Category: dh+lib review

“Overcoming Legal Barriers to Text and Data Mining” hosted by ACH on May 15 at 1pm EST is a free webinar open that is open to ACH-members and non-members. From the event description:

This webinar is meant to help researchers understand how existing law can help them move forward on text and data mining projects using modern, copyrighted materials. In particular we will focus on fair use and TDM-specific exemptions that allow researchers to break digital locks such as DRM.
Computational research techniques such as text and data mining (TDM) hold tremendous opportunities for researchers across the disciplines, with the digital humanities at the forefront of work to build large corpora of creative works to gain better understandings into concepts such as how gender, race, and identity are shared over time. Unfortunately, legal uncertainty associated with text and data mining can stifle this research.

This webinar is meant to help researchers understand how existing law can help them move forward on text and data mining projects using modern, copyrighted materials. In particular we will focus on fair use and TDM-specific exemptions that allow researchers to break digital locks such as DRM. The workshop is offered with Authors Alliance, a nonprofit that exists to support authors who research and write for the public benefit, and will be led by Dave Hansen, Executive Director, and Rachel Brooke, Senior Staff Attorney, both of Authors Alliance, Both are copyright experts who have worked extensively on legal barriers to research, and both are PIs for the Authors Alliance Text and Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use Project, which is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation.

Registration is open.

Registration is now open for the first annual wikihistories symposium: Wikipedia and its implications for memory (and forgetting), a free virtual conference that will be re-run across a number of time zones between June 7th and June 9th to best accommodate registrants around the world. The symposium will feature keynotes by Dr. Shira Klein, author of “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust,” and Dr. Simon Sleight, co-editor of History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present. 

From the event description:

From its earliest beginnings shortly before 911,^[1] Wikipedia has documented history as it happens. Revolutions,^[2] terrorist attacks,^[3] earthquakes,^[4] fires and floods have been written about on the platform, often within minutes of the first recorded protests, attacks, and blazes. This practice of documentation, conducted by volunteers who are connected by shared interest rather than shared expertise, falls between the disciplines of digital journalism and history. What does Wikipedia’s coverage of events “that haven’t even stopped happening yet”^[5] mean for history-making on the platform? Researchers have noted that recent events are covered more than early history^[6], and stories are more often presented from colonialist rather than local perspectives.^[7] More recently, Wikipedia has been uncovered as a site of both conscious forgetting and the “frenzy of commemorations,”^[8] a venue for nationalist propaganda projecting particular stories that favour particular ideologies and social groups.

• How does Wikipedia construct history and collective memory?
• Does Wikipedia enable the forging of a collective memory via consensus?^[9]
• How are some versions of the past pushed to the fringes?
• What gets remembered and what gets forgotten?
• How can we study history-making on the platform?

Adventures in handwriting recognition with Transkribus – experimentation with archives in Aotearoa New Zealand (May 9th 11 am AEST) is a free online event that explores a number of handwriting transcription projects and new features of Transkribus. The talk will feature Vivienne Cuff, an archivist based at the Dunedin Regional Office of Archives New Zealand, Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga, and Nicola Frean, Leader, Arrangement & Description, at the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa. The event is hosted by the Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand regional chapter of AI4LAM.

Register for the Zoom. A recording of the event will be sent directly to registrants and uploaded to at AI4LAM YouTube page.

ACH 2023 focuses on equity and justice in digital humanities scholarship, choosing to highlight the sociopolitical aspects of the work in the place of a formal theme. The keynote will be a roundtable focusing on accessibility and digital scholarship.

Registration is now open. The conference will be held virtually from June 29-July 1.

Coalition of Networked Information (CNI) is inviting people from its member institutions to a webinar on May 24 from 1-2:30 EST, “Directions in Digital Scholarship: Support for Digital, Data-Intensive, and Computational Research: What’s Next?” This talk will explore campus partnerships, communication, reorganization of library units, and policy development and strategies around current societal issues. From the event description:

This webinar is part of a CNI initiative exploring a broad and evolving set of research partnerships, services, instructional programs, events, and other activities where innovative approaches to digital content are integral to the research process. These activities include working with faculty and students in such technologies as GIS, text mining, data visualization, AR/VR, Python, 3-D printing, artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning, and many more. A recent set of invitational forums examined how different CNI member institutions have evolved programs in this area and how the programs are changing. Background information on the initiative and profiles of the programs of the 24 institutions that took part in the forums are available at https://www.cni.org/events/cni-workshops/directions-in-digital-scholarship-support-for-digital-data-intensive-and-computational-research-in-academic-libraries.

For those unable to attend, a recording of the event will be uploaded to the event page. For those interested in exploring other CNI programming, videos and slides from CNI Spring 2023 Membership Meeting are now available.

HASTAC 2023 Critical Making & Social Justice  (June 8-10) explores creative and design-based approaches to technology and education and will be held primarily in-person at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY with some hybrid and online opportunities. Sasha Costanza-Chock, author of Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, will keynote the conference. In addition to traditional papers, panels, and workshops the conference includes an extensive exhibition of art and other installations on the theme.

Registration is open for both in-person and online attendance. with early bird pricing available through May 8th. The full schedule is available online.