Matt Kirschenbaum (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) shares the text from his talk at the Library of Congress’s Electronic Literature Showcase. In the talk, Kirschenbaum self-identifies as an Incunk, or “one who has assumed archival and curatorial stewardship over… electronic literature collections.” He discusses the issues at stake when “electronic literature passes from outsider practice to cultural heritage as sanctioned by its passage from private hands to an increasing number of major collecting institutions,” where the processing of digital materials both raises important theoretical questions and constitutes “what is increasingly normalized professional practice.”
Category: Post
POST: JLA Lights the Way
On Saturday, the news broke that the entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration (JLA) had resigned in protest of the journal’s restrictive author agreement. In a post on ACRLog, Scott Walter (Editor of College and Research Libraries) puts this move in context with the open access movement and asks, “Why do so many of us still serve as the editorial leadership for journals whose policies do not reflect our ideals?”
Scott’s post comes at the heels of earlier posts from members of the JLA editorial board, Brian Mathews, Jason Griffey, and Chris Bourg.
RESOURCE: Border Trouble: On the Frontiers of Digital Scholarship
Spencer Keralis (Director of Digital Scholarship, University of North Texas) has posted the text and slides of his presentation on the panel “New Frontiers for Research, Teaching and Learning: Digital Scholarship and Latin@ Archives/Nuevas Fuentes para Investigación, Enseñanza and Aprendizaje: Estudios Digitales y Archivos Latin@s” at the Fourth Texas Jalisco Conference in Education and Culture.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Creating Knowledge for the Common Good,” and Keralis’s talk explored the intersection of digital humanities, digital archives, and the histories of under-represented communities.
Archivists often approach these communities from a position of power and privilege, as though the archive were doing the community, or the individual a favor by taking their materials. Insisting on traditional donation contracts, in which the donor must relinquish the materials before they can be digitized, and in which the donor loses all real property ownership of the materials upon donation, can further alienate potential contributors to these archives. Archivists must learn to adapt their collection development strategies to the values and needs of the communities they are attempting to collect from, and to approach these communities in a spirit of service, not from a position of power.
RESOURCE: New Challenges in Digital History: Sharing Women’s History on Wikipedia
Mia Ridge has shared her presentation notes from the Women’s History in the Digital World Conference at Bryn Mawr’s Albert Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education. The talk explores how and why academics should edit Wikipedia, a topic that has received a lot of attention recently in the library world, with many libraries now hosting Wikipedians-in-Residence. Ridge concludes:
If it’s worth researching the life and achievements of a notable woman, it’s worth making sure their contribution to history is available to the world while improving the quality of the world’s biggest encyclopaedia.
The conference, which took place March 22-23, was live tweeted using the hashtag #WHDigWrld, and Michelle Moravec has created a Storify.
POST: Why South By Southwest is Important for Libraries, Archives and Museums
What does South By Southwest (SXSW) have to offer practitioners engaged with libraries and the digital humanities? A recent post by Butch Lazorchak on The Signal (the digital preservation blog from the Library of Congress) argues: “A lot.” Pointing to the growing presence of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) at the 26th annual SXSW conference, Lazorchak argues that the event broadens and contextualizes issues LAMs care about:
[M]ost of the conference is made up of smaller-scale conversations featuring non-profits, academics, government agencies and the private sector on an incredible range of technical topics. The shared interest in technical innovation helps to break down the silos and provides numerous opportunities for engagement and learning. … SXSW forces LAMs out of that comfort zone and puts them in contact with like-minded people who might not have the exact same perspective as LAMs but have shared interests and are looking to solve some of the same problems.
Panels such as “Why Digital Maps Can Reboot Cultural History” [previewed in a post highlighted on dh+lib last week] and “Citizen Archivists and Cultural Memory” explore this technical innovation in the realm of public humanities and the cultural heritage sector.
For those of us following along from home rather than braving the Austin hordes, keep an eye on Twitter using the hashtag #sxswLAM and check out the schedule and stream of interviews hosted by ER&L’s #ideadrop house.
