Category: Post

Chris Bourg (Stanford University) has offered initial ideas for the LTG Summit, a 3-day gathering to discuss leadership, technology, and gender in libraries, which will be held March 19-21, 2014, in Austin, Texas. The summit will explore answers to the challenge question, “What can we do to combat gender inequality and sexism in library technology?” Bourg outlines some possible topics for discussion, including:

• Diversity/representation in library technology (and in libraries and higher ed in general)
• Sexism, racism, ableism, etc. in libraries/library technology
• Leadership, mentoring, modeling behavior
• Gendered nature of technology itself
• Intersectionality
• Community building

Jennifer Vinopal (New York University) asks the question, “how do you cope with the possibility that the tools you are using may be biased (or error prone) and that the “black box” is sending you down the wrong research highway?” Vinopal relates her experience using a text analysis tool that revealed the term “e-books” was apparently used more frequently in 1930s library literature than in the 2000s. The anomaly suggested an interesting question:

Without the specific programming skills to evaluate how a tool was built and look for biases or errors in the code, how can we be sure the tools we’re using aren’t giving us erroneous results?

Vinopal goes on to offer several suggestions to begin evaluating the effectiveness of tools and methods.

Kevin Smith (Scholarly Communications Officer, Duke University) introduces Fair Use week, taking place Feb. 24-28, and organized by the Harvard Library’s Office for Scholarly Communication. Smith contextualizes this celebration, noting that fair use:

is today one of the most important underpinnings of scholarship.  We argue about its scope sometimes, but we rely on it everyday.  The most basic relationship in academic writing, the quotation of a scholar in another scholar’s work, is a form of fair use that is so central and natural to scholarship that we forget what it really is and the body of law that it depends on.  Fair Use Week is worthy of celebration on our campuses because it is a reminder that this aspect of copyright law is a sine qua non for scholarship and has been for a great many years.

To keep up on activities and discussions throughout the week, follow @fairuseweek on Twitter and the hashtag #fairuseweek.

Lincoln A. Mullen (Ph.D. Candidate, Brandeis University) has written a series of posts analyzing historical history dissertations using data from the Proquest Dissertations and Theses Database. Mullen was able to obtain two “dumps” from the database:

From the MARC records that ProQuest gave me, I’ve been able to extract a number of fields, only some of which are available for each record. There is a ProQuest assigned ID number and sometimes an ISBN. Items always have an author and a title, and almost always a page count and a year of graduation. Many of the dissertations have an abstract, which I think will be useful for mining the topics that historians have studied. There are also Library of Congress subject fields, but these are usually very generic. Almost always a university is listed, along with a “school code” which I think standardizes university names; sometimes a department is listed as well. Some items have the lead adviser and other committee members listed separately; some mash them together; still others don’t have the information at all. I’m hoping the adviser data will let me trace scholarly generations. The degree conferred is always listed. And finally there is a URL to a ProQuest record.

The latest post looks at the gender of the authors in the dataset, using a method devised to “guess” the gender based on first names by comparing the Proquest data with the Social Security Administration’s names data set. Other posts in the series cover locations, page counts, and cleaning the data, among others.

Caro Pinto (Mount Holyoke College) discusses her experience co-teaching the course Media Archaeology, Digital Humanities & The Archives, which experimented with the concept of a humanities lab in the classroom. Projects included appraising digital photos, taking apart an iMac, and running programs on a C-64. Pinto also discusses how librarians need to adapt their pedagogical approaches to be successful in such courses:

As librarians working with digital forensics and new media, our role as content providers is given, but our role as engagement developers is an emerging one. In order for complex assignments and experiences to be scaled in undergraduate classrooms, faculty, librarians, and technologists need to team up to make these projects sustainable realities. Librarians are primed to collaborate meaningfully in these teams not just as “content providers but as engagement developers.”

In a post to her website, Digital Humanities Librarian Laurien Taylor (University of Florida) discusses the use of community-sourcing and scholar-sourcing in her work. These terms, Taylor argues, are distinct from “crowdsourcing” because they are more targeted in scope, focusing not on “the entire online world” but on commitments at the institutional level, which in turn can  be scaled up for scholarly crowdsourced project. Taylor builds on an earlier article by Johanna Drucker (UCLA) that criticized academic crowdsourcing projects as using an approach that works only in a few highly limited and structured circumstances.

She writes: “some institutions have leveraged the technical infrastructure to engage with scholars on known problems, like limited metadata (or item information) for materials in their collections. This is the opening to a conversation on shared needs, goals, and concerns. Rather than the crowdsourcing model applied to a smaller scholarly ‘crowd’, the process itself changes in terms of collaboration for collaboration at scale.” Taylor credits technologies like SobekCM, a content management system developed at the University of Florida using a community source process, with providing a technical infrastructure that enables her focus on the “human infrastructure” elements of scholarly support systems, making her discussion relevant for librarians as DH project managers as well.

Ed Summers (Library of Congress) has written a brief post about playing with interviews from the Paris Review and Wikipedia articles, and his attempts to use JSON-LD and D3 for network visualization. His post is a great example of the way that a passing interest in something can be an entry into new technology skills. It also demonstrates how experimentation with simple scripts and new tools can produce tangible results (his post includes a list of the 40 interviews that haven’t yet been linked to Wikipedia, for any enterprising Wikipedians out there). Summers notes,

I wanted to get a picture not only of what Wikipedia articles pointed at the Paris Review, but also Paris Review interviews which were not referenced in Wikipedia. So I wrote a little crawler that collected all the Paris Review interviews, and then figured out which ones were pointed at by English Wikipedia.

This was also an excuse to learn about JSON-LD, which became aW3C Recommendation a few weeks ago. I wanted to use JSON-LD to serialize the results of my crawling as an RDF graph so I could visualize the connections between authors, their interviews, and each other (via influence links that can be found on dbpedia) using D3′s Force Layout.

Trevor Owens (Library of Congress) has written an intriguing post on The Signal that considers the future direction of interfaces to digital collections by examining the rescue of Geocities data by a group of digital preservationists known as the Archive Team. Owens explains:

Through data dumps of full sets of raw data, cultural heritage organizations can consider embracing the fact that they don’t need to provide the best interface, or for that matter much of any interface at all, for digital content they agree to steward. Instead, a cultural heritage organization can agree to acquire materials or collections which are considered interesting and important, but which they don’t necessarily have the resources or inclination to build sophisticated interfaces to if they are willing to simply provide canonical homes for the data, offer information about the provenance of the data, and invest in dedicated ongoing bit-level preservation. This approach would resonate quite strongly with a more product less process approach to born digital archival materials.