Category: Post

POST: A Kind of Skepticism Humanists Should Hold On To

Ted Underwood, Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, continues his examination of some of the areas of overlap between the humanities and more quantitative disciplines. Underwood’s main concern is that

numbers tend to distract the eye. If you quantify part of your argument, critics (including your own internal critic) will tend to focus on problems in the numbers, and ignore the deeper problems located elsewhere.

Underwood uses the example of his series of posts on genre in large digital collections to illustrate how the quantitative-focused feedback he received kept him from seeing the more significant problem in how he was understanding the concept of genre itself. He continues,

Skepticism about foundational concepts has been one of the great strengths of the humanities. The fact that we have a word for something (say genre or the individual) doesn’t necessarily imply that any corresponding entity exists in reality. Humanists call this mistake “reification,” and we should hold onto our skepticism about it.

POST: Refining the Problem — More work with NYPL’s open data, Part Two

In part II of his experiment to create an index of items using the New York Public Library’s What’s on the menu? data set, Trevor Muñoz discusses his work with the data and some of the lessons he learned. Muñoz used the Open Refine tool and, finding the NYPL data set too large to easily work with, he discusses some of his workarounds. Muñoz concludes,

The larger question is whether there is a still a plausible vision for how a data curator could add value to this data set. The need to script around limitations of a tool increases the cost of normalizing the NYPL data. At the same time, the ability to see the clusters of similar values that Refine produces increases my confidence that the potential gain in data quality could be very substantial in going from the raw crowdsourced data to an authoritative index.

POST: What IS on the Menu? More Work with NYPL’s Open Data, Part One

Part of making the argument for open collections data is showing what can be done with it. Trevor Muñoz’s recent blog post, in which he plays with the NYPL’s open data from the “What’s on the Menu?” project, explains how he uses the collection data as a testbed for data curation work. As Muñoz states:

I’m particularly interested right now in work that data curators can do to build secondary and tertiary resources—reference materials, if you will—around data. I mean particularly reference materials that draw on the skills of people with training in library and information science, things like indexes. These types of organized systems of description can be one way to provide additional value over full text search (which, for many kinds of data sets, e.g., a table of numerical readings, is not particularly effective anyway).

After evaluating the data release against Tim Berners Lee’s 5 Star Linked Open Data Scale, Muñoz begins the process of creating a useful index to the names of the dishes represented in the collection, introducing linked data concepts and showcasing the work (and potential work) of data curators along the way.

 

POST: What’s a Nice English Professor Like You Doing in a Place Like This: An Interview With Matthew Kirschenbaum

Trevor Owens has posted a terrific interview with Matt Kirschenbaum (Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities). In it, they discuss his involvement in the digital archives and digital forensics communities, the hurdles that born digital materials create, BitCurator, and places like MITH “as inhabiting a kind of ‘third space’ between manuscript repositories processing born-digital collections on the one hand, and computer history museums on the other.”

Regarding what practices to adopt for working with born digital materials in the long-term, Kirschenbaum notes that in some cases the problem is not primarily technical:

[T]he increasing tendency towards preemptive data encryption—practices which will surely become even more commonplace in the wake of recent revelations—threatens to make archival preservation of personal digital content all but unthinkable for entities who lack the resources of the militarized surveillance state. I know of very little that archivists can do in either of these instances other than to educate and advocate (and agitate). They are societal issues and will be addressed through collective action, not technical innovation.

 

POST: From Trees to Webs: Uprooting Knowledge through Visualization

Scott B. Weingart has posted a preprint [pdf] of “From Trees to Webs: Uprooting Knowledge through Visualization,” in which he discusses the shift from visualizing the classification of knowledge as hierarchical and linear (tree) to the modern conception of knowledge as rhizomatic and networked (web).

In the blog post announcing the work, which also contains several images that are not included in the preprint, Weingart explains:

It’s basically two stories: one of how we shifted from understanding the world hierarchically to understanding it as a flat web of interconnected parts, and the other of how the thing itself and knowledge of that thing became separated.

The article will be published as part of the proceedings of the  Universal Decimal Classification Seminar at the Hague, taking place in October 2013.

