford: It’s a pretty long, convoluted story, actually. I was an English major in college and planned to go on to graduate school, but this was the early 1980s, and the job market was grim, and we were all discouraged from pursuing that path. (Little did anyone know how bad it would get later, of course.) I had friends and roommates who were into computers, though, and from them I got the idea that computational linguistics and artificial intelligence would be another way of thinking about language and thought. So—with a single programming course under my belt—I managed to talk my way into graduate school in computer science. I left grad school with a Master’s degree to go work in a medical AI lab, where I built graphical user interfaces for a number of years, but then, in my late twenties, I found myself itching to study literature, and in the theory and practice of hypertext I saw a way to bring my interests together.

[pullquote]I came to computer science from a “close reading” background, so my concepts of language, knowledge, and meaning seemed quite different from those of the artificial-intelligence researchers and computational linguists I worked with in the 1980s.[/pullquote]

So at age thirty I returned to grad school to pursue a PhD in English, writing on traumatic narrative structures in Faulkner and Woolf. I didn’t end up doing much with hypertext then—turns out I was a bit ahead of my department that way—but I kept my hand in, and by the time I graduated, when the job market truly was grim, I was fortunate enough to land a post-doc with the Perseus Digital Library Project at Tufts. That, I suppose, was the real point of intersection, because I was able to pursue interests in language, literature, and computer science among an enthusiastic group of colleagues who understood what I was talking about!

When the post-doc ended, I became project manager (and then technical director) of the Modernist Journals Project. That really brought things together—digital libraries and modernism—and I was able to grow the MJP from a single-title project to a well-used resource. Once again, I was fortunate to have a wonderful group of colleagues, who spoke all my languages, so when I finally had to find a permanent position I was encouraged to look to the library as a place where the work I had been doing could continue. And here we are.

Roxanne: Recently, the term “scholar-practitioner” has been taken up by many in the alt-ac movement, and the digital humanities community in particular has emphasized the value of humanities scholars who are also versed in computing. In what way has your PhD training influenced your work as a programmer, and vice versa?

Clifford: I came to computer science from a “close reading” background, so my concepts of language, knowledge, and meaning seemed quite different from those of the artificial-intelligence researchers and computational linguists I worked with in the 1980s. Their concepts were logic-based, for the most part, whereas mine were more associative, and their notions of “language understanding” seemed quite limited to me. But I think my CS training made me much more aware of structure and process, and I became interested in structuralism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis as a result. And in hypertext, of course, which seemed to me to be the reification of a great deal of literary and linguistic theory.

What is the value of this vice-versa versatility? First and foremost, it has made me pretty fearless: I’m almost always open to trying something new. And of course it has made it possible for me to see issues from many sides. But it’s interesting: for all our talk about academic diversity, one hears a great deal about “the scholar,” as though there were a single, monolithic figure embodying a consistent set of concerns and practices (picture Jerome in his study, or Rodin’s Thinker, or Ozymandias…). Likewise, the notion of “programming,” in the digital humanities, seems to cover everything from developing new algorithms for text analysis to making WordPress sites. I think I resist definition: I exist as an Other to mainstream notions of “scholar,” “academic,” “computer scientist,” and “programmer”—not to mention any notion of “librarian”!—and I think that bothers a lot of people who like nice, simple identities. A scholar is not an intellectual; a programmer is not a computer scientist, and yet in many ways I am all of these. No wonder I am “alt-ac!”

Roxanne: The area of overlap between digital libraries and digital humanities is quite large. How would you characterize the difference between these areas? How important is the distinction between, say, The Perseus Project as a digital library, and the Modernist Journals Project, which is frequently referred to as a DH project?

Clifford: First of all, I think there’s a crucial and fundamental difference between a “digital library” and a “digitized library.”

The terms digital and digitize are treacherously polysemous. Digital derives from the Latin word digitus, digiti, meaning finger or toe; it has become a metonym for the discrete values modern computers use to represent information. To digitize, then, is to represent information by means of discrete values, and digital data is simply information stored as ordered sequences of discrete states. These ordered sequences are often called files or streams, and they come in many varieties, but at the most basic level they are all the same: audio files, image files, text files are all just sequences of bits.

What, then, does it mean to digitize a book? What it means to digitize a book depends crucially on another question: what is a library?

From one perspective, a library is a hoard of physical artifacts whose principal function is to be looked at. Seen from that perspective, digitization is an image-making activity: rendering surfaces on which drawings and inscriptions appear into sequences of bits that a computer can use to produce a reflection of that surface. From another perspective, a library is a gathering of texts whose principal function is to be read, and from this perspective digitization is a linguistic activity: rendering words into sequences of bits that a computer can use to create linguistic symbols that can be analyzed and compared. It is the scholar’s privilege to regard the library from the latter perspective; it is the librarian’s burden to view it from the former.

The librarian’s concern with preservation and access puts a premium on creating large collections of digitally photo-duplicated holdings, with the same kind of metadata they’ve always created: information that facilitates maintenance of, and access to, institutional assets. I think “digital humanists” want more than that, or soon will. Perseus is a digital library, and not a digitized library, because its resources are not simply digital photo-duplications or transcriptions. They are encoded texts co-existing in a software environment that enables programs and people to interactively search, query, analyze, combine, and compare objects of investigation.

[pullquote]The digital humanities have highlighted the need for other forms of discovery and access, beyond simple string searches.[/pullquote]

Perseus self-identifies as a digital library. The MJP is a digital library, too. There are lots of opinions and definitions out there, but I’d venture to say that a digital library is a resource whose mission is to support inquiry, while a digital humanities project is an endeavor whose mission is to answer a question, or make a claim, or engage in an argument. The distinction is not a clean one, but it is probably important for funding agencies and tenure committees, whose mission is to encourage work in particular directions.

Roxanne: There is an ongoing debate in digital humanities librarianship surrounding the idea of service, with some librarians pushing back against the sort of support role in digital projects connoted by the term. In your experience, how have librarians contributed to digital projects and what expertise do they offer that might not be readily apparent to scholars from other disciplines?

Clifford: That debate seems to be, not only ongoing, but also, like so much “debate” these days, drenched in epinephrine and vitriol! As I said earlier, I’m suspicious of identities, so I don’t really know what a “librarian” is. I think people who are able to think systematically about information; who are familiar with evolving standards and know the state of the various arts involved in creating digital projects; who are responsible for imparting a long-term perspective on intellectual work—the people with this knowledge are important partners in digital humanities projects. Are those people called “librarians?”

Roxanne: Fair enough. Let’s talk about your current work on the Blue Mountain Project.

Clifford: Blue Mountain is an ongoing project centered on the creation of granular, machine-readable facsimiles of avant-garde magazines for use by traditional scholars and students and also by researchers in the digital humanities. A grant from the NEH has enabled us to digitize 34 titles comprising approximately 53,000 pages in twelve languages, and we continue to add more. This collection presents a cross-pollination of image and text, a mix of genres and forms (poetry, prose, drama, music, opinion, advertisement), and diverse print spaces where conventions and reading habits are challenged by bold experimentation with typography and graphic design.

Blue Mountain, however, intends to be more than a simple digital library. The digital humanities have highlighted the need for other forms of discovery and access, beyond simple string searches. More and more, humanities scholars want to work with digitized materials at a higher degree: they want to explore relationships among named entities like people, places, things, dates; many want to be able to use extant tools like syntactic parsers, automatic translators, and statistical analysis programs; others, along with computational linguists, and computer and information scientists, want access to large text corpora to which they can apply their own algorithms. Blue Mountain has been designed to support the needs both of traditional humanities scholars and of this new breed of researcher.

To expand on the mountain metaphor a bit: Blue Mountain has four essential faces:

The Archival Face: Blue Mountain is a curated repository of high-quality page images and high-quality metadata housed in a major research library.
The Digital Library Face: Like most contemporary digital libraries, Blue Mountain provides a searchable and browsable catalog of its resources and a web-based graphical interface that enables users to look at the page images.
The Research Face: Much of Blue Mountain’s value lies beneath the surface, in its richly encoded data (machine-readable transcriptions) and metadata (library-standard data about titles, authors, places of publication and the like). Blue Mountain currently makes all its data and metadata freely available, in raw form, on the popular web-based hosting service GitHub.
The Community Face: Thematic research collections like Blue Mountain attract the interest of researchers, students, teachers, librarians, and archivists from many disciplines. In addition to providing access to resources, projects like Blue Mountain can function as hubs for collaborative research and integrated collection growth.

This multi-faceted design makes Blue Mountain a modern resource useful for the broadest range of scholars working in traditional area studies, modernist studies, periodical studies, library and archival science, as well as the digital humanities.

Blue Mountain’s data is already available on GitHub, for anyone who wants it.

[pullquote]The future of computer-assisted research in the humanities lies not in monolithic tools and websites but in networks of programs and data that can work together over the World Wide Web.[/pullquote]

The future of computer-assisted research in the humanities lies not in monolithic tools and websites but in networks of programs and data that can work together over the World Wide Web. Thus Blue Mountain is working to develop not only a set of tools to allow researchers and students to exploit its data, but also to develop Blue Mountain itself as a service-oriented framework. Such frameworks of program-accessible interfaces and standard data-interchange formats are the foundation of the emerging semantic web, and will lay the groundwork for realizing the full potential of avant-garde periodical materials in the context of the next generation of networked digital libraries.

So while we continue to add new titles to our collection, we’ve also begun to develop a couple of new technologies. One is a set of custom-made tools for visualization and analysis we call Blue Mountaineer (for exploring Blue Mountain); the other is a set of APIs we’re calling Blue Mountain Springs, because they will make Blue Mountain an abundant source of clean data that can be poured into tools outside our project.

