Category: dh+lib review

OPPORTUNITY: CollectionBuilder LIS Student Program

The CollectionBuilder 2023 Incentives Program is the latest grant-funded opportunity for using and contributing to CollectionBuilder, and open-source, Lib-Static tool and infrastructure. Currently, applications are being accepted to their Library & Information Science (LIS) Student Program. The program offers eight $400 stipends to current LIS students interested in learning more about and using CollectionBuilder for their own digital projects. From the announcement:

Are you a Library and Information Science (LIS) student interested in expanding your digital collection knowledge and/or learning web development skills? CollectionBuilder is an excellent option for creating a free and long lasting digital collection site that you can add to your portfolio, while exploring tools and platforms such as Git, GitHub, Jekyll, Markdown, HTML, and CSS that you are likely to encounter in your future career as a digital librarian.

We are looking for students who are interested in learning and customizing a CollectionBuilder site. A CollectionBuilder project might be suitable for an independent study or capstone project at your institution. To view example CollectionBuilder projects, please visit our CollectionBuilder Examples site.

Participants will have the opportunity to experiment with creative uses of the CollectionBuilder framework while learning from one another and comparing experiences in a cohort environment. This program is meant to be a learning opportunity; therefore, no specific technical knowledge is required to apply. Participants will use CollectionBuilder’s robust documentation and follow tutorials to set up their sites, then work with the CollectionBuilder team and one another to implement and document customization ideas.

Expectations Include:

  • Participate in virtual discussions with other student incentive recipients and the CollectionBuilder team
  • Follow a series of brief tutorials to prepare data and create a CollectionBuilder site
  • Prepare and publish one short video tutorial documenting a CollectionBuilder feature, or a blog post that highlights your project
  • Submit feedback and attend a follow-up virtual meeting with the CollectionBuilder team to discuss the experience

How to Apply: In the application form, you will be asked to answer some basic questions about yourself and the following short answer questions:

  • Please briefly describe why you are interested in learning how to use CollectionBuilder.
  • In 1-2 paragraphs, please describe any ideas you have for CollectionBuilder projects and discuss your research and academic interests.
  • What kind of skills are you most interested in learning while using CollectionBuilder and why? We suggest reading this article before writing your response to help generate ideas.
  • How would this cohort experience benefit your education and future career?

Students will create their projects during the Spring 2024 semester. Applications are due November 30, 2023.

OPPORTUNITY: NEH, Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced a new program, Humanities Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, “to support research projects that seek to understand and address the ethical, legal, and societal implications of AI. NEH is particularly interested in projects that explore the impacts of AI-related technologies on truth, trust, and democracy; safety and security; and privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties.” The initiative supports AI-related humanities projects through the following funding opportunities:

See the announcement for more details, deadlines, and funding amounts at https://www.neh.gov/AI.

JOB: Digital Scholarship Team Leader, Case Western Reserve University

From the post:

Employer
Case Western Reserve University
Location
Cleveland, Ohio
Salary
This position is a Librarian 3 with a minimum of $77,780.
Posted Date
Oct 17, 2023

Case Western Reserve University seeks a forward thinking, inclusive, and collaborative
individual for the Digital Scholarship Team Leader position.

POSITION DESCRIPTION The Digital Scholarship Team Leader heads a highly collaborative
team that supports the Creation and Curation Services division in the Kelvin Smith Library at
Case Western Reserve University. The Team Leader has responsibility for articulating,
developing, and implementing a digital scholarship strategy and is responsible for the
management of the Digital Scholarship team and services including areas of scholarly
communication, open access, text analysis, geographic information systems, and data
management services. The team leader will work with the Associate University Librarian for
Creation and Curation Services to play a leadership role in library-wide policy making, and in the
development and evaluation of services. The Digital Scholarship Team Leader serves as a
member of the library leadership team.

