Category: Recommended

Tanya Clement (U Texas), Andi Gustavson (U Texas), Allyssa Guzman (U Texas), Nathan Alexander Moore (CU Boulder), and Lauren Walker (U Texas) have published a white paper entitled “Good Systems Humanist-in-the-Loop: Responsible Data Operations and Workforce Development in Libraries, Archives, and Museums” on the University of Texas at Austin’s Texas Scholar Works repository. This paper describes the “Humanist-in-the-Loop” project, a “first-step attempt to create a workforce development program called ‘Ethical Data in Practice’ for future library and archives professionals that teaches them to engage in the work of ‘responsible data operations.'” As the paper states,

Cultural heritage institutions are increasingly interested in data practices, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI) but are far from being able to use these practices ethically, efficiently, and cost-effectively. Without informational professionals trained in ethical data work, libraries and archives run the risk of replicating bias with new data-oriented practices. While graduate students in schools of information and library science are trained in the importance of digital cultural heritage and critical data studies and graduate students in the humanities are trained in the ethics of archival research, neither groups are given first-hand experience providing access to collections and engaging directly with data projects. It is imperative that we train a workforce of information professionals who will, in their future careers, be prepared to make ethical decisions about the data practices that shape our world.

This project and white paper build on the work of Safiya Noble and Ruha Benjamin, who have highlighted the ways in which algorithmic biases “replicate hierarchical and exclusionary practices within archives.” It is of particular interest to DH library workers who engage in data-intensive work or hope to create data-centered services.

Mary Aycock, Nicole Critchley, and Amanda Scott (all Texas State University) presented “Bringing Linked Data into Libraries via Wikidata,” at the CNI Fall 2021 Showcase. From the abstract, “As part of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging Wikidata pilot, Texas State University Libraries has embarked on new linked data projects: authority work for faculty, an oral history project, and linked data for special collections archives. This presentation will outline methodologies and discuss new opportunities and obstacles presented by these projects, as well as how Wikidata can promote identity management, digital scholarship, and historical research on wider global online levels.” This 18-minute recording offers pragmatic examples for linked open data collaboration in digital humanities projects.

Anne Baillot (Le Mans Université), James Baker (University of Sussex), Madiha Zahrah Choksi (Columbia University), Alex Gil (Columbia University), Kaiama L. Glover (Barnard College), Ana Lam (Barnard College), Alicia Peaker (Barnard College), Walter Scholger (University of Graz), Torsten Roeder (University of Wuppertal), and Jo Lindsay Walton (University of Sussex), have authored, “Digital Humanities and the Climate Crisis: A Manifesto.”

Foregrounding a collective desire to center the climate crisis within digital humanities work with imperatives for action, they remind us that digital research has extensive physical and tangible impacts, whether it’s our power consumption using computing resources or traveling by airplane to present at a conference. The authors invite fundamental reimagining our practices in digital humanities, large and small, and for the community to commit to Next Steps.

The climate emergency necessitates these provocations in order to shift our practices towards a just and sustainable DH landscape, both individually as DH practitioners and collectively as a community and as organizations.

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has released a news post that is essential reading on the current landscape of surveillance systems integrated into library vendor products:

On April 2nd, news broke that RELX subsidiary LexisNexis signed a multi-million dollar contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). According to reporting on the ICE contract by the Intercept, LexisNexis’ databases “offer an oceanic computerized view of a person’s existence” and will provide the agency with “the data it needs to locate people with little if any oversight.”

While this contract may be new, it is just the latest development in an alarming trend that SPARC is following. Two major library vendors—RELX and Thomson Reuters—have been building sophisticated, global systems of surveillance that include online tracking technologies, massive aggregation of user data, and the sale of services based on this tracking, including to governments and law enforcement.

The post is also a call-to-action and represents a reckoning for libraries, in that we need to face the urgent questions of whether we can support this threat to user privacy, and whether we can accept being complicit for the harms that these library vendors cause beyond our ivory towers. The author notes that libraries may want to start planning how to recalibrate relationships with vendors that actively contribute to broader systems of surveillance: “Some may be able to walk away from a vendor or significantly reduce their spend. While for many others, it may not be possible to walk away for now, and recalibration may start with a renewed focus on contractual terms (particularly privacy clauses) and taking steps to educate faculty and students about vendors’ surveillance activities. In the long term, recalibration may require building alternatives that do not currently exist.”