Roxanne: Can you tell us about the infrastructure decisions your team made?

Clifford: I think the most important choice we made was to focus on the data, independent of its delivery. There are lots of catalog-searching, page-turning applications out there, with more coming along all the time. Rather than binding ourselves to one platform, we’ve chosen to encode our data and metadata using bona fide and de facto standard schemas like MODS, METS, ALTO, and TEI.

A sample issue-level MODS file from the Blue Mountain Project — Detail from Blue Mountain Reference, the project’s wiki on GitHub

The most expensive and valuable part of Blue Mountain is the human labor that goes into creating, revising, and extending its underlying encodings, and by choosing to capture that work in standard forms, we think that we are greatly extending its useful lifetime and improving the return on investment.

Roxanne: What do you see as some of the more exciting directions for digital libraries and digital humanities to take in the future?

Clifford: I think the semantic web offers exciting possibilities. I think we’ll see a renewed interest in expert systems—programs that reason about knowledge based on rules and inferences—that interact with users and data to perform complex tasks of discovery and analysis over the vast bodies of data we are now encoding in digital libraries. The challenges are enormous, but we’ve learned a lot since the AI winter.

Clifford Wulfman has written extensively on modernism and digital libraries and is the co-author, with Robert Scholes, of Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction.

Minor updates to Clifford Wulfman’s byline at the top of the post were made on Nov. 3, 2014.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Reaching Out to the Humanities for Open Access Week

Today marks the start of Open Access Week, now in its 7th year. From October 20 through 26, individuals and institutions worldwide will hold events (workshops, symposia, lectures, and even upload-a-thons) centered on the issue of open access.

Last year, dh+lib compiled a round-up of events that focused on the humanities, and we’d like to do the same this year. If you’re hosting an open access event that specifically reaches out to disciplines in the arts and humanities, please send relevant info to dhandlib.acrl@gmail.com or tweet us! And if you’re interested in writing up your OA efforts in the humanities, pitch us your idea—we’re always looking for original pieces that showcase the work of our community.

Curious what others are up to this week? Check out the mammoth list of OA Week events over at the Open Access Directory.

The Editors

Registry of DH and Library Sites

Do you offer digital humanities or digital scholarship support at your library/institution? Do you have a website? Add it to our list!

dh+lib is seeking to compile a registry of websites of groups that offer DH and digital scholarship services. At the Digital Humanities Interest Group meeting at ALA Annual, many of you mentioned frequently looking at other institution’s websites to see how your peers are offering DH services. This cyberstalking is tedious and boring! Take a minute to add your information to our open registry and make all of our lives easier.

The registry is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsh

eets/d/13hZlUCp3Zc5l7vAJyxfpcyIL8lnb4sZhtvW7MzQlHNo/edit#gid=0

Fine print:

The information you submit will be publicly available.
This list intentionally collects the bare minimum of information. Since we are all constantly adapting how we offer DH support and services, a list of people/projects/services/etc. would immediately become outdated. The idea is that by collecting URLs, we assume (dangerously) that each institution will keep a more current list of the details relevant to its DH group.
Is there any criteria for who should or should not fill out the spreadsheet? No! Our goal is to create a resource that’s useful to librarians doing DH work. We’re not looking to draw lines or get involved in definitions. If you have something to share that your colleagues would find useful, please do.
What if you want to add your group but you don’t have a website? You’re more than welcome to add your group – there is a Notes field where you can add any relevant info you’d like to share (e.g. Does the group have representatives from the library? Are you planning for a new space? Do you offer workshops or other events to your campus community?).
What if you’re the only person doing DH at your institution? Same as above. You’re welcome to add yourself, and use the Notes field to describe your work.
All questions on the spreadsheet are optional. Some may not want to give their contact info. Some may not have formalized the name of their group yet. Provide whatever info you feel comfortable with.

Contact dhandlib.acrl@gmail.com with questions.

The Opportunistic Librarian

In this post summarizing his Digital Humanities 2014 conference paper, Demmy Verbeke (KU Leuven) argues for a scholar-practitioner model of librarianship, with academic libraries structured to incorporate their own research and development.

Generally speaking, Digital Humanities practitioners agree that what they do is in essence a collaborative activity, which connects people in different positions – such as, for instance, researchers, software developers, project managers, and librarians. Naturally, the exact nature and form of the specific contribution of librarians to Digital Humanities projects at a particular academic institution will differ, depending on who else is already involved, the available staff and infrastructure, the research agenda of faculty members, their enthusiasm to collaborate with the library, and the ambitions and priorities of the institution in question. Possibilities range anywhere from offering basic information on existing tools for Digital Humanities research and negotiating access to infrastructure, to providing training in the use of Digital Humanities tools, or even creating “library-based skunkworks – or semi-independent, research-oriented software prototyping and makerspace labs” (Nowviskie 2013, 53).

[pullquote]the best way to prepare for future research needs is by being a forerunner in research[/pullquote]

My paper for the DH2014 conference illustrated my support for the skunkworks approach. This approach, in my opinion, should be the preferred route for any academic library wanting to maintain its position as an essential partner in research (besides realizing the other two traditional elements in its mission statement, namely to support learning and teaching). To me, it seems that the best way to prepare for future research needs is by being a forerunner in research. So I plead for an academic library, structured and staffed in such a way that it is not only able to support research initiated by others, but also to take the lead in particular domains (such as the development of advanced digitization tools and the creation and analysis of large digital corpora). In order to do this, libraries will need to find space for research & development within their own organization and aim to “set the conditions for the advancement of knowledge itself, through the fulfillment of research desires yet unknown, un-expressed” (Nowviskie 2014). In Leuven, we are trying to do this, for instance, in the context of our Digital Lab (partnering in projects such as RICH), and by joining the Support Action Centre of Competence in Digitisation (Succeed) with a view to contributing to the development of advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and NER (Named Entity Recognition) technology.

The title of my paper was inspired by my conviction that the Digital Humanities create possibilities for libraries and their staff. They give librarians the chance to move beyond a rather passive role as supporters of research (if and when invited to do so), to take up a more active role as scholar-practitioners. At universities where the divide (frequently on more than one level) between academic and library staff is currently too big, the Digital Humanities can also warrant an upwards re-evaluation of the position of the latter group. In short, we are given the opportunity to reinstate the library as a visible, valuable (and valued) partner in research, which, in my experience, is essential at universities where the allocation of budgets is decided by academic staff who still spend most of their time doing research. The library’s value is thus proven, in a very direct manner and on an almost personal level, to the decision makers, which never hurts in the context of the never-ending struggle to secure sufficient funding.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Intertwingularity with Digital Humanities at the University of Florida

Laurie N. Taylor (Digital Scholarship Librarian) and Blake Landor (Classics, Philosophy, and Religion Librarian) profile recent DH developments at the University of Florida. These interconnected developments, including the formation of a dedicated library group, the development of a training course for librarians, and the launch of the Scott Nygren Scholars Studio, draw on related and distributed expertise across the campus.

Background

The University of Florida is a comprehensive, public, land-grant, research university, among the largest and most academically diverse public universities in the US. The UF Libraries form the largest information resource system in the state of Florida (the third most populous state).

Part of the history of digital humanities at UF is deeply connected with the UF Digital Collections at the George A. Smathers Libraries at UF. The UF Libraries have a long history of collaboration using technologies for preservation and access, including international collaboration for microfilming. In the 1990s, the UF Libraries began experimenting with digitization to preserve materials held in the Latin American & Caribbean Collections—collections that were built over many decades, through much collaboration with partner institutions—and in 1999, the UF Libraries formalized ongoing support for digitization by creating the Digital Library Center.

Gilt Wood Seated Bodhisattva CAT Scan, for UF’s Korean Art: Collecting Treasures online exhibit.

In 2006, the UF Libraries launched the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) using the open source SobekCM content management system. UF and partners collaboratively developed the SobekCM software to meet shared needs, including a robust socio-technical (people, policies, and technologies) infrastructure for:

Digitization and digital curation (e.g., workflows, integrated tracking and reporting, integrated digital preservation); shared documentation; collaborative training programs; online tools for workflow needs including item creation, quality control, and metadata editing;
Hosting for online access for all material types; integrated and separately aggregated per curatorial needs; specialized viewers for materials; branding; specialized supports for patron, scholar, librarian/curator, and other external and internal user groups; integrated online mySOBEK tools designed for general users, internal production users, and curators and scholars;
Ongoing growth and development for needs related to institutions, collections, technologies, collaboration for growing capacity among all partners for new activities and for growing the collaborative community, new activities as with digital scholarship and data curation.

[pullquote]dLOC now has 38 international partner institutions, many scholar contributors, over a million user views each month, and is one of the largest Open Access collections for the Caribbean.[/pullquote]

SobekCM also powers the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), for which the UF Libraries are one of the founding partners and the technical host partner. Started in 2004, dLOC now has 38 international partner institutions, many scholar contributors, over a million user views each month, and is one of the largest Open Access collections for the Caribbean. dLOC partners digitize materials, curate collections, and collaborate with scholars on intellectual infrastructure, context, growing and supporting Caribbean Studies, and new research initiatives.

By 2011, thanks in large part to the community and collaboration with programs like dLOC, the UF Digital Collections boasted rich content and rich repository features supporting direct library needs and DH projects.[1] With the UF Libraries’s robust technical infrastructure, experience with collaborative projects, and a critical mass of digital library content, the UF Libraries recognized that the next steps required additional support to enable the UF Libraries, UF faculty and students, and others to grapple with ways of answering what do you do with it? and what next?