ENVIRONMENT: Consistently ranked as one of the country’s leading private research
institutions, Case Western Reserve University is a member of the Association of American
Universities (AAU) that offers a robust learning environment for approximately 5,792
undergraduate and 6,400 graduate and professional students. Students enroll in the schools of
dental medicine, engineering, management, medicine, law, nursing, and social work and the
College of Arts and Sciences. Students can further engage with 100 interdisciplinary academic
and research centers and institutes, all within an academic culture that promotes and values
innovation of all kinds. Situated in Cleveland’s vibrant University Circle cultural community,
CWRU is an integral partner with world-class cultural organizations such as the Cleveland
Museum of Art, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cleveland Botanical Garden, and
the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
The Kelvin Smith Library is the knowledge and creativity commons of Case Western Reserve
University and part of a library system with over three million titles in print and digital formats.
KSL is home to the University Archives and Special Collections and manuscripts consisting of
over 17,000 linear feet, the Kulas Music Collection, and the Freedman Center for Digital
Scholarship which advances research by partnering with scholars and students to explore and
develop new forms of scholarship. KSL is a member of the Association of Research Libraries
(ARL), OhioLINK, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), HathiTrust, and the Center for
Research Libraries. In 2019 KSL was the recipient of the ACRL Excellence in Academic
Libraries Award. KSL affiliate libraries include the Cleveland Institute of Art Library, the
Cleveland Institute of Music Robinson Music Library, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Library,
and a cooperative relationship with the Western Reserve Historical Society Research Library.

QUALIFICATIONS Team leaders must have sufficient experience and expertise in the work of
the Team to serve as a supervisor, advisor and mentor to others. Appointment to this level
assumes that all requirements of Librarian 2 have been met and sustained, that the individual
has demonstrated continued and outstanding growth in the profession and is able assume
leadership responsibilities and perform existing responsibilities at the highest level. Promotion to
this level requires not only excellence of performance but also recognition of contributions at the
state, national or international level. Leadership at this level can be managerial, communicative
or intellectual in nature, and can manifest itself in any aspect of the profession.
Experience: 6 years of appropriate experience required.
Education: Master’s degree in library science or related discipline required. Advanced
educational credentials (second Master’s degree, Ph.D.) preferred.

SALARY This position is a L3 with a minimum of $77,780. The salary will be offered to
commensurate with qualifications and experience.
APPLICATION PROCESS The full job description and application information are available at
https://bit.ly/3MhdWUv Job ID 11958. Please submit CV and Cover Letter.
CWRU LIBRARIES DIVERSITY STATEMENT The Case Western Reserve University Libraries
are deeply committed to achieving racial justice, and promoting a culture of anti-racism,
inclusion, equity, and diversity, so all people are welcome, heard, empowered, and valued.
CWRU DIVERSITY STATEMENT: In employment, as in education, Case Western Reserve
University is committed to Equal Opportunity and Diversity. Women, veterans, members of
underrepresented minority groups, and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

JOB: Data Services Librarian, Middlebury College

From the post:

The Data Services Librarian leads the library’s efforts to support digital scholarship and data science research and teaching. They lead the management and use of the Federal Depository documents collection. They act as a library liaison, teach information literacy skills, provide outreach, and build relationships with students, faculty, and staff, contributing knowledge and creativity to the library, the college, and the profession.

This is a full time, benefits eligible, salaried position with a hiring range of $60,954 – $76,207 annually.