POST: Size Matters
Academic librarians teach information literacy, visual literacy, digital literacy — but do we teach spatial literacy? This post from Kelly Johnston (GIS Specialist for the Scholars’ Lab, University of Virginia) explores the value of spatial thinking, linking out to a variety of intriguing resources and research, and introduces the GeoTron 5000 tool, an app developed “to put the power of comparative geography and spatial literacy in hand.” GeoTron 5000 allows for free comparisons across the 50 US states (and the District of Columbia!); users must purchase access to geographical comparisons beyond the US.
POST: The Digital Data Backbone for the Study of Historical Places
In preparation for their March 10 SXSW Interactive session, Why Digital Maps Can Reboot Cultural History, Butch Lazorchak (Digital Archivist, Library of Congress) and Matthew Knutzen (Geospatial Libarian, NYPL) discuss digital geospatial tools, using maps to tell stories, and digital stewardship and preservation issues in mapping projects. Knutzen goes step-by-step through the NEH-funded New York City Historical GIS Project and the MapWarper tool that NYPL Labs built to georectify over 5,000 maps from the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division at the New York Public Library.
POST: Emerging Careers in Librarianship: Digital Humanities Librarian
Hack Library School takes a look at the Digital Humanities Librarian as part of their Emerging Careers in Librarianship series. In a post by Amy Frazier, Lindsay Skay Whitacre, Assistant Digital Collections Librarian at Boston College, shares her experience on how she came to DH, what skills she needs to do DH as a librarian, and offers advice to those interested in getting involved.
She writes of libraries as part of a three-legged stool of DH that also includes programmers and scholars:
Digital Humanities and libraries work hand in hand. Think of it like a three legged stool: one leg is the programmers (those creating the tools), one leg is the scholars (those using the tools) and one leg is the Library and Digital Repository (where the scholars are getting their information to use the tools.) The library is a bit of a changing landscape right now, especially as more materials are being born digital. Remember, though, digitizing something is not the same as digital humanities. You need to use that digital material as a jumping off point to create something new.
POST: Born Digital Folklore and the Vernacular Web: An Interview with Robert Glenn Howard
This interview of Robert Glenn Howard (University of Wisconsin) by Trevor Owens (Library of Congress) offers a helpful introduction to the topic of born-digital folklore. Howard defines folklore as “the informally shared knowledge that we perceive as connecting us to each other,” and the two examine how this engagement has changed in a networked world. The discussion covers theoretical aspects of folklore, theorizing the web, and current content that should be preserving for future folklorists.
POST: The CODATA Mission: Preserving Scientific Data for the Future
At Spellbound Blog, Jeanne Kramer-Smith has posted on a session from The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation conference, sponsored by UNESCO in cooperation with the University of British Columbia and held in September 2012 in Vancouver. Untangling the acronyms, Kramer-Smith identifies the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) as part of the International Council for Science. CODATA hosts the Data at Risk Task Group (DARTG), which seeks “to preserve scientific data that is in danger of loss because they are not in modern electronic formats, or have particularly short shelf-life.”
In summarizing talks included in the session and helpfully linking out to presenters’ slides, Kramer-Smith also provides an opportunity to consider the implications of data preservation and loss– including for DH and libraries. As she notes in her summary of a presentation by D. R. Fraser Taylor and Tracey Lauriault, of the Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre at Carleton University, on “The Map as Fundamental Source in the Memory of the World”:
“The 1986 BBC Domesday Book [sic] was created in celebration of 900 years after William the Conqueror’s original Domesday Book. It was obsolete by the 1990s. A huge amount of social and economic information was collected for this project. In order to rescue it they needed an Acorn computer and needed to be able to read the optical disks. The platform was emulated in 2002-2003. It cost 600,000 British pounds to reverse engineer and put online in 2004. New discs were made in 2003 at the UK Archive.
“It is easier to get Ptolomy’s maps from 15th century than it is to get a map 10 years old.”
POST: Visualizations and Digital Collections
In a previous post on dh+lib, Jefferson Bailey outlined some of the ways in which the digital humanities could enhance access and discovery of cultural heritage materials. Now, in “Visualizations and Digital Collections,” he explores the potential of visualization as a technique for appraisal in born digital collections:
[G]iven the ever-increasing volume of material in born-digital archival collections, visualizations are increasingly a crucial tool in a variety of managerial functions for digital stewards, from analyzing directory contents prior to acquisition, to risk assessment, to visualizing contextual relations between collections.