Answering these questions required changes in the socio-technical infrastructure for the human infrastructure in terms of positions, responsibilities, and organization. Within the existing structure, more steps were needed to build towards a comprehensive approach to address the place of subject and liaison librarians with data and DH. It was at this point that the UF Libraries created the Digital Humanities Librarian position from a Digital Projects Librarian position within the Digital Library Center. In 2012, the DH Librarian position moved to the Scholarly Resources & Research group, reflecting the growth and changed focus from curation as part of production to part of research services, with a closer alignment with Subject Specialist/Liaison Librarians. The past and unfolding history of the UF Libraries in supporting DH continues to grow and connect with digital library activities and related work, including in data curation.

In 2013, dedicated and specific supports for all UF librarians for DH were not in place. The Digital Humanities Library Group began in 2014 as a direct outgrowth of UF’s Data Management/Data Curation Task Force (hereafter, DMCTF), a group with many campus representatives and a campus-wide scope.

Data Curation Task Force and Digital Humanities Library Group: Subject/Liaison Librarian Roles

The DMCTF was established in 2012 to address the needs of researchers on the UF campus for a coordinated approach and culture of support for data curation and management across disciplines (DMCTF Charge). The DMCTF has been responsible for sponsoring data-related events, making policy and procedure recommendations for developing human and technical infrastructures, providing information resources for the university community, and fostering collaborations and developing a full culture of support.

One of the DMCTF’s first recommendations was that Subject or Liaison Librarians develop a basic level of data literacy involving the skills necessary to effectively locate, analyze, manage, and interpret datasets, including (at a basic level) knowledge of data lifecycles; local and long-term storage options; knowledge of the DMPTool; awareness of data usage and practices in assigned subject areas; and awareness of tools and experts on campus to assist with data management for making appropriate referrals. At a more advanced level, the DMCTF recommended that Subject or Liaison Librarians have familiarity with analytical, statistical and visualization techniques and software.[pullquote]One of the DMCTF’s first recommendations was that Subject or Liaison Librarians develop a basic level of data literacy.[/pullquote]

The DMCTF was designed as an integrated group connecting other data activities and groups to enable full, campus-wide support in part by fostering a culture of radical collaboration. Although the DMCTF was somewhat too blunt an instrument to address the specific needs of digital humanists, especially in the development of training programs that centered on digital humanities, it was designed to be able to incubate new groups if appropriate. Two representatives from humanities disciplines sit on DMCTF: Laurie Taylor, Digital Scholarship Librarian (formerly called the “Digital Humanities Librarian”) and Blake Landor, the Classics, Philosophy, and Religion Librarian. Laurie is co-chair of DMCTF.

Laurie and Blake, authors of this post, discussed forming a separate, library-based group which focused on skills that library faculty and staff (especially Subject or Liaison Librarians) require to be effective supporters of digital humanities programs on campus as well as potentially involved themselves in digital humanities projects. We agreed that this group should function independently of DMCTF, while reporting back to DMCTF as input to policy recommendations. That conception was the origin of UF Libraries’ Digital Humanities Library Group (DHLG). Over the Winter Break this idea was developed into a proposal and submitted to the Library Administration; it was approved on January 29, 2014.

The DHLG was created without a specific charge other than to address/discuss issues in digital humanities and to schedule training in support of the group’s members. While the formation of the group was approved by Library Administration (with Blake in the role of Chair), it is very much a grass roots cohort of primarily Subject or Liaison Librarians brought together by a common interest. Laurie’s role has been as the administration liaison to the group as well as co-coordinator.

Shortly after the proposal was approved, an invitation to join the group went to the UF Libraries’s “All Librarians” email list and other email lists. Between 15 and 20 librarians and staff members responded to this invitation with the strong support of their supervisors to take the time off their normal schedules. The group participants include librarians and staff from various departments, including Special & Area Studies Collections, Humanities and Social Sciences, Fine Arts, Cataloging, and Administration. Since February, the group has met approximately every three weeks to discuss issues in digital humanities librarianship and define/plan a training course that would focus on digital humanities. As a model for our group to consider, Laurie developed a series of training modules or units that comprised the basic skill sets that our group agreed would give us a start on becoming well-rounded digital humanities Subject Librarians.

The Scott Nygren Scholars Studio

While this was taking place, two exciting, related developments occurred that reinforced the importance of what we were doing. The first was that UF Libraries’ Dean Judy Russell encouraged the group to explore the implementation of a Scholars Studio in our Social Sciences and Humanities Library (Library West). Dean Russell suggested that our newly-formed DHLG look into this idea and work up a proposal. We called an outside expert, Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University Libraries, who provided recommendations and suggestions, including recommending a Scholars Studio model with a BYOD (“bring your own device”) environment that would offer wall paint, projector, and tables forming a collaborative space for instructional activities and collaborative projects, and a staging area for digital humanities-related presentations and events.

With strong internal support and sponsorship, DHLG participants organized a subgroup to develop the proposal. The subgroup added to the basic design, identifying use cases that demonstrated the value of a LED multi-touch screen, a “smart” podium, and inviting furniture, in addition to the updates to transform what is currently a rather traditional classroom into a flexible studio space. In response to input from academic departments, we added three computers with dual monitors to the proposal, and by April our completed proposal for a Scholars Studio was approved by the Library Administration, and named as the Scott Nygren Scholars Studio.

DH Library Group and Developing Librarian Program: DH and Subject/Liaison Librarians

In addition to giving us advice about UF’s Scholars Studio, Alex Gil also shared some of his experience coordinating Columbia University’s Developing Librarian Project, which turned out to be the inspiration for the training program that the DHLG decided upon. The DHLG was especially convinced by the idea that training should not take place in a vacuum, but should rather be part of a collaborative project designed to improve library resources. The “learning by doing” motif has now formed the basis for the training program that DHLG devised. After much discussion, we decided to work on the curation of the Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales digital collection, a sub-collection of UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature collection.

Little brother & little sister and other tales, illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1917)

In order to implement the Developing Librarian model, we drew on internal as well as external trainers, and applied for a library Mini-Grant in support of bringing in external trainers. The title of this one-year funding proposal, which references the Columbia University project, is “Developing Librarian Digital Humanities Pilot Training Project.” The proposed training schedule draws heavily on the training units that Laurie devised for our group and is centered on the curation of the Grimm Brothers’ digital collection as our specific focus. The grant proposal has been funded, with a funding period that will extend through June 2015.

The skill sets DHLG members hope to acquire with this pilot training project include, but are not limited to, project management and charters, content management systems (e.g. WordPress, SobekCM), TEI and metadata training, GIS, data mining and visualization, linked data, and online exhibit design and development. The overall program is being designed for participants to gain skills, experience, methodological knowledge, and confidence for learning new tools and for taking on leadership roles in initiating and collaborating on projects, developing training sessions for students and scholars, and addressing new needs as they emerge. Because DH is a growth area which potentially impacts a number of functional units in the library, and many departments outside the library, the wide interest in the DHLG’s training program is not totally surprising. However, not everyone who is interested in the training has time for the whole program, and so we are trying to make allowances to accommodate different needs.

From “Just in Case” to “Just in Time”

While the DHLG was getting started, planning was also underway for a graduate certification program in digital humanities. This idea started when Elizabeth Dale, Professor of History and Law, began working with the History Librarian, Shelley Arlen, on developing a digital humanities course for the fall of 2014, which includes a certificate upon completion of the course. A proposal to expand this idea to a graduate certification program in digital humanities is being worked on collaboratively by faculty members of the Departments of English and History, Laurie, Blake, and Shelley from the Libraries, and Sophia Acord, Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities & the Public Sphere. As a starting point, this program is leveraging courses currently being taught or in development. It has been instructive to learn during the early stage in the planning of this program the number (over 25) and variety of courses in numerous academic departments that offer digital humanities content. This is a fairly recent development and speaks to the timeliness of the new Scott Nygren Scholars Studio and developing librarian training program. When the DHLG proposal was submitted last January, to some extent we were in a “just in case” frame of mind (we need these skills just in case user demand for Subject Librarians with these skills ticks up). This has now turned into a “just in time” orientation; our training will be in full tilt just as the new DH graduate certificate program and the new Scott Nygren Scholars Studio are unveiled in the fall.

Thus, three separate concurrent developments at UF have been serendipitously dovetailing. Additionally, other work that builds from, informs, and connects to these developments includes activities to better formalize and support collaboration with Scholars Councils, across Florida with the nascent Florida Digital Humanities Consortium, integration and collaboration for teaching and research with the “Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Migration, Money, and the Making of the Modern” DOCC or Distributed Online Collaborative Course, and more.[2]

Being at the epicenter of several developments at their very inception and being closely connected and collaborating with many groups and individuals is an exciting place to be. We look forward to reporting back to this group in a few months, after these developments have had a chance to progress further.