Core Responsibilities:

  • Develop strong working relationships with faculty, staff, and students who use (or support the use of) quantitative and qualitative data in their research, teaching, and scholarship.
  • Provide expert instruction to students, faculty, and staff regarding the discovery, acquisition, management, manipulation, interpretation, analysis, and visualization of data (e.g. infographics, charts, maps, and interactive media) using specialty software and coding languages (e.g. R, Python, Stata, ArcGIS, QGIS); provide expert instruction in specialized methods (e.g. statistical techniques, text/data mining, sentiment analysis, network analysis, GIS).
  • Provide proactive leadership, direction, and vision for the support of digital scholarship and data science research and teaching in the libraries; collaborate with faculty and staff from all Middlebury campuses.
  • Lead the collection, management, and use of internal library data and the Federal Depository documents collection; create analyses, visualizations, and reports using internal data sources, and regional, national, and international data sources; support of assessment, collection management, research and instruction, and user experience research; advise other library staff on these practices.
  • Build relationships with students, faculty, and staff by providing discipline-specific research advice, proactively communicating about relevant resources, and making decisions about library collections and spaces that are informed by curricular needs.
  • Teach research and information literacy skills in the classroom and in one-on-one meetings, modeling best practices from instructional design and the science of learning.
  • Develop web guides and other learning and outreach materials that highlight library resources and exhibit universal design principles for accessibility.
  • Contribute knowledge and creativity to the library, the college, and the profession by supporting principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, working cooperatively, participating in campus initiatives, and engaging in scholarly and professional service activities.

Middlebury College is an equal-opportunity employer where diversity, equity, and inclusion are core values. To this end, the College recruits talented and diverse faculty, staff, and students from across the United States and around the world. Middlebury College encourages applications from women, people of color, people with disabilities, and members of other protected classes and historically underrepresented communities. The College also invites applications from individuals who demonstrate an ongoing commitment to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.

Requirements

  • Knowledge of and some experience with data science and digital scholarship tools (e.g. Python, R, Stata, NVivo, GIS tools, etc.) and techniques (e.g. web scraping, APIs, statistical analysis, text/data mining), as well as ability and interest in learning new tools and techniques, required.
  • Knowledge of established and cutting-edge tools and methods for scholarship, research and data management, and publication (including open access, open data, and preservation), especially in the social sciences and humanities, required.
  • Understanding of government information sources and their use, preferred.
  • Three to five years of progressively responsible experience in data science and digital scholarship services at an institution of higher education or research library, preferred.
  • Graduate degree in library or information science from an accredited institution, or its equivalent in education and experience, required.
  • Technical aptitude, including proficiency with web authoring tools, communication tools, and citation tools, along with a willingness to develop new competencies, required.
  • Strong interpersonal and problem-solving skills, including the ability to work collaboratively in a team-oriented environment, a passion for providing empathetic research support, a strong sense of accountability, and excellent attention to detail, required.
  • Learner-centered teaching skills and outstanding oral and written communication skills required; foreign language skills preferred, but not required.
  • We encourage candidates who meet the minimum requirements to apply. There are multiple paths to success, and we are committed to supporting professional development and growth in this position.

Physical Demands and Working Conditions:

  • This is a full-time, on-campus position. 1-2 days of remote work per week is a possibility most of the year.
  • Shared participation in evening and weekend hours may be required.
  • The work is mostly sedentary and includes no special physical demands. It may involve some walking, standing, bending, or carrying light items.

RECOMMENDED: Teaching DH on a Shoestring: Minimalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy

Danica Savonick (SUNY Cortland) published “Teaching DH on a Shoestring: Minimalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy” in the December 2022 issue (no 21) of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. This was a themed issue dedicated to Open Educational Resources and hosted on Manifold. From the abstract:

This article explores minimalist digital humanities pedagogy: strategies for teaching DH at institutions that don’t have many resources for doing so. Minimalist digital humanities pedagogy aims to maximize learning while minimizing stress, barriers of access, and time (for both instructors and students). This article considers how we can take a minimalist approach to course design, course websites, and DH project assignments. Throughout, it highlights how free, low-cost, and open-source tools can be used to help students increase their digital literacy, including their awareness of the ways technologies reproduce and challenge conditions of inequality. Such methods, I contend, can help students at a range of institutions develop digital skills both to navigate the world and to change it.

