Category: Post

Trevor Owens (Institute of Museum and Library Services) authored a post about the invention and dissemination of the transparent GIF, noting: “These invisible files have a story to tell, and I think exploring there presence and traces in web archives can end up illustrating some ideas for modes of researching in web archives.” [sic] Owens closes with some points of consideration:

• Lots of Potential in Exploring Web Archives by Hash Value
• Essential Need to Document Crawling Practices & for Looking for Traces of Crawling Practices
• The Value of Multiple Archives
• The Value of Records of Multiple Copies
• Hashes are Still Just One Way of Characterizing

 

Scott Weingart (Indiana University) wades into the conversation about Syuzhet, distant reading, and “the great unread” in a recent blog post, “Not Enough Perspectives, Pt.1.”

Syuzhet is an R package created by Matthew Jockers (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) and used to extract sentiment in text analysis, which became the subject of much discussion, in part spurred by Annie Swafford’s (SUNY, New Paltz) critique of the package last month.

Citing Andrew Piper’s statement that “Right now DH is all texts, but not enough perspectives,” Weingart asserts that the digital humanities “suffers from a lack of perspectives in two ways: we need to focus more on the perspectives of those who interact with the cultural objects we study, and we need more outside academic perspectives.”

The important point is that reading at scale is not clear-cut. This isn’t a neglected topic, but nor have we laid much groundwork for formal, shared notions of “corpus”, “collection”, “sample”, and so forth in the realm of large-scale cultural analysis. We need to, if we want to get into serious discussions of validity. Valid with respect to what?

Those looking to catch up on the Syuzhet conversation will find Eileen Clancy’s (The Graduate Center, CUNY) two-part storify (I and II) immensely helpful, and Ted Underwood (University of Illinois) has just added a further response in his latest post, “Free Research Question About Plot.”

Merrilee Proffitt (OCLC) gives an overview of challenges currently faced by libraries working to digitize collections, as reported in a series of discussions hosted by OCLC Research. These challenges, which will inform future work from  OCLC Research, include:

Metadata: Item-level description vs collection descriptions
“…there is an inherent challenge in digitizing collections at the item or page level when the bulk of the description is at a collection level.”

Process management / workflow / shift from projects to programs
“Some institutions are looking to establish workflows that will more effectively allow them to leverage patron-driven requests, while others are thinking about the implications of contributing content to aggregators like DPLA.”

Selection – prioritizing users over curators and funders
“Many institutions are still operating under a model whereby curators or subject librarians feed the selection pool, either through a formal or informal process.”

Audio/Visual materials
“As with born digital, everyone has A/V materials in their collection, and making them more accessible is a concern.”

Access: are we putting things where scholars can find them
“For many institutions, aggregation is the name of the game, and thinking as a community about aggregating content is key.”

Anastasia Salter (University of Central Florida) has written a post for ProfHacker about creating story games with Twine 2.0 . Salter warns long time Twine users that Twine 2.0 is not backwards compatible, but assures readers that the changes to 2.0 will welcome new users and broaden the community, especially as many of the changes to Twine allow for direct work in browsers which is ideal for teaching.

While Twine 2.0 now has downloadable editors for PC and Mac, the real appeal for educators might be found in the browser version. If you’re teaching in a computer lab where installing software is a hassle, building game-making into a curriculum might require lots of fuss and advance planning. Browser-based editors, on the other hand, just require a reasonably up-to-date browser. It also makes it easy for students to work on projects in a lab and at home… A browser-based editor is much more accessible at libraries and campus labs.

 

 

Lev Manovich (The Graduate Center, CUNY) wrote the first post in an upcoming series describing the interactive exhibition and web application On Broadway, which includes “660,000 Instagram photos shared along Broadway during six months in 2014; Twitter posts with images for the same period in 2014;over 8 million Foursquare check-ins, 2009-2014;22 million taxi pickups and drop-offs for al of 2013;selected indicators from US Census Bureau for 2013 (latest data available).” The first post examines temporal patterns of Instagram.

 

 

Jason A. Clark (Montana State University) has written a post about his experience with the Digital Library Federation (DLF) E-Research Network, a “community of practice focused on sharing resources for implementing research data management services as well as for shared skill development and collaboration.” Clark outlines some of the immediate benefits of participating in the program, while also considering the long-term value of the endeavor:

As I see it, the DLF E-Research Network can be a part of that movement and help us build research libraries that are conversant with how data is created, shared, and shaped into new tools and services.

Registration for the 2015 E-Research Network is open until March 31st. The fee per institution with up to three participants is $3,000; DLF members and CLIR sponsors receive a $500 discount on the institutional fee.

Trevor Owens (Institute of Museum and Library Services) provides a recap of the Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L) Workshop that took place at Stanford University in February, 2015, in a post on the IMLS blog.

Owens notes that “one of the central points of focus at the meeting was to work through a series of use cases in which librarians and library users might make use of linked data-based services to aid their use of library resources” that are “quite useful in illustrating how linked data can help meet the needs of particular library user communities.”

Owens goes on to provide links to lightning talks and presentations, the “tweetwall” archive of the #LD4L twitter stream, and other resources for learning more about linked open data.

 

 

William G. Thomas III (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) offers a typology for digital scholarship in the humanities, which will be discussed in greater depth in the upcoming revised edition of Blackwell’s Companion to Digital Humanities. Thomas notes that the definitions “are not meant to exclude or restrict the definition of digital scholarship. Indeed, I hope these definitions might provoke some further discussion about how to undertake reviews of digital scholarship.”

The types, in brief, are:

Interactive Scholarly Works
“These works are hybrids of archival materials and tool components, and are situated around a historiographically significant or critical concern. These works often assert a methodological argument as well, demonstrating that the combination of tools and materials serves as a method worthy of applying to the problem.”

Digital Projects or Thematic Research Collections
“Combining tools and archival materials framed around a historiographically significant or critical problem, these projects are sprawling investigations into a major problem.”

Digital Narratives
“These scholarly works are born-digital, and they primarily feature a work of scholarly interpretation or argument embedded within layers of evidence and citation. They do not and presumably cannot exist in analog fashion.”

Chris Alen Sula (Pratt Institute) has written a post that provides a workflow for creating Lexis Maps in Tableau Public. Recognizing that Lexis maps have application beyond demography, Sula provides readers with step by step instructions for working in Tableau as well as tips and tricks for data preparation.

Though few have heard of them outside of demography, Lexis maps can handle the complex type of data that visualization was meant for: quantitative, longitudinal, high-density, multivariate data. Most Lexis diagrams span a hundred years or more for ages 0–100+, resulting in tens of thousands of data points in a single display.

Param Bedi, Matt Gardzina, and Emily Sherwood (Bucknell University) have written a post about the central role student engagement plays in digital scholarship at Bucknell University. Robustly defining digital scholarship “as any scholarly activity that makes extensive use of one or more of the new possibilities for teaching, learning and research opened up by the unique affordances of digital media,” the authors describe how their merged Library and Information Technology division plays an integral role in cultivating digital scholarship on campus with a Digital Scholarship Center, campus partnerships, and infrastructure. A liberal arts college, Bucknell held its first annual Digital Scholarship Conference to highlight student engagement with faculty research, a facet of digital humanities scholarship and practice not as often highlighted in the DH community:

 While other conferences emphasize large digital humanities projects, specific tools, or may touch on pedagogy, our focus remains student-centered. Repeatedly, back channel Twitter discussions praised the student presenters from various institutions. The broad range of skills students acquired, the professionalism with which they spoke about their subjects, and their enthusiasm for their research affirmed our beliefs that students are highly capable of and will greatly benefit from this type of work.