[1] Other examples of digital humanities collaborations by UF Libraries

Diaries of a Prolific Professor: Undergraduate Research from the James Haskins Manuscript Collection online and print on demand edited collection by teaching faculty librarians, archivists, and student researchers; written based on the experience of processing and working in the archival collection; the book represents a new scholarly contribution and serves as an artifact of the collaboration.
Online exhibits, new Exhibits Coordinator, and Exhibitions Program: librarians have collaboratively created online exhibits with teaching faculty, students, and others from UF and beyond. In 2011, the UF Libraries created a new Exhibits Coordinator position to implement a full exhibitions program, which was necessary in part because of the consistently increasing in demand for collaboratively creating online exhibits as digital humanities scholarship.
UF Digital Humanities Librarian and DH Program: In 2011, the existing Digital Librarian position title was changed to reflect the transformed position focus, from building digital collections to taking digital collections—including new digital collections—as foundations and critical components in the larger work of digital humanities, digital scholarship, data curation, and scholarly cyberinfrastructure. In 2012, the Digital Humanities Librarian position moved from the Digital Library Center, aligned more with digital production, to report through the Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources & Services which includes collections, positioning the DH Librarian and DH activities with Subject and Liaison Librarians.
UF’s Digital Humanities Working Group (DHWG): UF’s DHWG began in 2011 when Sophia Acord, Center for the Humanities & the Public Sphere, and Laurie Taylor, Digital Humanities Librarian, jointly convened the inaugural meeting to discuss activities designed to build a community of practice at UF for exploring the humanities in and for a digital age. UF’s DHWG includes members from across campus, with many from within and outside of the UF Libraries.
UF Annual Digital Humanities Day: UF’s DHWG hosted the 1^st and 2^nd annual UF DH Days in 2012 and 2013 saw over 120 people at each event, gathered enormously positive feedback from the post-conference attendee surveys, and abundant, positive anecdotes of new collaborations, projects, and practices from participants (2012 introductory slides and 2013 program materials) as well as several new DH projects like the collaborative grant with Museum Studies and Library faculty for “Archiving the Photographs of the First Transcontinental Railroad.” Perhaps most importantly, these events help support development of the DH community at UF.
THATCamp-Gainesville: the 3^rd UF DH Day event was THATCamp-Gainesville, the first THATCamp for UF and Gainesville in April 2014, which received positive post-event participant evaluations and positive anecdotes across such a great variety of areas (program materials). We don’t yet have clear examples of new projects or initiatives that can be directly traced to THATCamp-Gainesville, but the event brought together attendees from across Florida and allowed for the next-step discussions on creating the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium, with that creation underway.

[2] Related, Connected, and Intertwingled Activities
Some of the related current work, with more details, includes:

“Forging a Collaborative Structure for Sustaining Scholarly Access to the Baldwin Library for Historical Children’s Literature,” a project by Suzan Alteri, Curator of the Baldwin Library, to develop a Scholars Council for the Baldwin to formalize support to growth collaboration among the Baldwin Library and its scholarly community.
dLOC Scholarly Advisory Board Expansion, where UF is participating with the dLOC partners in developing plans for expanding the Scholarly Advisory Board (perhaps also having it become a Scholars Council) to best support and provide credit for the rich and abundant work already being done, and to support future growth.
“Florida Digital Humanities Consortium,” with many institutions in Florida collaboratively planning the prototype or draft of the operational model to support the broad, rich, and deep collaboration and DH work in Florida. Discussions on statewide collaboration began at THATCamp-Florida hosted by the University of Central Florida and continued at THATCamp-Gainesville at UF. Now, UCF teaching faculty and UF teaching and librarian faculty are serving as core organizers for facilitating and launching the new initiative with the statewide community.
“Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Migration, Money, and the Making of the Modern,” DOCC or Distributed Online Collaborative Course taught in fall 2013 by Rhonda Cobham-Sander with librarian Missy Roser at Amherst College, Donette Francis with librarians Beatrice Skokan and Vanessa Rodriguez at the University of Miami, and Leah Rosenberg with librarians Margarita Vargas-Betancourt and Laurie N. Taylor at the University of Florida. In designing the course, the scholars deliberately created the syllabus, modules, and teaching resources such that other teachers could easily use the materials to teach the full course or select specific lessons in the future with the clearly articulated goal to build intellectual infrastructure for Caribbean Studies by creating course materials, identifying materials for digitization, and creating new scholarly works with all added to dLOC (materials for teaching and research resulting from the course).
“Piloting a Peer-to-Peer Process for becoming a Trusted Digital Repository:” the libraries of the University of North Texas and UF are collaboratively creating a pilot peer-to-peer process for TRAC to build towards becoming a Trusted Digital Repository, including using the process to build even stronger capacity locally and as a community for supporting collaborative needs related to preservation, governance, auditing, reporting, and other concerns.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

[wp_biographia user=”blaland”]

[wp_biographia user=”lntaylor”]

dh+lib Guide to ALA Annual 2014

To aid in navigating the behemoth that is the ALA Annual Conference (1797 sessions!), we’ve compiled a list of sessions that intersect in some way with the digital humanities.

Thanks to all who responded to our call for suggestions, including Kristen Mapes, Abby Scheel, and Lisa McFall. Have a session you’d like us to add? Shoot us an email or find us on twitter @dhandlib.

Update, June 19: Added two Saturday sessions (“Electronic Lab Notebooks: Managing Research from Data Collection to Publication”; “New Directions for Data Visualization in Library Public Services”), two Sunday sessions (“ACRL Literatures in English Section General Membership Meeting with Panel Discussion”; “Building Gorgeous Responsive Web Sites Fast with Twitter Bootstrap”), and one Monday session (“User Experience Interest Group”).

Jump to: Friday | Saturday | Sunday | Monday

And, of course, be sure to join us at the ACRL Digital Humanities Interest Group meeting on Sunday at 4:30pm in the convention center, room N263.

n.b. CC = Convention Center

Friday, June 27th

Managing Local and Community-produced Born-digital Audiovisual Content [$][preconference]
TIME: 9:00am to 4:00pm
LOCATION: Caesars Palace Neopolitan II
FEE: $50
PRESENTERS: Howard Besser, Natalie Milbrodt, Siobhan Hagan, Stefan Elnabli, Steven Villereal, Yvonne Ng
DESCRIPTION: Multiple speakers will provide examples of strategies for the ingest and management of important born-digital content, illustrating reasonably achievable processes for institutions with varying collections and resources. Topics will include offering advice to content contributors (on preferred file formats, wrappers, and metadata), to file structures and metadata for maintaining a collection, to a variety of methods for providing access, to concerns about ensuring the longevity and integrity of these works.

Managing Data: Tools for Plans and Data Scrubbing [$][preconference]
TIME: 8:30am to 4:00pm
LOCATION: CC N109
FEE: $235, LITA Member; $350 ALA Member; $380 Non-Member
DESCRIPTION: As data continues to come to the fore, new tools are becoming available for librarians to assist faculty and use with their own data. This preconference would focus on the DMPTool and OpenRefine. The DMPTool will be presented to demonstrate customization features, review data management plans, best and worst practices, and writing a data plan for a data set a library may collect. OpenRefine will be demonstrated with sample data to show potential use with library data sets and more of the data lifecycle process.

Practical Linked Data with Open Source [$][preconference]
TIME: 8:30am to 4:00pm
LOCATION: CC N258
FEE: $235, LITA Member; $350 ALA Member; $380 Non-Member
PRESENTERS: Dan Scott, Galen Charlton, Jodi Schneider, Kevin Ford, Richard Urban, Richard Wallis, Silvia Southwick
DESCRIPTION: This pre-conference combines theory and practice by giving participants a working knowledge of the creation and use of linked data and linked data applications. This session will ground participants in linked data models and patterns through hands-on exercises. Participants will go home with a working knowledge of the state of the art of linked data in open source library systems and the use of linked data to solve metadata problems across libraries, archives, and museums.

Saturday, June 28th

Chief Collection Development Officers of Large Research Libraries Interest Group [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 8:30am to 11:30am
LOCATION: Flamingo Hotel, Room Virginia City I & II
DESCRIPTION: The program includes a 10:30am presentation by Peter Leonard on “Humanities Data Mining: Transforming Local Copies of Vendor-Digitized Cultural Material.”

GIS Discussion Group [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: CC N101
DESCRIPTION: The GIS Discussion Group is hosted jointly with MAGIRT and GODORT. Topics of discussion will involve geospatial data from both federal agencies and private sources. A call for discussion topics will go out ahead of time to MAGIRT and GODORT members, but everyone is welcome.

International Developments in Library Linked Data: Think Globally, Act Globally – Part One [program]
TIME: 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: CC N264
PRESENTERS: Theo Gerontakos [moderator], Jodi Schneider, Neil Wilson, Richard Wallis
DESCRIPTION: Libraries have the potential to make major contributions to the Semantic Web, but are still emerging as global participants. RDA implementation and the BibFrame initiative have drawn fresh attention to the promise and potential of linked data. What are the international developments in linked data, emerging from libraries and other memory institutions? Come hear our speakers address current projects, opportunities and challenges. NOTE: The program will continue with Part Two from 10:30-11:30 a.m.; it is not necessary to attend both.

Electronic Lab Notebooks: Managing Research from Data Collection to Publication [program]
TIME: 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: CC N232
PRESENTERS: Kristin Bogdan, Wendy Kozlowski
DESCRIPTION: Electronic lab notebooks (ELN) are becoming an integral part of the data management services provided to researchers by academic libraries. These tools allow researchers to keep track of their lab’s products throughout the research data life cycle. You will see how Yale and Cornell chose and implemented the LabArchives cloud-based electronic lab notebook, including a demonstration of the software, and how the ELN fit into their broader data management support programs.

International Developments in Library Linked Data: Think Globally, Act Globally – Part Two [program]
TIME: 10:30am to 11:30am
LOCATION: CC S230
PRESENTERS: Sarah Quimby [moderator], Gordon Dunsire, Reinhold Heuvelmann
DESCRIPTION: Libraries have the potential to make major contributions to the Semantic Web, but are still emerging as global participants. RDA implementation and the BibFrame initiative have drawn fresh attention to the promise and potential of linked data. What are the international developments in linked data, emerging from libraries and other memory institutions? Come hear our speakers address current projects, opportunities and challenges. NOTE: Part One of this program takes place from 8:30-10:00 a.m.: it is not necessary to attend both.