DH library folks might consider how they could take similar action to advocate for privacy in DH tools that we use. Finally, SPARC encourages contacting them with information or experience with a vendors that you believe might help inform their privacy work – please email Nick Shockey directly at nick[at]sparcopen.org.

In the latest issue (2021 15.1) of Digital Humanities Quarterly, authors Samantha Fritz (Department of History, University of Waterloo), Ian Milligan (Department of History, University of Waterloo), Nick Ruest (Library, York University), and Jimmy Lin (David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo) reflect on their work on Archives Unleashed. In “Fostering Community Engagement through Datathon Events: The Archives Unleashed Experience,” they share their work developing an open-source digital humanities project. From the abstract:

This article explores the impact that a series of Archives Unleashed datathon events have had on community engagement both within the web archiving field, and more specifically, on the professional practices of attendees. We present results from surveyed datathon participants, in addition to related evidence from our events, to discuss how our participants saw the datathons as dramatically impacting both their professional practices as well as the broader web archiving community. Drawing on and adapting two leading community engagement models, we combine them to introduce a new understanding of how to build and engage users in an open-source digital humanities project. Our model illustrates both the activities undertaken by our project as well as the related impact they have on the field. The model can be broadly applied to other digital humanities projects seeking to engage their communities.

The article details their model of community engagement, consisting of six stages: Scope, Inform, Consult, Involve, Collaborate, and Empower. This article will be of use to dh+lib readers looking to undertake community engaged projects.

Dorothea Salo (University of Wisconsin at Madison) recently published an open access chapter, “Is There a Text in These Data? The Digital Humanities and Preserving the Evidence.” Part of the edited volume, Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, eds. Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray (MIT Press, 2020), this chapter explores digital humanities scholarship and the challenges it faces in being preserved – in libraries, museums, and archives – in a scholarly communication system structured around print.

Salo closes by succinctly summarizing the key factors in how digital humanities scholarly communication is still being hampered by traditional models:

Publisher intransigence, library unpreparedness, and unshakable humanist allegiance to print forms of research communication distort scholarly communication systems in ways that disadvantage digital humanists and prevent migration to opener and likely more sustainable digital modes of publication and dissemination. This, in turn, isolates and disadvantages the humanities both within and outside the academy. Exactly how the humanities in general and the digital humanities specifically will break out of this untenable box remains unclear. Until they do, however, the monograph crisis will intensify, digital humanists will continue fleeing the academy for fairer, greener pastures, and the humanities will impoverish their own future.

The chapter, along with the entire book, is accessible as a PDF: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/11885.003.0023. The chapter will be of interest to DH library folks interested in digital publishing, the open access movement, and transforming scholarship more broadly.

Books contain multitudes: Exploring Experimental Publishing is a three-part research and scoping report created to support the Experimental Publishing and Reuse Work Package (WP 6) of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project. It also serves as a resource for the scholarly community, especially for authors and publishers interested in pursuing more experimental forms of book publishing.

COPIM is a 3-year project led by Coventry University as part of an international partnership of researchers, universities, librarians, open access (OA) book publishers and infrastructure providers. The project aims to create “community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable OA book publishing to flourish, delivering major improvements in the infrastructures used by OA book publishers and those publishers making a transition to OA. The project addresses the key technological, structural, and organisational hurdles—around funding, production, dissemination, discovery, reuse, and archiving—that are standing in the way of the wider adoption and impact of OA books. COPIM will realign OA book publishing away from competing commercial service providers to a more horizontal and cooperative knowledge-sharing approach.

This research and scoping report serves as an online resource to promote and support the publication of experimental books:

• Parts I and II situates “experimental books in the context of academic research and map current experiments in book publishing in order to create a typology accompanied by a selection of examples of experimental book publishing projects.”
• Part III reviews “existing resources on tools, platforms, and software used in the production of experimental books, and we sketch a roadmap and methodology towards the creation of the online resource mentioned previously.”