The article focuses on teaching digital humanities at under-resourced institutions “where the vast majority of our nation’s students are educated” to “articulate a vision of minimalist digital humanities pedagogy… that refers not only to the use of digital tools and platforms, but to the process of helping students think critically about them, especially in relation to broader social conditions and questions of power. Minimalist digital humanities pedagogy aims to maximize learning while minimizing stress, barriers of access, and time (for both instructors and students).” Savonick focuses on how minimalist DH pedagogy can be applied to course design, course websites, and DH project assignments.

Savonick offers seven strategies for minimalist DH course design:

  1. Organize courses around topics that matter to students
  2. Assuage anxieties surrounding technological expertise
  3. Begin with relevant texts that give students new perspectives on their everyday lives
  4. Help students identify their intellectual investments in the course material
  5. Organize course units around praxis
  6. Create opportunities for students to design a portion of the course
  7. Utilize group work to teach collaboration

She argues for working outside of the learning management system and using WordPress instead, in part because of its ubiquity, and in part to center students’ words on the site (in contrast to most LMS). And, arguing for collaborative, project-based DH assignments, Savonick urges us to “consider students’ distinct learning styles, skill levels with different technologies, and the materials (hardware, software, bandwidth, and equipment) they have access to, both on campus and at home. ” She notes the importance of devoting class time to collaborative group work, to help working students and student caregivers. And she advocates for open-ended projects:

Rather than dictating the form their projects will take, students select their own form (such as website, podcast, timeline, or lesson plan) and choose an appropriate platform for their project. One key requirement is that the project should be useful to an audience beyond our classroom.

Open-ended projects have many benefits, especially for students at under-resourced institutions. They create space for student creativity. This is especially important, given the inequities of our tiered US education system, which readily provides affluent students with learning that nurtures their creativity, and leaves standardization and teaching to the test for everyone else. Open-ended projects also honor the experiential knowledge that students bring to the classroom. In addition, they require students to think critically about which platform they will select to fit the goals of their project—a key component of digital literacy. Open-ended projects are also well suited for heterogeneous students with a range of different skill levels, abilities, and levels of comfort with technologies. They allow students to determine whether they will use the project as an opportunity to learn a new platform or create something using a tool they’re more comfortable with. Such assignments are also easy to reuse and adapt for other courses—especially important for instructors with heavy course loads.

The article includes a sample syllabus and assignment.

POST: Modeling Cultural Networks in the Classroom with Constellate

In recent years, JSTOR Labs launched Constellate Lab, a modern successor of JSTOR Data for Research, to enable computational analysis of historical newspapers, scholarly journals, and other documents within the JSTOR corpora. With tutorials including analysis with Python notebooks and datasets builders, Constellate focuses on data pedagogy to sharpen and enhance ones data skills.

Dr. Natalie M. Susmann, digital scholarship librarian at Brandeis University and Mediterranean Landscape Archaeologist, shares her experience with Constellate in a recent post from JSTOR Daily, “Modeling Cultural Networks in the Classroom with Constellate: Using JSTOR’s Constellate lab to teach students how to do digital text analysis and data visualization for historical subjects.” She explores conducting text analysis on peer-reviewed articles related to the Argive Heraion sanctuary in Argos, Greece.

Her step-by-step process offers a use-case and template for exploring Constellate’s tools and data for your own research and especially for pedagogical purposes in courses and workshops.

CFP: XVII Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Conference

Hosted at the University of Houston, the XVII Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Conference will be held April 25-27, 2024. The meeting theme, “The Right to Write, Speak and Be in Times of Banning, Censorship and Persecution,” seeks to highlight the resistance to state oppression of ideology, identity, race, sexuality, language, immigration status, etc. From the call for proposals:

Archivists, librarians, linguists, historians, critics, theorists and community members are invited to share examples of the legacy they are recovering, preserving and making available of Hispanic peoples—whether residents, immigrants or exiles—of the United States over the past centuries. We seek papers and posters in either English or Spanish that highlight these many contributions, but also offer critical ways to rethink issues of agency, gender, sexualities, race/ethnicity, environmental justice, class, power and others.