Batman: A Celebration of 75 Years [program]
TIME: 10:30am to 11:30am
LOCATION: CC S224
PRESENTERS: Brian Buccellato, Francis Manapul, Patrick Gleason, Peter Tomasi
DESCRIPTION: Throughout his 75 year history, the Dark Knight has become one of the most popular and widely recognized super heroes in the world. From comics to TV to movies to video games, the World’s Greatest Detective has permeated all entertainment mediums and beyond. Come by for a look at Batman’s rich history and what the future holds this pop culture icon! Presented by the Graphic Novels & Comics in Libraries MIG with thanks to DC Comics

Copyright Discussion Group [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 10:30am to 11:30am
LOCATION: CC N101
DESCRIPTION: The ACRL Copyright Discussion Group reviews and discusses legislative, judicial and regulatory developments related to copyright and libraries in higher education.

Map and Geospatial Data Collection Managers Discussion Group [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 10:30am to 11:30am
LOCATION: CC N120
DESCRIPTION: We look forward to a good discussion of the issues, new developments, and problems in the selection, acquisition and management of map collections.

Librarians as Digital Leaders: Collaborating on the Development and Use of Digitized Collections [program]
TIME: 10:30am to 11:30am
LOCATION: CC N252
PRESENTERS: Maura Marx
DESCRIPTION: Digitization has enormous potential to bring local history collections to a wider audience, often through academic and public library partnerships. In this session participants will hear from several successful collaborations funded through IMLS that highlight promising practices for the wider dissemination of digitized collections. Panelists will share tools they leveraged to bring their materials to researchers, students, and the general public, as well as evidence of how these collections are being used in unanticipated ways.

Libraries in the Publishing Game: New Roles from Content to Access [program]
TIME: 10:30am to 11:30am
LOCATION: CC N262
PRESENTERS: Melinda Dermody [moderator], Catherine Mitchell, Cyril Oberlander, Rebecca Kennison
DESCRIPTION: Libraries have been at the receiving end of the publishing process, but things are changing for the good of libraries, authors and scholarly communication. Libraries are taking on new and innovative roles in every aspect of the publishing process. Examples of such innovation include partnering with publishers, creating content, providing author-support services and publishing an assortment of content. Hear from libraries and institutions that serve in a variety of publishing roles, affecting publishing by becoming integrated into it.

RUSA History Librarians Discussion Group [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: CC N263C
PRESENTERS: Joel Kitchens [moderator], Harriett Green, Thomas Padilla
DESCRIPTION: Panel discussion on “Role/s of Humanities Librarians in Digital Humanities.” The panel is co-sponsored by the ACRL Digital Humanities Interest Group.

OITP – Copyright Hot Topics and Big Ideas [program]
TIME: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: CC N256
PRESENTERS: Adam Eisgrau, Tom Lipinski, Gretchen McCord, Laura Quilter, Carrie Russell
DESCRIPTION: This panel presentation modeled after LITA’s Top Tech Trends will highlight recent copyright policy developments including copyright legislative reform and the status of the HathiTrust and Georgia State court appeals.

Taking action: Linked data for digital collection managers [program]
TIME: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: CC S222
PRESENTERS: Cory Lampert, Silvia Southwick
DESCRIPTION: The linked data movement has gained momentum. But how does paradigm shift affect digital collection workflows? This workshop will provide key theoretical concepts of linked data and engaging hands-on activities demonstrating how CONTENTdm metadata can be transformed into linked data. The workshop will also provide a forum to discuss how linked data might alter our current practices and workflows. This workshop is geared toward beginners and is designed for curious exploration and active learning.

New Directions for Data Visualization in Library Public Services [program]
TIME: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: CC S224
PRESENTERS: Angela Zoss, Josh Boyer
DESCRIPTION: A wide array of new instructional technologies have joined an increased understanding of the diversity of learning styles to foment new forms of teaching and information sharing. Data visualization is increasingly used in higher education and libraries to organize information, or provide new and innovative ways of disseminating data and learning objectives. The speakers at this event will provide further detail and background on the topic of data visualization, as well as examples of their use in various projects and settings.

Digital Special Collections Discussion Group (ACRL RBMS) [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 3:00pm to 4:00pm
LOCATION: CC N115
DESCRIPTION: As special collections transition from considering digitization as a project to considering it as a fundamental part of operations, resourcing considerations become much more complex. To solve this issue, many departments are seeking new collaborations. The 2014 ALA Annual Digital Special Collections discussion group will focus on building relationships with non-special collections personnel and departments to support digitization programs.

Preservation Metadata Interest Group [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 3:00pm to 4:00pm
LOCATION: CC S232
PRESENTERS: Cal Lee, Jarrett M. Drake, Rebecca Russell, Amanda Focke
DESCRIPTION: The program will feature a presentation by BitCurator PI Cal Lee, followed by lightning talks by BitCurator users at Princeton and Rice and Q&A.

Metadata Beyond the Library: Consultation and Collaboration with Faculty, Staff and Students [program]
TIME: 4:30pm to 5:30pm
LOCATION: CC N253
PRESENTERS: Jason Kovari, Lisa McFall
DESCRIPTION: This program will discuss ways in which metadata experts can share expertise beyond traditional library settings. Presenters will share examples of successful metadata consulting initiatives with their constituent communities, such as training sessions, workshops, boot camps, and other venues for deploying metadata expertise outside the library. McFall’s presentation will focus on the role of metadata and catalog librarians in digital humanities.

ACRL’s Women & Gender Studies Section Forum [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 4:30pm to 5:30pm
LOCATION: CC N115
DESCRIPTION: General Membership forum meeting for ACRL’s Women & Gender Studies Section. The WGSS sponsored research poster sessions immediately follow the membership forum.

Sunday, June 29th

Digital Preservation Interest Group [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: CC S226

Linked Library Data Interest Group [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: CC N237
PRESENTERS: Jon Phipps
DESCRIPTION: Phipps will present a talk entitled “RDA and LOD — FTW or WTF? : A Fair and Balanced Point of View.” Is RDA just ‘the rules’ or is it a robust bibliographic metadata model designed specifically to support rich, FRBRized, distributed LOD that just happens to come with several thousand ‘pages’ of rules? What’s this ‘unconstrained’ stuff? Why does RDA RDF have URIs I can’t ‘read’ and will never remember (and what are lexical aliases)? Why are there so many definitions for ‘Work’ anyway? How is RDA handling versioning and releases? How is RDA using Git and GitHub? Why does any of this matter to my data and, more importantly, me?

Building Gorgeous Responsive Web Sites Fast with Twitter Bootstrap [program]
TIME: 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: CC S227
PRESENTER: Andromeda Yelton
DESCRIPTION: Do you have a web site? Do you need it to look good, even if you’re not a designer? Do you need it to work on lots of devices and browsers, even if you have no testing budget? Of course you do! With Twitter Bootstrap, you win. In this hands-on session (bring a laptop if you can) we’ll build a gorgeous web site fast with the Bootstrap framework. (Basic HTML/CSS knowledge required.)

Understanding Schema.org [program]
TIME: 10:30am to 11:30am
LOCATION: CC S230
PRESENTERS: Dan Scott
DESCRIPTION: Schema.org is an effort among major search engines to promote better linking of Web content through the use of metadata attributes in HTML markup, allowing for improved access to digital objects. The ALCTS/LITA Metadata Standards Committee invites you to hear speakers who are active in schema.org development in libraries, and who will discuss initiatives in this area within the GLAM community which promote a broader understanding of the development of bibliographic information among these communities.

Digital Curation Interest Group Meeting [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: CC N236
PRESENTERS: Lydia Zvyagintseva, Trevor Muñoz
DESCRIPTION: Join the Digital Curation Interest Group for “Data Curation You Can Taste: Improving Crowd-Sourced Data from the New York Public Library’s Menu Transcription Project.” The New York Public Library’s “What’s On the Menu?” project—a crowdsourced effort to transcribe historic menus from the Library’s collections—is one of the most successful public digital humanities projects of recent years. In this presentation, Lydia Zvyagintseva will describe her experience trying to clean up, classify, and describe data from “What’s on the Menu?” in the context of an internship project at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Trevor Muñoz will describe why the Menus data set is an ideal site for practical data curation training. Muñoz will also describe new work on the project. The DCIG business meeting will follow the presentation.

ACRL Literatures in English Section General Membership Meeting with Panel Discussion
TIME: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: Bally’s Bronze 3
PRESENTERS: Jennifer Bartlett, Angela Courtney, Steven Harris, Rob Melton
DESCRIPTION: Please join us at the LES General Membership Meeting for an exciting panel discussion about the career paths of literature librarians. As literature librarians our careers may take many different shapes. Our panelists will talk about how their careers developed, the influences that brought them to literature librarianship, the paths they took to a variety of roles including work in special collections and archives, digital humanities, management and administration and more. If you are new to the profession or looking for ways and means to refresh your career this will be an excellent opportunity to explore career options.
The panel will follow comments from LES Chair Arianne Hartsell-Gundy and Chair-elect Laura Taddeo about recent and forthcoming LES achievements and initiatives, and Sarah Wenzel will report on our liaison activities with MLA.

Digital Humanities Interest Group [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 4:30pm to 5:30pm
LOCATION: CC N263
DESCRIPTION: Conversations between librarians involved with, or sharing interests in, the intersections, partnerships, and collaborations among libraries, librarians, and the digital humanities.

Monday, June 30th

Digital Humanities and Academic Libraries: Practice and Theory, Power and Privilege [program]
TIME: 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: CC N252
PRESENTERS: Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Jane Nichols, Megan Wacha, Roxanne Shirazi
DESCRIPTION: Our panel explores the multiple roles libraries play in digital humanities. Librarians’ capacity to engage critically with the production, consumption, and pedagogy of digital humanities increases our ability to partner with and be valued by our campuses. Whether we see ourselves in a service or a scholar role, we are providing leadership for digital humanities. Our goal is to foster lively discussion about practical and theoretical concerns, and offer conceptual tools.

