Category: Recommended

The Digital Library Federation (DLF) recently published the Digital Library Accessibility Policy and Practice Guidelines, a “collaborative document provides guidance for GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) to implement accessibility best practices through policies and workflows.”

From the announcement:

Some topics discussed and key takeaways include:

• Policies should commit to accessibility, name standards like WCAG for each type of content, provide contact info, and define monitoring processes.
• Procedures should cover ingestion, content types, software and tools used, who will perform accessibility tasks, and uphold applicable standards included in policies.
• Get institutional buy-in by emphasizing the user benefits, increased usage, and legal requirements. Budget for staff time, tools, or vendor services.
• Accessibility cannot be achieved in a silo, and is a shared responsibility. Distribute responsibility vertically and horizontally. Accessibility specialists should guide work, administrators supply resources, and all project participants have duties.
• Integrate accessibility into all phases like planning, design, testing, and maintenance. Spread the cost throughout the lifecycle.
• Follow standards like WCAG for web content, PDF/UA for documents, and include transcripts, captions, and descriptions with Audio/Visual content. Use inclusive language in metadata.

The guide was created by Calida Barboza, Rebecca Bayeck, Amy Drayer, Jacqueline Frank, Gabe Galson, Mary Hricko, Rachel Hu, Bonnie Russell, Lydia Tang, and Wendy Guerra. Additional support was provided by the DLF Policies and Workflows subgroup, the Digital Accessibility Working Group, and the extended community of accessibility enthusiasts who provided feedback and informed the group’s work.

The Digital Preservation Coalition has made freely-available online Preserving Geospatial Data, written by Meagan A. Snow, Geospatial Data Visualization Librarian at the Geography & Map Division of the Library of Congress:

This report is designed as a resource for use by librarians, archivists, and digital preservation specialists who may be new to the realm of geospatial data but want a practical understanding of the geospatial data files they encounter in their collections. It may also be useful to geographers, cartographers, academics, and researchers who are increasingly involved in the preservation decisions around their own research data or mapping products. The report focuses on describing challenges specific to the preservation and management of geospatial data.

Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023, a book by Matthew K. Gold (CUNY Graduate Center) and Lauren F. Klein (Emory University) looks at digital humanities in 2023, presenting “a state-of-the-field vision of digital humanities amid rising social, political, economic, and environmental crises; a global pandemic; and the deepening of austerity regimes in U.S. higher education.” This is the fourth volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series. Topics such as the queer gap in cultural analytics, the challenges and possibilities of social media data, and black womanhood in digital spaces are featured. The book can be read online or purchased in paperback.

From cOAlition S, the funded initiative to make full and immediate Open Access publication of research a reality, comes a new draft proposal titled “Towards Responsible Publishing,” which outlines “a vision and a set of principles that a future scholarly communication system should aspire to, along with a mission that enables research funders…to deliver this.”

The proposal responds to the fact that 5 years on from the development of the European Commission and European Research Council’s Plan S, academic publishing practices continue to lag behind advances in how scientific research is performed, disseminated, and used.

Along with the draft proposal comes a call for researchers to share their feedback on the proposal through a survey open through November 29, 2023:

For such a scholar-led system to be successful, it will need broad support from the research community. To understand if our proposal resonates with the community of researchers, we embark on a consultative process, with support from Research Consulting Limited in partnership with the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS). This process offers researchers the opportunity to voice their opinions and contribute to the development of a proposal that serves their needs. The consultation will run from November 2023 until April 2024. Based on the feedback through this consultation, a revised proposal will be developed for the cOAlition S funders to consider in June 2024.

A recently published paper in the Journal of Open Humanities Data titled “Datasheets for Digital Cultural Heritage Data” explores the complexities of datasets created from digital cultural heritage collections, with the purpose of providing recommended standards for documenting these datasets. Their interest in better describing these kinds of datasets relates primarily to the Collections as Data movement in GLAM institutions, where machine-learning algorithms are often applied to large cultural heritage collections datasets.

Authors Henk Alkemade, Steven Claeyssens, Giovanni Colavizza, Nuno Freire, Jörg Lehmann, Clemens Neudecker, Giulia Osti, and Daniel van Strien summarize this goal and argue for the creation of structured datasheets as a potential solution to the observed data documentation problem:

This paper elaborates on the use of datasheets, as introduced by (Gebru et al., 2021) to the ML [machine-learning] community for the first time in 2018, for creating and disseminating documentation about DCH materials shared as “collections as data.” … Dataset documentation can take on a myriad of shapes and forms, ranging from highly structured data, for both humans and machines to read (for example, metadata description in the Data Catalog Vocabulary¹ (DCAT)), over semi-structured datasheets, organised around a standard list of questions, to unstructured, primarily narrative data papers. … Datasheets, however, bring a structured approach to the description of datasets, which provide guidance to the data publisher in describing the datasets according to the information needs of data re-users, and they offer the advantage of allowing information to be collected in both a structured manner, whenever possible, and in a narrative form, whenever necessary. Considering the particularly diverse nature of DCH collections, that combination is invaluable.