We encourage papers that make use of archival research that provoke a revision of established literary interpretations and/or historiographies from the colonial period to 1980. Presentations and posters on material between 1960-1980 must be focused on civil rights and the documentary legacy of Latinas/os/es.

We invite proposals on the following themes:

  • 1960-1980 only movement(s)-related research
  • Analytical studies of recovered authors and/or texts
  • Collections and archives: accessioning and critical archive studies
  • Critical, historical and theoretical approaches to recovered texts
  • Curriculum development: integrating recovered texts into teaching at university and K-12 levels
  • Documenting the fight for equality
  • Environmental justice
  • Feminisms
  • Folklore/oral histories
  • Gender and sexualities
  • Historiography
  • Language, translation, bilingualism and linguistics
  • Library and information science
  • Material culture
  • Printing and publishing
  • Religious thought and practice
  • Social implications and cultural analyses
  • US Latino digital humanities

Submit your proposal at https://bit.ly/recoveryconference2024 by October 22, 2023.

CFP: CJAL Special Issue: Libraries and/as Extraction

The Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship has announced a call for a special issue on Libraries and/as Extraction, a theme which intersects with digital humanities librarianship in multifaceted ways. From the call:

The concept of extraction (or extractivism) has been used in myriad disciplines — geography, international relations, environment, economics — often to describe social formations around natural resource management. However, we can also think about how extraction functions in academic libraries—with libraries being extracted from, or libraries doing the extracting—in how we see, for example, the growth of library consulting firms or how libraries collect materials produced by marginalized groups. Engaging with these ideas is not new; librarians have been researching extraction through other lenses, such as racial capitalism, neoliberalism, surveillance, and issues surrounding academic librarian labour. This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship seeks to hone in on the concept of extraction or extractivism as a logic and operating principle of current forms of capitalism within academic librarianship.

In their introduction to a special issue of Cultural Studies focusing on extractivism, Laura Junka-Aikio and Catalina Cortes-Severino describe the ways in which the concept is also central to understanding current capitalism, noting the broadening of this ideological construct that proliferates as “severe exploitation” as a “characteristic of contemporary capitalism and neoliberalism at large.” They continue to emphasize that this means extraction is not tied to a particular industry or activity, but rather, “understood also as an analytical and also political concept that enables the examination and articulation of deeper underlying logics of exploitation and subjectification that are central to the present conjuncture of capitalist globalization and neoliberalism” (2017, p. 177).

Extraction relies on overlapping and multiple axes of domination and exploitation and the fragmentation of groups, but always centers power, and it is those questions of power that this special issue of CJAL seeks to explore. We invite articles and essays that interrogate any aspect of extraction in academic libraries and archives related to library policies and practices, library and educator labour, LIS theory and other theoretical traditions, LIS education, and more.

Examples of topic areas on extraction in academic libraries include but are not limited to:

  • Extraction from libraries and library staff
    • The role of consultants in libraries, e.g. around DEIA, strategic planning, and other areas
    • The role of vendors, e.g. vendors that sell tutorials to libraries
    • Educational technology
    • Library value, material, and immaterial
    • Library instruction
    • Overreliance on metrics and quantification
    • Libraries as institutions & library staff as individuals participating in extraction
    • Libraries and archives as collectors – e.g. the tension between stewardship of Indigenous artifacts and repatriation in Canada and U.S, or, the University of Michigan has a vast Filipino collection due to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, but also actively collects related material
    • Library labour, e.g. campus communities extract library labour, library extracts student labour and data
    • Data, e.g. patron, collection, and so on
    • The use of library collections for large language models/AI
    • Outsourcing, e.g. cataloguing, preservation, and other labour
    • Closed and proprietary platforms
    • Environment and energy, e.g. the move to cloud computing with its associated costs
    • Transactional relationships with faculty, staff, students, and other communities
  • Library organizations extracting from members
    • Volunteer labour in professional organizations, e.g. OLA, CAPAL, CFLA, ALA, ACRL, and others
    • The role of library-adjacent organizations, often nonprofits such as CARL, ARL, CNI, OCLC, Lyrasis, Ithaka, and others
    • Library consortia

Authors interested in submitting a proposal are asked to submit their work (maximum 800 words plus bibliography) as an email attachment (Word document or PDF) to can.j.acad.lib@gmail.com.