Information Manipulation Part II: Surveillance [program]
TIME: 8:30am to 10:00am
LOCATION: CC N243
PRESENTERS: Thomas Susman, George Christian, Vivian R. Wynn
DESCRIPTION: What does the collection and retention of bulk phone records and other personal information mean for the public and for our library users? Is personal information and Internet access being managed and manipulated by the government and/private companies?

User Experience Interest Group [discussion/interest group]
TIME: 1:00pm to 2:30pm
LOCATION: CC N242

Note: all speaker lists and descriptions have been pulled from ALAConnect or from emails distributed to listservs.

TaDiRAH: Building Capacity for Integrated Access

In this post, Quinn Dombrowski (UC Berkeley) and Jody Perkins (Miami University in Ohio) introduce the digital humanities taxonomy project known as TaDiRAH, reviewing the motivating factors behind its inception and outlining future goals of the project. Both are members of the TaDiRAH Coordinating Committee.

TaDiRAH, the Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities, is the result of a year-long project undertaken by the DiRT (Digital Research Tools) Directory and DARIAH-DE (Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities) to develop a shared taxonomy that can be used to organize the content of sites as diverse as the DARIAH Zotero bibliography ‘Doing Digital Humanities’, the DiRT directory, and the DHCommons project directory.

Motivations

TaDiRAH was developed in part as a response to the evolving needs of the DiRT directory, a longstanding, well-regarded source of information about available tools that support scholarship in the humanities. From its inception, DiRT has sought to engage a broad audience of tool users by limiting the use of jargon, and categorizing tools by the task(s) they perform, rather than using a more abstract taxonomy. A wiki format was originally chosen to ensure a low barrier to entry, providing a great deal of flexibility and allowing the site to develop quickly without a specific source of funding.

As the number of resources grew, the wiki platform became unwieldy. Consequently, DiRT was completely rebuilt in 2011 using Drupal, an open source content management system which provided more structure and enabled each tool to have a unique “profile” page. The platform supports options for browsing, sorting, and searching the entire directory across a variety of facets including tool category, cost, license, and developer. As of May 2014, the DiRT directory consists of approximately 800 tool listings, and receives approximately 3,000 unique visitors and 16-20,000 monthly pageviews. It has received funding from the Mellon Foundation for a new phase of technical development that includes the development of APIs to enable data exchange with DHCommons and Commons In A Box, a new feature for submitting tool reviews, and “recipes” that document how different tools can be combined to address research questions.

[pullquote]This project represents one of many data streams moving toward a networked integration of related hubs in the DH resource ecosystem.[/pullquote]

Early in 2013, members of the DiRT Steering Committee/Curatorial Board started looking at options for improving the site, which included an examination of the ways that the current taxonomy was being used by contributors. Following an analysis of the existing categories and free-form tags, we began a series of discussions with the DARIAH-DE team that created the Zotero bibliography (Christof Schöch, Matt Munson, Luise Borek). They had already begun work on a taxonomy of digital humanities activities. Recognizing our common goal, we formed a transatlantic collaboration around the task of developing a shared taxonomy. Based in Europe, DARIAH aims to enhance and support digitally-enabled research and teaching across the humanities and the arts. The DARIAH infrastructure will be a connected network of people, information, tools, and methodologies for investigating, exploring, and supporting work across the broad spectrum of the digital humanities. DARIAH-DE represents the German contribution to DARIAH.

How does it work?

Although the motivating factors behind the development of TaDiRAH are pragmatic, TaDiRAH and its antecedents are not without more theoretical and scholarly influences, including the concept of “scholarly primitives”[1. Unsworth, John. 2000. “Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?” London: King’s College London], DARIAH research into modeling the research process [2. See, for example: Benardou, Agiatis, Panos Constantopoulos, Costis Dallas, and Dimitris Gavrilis. “Understanding the Information Requirements of Arts and Humanities Scholarship.” International Journal of Digital Curation 5, no. 1 (June 22, 2010): 18–33. doi:10.2218/ijdc.v5i1.141.; Ruth Reiche, Rainer Becker, Michael Bender, Matthew Munson, Stefan Schmunk, Christof Schöch: “Verfahren der Digital Humanities in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften” DARIAH-DE Working Papers Nr.4. Göttingen: DARIAH-DE, 2014. http://webdoc.sub.gwdg.de/pub/mon/dariah-de/dwp-2014-4.pdf], and research on digital scholarly methods in the humanities.[3. See Borgman, Christine. Scholarship in the Digital Age : Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010; Gasteiner, Martin, and Peter Haber, eds. 2010. Digitale Arbeitstechniken für die Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften. Vienna: UTB; and Siemens, Ray, John Unsworth, Susan Schreibman, eds. 2004. A Companion to Digital Humanities. Hardcover. Oxford: Blackwell] Unsworth’s “scholarly primitives” were developed with an eye towards practical applications: the “primitives” were functions of scholarship that could be embodied in tools, which could then be combined to achieve “higher order functions” (similar to DiRT’s “recipes”). Later work on articulating and organizing stages and aspects of research activity provides a more process-oriented approach to understanding scholarship. Both ways of breaking down scholarship into its constituent parts, and using those terms to categorize tools, can help a user understand how and when a given tool might apply to their research, and what other tools might complement it.

[pullquote]Two rounds of detailed, thoughtful feedback from the digital humanities community played a significant role in shaping the taxonomy.[/pullquote]

The taxonomy does not aim to be comprehensive, focusing instead on a subset of relatively broad categories that are widely used and generally understandable. It is expected to be most useful to projects seeking to collect, organize and provide access to information on digital humanities tools, methods, projects, or readings.

The current version of the taxonomy is based upon three primary sources:

the arts-humanities.net taxonomy of DH projects, tools, centers, and other resources, especially as it has been expanded by digital.humanities@oxford in the UK and DRAPIer in Ireland;
the categories and tags originally used by DiRT; and
the DARIAH ‘Doing Digital Humanities’ Zotero bibliography of literature on all facets of DH.

These resources were studied and distilled into their essential parts, producing a simplified taxonomy of two levels: eight top-level goals that are broadly based on the steps of the scholarly research process, and a number of general methods under these goals that are typically used by scholars to achieve these research goals. Guided by the principle of separating research activities from research objects and the experience of managing earlier taxonomies, we created two additional open-ended lists for techniques and digital humanities research objects. Terms from either or both of these lists can be combined with any goal and/or method to further describe the activity. Two rounds of detailed, thoughtful feedback from the digital humanities community played a significant role in shaping the taxonomy, particularly the choice to treat techniques as a separate list, rather than forcing them awkwardly into a third level of the main taxonomy.

Acknowledging the impossibility of creating categories that would always be mutually exclusive, we aimed to create groupings that were distinct enough from one another to produce a level of consistency in application that would support interoperability and enhance discovery. We separated compound categories used by DARIAH (e.g. dissemination and storage), collapsed many of DiRT’s more granular categories (image editing and textual editing became: editing + an object), and added categories from both that were not easily mapped in either direction (e.g. designing and organizing). Decisions about what would be considered a “method”, and what would be treated as a “technique” were sometimes contentious. If more than one activity could be used to achieve the same ends then those activities were usually classed as techniques. Having an open list of techniques and objects will make it easier for TaDiRAH to keep up with a fast-changing field, as we anticipate those lists evolving far more quickly than goals or methods.

This project represents one of many data streams moving toward a networked integration of related hubs in the DH resource ecosystem. It will help to address the de-contextualization that is an unavoidable consequence of the move away from comprehensive sites that are difficult to sustain. TaDiRAH allows topically-restricted sites like DiRT (tools) and DHCommons (projects and collaborators) to focus on curating one particular kind of content, while still providing a way to identify and connect related information.

Future Steps

This summer, DiRT will undertake a comprehensive review of each tool entry. Terms from the TaDiRAH taxonomy will be added as part of this process. DHCommons staff will, similarly, add TaDiRAH terms to project profiles based on existing free-form metadata. Information from DiRT and DHCommons will be exposed using RDF, making this content available as linked open data, as well as through the APIs that are currently under development as part of the Mellon-funded integration initiative.

Applying TaDiRAH to actual directories will provide an opportunity to assess the degree to which it can accommodate real-world data. We anticipate revising TaDiRAH periodically in response to issues that arise during this process, as well as feedback from those who have used it in other ways (e.g. Micah Vandegrift, Scholarly Communications Librarian at Florida State University, made reference to TaDiRAH as a resource for introducing digital humanities to undergraduates, by using it as a guide to the roles within digital humanities projects).

DARIAH-EU has also committed to using this taxonomy as a basis for their development of a more complex ontology of digital scholarly methods, and we are also engaged in ongoing dialog with other ontology initiatives, including NeDiMAH’s work around scholarly methods. NeDiMAH (Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities), funded by the ESF (European Science Foundation), is a network of scholars involved in various aspects of the Digital Humanities across Europe, including understanding and classifying digital research practices. Our goal is to share at least high-level categories with NeDiMAH’s ontology, so that objects (projects, tools, articles, etc.) classified using our taxonomy can be automatically “mapped” to some level of the NeDiMAH ontology, and vice versa.

