Category: Post

POSTS: Museums, Digital Preservation Policies, and Copyright

Two recent posts address two important issues in museums: digital preservation policies and copyright.

In a piece in The Signal, “Towards a Digital Preservation Policy For Museums,” Madeline Sheldon discusses her research into digital preservation policies, noting that, while libraries and archives tend to maintain published policies, she has only found one museum thus far that does so (the National Museum of Australia). While some arts organizations, such as Rhizome and the Guggenheim are active in the digital preservation of video, animation, and art, “it appears that museums are fully invested in the preservation of time-based media, but few have taken the next step towards compiling their experiences into a definite strategy or policy.”

Kevin Smith (Duke University) provides a useful primer on getting copyright permission from museums to use images of artworks in projects. Smith builds on the arguments presented in a recent article by Kenneth Crews that delves deeper into issue, “Museum Policies and Art Images: Conflicting Objectives and Copyright Overreaching,” to outline how DH projects and the public benefit when museums (as well as archives and libraries) create less restrictive rules for copyright and licensing of content. Put simply, Smith states,

For those beginning to explore the uncharted territory of the digital humanities, permission fees and reuse restrictions will probably continue to create nearly unnavigable thickets of complication…Libraries and the digital archives associated with them need to model the best practices that we can in hopes that the most absurd kinds of copyright overreaching will become less common and rational policies based on an accurate assertion.

In addition to creating clear rules for the use of images, LAM organizations can also contribute to DH projects by making their data publicly available and grant reuse rights. For example, last week the Penn Museum released metadata for 332,882 object records in CSV, XML and JSON format under a CC-BY licence.

POST: When Are We Peers, When Are We Exploited? Rsp to NYT Op Ed by Jaron Lanier

Cathy Davidson responds to Jaron Lanier’s New York Times opinion article that talks about the social and economic inequities that have grown out of the Internet Revolution. Davidson reminds us of how important it is to be informed digital citizens so we can better understand the risks and rewards of participating in social media and peer to peer engagement.

Jaron Lanier’s important and pointed deconstruction of the “information wants to be free” anthem must remind us all that, if we are to be free, we also have to protect ourselves from exploitation and rethink contribution when it serves someone else’s bottom line and not our own well-being.

Given the frequency of “collaboration posts” on dh+lib, it’s important for stakeholders to remember the importance of not only self-protection, but also advocacy for all of our collaborations that make digital humanities projects work in libraries and the academe.

POST: Function over Form: understanding the TCP encoding philosophy

Sarah Wingo from the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), a group of libraries that encode early printed books, outlines one of the Partnership’s basic rules for marking up texts: function over form.

Serving the goal of creating searchable texts, “TCP aims to capture structural information which will be useful for intelligible display, informed searching, and intelligent navigation. In this way we capture the content of each book, and the meaning/purpose of any special formatting, but do not exactly reproduce the look or specific style presented in the original printed work.”

POST: How Collaboration Works and How It Can Fail

In a thoughtful post, Elijah Meeks (Stanford University Libraries) considers the role of the librarian in digital humanities projects, touching on the question of academic hierarchies, alt-ac, and the professional designation of librarians as “staff”:

Anyone who has worked with undergraduate and graduate research assistants knows that their effort and engagement is not demanded but negotiated. Such is obviously the case with faculty working with other faculty. Staff, on the other hand, with their various layers of management and leadership, are service providers embedded in a more formal hierarchy. This distinction can be the source of tension in situations where faculty, students, and staff are working together to advance digital humanities scholarship.

Meeks goes on to present a case for peer collaboration based on practical considerations of the research agenda, the life of a project, and professional benefits.

POST: On Changing the Rules of Digital Humanities from the Inside

Melissa Terras (University College London) reflects on the recent conversations around both the inclusivity of digital humanities and issues of gender, race, class, and disability as they relate to DH work. In the post, she describes her experience working with the TEI guidelines for gender, an issue that also came up at the Women’s History in the Digital World conference:

For example, in 2006 I first noticed that the TEI guidelines encouraged the use of ISO5218:2004 to assign sexuality of persons in a document (with attributes being given as 1 for male, 2 for female, 9 for non-applicable, and 0 for unknown). I find this an outmoded and problematic representation of sexuality, which in particular formally assigns women to be secondary to men, and so, in one of the core guidelines in Digital Humanities, we allow and indeed encourage sexist structures to be encoded.

Terras goes on to explain how she was moved to try to change the guideline, and encourages others to continue to speak up when they encounter problems in DH, pointing out that “criticism is helpful.”

POST: Cultivating Partnerships in the Digital Humanities

In a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education, William Pannpacker argues for the shared value of DH collaborations between teaching-focused liberal arts institutions and research-focused universities. Emblematic of these “multi-institutional partnerships” is the Praxis Network, “developed as a partnership to share information about efforts to reboot graduate education and prepare Ph.D.’s for a range of career paths wider than tenure-track research positions.”