The report’s creators explain that, “To support the pilot cases we have made a start with exploring two key practices within experimental publishing and the creation of experimental books that feature within this online resource: collaborative writing and annotation. As such we outline tools, platforms, software, and workflows that support and enable these practices next to describing the desired aspects we argue this technical infrastructure should cover.”

This report will be of interest to DH library folks interested in open and experimental monograph publishing.

Barbara Fister (Gustavus Adolphus College and Project Information Literacy) has authored an essay, “Lizard People in the Library,” for Project Information Literacy’s Provocation Series. In this piece Fister tackles the role of information literacy educators in the age of “fake news,” QAnon, and other conspiracy theories.

Fister provides an overview of polarization, filter bubbles, and propaganda networks, and the current “divided reality” we find ourselves in:

How could so many people believe things that are obviously untrue? Why don’t kids learn about this in school? Shouldn’t being able to navigate information and separate truth from lies be a standard part of education?

It is. It has been, for a long time. It clearly hasn’t worked.

Fister describes reasons for the failure of information literacy, including “the low social status of teachers and librarians,” a lack of consistency in information literacy throughout students’ years of education, the devaluing of the humanities, the quick pace of technological and media change, the rise of digital culture, and the lack of a specific place for information literacy within school curriculum: “It’s everywhere, and nowhere. It’s everyone’s job, but nobody’s responsibility. In many cases, the people who care about it the most have had their jobs felled by the austerity axe.”

Despite librarians’ and other educators’ promotion of independent research, critical thinking, and lifelong learning, Fister points to the results of Project Information Literacy’s 2016 lifelong learning study as indicative of the problem: respondents overwhelmingly indicated that undergraduate research “failed to prepare them to ask questions of their own.” The author reflects that classroom learning tends to focus on producing papers, reports, or projects rather than focusing on how media and information ecosystems “make[s] choices about which messages to promote and how those choices intersect with political messaging and the social engineering of interest groups.” In fact, Fister points out that inadequate information literacy education might be more harmful than none at all, and that “the slogan ‘research it yourself’ has become the empowering antidote to elitist expertise.”

So, with the problem laid out so clearly, what does the author suggest information literacy librarians and educators do? Fister cautions against assignment strictures that “explicitly forbid students from using information that doesn’t pass through traditional gatekeeping channels,” stating that,

we need to teach students “how information ‘works’” — not just how to find and select information as if it’s a market good to be produced and consumed, but rather to understand the social and economic contexts that influence how information is created and circulated.

Suggestions include using journalism’s framing theory, forming teaching practice communities with experts in intersecting information systems, allowing students to bring their own expertise and experience on navigating information to the classroom, and to emphasize that not “every exchange of information must be financialized” but that there are more nuances and ethics involved in sharing information.

The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) released abstracts for its Fall 2020 project briefings, which include wide-ranging topics and scope, from containerization of digital exhibits and building data literacy, to big social data stewardship and collaborative pedagogy. We’ve listed some of the many of interest to digital humanities librarianship.

• Academic Libraries Join the Fight Against Climate Change, Lisa Spiro and Ashley Fitzpatrick (Rice University)
• Adapting Library GIS Services in the Age of COVID-19: Challenges, Changes, and Planning for the Future, Michael Shensky (University of Texas at Austin)
• Advancing Computational Reproducibility in the Social Sciences: Creating and Using Digital Reproduction Records as a Pedagogical Tool, Katie Hoeberling and Fernando Hoces de la Guardia (University of California, Berkeley)
• Building Data Literacy – the Northeast Student Data Corps, Florence Hudson, Columbia University, Yousef Danisman, Queensborough College, Jennifer Oxenford, Kinber
• Compassionate Computing: Leveraging Socio-Technical Practices for Technical and Cultural Change, Laurie Taylor and Todd Digby (University of Florida)
• Connecting Communities of Practice to Support Big Social Data Stewardship, Sara Mannheimer, Montana State University
• Containerizing Digital Exhibits for Scalability and Sustainment, Larry Yang and Allyssa Guzman (University of Texas at Austin)
• CreateUK: Opportunities for Digital Pedagogy, Projects, and Collaborative Infrastructure (December ’20) Jennifer Hootman (University of Kentucky)
• Demonstrating PresQT Services for FAIR Software and Data Preservation, Natalie Meyers (University of Notre Dame)
• