Category: Post

Geoffrey Rockwell has written a short post calling attention to Jan Christoph Meister’s reflection from the last day of the DH2014 conference, “Weaponizing the Digital Humanities.”

Meister relates his experience in a conference session in which another attendee appeared to work for a US intelligence agency. He writes:

[T]he more attention DH researchers invest in Big Data approaches and anything that might help with the analysis of human behaviour, communication and networking patterns, semantic analysis, topic modeling and related approaches, the more our field becomes interesting to those who can apply our research in order to further their own goals. 

This is the nature and dilemma of all open research: we are an intellectual community that believes in sharing, and so unless we decide to become exclusive, there’s no stopping someone from exploiting our work for other purposes.

As Rockwell notes:

Meister rightly opens the ethical issue of whether our organization should have a code of ethics that touches on how our research is used. We have a code of conduct, should it extend to issues of surveillance?

Thomas Padilla (Michigan State University) has shared the slides and notes from his presentation for the RUSA History Librarians Discussion group panel that explored the ‘role/s of humanities librarians in the digital humanities.’ Harriett Green (University of Illinois) also presented with Padilla.

His talk in part discusses the evolving nature of the Digital Scholarship Collaborative at Michigan State. The Collaborative, which draws from librarians devoted to digital humanities from different departments within the Michigan State Library, empowers librarians at Michigan State to tackle challenging projects that can be directly applied on campus. “It is one thing to point to a number of use cases, its another thing entirely to be able to say look at this great thing we’ve prepared for you, here are the research possibilities we’ve uncovered, lets have a conversation about how you or your students might realize their own insights working with this data.” Finally, Padilla shared some relevant topics that emerged during the question and answer session that are worthy of continued consideration:

• Charting the relationship between DH Librarian, Disciplinary Faculty, and Subject Librarian
• Negotiating text and data mining rights
• Supporting DH without ‘technical’ skills
• DH needs assessment
• Methods for DH engagement on campus

Jackie Dooley (OCLC Research) has written an excellent overview post of the 2014 Rare Books and Manuscripts Preconference, which took place June 24-27, 2014, in Las Vegas, Nevada. Posts from both Dooley and Merrilee Proffit (OCLC Research) discuss the plenary talk by Michelle Light (University of Nevada, Las Vegas), “Controlling Goods or Promoting the Public Good: Choices for Special Collections in the Marketplace” [posted slides and text of Light’s talk]. Light presented results from a survey on the rights/reproduction policies of 125 special collections in US research libraries, “to better understand how we, as a profession, handle permissions and fees for those who wish to publish or distributed our content for commercial gain.”

The Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library conference took place last week in Charleston, South Carolina. The conference featured keynotes from Riccardo Ferrante (Smithsonian Institution), Emily Gore (Digital Public Library of America), and Trevor Muñoz (University of Maryland), workshops, a day and a half of sessions, and a lively Twitter feed.
In a write-up for the Davidson College Archives & Special Collections blog that incorporated responses from fellow presenters/attendees Jan Blodgett and Craig Milberg, Caitlin Christian-Lamb identified several themes of the conference. Christian-Lamb cited a presentation by Brian Rosenblum (University of Kansas), summarizing his description of “DH librarians as ‘nodes,’ whose main job duty is to centralize digital activities on campus and push them forward.”

Similarly, James Baker (British Library) provided his own summary, reporting on Muñoz’s keynote as “positioning librarians as collaborators in rather than supporters of research activity, arguing in favour of a DH librarianship resistant to notions of administrative and programmatic service, and teasing at the key points of connection, – evident in the history of librarianship pre-dating the digital – between core library work and humanistic scholarship.”

Papers and keynote presentations delivered at the conference will be published by Purdue University Press in 2015. In the meantime, you can find slides and references from Muñoz’s keynote “Data Driven but How Do We Steer This Thing?” and Harriett Green’s (University of Illinois) talk on “Libraries and Digital Pedagogy” posted online.

Kevin Smith (Duke University) has written a post on the Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog about the recent Authors Guild v. HathiTrust decision, which Smith describes as “another important win for libraries and fair use.” Smith discusses a technical but important aspect of the decision:

The oddity about this remand is that it does not actually question the conclusion that digitization for preservation can be fair use. Instead, the Court sent this portion of the case back to the lower court to decide if there was any plaintiff remaining in the case, once it was determined that the [Authors Guild] lacked standing, who was at any real risk of having a preservation copy of their book released by HathiTrust while there were still copies commercially available. In short, The Court of Appeals suggested that any ruling about fair use might have been premature because there was no plaintiff in a legally-recognizable position to raise the challenge. It is still entirely possible that, if such a plaintiff is found in the remaining group of named authors, fair use could nevertheless be affirmed. And, because of the rest of the ruling, it would be hard to see what difference even a ruling against fair use for preservation would make to the actual practice of the HathiTrust. So this was really a technicality, and quite strange.

While this decision was a win, Smith cautions librarians that “the best protection the library community has against aggressive litigation is still, as it always has been, careful and responsible reflection. In that context, fair use is an increasingly safe option for us.”

Responding to the #esrworkshop (Evolving Scholarly Record and Evolving Stewardship Ecosystem workshop, preceding a meeting on Libraries and Research: Supporting Change/Changing Support), Jennifer Schaffner (OCLC Research Library Partnership) has written a post on the “evolving scholarly record.” Schaffner considers the changing nature of archival collections in the digital age as “components of the ‘scholarly record.'” Schaffner discusses how context ties diffuse, distributed records together in an evolving and complex ecosystem. She concludes:

I think there is a great deal to be learned from participating in this high-level ecosystem, where roles are changing. Can an archival mind have empathy for the complex decisions about collecting the scholarly record that are facing our users, creators, and administrators?

For more on this topic, see the June 2014 report from OCLC Research, “The Evolving Scholarly Record,” by Brian Lavoie, Eric Childress, Ricky Erway, Ixchel Faniel, Constance Malpas, Jennifer Schaffner, and Titia van der Werf.

In a post to The Signal, Kate Murray (Library of Congress) summarizes a recent meeting of the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group, focused on issues around preserving digital and software-based artworks. Presenters from the Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian’s Time Based Media Art initiative, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art were asked to “share their experiences in both preserving and providing access to these unique and challenging digital objects.”

Paige Morgan (University of Washington) has written a post summarizing the advice she shared while leading an unconference session at DHSI 2014. “How to Get a Digital Humanities Project off the Ground” includes 15 points of general and specific recommendations. Though some address issues that are specific to graduate students, many could be useful for librarians and others attempting to get their feet wet in the digital humanities. For example:

5. Figure out what the smallest version of your project is, and start by doing that.

…

If you’re able to put together a single component without running into any trouble, scale up from there: what’s the next smallest exhibit you can build that you can imagine presenting to an audience? Three items? Five? Do it; and write a basic introduction and rationale for the way you’ve done it, just as though this were something that you were publishing. If there is an appropriate occasion or venue for you to display this project and write/talk about it, do so. If you are comfortable doing so, explain that it is a test version of a larger project that you are pursuing.

In a post introducing the African American Theater History Project, Cecily Marcus (University of Minnesota Libraries) introduces the collaboration between the Penumbra Theater and the University of Minnesota Libraries aiming to increase access to “the primary materials that document African American theater and cultural history.”

In developing the IMLS-funded project, the participating institutions will be:

1. working with leading African American theaters and repositories to identify and make accessible a national collection of digital archival material that documents African American cultural history, including theater;

2. creating a freely available online search tool that can live on any website and that makes African American historical documentation more easily discoverable; and

3. promoting awareness and use of this resource by theater professionals, scholars, students, educators, and the general public.