Deadline for proposal submission: December 18, 2023

CFP: Computers & Writing 2024

Texas Christian University will be hosting the conference, Computers & Writing 2024, June 21-23 in 2024, with the theme, “Seriously Digital: Work, Play, and Digital Storytelling for ‘Post’ Pandemic People.” From the call for proposals:

Throughout the ongoing pandemic, digital tools have been heralded as solutions to pandemic-related problems. This historical moment features several disruptions to “business as usual” where the lines between work, play, and digital storytelling have been blurred. This theme is designed to explore those boundaries and to consider the impact of these tools moving forward.
In these tumultuous moments, there are opportunities for resistance and many more opportunities for oppressive structures to re-instantiate themselves. This theme recognizes this as a moment for storytelling, for recognizing the power of stories to determine material impacts. It is designed to center interdisciplinary discussions across rhetoric, composition, critical race studies, disability studies, Latinx studies, game studies, library studies, and more.
As the neoliberal academy ratchets up workloads and extends itself into our very bedrooms through telepresence, we respond with calls to play at work, to tell the stories the academy too often silences, to approach our play seriously, and to explore new opportunities for hybrid communities. This is a field-agnostic call for others to play, resist, and tell stories with us. Whether you are in writing studies, DH, media studies, or any discipline we might not expect, please come tell us how we can make space for your stories.

Question, Themes, Issues

  • What is gained and/or lost when we tell the stories of lived experiences in the digital spaces we increasingly inhabit?
  • What is the space/place for non-digital archives in an era of digital storytelling? How do we approach hybrid archives?
  • Can we gamify work-life balance? Should we? What are the implications of gamifying work and possibly losing the boundaries between work and life?
  • How does digital storytelling use play as a way to obscure labor?
  • What opportunities for resistance does the metagaming of neoliberal work make possible? Can metagaming neoliberal work also reinscribe neoliberal ideals?
  • How can we keep disability at the forefront when telling digital stories? What does it mean to design digital stories for disabled audiences first? Who does universal design leave out?
  • How has the pandemic changed our habits of work and play in digital spaces?
  • How can digital storytelling disrupt inequity and oppression, and what are the current challenges of doing this work?
  • How do we make space for our students to resist or break the stories we continually tell them (through syllabi, assignments, etc.)?

Proposals are due by November 13, 2023.

CFP: Open Book Futures

Sponsored by Coventry University and the Open Book Collective, Open Book Futures invites individuals and project teams to submit proposals for experimental, long-form scholarly book projects. From the call for proposals:

We are delighted to announce support and funding for three experimental book publishing pilots as part of the Open Book Futures (OBF) project. These pilot projects will be supported by Coventry University and the expertise of OBF’s Experimental Publishing Group (OBF Work Package 6) and will be overseen by the Open Book Collective (OBC).

The call is open to individuals looking to collaborate and to already formed project teams (which can consist of authors, publishers, open source technology and software providers, librarians, and designers). If you apply without a complete project team, we will work with you to find suitable collaborators. Work on the pilots must start on 1 April 2024 and the pilots must be finalised by 1 April 2026.

Proposal submission deadline is 22 November 2023.

EVENT: DH Office Hours: Lightning Talks Fall 2023

Northeastern University’s Digital Scholarship Group and NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks are hosting a set of virtual lightning talks on November 1 at 12–1pm Eastern, 9–10am Pacific, 4–5pm Greenwich Mean Time:

The panel will feature lightning talks by:

Registration required.