Category: dh+lib review

RESOURCE: Appraising our Digital Investment: Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries

A new report from the Association of Research Libraries and Ithaka S+R investigates the financial and technological longevity of digital special collections:

While many research libraries have begun to digitize their collections and share best practices around the steps required to create digital content, much less is known about what happens post-launch…[this study] offers a first look at the practices, attitudes, costs, and revenues associated with caring for digitized special collections. [excerpt]

POST: The CODATA Mission: Preserving Scientific Data for the Future

At Spellbound Blog, Jeanne Kramer-Smith has posted on a session from The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation conference, sponsored by UNESCO in cooperation with the University of British Columbia and held in September 2012 in Vancouver. Untangling the acronyms, Kramer-Smith identifies the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) as part of the International Council for Science. CODATA hosts the Data at Risk Task Group (DARTG), which seeks “to preserve scientific data that is in danger of loss because they are not in modern electronic formats, or have particularly short shelf-life.”

In summarizing talks included in the session and helpfully linking out to presenters’ slides, Kramer-Smith also provides an opportunity to consider the implications of data preservation and loss– including for DH and libraries. As she notes in her summary of a presentation by D. R. Fraser Taylor and Tracey Lauriault, of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University, on “The Map as Fundamental Source in the Memory of the World”:

“The 1986 BBC Domesday Book [sic] was created in celebration of 900 years after William the Conqueror’s original Domesday Book. It was obsolete by the 1990s. A huge amount of social and economic information was collected for this project. In order to rescue it they needed an Acorn computer and needed to be able to read the optical disks. The platform was emulated in 2002-2003. It cost 600,000 British pounds to reverse engineer and put online in 2004. New discs were made in 2003 at the UK Archive.

“It is easier to get Ptolomy’s maps from 15th century than it is to get a map 10 years old.”

PROJECT: transcribe.unl.edu: Collaborative transcription at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has unveiled the first project in its effort to transcribe digitized documents through crowd-sourcing. UNL “alumni, students, and friends” are invited to volunteer to transcribe the collection of UNL’s historical Cornhusker yearbooks. The transcription project arose through a collaboration between the Archives & Special Collections, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH), Computer Operations and Research Services, and Development and Outreach at UNL.

The site for yearbook transcription, which extends the Transcribr Drupal distribution, marks progress for the overall project as well as individual yearbooks.

A complete run of the yearbooks is currently available online (but not yet full-text searchable… pending transcription!).

 

RESOURCE: code4lib 2013 Conference

code4lib’s 2013 conference, held February 12-14 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, included sessions dedicated to open source projects, crowd transcription, metadata, HathiTrust relevance ranking, REST APIs, born digital special collections, and many other topics of interest to dh+lib readers. While event organizers finalize the transfer and load of video files from the event, the livestream captured is still accessible.

 

RESOURCE: Boston-Area Digital Humanities Consortium website

The Boston DH Consortium, formed in August 2012 “to pursue shared funding opportunities; organize a series of events; network with digital humanities centers, organizations, and societies worldwide; and encourage local discussion of digital humanities and related topics,” has launched a new site. The Consortium describes itself as:

“an information association of educational and cultural institutions in New England committed to the collaborative development of teaching, learning, and scholarship in the digital humanities and computational social sciences.”

The site currently includes a calendar featuring upcoming events in the area, a list of consortial members, and information about joining the BostonDH mailing list. And– good news for DHers outside of New England– the group plans to extend membership beyond the Greater Boston area in Spring 2014.

 

RESOURCE: The Lib Pub blog

Lib Pub, a new group blog on library publishing, launched in January 2013. As blog founder Melanie Schlosser, the Digital Publishing Librarian at Ohio State University Libraries, writes in an introductory post:

“Publishing efforts in libraries are becoming more and more common, but there aren’t yet a lot of venues for those involved to come together and share their thoughts and experiences. The Lib Pub is meant to be one.”

This week, Schlosser issued a call for those whose work involves both DH and library publishing to contact her. She writes:

“I’m curious about how many  of you have both publishing and DH in your job description, or have a humanities focus in your publishing program, or work with a DH center in some way.”

 

RESOURCE: MLA Commons, The Early Modern Digital Collaboratory

A new public group, EMDC: The Early Modern Digital Collaboratory, has launched on MLA Commons. Billed as “a venue for digital humanists studying early modern texts and culture (roughly 1450-1700), principally in the English language,” the EMDC “fulfills an idea that circulated at MLA 2013: what if early modernists using digital humanities tools and methods had a venue for our research collaborations?”

Other MLA public groups of potential interest to dh+lib readers include:

+Libraries and Research in Languages and Literatures
+Digital Humanities

POST: Visualizations and Digital Collections

In a previous post on dh+lib, Jefferson Bailey outlined some of the ways in which the digital humanities could enhance access and discovery of cultural heritage materials. Now, in “Visualizations and Digital Collections,” he explores the potential of visualization as a technique for appraisal in born digital collections:

[G]iven the ever-increasing volume of material in born-digital archival collections, visualizations are increasingly a crucial tool in a variety of managerial functions for digital stewards, from analyzing directory contents prior to acquisition, to risk assessment, to visualizing contextual relations between collections.

OPPORTUNITY: “Taking TEI Further: Customizing the TEI”

A reminder that there is still time to apply for the NEH-funded “Taking TEI Further: Customizing the TEI,” offered at Brown University. The seminar, which takes place May 8-10, 2013, has no registration fee and travel funding is available.

Deadline to apply is February 15th.

For further details and information about the seminar series, check out this announcement.

 

POST: Learning By Doing: Labs As Pedagogy

Cameron Blevins writes here about the challenges of teaching digital methods in a history classroom. Some of the experiences might ring true with librarians tasked with teaching information literacy, such as this:

My first lab, for instance, spelled out instructions in excruciating detail. Unfortunately, this led to exactly the kind of passive learning I wanted to avoid. I liken it to the “tutorial glaze” – focusing so much on getting through individual tasks that you lose track of how they all fit together or how you would apply them beyond the dataset at hand. The ability to teach early-stage technical skills involves a litany of pedagogical challenges that humanities instructors are simply not used to tackling.

How might librarians partner with faculty to avoid this scenario? What techniques have you discovered to help students from a variety of skill levels remain engaged throughout an instruction session?