The paper addresses the specific characteristics of digital cultural heritage data that need to be considered when utilizing them for “collections as data” projects and provides a Template Datasheet for Digital Cultural Heritage Datasets (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8375033).

Danica Savonick (SUNY Cortland) published “Teaching DH on a Shoestring: Minimalist Digital Humanities Pedagogy” in the December 2022 issue (no 21) of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. This was a themed issue dedicated to Open Educational Resources and hosted on Manifold. From the abstract:

This article explores minimalist digital humanities pedagogy: strategies for teaching DH at institutions that don’t have many resources for doing so. Minimalist digital humanities pedagogy aims to maximize learning while minimizing stress, barriers of access, and time (for both instructors and students). This article considers how we can take a minimalist approach to course design, course websites, and DH project assignments. Throughout, it highlights how free, low-cost, and open-source tools can be used to help students increase their digital literacy, including their awareness of the ways technologies reproduce and challenge conditions of inequality. Such methods, I contend, can help students at a range of institutions develop digital skills both to navigate the world and to change it.

The article focuses on teaching digital humanities at under-resourced institutions “where the vast majority of our nation’s students are educated” to “articulate a vision of minimalist digital humanities pedagogy… that refers not only to the use of digital tools and platforms, but to the process of helping students think critically about them, especially in relation to broader social conditions and questions of power. Minimalist digital humanities pedagogy aims to maximize learning while minimizing stress, barriers of access, and time (for both instructors and students).” Savonick focuses on how minimalist DH pedagogy can be applied to course design, course websites, and DH project assignments.

Savonick offers seven strategies for minimalist DH course design:

1. Organize courses around topics that matter to students
2. Assuage anxieties surrounding technological expertise
3. Begin with relevant texts that give students new perspectives on their everyday lives
4. Help students identify their intellectual investments in the course material
5. Organize course units around praxis
6. Create opportunities for students to design a portion of the course
7. Utilize group work to teach collaboration

She argues for working outside of the learning management system and using WordPress instead, in part because of its ubiquity, and in part to center students’ words on the site (in contrast to most LMS). And, arguing for collaborative, project-based DH assignments, Savonick urges us to “consider students’ distinct learning styles, skill levels with different technologies, and the materials (hardware, software, bandwidth, and equipment) they have access to, both on campus and at home. ” She notes the importance of devoting class time to collaborative group work, to help working students and student caregivers. And she advocates for open-ended projects:

Rather than dictating the form their projects will take, students select their own form (such as website, podcast, timeline, or lesson plan) and choose an appropriate platform for their project. One key requirement is that the project should be useful to an audience beyond our classroom.

Open-ended projects have many benefits, especially for students at under-resourced institutions. They create space for student creativity. This is especially important, given the inequities of our tiered US education system, which readily provides affluent students with learning that nurtures their creativity, and leaves standardization and teaching to the test for everyone else. Open-ended projects also honor the experiential knowledge that students bring to the classroom. In addition, they require students to think critically about which platform they will select to fit the goals of their project—a key component of digital literacy. Open-ended projects are also well suited for heterogeneous students with a range of different skill levels, abilities, and levels of comfort with technologies. They allow students to determine whether they will use the project as an opportunity to learn a new platform or create something using a tool they’re more comfortable with. Such assignments are also easy to reuse and adapt for other courses—especially important for instructors with heavy course loads.

The article includes a sample syllabus and assignment.

UCL Press has published an open-access volume focusing on DH’s processes as “making.” On Making in the Digital Humanities: The scholarship of digital humanities development in honour of John Bradley is an homage to John Bradley’s work in DH and “assembles a group of well-known, experienced and emerging scholars in the digital humanities to reflect on various forms of making (we privilege here the creative and applied side of the digital humanities)” and “provide[s] a very human view on what it is to do the digital humanities, in the past, present and future.”

The volume is co-edited by Julianne Nyhan, Geoffrey Rockwell, Stéfan Sinclair, and Alexandra Ortolja-Baird, and is divided into 4 sections: “Making Projects,” “People Making,” “Making Praxis,” and “In Memoriam,” a section by Geoffrey Rockwell dedicated to the contributions of Stéfan Sinclair.

“Finding the Right Platform,” by Cheryl E. Ball, Corinne Guimont, and Matt Vaughn compares purposes and features of 10 different academy-owned, open-source publishing platforms, including Fulcrum, Humanities Commons, Janeway, Manifold, Mukrtu, Omeka, Open Journal Systems (OJS), Pressbooks, PubPub, and Scalar. The piece is meant to help researchers, publishers, and librarians answer questions about their projects in order to determine which platform would best serve the work they’re doing.

From the abstract:

“A key responsibility for many library publishers is to collaborate with authors to determine the best mechanisms for sharing and publishing research. Librarians are often asked to assist with a wide range of research outputs and publication types, including eBooks, digital humanities (DH) projects, scholarly journals, archival and thematic collections, and community projects. These projects can exist on a variety of platforms both for profit and academy owned. Additionally, over the past decade, more and more academy owned platforms have been created to support both library publishing programs. . . . Because of the challenges involved in identifying and evaluating the various platforms, we created this comparative crosswalk to help library publishers (and potentially authors) determine which platforms are right for their services and authors’ needs.”