Category: Post

Celia Emmelhainz (Colby College) has written a post at Hack Library School on Things You Can Do as a Library Student to Prepare for a Career as a Data Librarian. She discusses the type of work that data librarians perform, the skills that define them, and offers suggestions on how to learn data skills. Some of the skills held by data librarians listed by Emmelhainz include:

• Teach data or statistical literacy as well as information literacy
• Provide “data reference” for people who need help finding data or analyzing in online tools (like the US Census website)
• Help fellow librarians to overcome their fears and help patrons find data, just like they help people find books, websites, and multimedia sources
• Lead ethnographic interviews and analyze qualitative data in NVIVO and Atlas.ti
• Can use Excel, Stata, R, and/or SPSS to produce statistical results
• Learn project management, assessment, or library metrics

Jason B. Jones (Trinity College) has written a post on ProfHacker reflecting on the news that Google Earth Pro is now being offered for free. The Pro version of the software “adds several interesting features, some of which might be more widely interesting: it lets you work with ArcGIS data, access different data layers, batch geocode addresses, print high-resolution images, record movies, and more.”

Jones gently reminds readers that Google will continue to require a registration key that is available for download here and he helpfully points to some excellent resources for getting started with Google Earth Pro.

Andy Baio examines the consequences of Google’s stated mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Biao describes how in recent years Google has moved away from this mission by leaving these archival project in limbo (Google Books) or abandoning them entirely (Google News Archive). In contrast, Biao profiles the Internet Archive and argues that such an organization is better suited to act as a steward of digital cultural heritage because it’s not concerned with generating profits.

The post stems from a recent piece in The New Yorker about the Internet Archive by Jill Lepore. Responding to Lepore’s piece (and indirectly to Biao), Ed Summers argues that we need more Internet Archives; more organizations should be creating and providing access to web archives to build on the work of the Internet Archive to preserve our cultural heritage.

The British Library has shared a recording and transcript of the 2014 British Library Labs Symposium keynote by Tim Hitchcock (University of Sussex), “Big and Small Data in the Humanities.” Hitchcock opens his keynote with praise for the British Library Labs project:

There are any number of research council initiatives, European funding calls, and twitchy private sector start-ups out there, ragging at the edge of established practise. We are advised to seek ‘disruption’, and to pursue the shiny. But it is important to remember that the institutions we have inherited – libraries and museums in particular – were created in service of a deeper purpose. It is not simply that we value them because they are ancient and august. Instead, we value them as a means of preserving memory, and acknowledging worth. And as importantly, we value them as part of a complex ecology of knowledge discovery, dissemination, and reflexion. So while disruption and the shiny, are all good; it remains important that libraries, continue to serve the fundamental purposes for which they were created. And the Lab, seems to me to answer this need.

A conference celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media took place at George Mason University, November 14-15, 2014. The first day was an unconference format devoted to “Hacking the History of RRCHNM,” followed by a day of invited short talks and discussion grouped into two topics: “the future of DH Centers” and “the future of Digital History.”

Bethany Nowviskie has shared her comments from the session on DH Centers. In “Speculative Computing & the Centers to Come,” Nowviskie reflects on the history of RRCHNM and its role in shaping digital humanities centers, alongside her own background first at the University of Virginia’s SpecLab, and followed by her work at UVa’s Scholars’ Lab, noting “the founding and sustaining and continual renewal of a DH center is itself an active form of hope for the future.”

Also part of the conversation on DH Centers was a session on Gender and DH Centers, whose collaborative notes were shared by Sheila Brennan.

During the second part of the day, William G. Thomas III (University of Nebraska) delivered a talk on “The Future of Digital History,” in which he calls for digital historians to “review more, interpret more, and reciprocate more,” in order to “reconstitute history for the digital age.”

In digital history we will do those computational things, of course, and we have for a long time, but our purpose is more radical, a reconstitution of history for the digital era in which a fully complex social reality of today, the present, meets or resides with and in relation to a fully complex social reality of yesterday, the past.

Other highlights from the conference include the Digital Campus Episode #109 podcast, which was recorded live from the conference:

Mills Kelly, Stephen Robertson, and Tom Scheinfeldt joined host Dan Cohen to recap the earlier sessions of the day, including discussions on failure, ECHO, History Makers, pedagogy, and digital humanities centers’ websites.

Scott Weingart (Indiana University) has written a series of posts about submissions to Digital Humanities 2015. The first post provides an overview of submissions, the second post compares and contrasts submissions for 2015 with the previous two years, and the third post investigates “the geography of submissions.” He observes, among other shifts, a rise in submissions tagged as “Glam: Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums.”

In sum, it turns out “Global Digital Humanities 2015″ is, at least geographically, much more global than the conferences of the previous two years. While the most popular topics are pretty similar to those in earlier years, I haven’t yet done an analysis of the diversity of the less popular topics, and it may be that they actually prove more diverse than those in earlier years. I’ll save that analysis for when the acceptances come in, though.

 

Bethany Nowviskie has shared the text of her keynote address at the 2014 Digital Library Federation Forum, in which she examines the changing nature of expertise in the academy. Nowviskie lauds the DLF community and the Forum in particular for bringing together a unique mix of experts and generalists:

The ability (actually, I think, the requirement) that the people in this room inhabit and embody that particular mix—that combination of our serious, zeroed-in, individualistic, obsessive, and rare specialization on the one hand, and our expansive, jack-of-all-trades pragmatism and service-orientation and social consciousness and breadth of vision (on the other) is—I think—one of the most profoundly attractive things about a career in and around libraries.

Deftly moving from personal history to broad concerns about doctoral training and the future of higher education, Nowviskie declares:

We in libraries and DH centers should be asking ourselves, more publicly and with greater regularity than we presently do, to what degree we are resisting or contributing to the establishment of a damaging new administrative world order.

 

Matthew Battles (metaLAB at Harvard) has written a post reflecting on his recent visit to the Internet Archive, where he was given a peek into Jason Scott‘s work archiving computer software and arcade games after giving a talk at the Books in Browsers conference.

It’s technologically both antic and elegant: Jason’s system has parsed and transcoded hundreds of games, automatically playing them thousands of times to unlock levels, detect bugs, and set up screenshots to guide visitors browsing the arcade. But the technological side of the project is less interesting than its cultural dimensions (although this very dichotomy is a specious one, as the Internet Arcade itself amply demonstrates).

Battles goes on to consider the implications of emulation versus hardware preservation.

Mia Ridge (Trinity College Dublin) has written an update on the project, “In their own words: linking lived experiences of the First World War,” as part of her CENDARI Visiting Research Fellowship. In addition to discussing the potential of crowdsourcing transcriptions, Ridge post helps to “figure out the issues researchers face and the variations in available resources.”

If there aren’t already any structured data sources for military hierarchies in WWI, do I have to make one? And if so, how? The idea would be to turn prose descriptions like this Australian War Memorial history of the 27th AIF Battalion, this order of battle of the 2nd Australian Division and any other suitable sources into structured data. I can see some ways it might be possible to crowdsource the task, but it’s a big task. But it’s worth it – providing a service that lets people look up which higher military units, places. activities and campaigns a particular battalion/regiment/ship was linked to at a given time would be a good legacy for my research.

Towards this end, Ridge calls for input and feedback on the project, pointing potential advisors to a shared GoogleDoc.