Pannpacker quotes Ethan Watrall, the associate director of MATRIX, on the need for broad participation in regional partnerships: “‘If you want to turn a region into a center of gravitational pull for digital work, everyone has to be involved: R1s, SLACs, cultural-heritage institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), and community colleges.'”

POST: Historicizing the Digital for Digital Preservation Education

Once again, The Signal features an excellent interview highlighting the work of digital preservationists.

This time, Trevor Owens talks with Alison Langmead and Brian Beaton, who are co-teaching a course on digital preservation at the University of Pittsburgh. Their innovative approach to structuring the course is described as “Media Archaeology meets Historical Epistemology”:

[W]e wanted to situate digital preservation problems as outcomes and effects of choices, activities, and interactions over time that involved a tremendous range of human and non-human actors…

The syllabus for the course is also available [pdf].

POST: The Digital Public Library of America: Details, the Librarian Response and the Future

Micah Vandegrift, Scholarly Communication Librarian at Florida State University Library, discusses the recently-launched Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and its implications for librarians and libraries in general, providing a helpful overview of the project and its aims and stakeholders. Vandegrift clarifies that “DPLA is not a public library, a content repository, or a threat to traditional library services,” and speculates why DPLA has generated little response from large library organizations such as the American Library Association and OCLC. The article outlines four things that “librarians want … from DPLA: Advocacy, Inclusion, Investment and Clarity.” Vandegrift ends with a call for librarians to invest in the DPLA:

… I’d like to propose that we take them at their word and take ownership of this as a realistic, collaborative, inclusive, “public” opportunity to showcase one aspect of value for libraries in a digital world. Considering the practical implications of a national digital library for our daily work, we should contribute to the conversation and development of the platform, the portal and the partnerships that define the DPLA. If it is successful, DPLA could be a national treasure which brings to light the value and essential qualities of our beloved organizations, as well as the physical collections and intellectual issues that we labor on daily (copyright, fair use, information literacy, access). Even if we don’t each have the time to get personally involved, we ought to articulate the wide-ranging possibilities and benefits of such an idealistic enterprise to public schools, to higher education, and to citizenship and government. In fighting for the ideals on an ambitious project like DPLA, we are fighting for our own place in the information economy.

POST: Humanities Unbound: Careers & Scholarship Beyond the Tenure Track

Despite the amount of discussion that alternative academics, or alt-ac, has generated recently, much of it has been speculative or anecdotal. Now, Katina Rogers, Senior Research Specialist the University of Virginia’s Scholarly Communication Institute, discusses the findings of her research over the past year on alt-ac employees and employers. The study looked at “perceptions of career preparation among humanities scholars” in order “to determine a baseline from which to make specific recommendations for curricular changes.” One of the key findings of the study is that:

… low tenure-track employment rates are not a new problem, but as the survey responses show, departments by and large are not succeeding at providing accurate and realistic information to their students, and many graduates still feel stigmatized when they pursue different types of careers.

As with any good discussion of a problem, there is a useful solution proposed. In this case, Rogers discusses the Praxis Network, which currently includes undergraduate and graduate humanities initiatives at seven institutions. These initiatives “can be thought of as one possible response to the question of how to equip emerging scholars for a range of career outcomes without sacrificing the core values or methodologies of the humanities, and without increasing time-to-degree.”

RESOURCE: Media Studies and DH

How does media studies inform DH– and vice versa? MediaCommons is currently hosting a series on “the differentiations and intersections of media studies and the digital humanities.” Twenty “digital humanists and media scholars” have been invited to comment on “the intersections of these two disciplines, how they use them, and how these intersections expand and/or complicate these two fields of study.” Posts have been scheduled April 15-May 10. They include, thus far:

As Rhody writes in his post (a DHNow Editors’ Choice), which looks at how DH has emerged and been refined:

The messy histories remind us that DH is a term in its relative infancy deployed — yes, strategically, tactically, rhetorically — to encompass a broader set of traditions that themselves have complex backstories threaded through a host of disciplinary backgrounds and, importantly, institutional types: not just universities, but galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (the GLAM quartet), small historic homes and historical societies.

Login to the MediaCommons site to post comments on these posts, several of which are hosting lively comment discussions!

 

 

POST: Digital Humanities and Digital Preservation

Leslie Johnston (Library of Congress) has written a post reflecting on digital preservation of digital humanities projects that serves as a nice overview of some of the issues involved, and calls for greater consideration of sustainability issues.

While one would like to focus on pure scholarship — discovering new sources, intuiting new interpretations, writing and designing innovative ways of presenting the outcomes of the research — sustainable technology has to be a consideration alongside the scholarly endeavor.