TaDiRAH (which is pronounced “ta-DEE-rah”, and is almost an anagram of “DARIAH” and “DiRT”) lives on Github at http://github.com/dhtaxonomy/TaDiRAH. We encourage readers to use TaDIRAH and submit feedback via the issue tracker on github. We currently only have a human-readable version available, but we’ll be publishing machine-readable versions (linked data, and a Drupal taxonomy feature module to make it easier for others to implement TaDiRAH on Drupal-based sites) in the near future.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Defining Digital Social Sciences

In this post, Lisa Spiro (Rice University) provides an overview of the different facets of digital social sciences, observing points of connection with digital humanities.

As a member of a research team investigating the skills and competencies important to digital scholarship, I’ve become interested in what “digital scholarship” means in different disciplines, particularly the social sciences and humanities. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’m finding some significant points of intersection between digital humanities and digital social sciences. For example, the Digging into Data Challenge promotes innovative research using computational methods across the humanities and social sciences, funding projects in literature, political science, law, and other domains. CLIR’s 2012 report on the results of the first round of Digging into Data, One Culture: Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, recommends embracing interdisciplinarity and developing more inclusive models for collaboration. Reflecting this call for interdisciplinary collaboration, several digitally-oriented research centers explicitly encompass both the humanities and social sciences, including Northeastern’s NULab, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (I-CHASS), and Michigan State’s Matrix. What are we to make of the connections between humanities and social science research? And what does digital research in social sciences entail, anyway?

[pullquote]By developing a deeper awareness of how social scientists use computational methods to address research questions, humanists might gain new insights into how they can apply similar techniques to their work—and vice versa.[/pullquote] I ask these questions from the perspective of someone with a background in digital humanities interested in connections to (and differences from) digital social sciences. Of course, the social sciences and humanities have long been associated with each other, particularly fields such as history (classified as a social science, humanities, or both) and anthropology, owing to a common interest in culture, material objects, and interpretation. Indeed, interpretive social sciences are often brought under the broad umbrella of digital humanities. But the increasing significance of data-driven methods to the humanities as well as the social sciences seems to be sparking new connections, particularly between computational social science and computational humanities.

While “digital humanities” is itself a fuzzy term, “digital social sciences” seems to be even less well defined. In the social sciences, several related terms fit under the general category of “digital social sciences,” including e-social science, computational social science, digital cultural heritage, and Internet studies. These terms differ in how they conceive of the role of digital technologies in the social sciences, whether in providing the infrastructure for computationally-intense, distributed research; fueling data-driven or computational analysis; supporting the curation, analysis and dissemination of cultural heritage materials; or providing the basis for the social, political, cultural, technical, psychological, and economic studies of the Internet. For ease of discussion, I’ll use “digital social sciences” as an umbrella term to refer to these different approaches, while acknowledging that the term lacks coherence and currency. In this post, I will briefly describe these different facets of digital social sciences and note points of connection with digital humanities. I hope that these general observations will spark further discussion about opportunities for deeper collaboration as well as about what makes each field unique.

E-Social Science/ Digital Social Research

In focusing on the infrastructure for distributed, computationally-intensive research in the social sciences, e-social science resembles e-science and humanities cyberinfrastructure initiatives. The term “e-social science” appears to be most common in the UK, probably because of the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) program to create a National Centre for e-Social Science as part of the nation’s e-science efforts. Established in 2004, this distributed center funded 12 nodes (plus a hub) that created “innovative tools, techniques and services.”[1. Peter Halfpenny and Rob Procter, “The E-Social Science Research Agenda,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 368, no. 1925 (July 18, 2010): 3762, http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2010.0154.] Most of the nodes developed applications in domains such as simulation, qualitative analysis, statistical analysis, data management, and GIS, while one conducted “social shaping” studies to understand the impact of these technologies on research. While the UK e-science program aimed to “facilitate bigger, faster and more collaborative science” through grid computing, this model was found to be less applicable to social science research, which typically occurs on a smaller scale, uses a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods, and already has good research tools.[2. Ibid, 3765.]

Now ESRC prefers the more general term “digital social research,” which focuses on “the application of a new generation of distributed, digital technologies to social science research problems.”[3. “Digital Social Research,” Economic and Social Research Council. Accessed March 11, 2014.] Digital social research encompasses both quantitative and qualitative approaches; it involves new data sources (such as social networking data), methods (such as social network analysis), capability (such as collaboration tools), scholarly practices (such as new publishing models), areas of study (such as Internet studies), and scale (such as global collaborations).

Computational Social Science

A 2009 article in Science by David Lazer, et al. declared the emergence of computational social science, as researchers use massive data sources (such as data from email, blogs, and web searches) to study human behavior.[4. David Lazer, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, Sinan Aral, Albert-László Barabási, Devon Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, et al., “Computational Social Science,” Science 323, no. 5915 (February 6, 2009): 721–723, http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1167742.] According to Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, “Computational social science is the integrated, interdisciplinary pursuit of social inquiry with emphasis on information processing and through the medium of advanced computation.”[5. Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, “Computational Social Science,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics 2, no. 3 (2010): 259–271.] Lev Manovich invokes Lazer, et al.’s article in calling for a computational humanities that uses data to understand cultural phenomena, such as visualizing patterns across a million manga pages. The intersection between computational social sciences and computational humanities is demonstrated by Northeastern’s NULab for Text, Maps and Networks, which is co-directed by Lazer, a political scientist, and English professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (NULab also develops digital cultural heritage projects such as Our Marathon).

“Text, maps and networks” provides an apt summary of three key approaches to computational social science. In his overview of the field, Cioffi-Revilla identifies five main methods. As I provide short definitions of these methods based on Cioffi-Revilla’s work, I’ll also offer one or two examples of how they are applied in digital humanities.

Automated information extraction. Computational social scientists use content analysis and text mining to monitor trends, extract event information, and study political rhetoric, just as digital humanists employ text mining to understand the characteristics of literary genres or social and political changes revealed in historical newspapers.
Social network analysis. In social science, social network analysis is used to design better transportation and public health networks, understand terrorist networks, and gain insights into how organizations work.[6. Ibid.] Likewise, recent digital humanities work involving social network analysis includes mapping correspondence networks.
Geospatial analysis. The spatial turn cuts across disciplines. Using GIS, researchers bring together data with mapping tools, investigating the spatial dimensions of phenomena such as the relationships between obesity and mobility, the spread of disease, or the dissemination of ideas.[7. Paul M. Torrens, “Geography and Computational Social Science,” GeoJournal 75, no. 2 (2010): 133–148.]
Complexity modeling. Complexity modeling applies mathematical techniques to understand the interactions among elements in a system and disturbances to equilibrium such as violent conflicts, market fluctuations, and natural disasters. While complexity modeling seems less common in digital humanities than the three methods mentioned above, there are efforts to apply it to the humanities. For example, in 2012 Anthony Beavers, Mirsad Hadzikadic, and Paul Youngman chaired a conference on “Modeling Complexity in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Accepted papers explored topics such as the social transmission of language and political change.
Social simulation models. Through Agent Based Modeling (ABM), researchers simulate how autonomous agents interact within an environment, investigating phenomena such as environmental changes and the emergence of organizations. Although ABM is less common in digital humanities, Michael Gavin (my former colleague at Rice) presented a fascinating paper at Digital Humanities 2013 that explored its potential for understanding the circulation of texts and ideas in seventeenth-century England.

These methods are employed in the sciences as well as social science and humanities (it would be fascinating to consider how and why these methods are used in different disciplines, but that is beyond the scope of this brief overview). Of course, many aspects of digital humanities do not fit under the rubric of computational social science as described by Cioffi-Revilla, such as digital editing, scholarly communication, critical making, and 3D modeling. However, many of these approaches can be associated with the third category, digital cultural heritage.

Digital Cultural Heritage

Digital cultural heritage explores the significance of digital technologies for representing, disseminating, and preserving cultures, drawing upon archaeology, art history, museum and library studies, history, literary studies, cultural studies, and other disciplines. We see an emphasis on digital cultural heritage at Michigan State’s Matrix, which characterizes itself as a “center for digital humanities and social sciences.” In a presentation on digital cultural heritage, Ethan Watrall, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University and Matrix’s associate director, notes the center’s support for interdisciplinary collaboration, educational programs like the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative, and the development of tools such as the digital repository and publishing platform Kora. Examples of digital cultural heritage initiatives include Mukurtu, a platform that empowers native peoples to manage and share their cultural heritage, and Open Context, which reviews, documents, and publishes open archaeological data.

Internet Studies

As an interdisciplinary field, internet studies builds upon political science, communications, library and information science, sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, cultural studies, computer science, and other disciplines to explore “the social and cultural implications of the widespread diffusion and diverse uses of the Internet, the Web, and related information and communication technologies.”[8. William H. Dutton, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies (Oxford Handbooks in Business and Management), Oxford UP, 2013.] As Dutton notes, areas of investigation include the development of technologies (such as social factors informing the design of Internet technologies); how people use these technologies (such as online communities, e-commerce, social media, and Internet culture); and policies governing the development and use of the Internet (such as intellectual property and privacy). Research centers in internet studies include Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Oxford Internet Institute. Internet studies bears some resemblance to new media studies, although the latter draws more from the arts, humanities and design.

Connecting Digital Social Science and Digital Humanities

[pullquote]It’s also important to recognize and respect what distinguishes the humanities and social sciences, such as their approaches to evidence and argumentation and their areas of focus.[/pullquote]

This short survey of digital social sciences is by no means comprehensive; we could also consider scholarly communication, digital ethnography, and fields such as digital anthropology and digital sociology. In any case, it’s clear that there are significant points of intersection between digital social sciences and digital humanities. While digital humanists and digital social scientists already work together in centers such as NULab and Matrix, employ similar methods, and use common tools such as R and Gephi, I wonder if there might be opportunities to deepen collaborations in order to share knowledge and build interdisciplinary community. For example, perhaps a digital humanities journal could run a special issue that explores the two domains, or a conference session on social network analysis could draw from both the humanities and social sciences, or digital humanities centers could host visiting scholars with expertise in digital social science. By developing a richer awareness of how social scientists use digital methods to address research questions, humanists might gain new insights into how they can apply similar techniques to their work—and vice versa.