POST: Librarians and Digital Humanities Services Conversation

A recent post on the PhillyDH blog reports on a conversation among librarians at the University of Pennsylvania about digital humanities and service design. Post author Karrie Peterson posed these questions around library service design:

How can we present a non-fragmented service interface to our constituents?

How can we determine what levels of support we should be offering to a widely diverse field of scholarship using a lot of unique-to-one-project workflows and technologies?  Which folks in the library should be involved in providing services and what should they do?

How do we build skills?

The librarians broke up into small groups to create “shared mental models” of DH scholarship to address: how to present a unified service interface to users, what levels of support should be offered, who in the library will provide those services, and how librarians should gain the skills necessary to practice digital scholarship.

POST: Library Acquisitions and ETDs

There have been a range of responses to the The American Historical Society’s “Statement on Policies Regarding the Embargoing of Completed History PhD Dissertations.”  In this post, Melanie Schlosser, the Digital Publishing Librarian at the Ohio State University Libraries, conducts a brief interview with Dracine Hodges, the Head of Acquisitions at Ohio State to “shed light on what goes into an academic library’s decision to buy a book-or not.” To Scholosser, “What libraries will and will not buy would seem to be the linchpin of the whole discussion: Scholars are afraid to make their dissertations openly available because presses won’t publish them. Press won’t publish them because libraries won’t buy them. Or will they? The policies and motivations of acquisitions librarians seem to be the least well-explored aspect of the whole situation.”

 

POST: On the Likelihood of Academia “Taking Back” Scholarly Publishing

Rick Anderson of The Scholarly Kitchen outlines his thoughts on how the academy can “take back scholarly publishing.” He discusses the noncommercial entities in libraries and academic departments that have the means to disseminate works, support legislation against commercial interests in scholarly communication, and encourage mandates by funding agencies to make publications open access.Anderson refers to these options as “replicating, foregoing, and excluding,” but identifies authors and publishers themselves as “the real barrier” to the academy “taking back scholarly publishing.” He concludes that

we are unlikely to see a major shift in academic journal publishing out of the commercial sector and into the academic one anytime soon. Not because there aren’t downsides to the existing system, but because those who are freest to make meaningful decisions (authors and publishers) are the ones least likely to find fault with things as they are now and unlikely to see great value in either taking on (authors) or giving up (publishers) the roles that have accrued to them over the past few centuries.

POST: Mismatch Between Graduates’ Information Skills and Employers’ Needs

Alison J. Head, Founder and Director of Project Information Literacy recounts her findings from an IMLS planning grant study about how recent college graduates “find and use information in the workplace.” While recent graduates are able to find “instant information” on Google, they often missed the “social side of research,” a skill employers value highly. Head observes,

As one employer explained, “Grads miss that you can reach out to other people and get information too. Research is not all factual, there are other experiential factors we need to think about in the workplace — internal business factors like budget, global economies, things like that.

Successful, young graduates can contextualize both research questions and their answers using tacit information learned from personal interactions with colleagues in conversation with “instant information” found in databases and Google.

POST: Respect Des Bits: Archival Theory Encounters Digital Objects and Media

In his latest post for The Signal, Trevor Owens explores digital objects through the lens of archival theory, such as respect des fonds, or the archival imperative to maintain original order. He explains:

While the representations of digital objects often appear non-linear it is critical to not be seduced by the flickering and transitory view of digital objects provided by our screens. At the end of the day, every digital object is encoded on some medium and that encoding is an ordered sequence of bits.

 

POST: Of Fences and Defenses

Kevin Smith (Duke University) has written a post exploring what it means to recognize fair use as a “postitive right” as opposed to an “affirmative defense.” Inspired by the language used in one of the amicus briefs filed in the Authors Guild, Inc. v. Hathi Trust case, Smith concludes:

If we understand fair use as a positive right that creates a boundary limiting the control of rights holders, we ought to be less afraid of exercising it.  After all, we do not fear to walk on a public sidewalk just because some landowner might scream “trespass;” we recognize that rights over land have boundaries and do not shirk from exercising our positive right to use public land.  The argument in this amicus brief points us to a similar confidence when exercising our fair use right.