Deeper collaborations might also enable the two communities to band together in confronting common challenges. Like digital humanities, computational social science faces challenges such as training new scholars, ensuring that research is recognized and rewarded by tenure and review committees, and fostering collaborations between domain experts and computer scientists.[9. David Lazer, et al., “Computational Social Science.”] On the campus level, perhaps digital humanists and digital social scientists can pool resources such as hardware and programming expertise. Likewise, training on tools like Gephi can be targeted at scholars in both the humanities and social sciences (as has happened at places such as UC Berkeley and Fordham), reaching larger audiences and fostering interdisciplinary dialogue. Researchers from one domain could adapt standards, models, or protocols developed in an another.

Even as both communities could benefit from even more contact with each other, I think it’s also important to recognize and respect what distinguishes the humanities and social sciences, such as their approaches to evidence and argumentation and their areas of focus. Humanists could offer important perspectives about the ethical implications of social research or ways to conceive of data, while social scientists could provide insights into statistical methods or suggest how ethnography could add another dimension to a study. The point is to enhance what discipline each does and open up new areas of inquiry, not to turn the humanities into the social sciences or vice versa. Conversations among digital humanists and digital social scientists could also deepen disciplinary self-awareness, since your own thinking often gets clearer when you explain your processes to someone with a different perspective.

Image Credit: “Social Science,” by Anders Sandberg, used under CC BY 2.0 | Cropped from original.

Note: This post was updated on April 11, 2014, with a minor edit to clarify an institutional affiliation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

TAPAS: Publishing and Archiving TEI

In this post, Julia Flanders and Scott Hamlin introduce the Text Encoding Initiative Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service project (TAPAS), which will launch in spring 2014, and invite the community to beta test the service.

For over 20 years, scholars of all kinds have been encoding transcriptions of scholarly and archival documents using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, an XML language and community standard. Those who care about documents are drawn to TEI XML, because it allows for rich description and embedded analysis of humanities research materials. Of course, the inevitable question for anyone who wants to use TEI XML is: “What can I do with my TEI-encoded documents?” And the answer to this question is not as straightforward as it should be. Challenges often arise when it’s time to publish and share the encoded content, especially for projects at small and under-resourced institutions. The TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS) has emerged to answer that question and address those challenges.

When TAPAS launches during the spring of 2014, scholars and practitioners developing TEI encoded texts will have a place to store, transform, and share their work with others on the web. Members of the TAPAS community will be able to publish their TEI data through TAPAS, creating projects which house collections of TEI documents. Initially TAPAS will offer a simple standardized publication interface, but as the service develops it will offer greater configurability so that projects can create more inventive and individualized publications.

Once materials have been published through TAPAS, anyone will be able to access and work with TAPAS data in many different ways. TAPAS will offer a collection-wide interface through which those new to TAPAS can explore, find projects and texts of interest, analyse the TEI encoding used, and perform other corpus-level activities. Individual projects will also offer their own views of their data, through their published collections. A reader interested in a specific project might visit it directly and use its collection interface to search, browse, and read the materials it contains. TAPAS also plans to offer an API to the TAPAS data, to support third-party use of TAPAS data.

At launch, there will be two different types of accounts available. Anyone can sign up for a free TAPAS account, and upload and publish data through the TAPAS Commons. The Commons will serve as a public collection of TEI data and is a good way for teachers and TEI beginners to get started with TEI. Full TAPAS members can create projects and collections of their own and manage users in their projects. At launch, TAPAS membership will be available as a benefit of membership through the TEI Consortium.

Over the next few months, TAPAS is conducting a final series of beta tests and we are still looking for people to participate:

Help us test the new and refined features of the service.
Help us test the service in classroom use in spring 2014.
Sign up as an early adopter to create working TAPAS projects and collections that demonstrate the features of the service.

To participate in any of these activities, please register here: http://bit.ly/ufjOFO. After the testing phase, we’ll be doing a formal launch, so anyone wanting to use or teach with TAPAS in the fall semester will be able to join at that point.

To find out more about TAPAS, please visit our project site. A fuller description of the project has also recently been published in jTEI, the journal of the Text Encoding Initiative.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

[wp_biographia user=”JFlanders”]
[wp_biographia user=”SHamlin”]

What if we do, in fact, know best?: A Response to the OCLC Report on DH and Research Libraries

In this post, Dot Porter (University of Pennsylvania) critiques a recently-published OCLC report (“Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?”), drawing attention to the range of backgrounds and stations occupied by those who practice DH, inside or outside of the library.

Reading through the OCLC report authored by Jennifer Schaffner and Ricky Erway, Does Every Research Library Need A Digital Humanities Center?, my initial responses were:

“Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?” sounds like a loaded question to me; and
“DH academics.” What the heck is a “DH academic”?

The OCLC report has a lot of good in it. The sections on metadata and the long-term preservation of digital objects are particularly apt. But the language used throughout the report sets up an unnecessary and unhelpful “us/them,” differentiating between “DH academics” and “librarians.” This language and the assumptions inherent in it simplify what is a truly complicated landscape. Almost any major research university will include faculty new to DH, faculty who have been practicing DH for many years, librarians new to DH, librarians who are long-time practitioners of DH, and non-librarians working in libraries who support digital work (including but not limited to DH).

The OCLC report uses a variety of terms that appear to refer to “faculty who do (or who wish to do) Digital Humanities,” although these terms are never defined, and seem to be used interchangeably. In the Executive Summary itself, we find “DH scholars,” “DH researchers,” and “DH academics.” Further in the report we find added to the mix “digital humanists” and “scholars engaged in DH.” Although all these terms remain undefined, it’s pretty clear from context that these scholars, researchers, and academics are not librarians – they are something else, another class of people who exist to be served by libraries and, by extension, by librarians. Librarians who know something about DH do get a mention, at the top of page 9. But they are “DH-skilled librarians,” or “DH librarian” – not “digital humanists” themselves.

[pullquote]The reality is more complicated than “DH academic” on one hand and “DH librarian” on another.[/pullquote]

The reality is more complicated than “DH academic” on one hand and “DH librarian” on another. Librarians who practice DH are not a coherent group. Some have PhDs. Some have MLS or MIS degrees. Some have subject MA or MS degrees. Many have some combination of these. Some of them have worked their entire careers in the library. Others (such as myself) started elsewhere and at some point were hired into a library. These librarians are professionals, who present alongside faculty at the annual Digital Humanities Conference (the annual international DH conference, co-organized by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations) and at more traditional subject conferences. They present on collaborations, and they present on their own work. Some of these librarians have been doing DH for years, although in more recent years many are new to the field, and some of them (both the newbies and the silverbacks) work at institutions where the only digital humanities work happening is in the library, and it is happening because they are doing it.

It is galling for these professionals to be told, as they are in the OCLC report, that “the best decision is to observe what the DH academics are already doing and then set out to address gaps,” and “What are the DH research practices at your institution, and what is an appropriate role for the library? What are the needs and desires of scholars, and which might your library address?” and especially “DH researchers don’t expect librarians to know everything about DH, and librarians should not presume to know best [my italics].” What if the librarians are the DH researchers? What if we do, in fact, know best? Not because we are brilliant, and not because we are presumptuous, but because we have been digital humanists for a while ourselves so we know what it entails?

[pullquote]What if the librarians are the DH researchers?[/pullquote]

I’m not entirely sure where the “DH academics” / “DH librarians” dichotomy in the OCLC report comes from. I’ve known incredibly competent digital humanists who work in libraries, and traditional humanities departments, and digital humanities centers (and quite a few who work in engineering departments, too). To be honest, I’ve known less competent digital humanists from all these areas as well. It doesn’t make sense to measure the digital humanist-ness of someone based on their current post (especially as digital humanists tend to be fairly fluid, moving between posts inside and outside of the library; you can’t just guess someone’s competence based on their job title).

Also absent from the report is a definition of what a “DH Center” entails, striking given the motivating question of the title (“Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?”). Diane M. Zorich’s 2009 piece “Digital Humanities Centers: Loci for Digital Scholarship” (and its accompanying 2008 CLIR report “A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States“) does an excellent job of describing DH, and investigating how it was practiced on the ground at that time. Her working definition of “Center,” used within the report is fairly broad, to wit:

A “center” implies a central (physical or virtual, or both) area where a suite of activities is conducted by individuals dedicated to a common mission. (Zorich, Survey, p. 4)

Depending on the definition you are using, a DH Center could include a room in a department or library where people gather to learn new technologies, explore research questions, or undertake scholarly projects. Such a thing does not necessarily require major investments.

I’d like to close with some suggestions for further reading for those (faculty, librarians, library directors, college deans) coming new to digital humanities in the context of libraries. There has been a lot of really good writing on the intersection of digital humanities and the libraries in recent years. Miriam Posner (former Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Emory University Library, currently Coordinator and Core Faculty in the Digital Humanities Program at UCLA) has a bibliography on her blog. It was last updated in April 2013, so it is not completely up-to-date but it does include a lot of important pieces of writing. Read them. Finally, it would be great to see another full survey of the DH support structures currently active and in development, along the lines of the 2008 CLIR survey but including less formal non-centers. Such a survey would be valuable for educating university deans and library directors about the variety of approaches that might be taken to support DH throughout their institutions, and how to best involve all digital humanists on the university payroll, whatever their job titles, who have expertise to contribute.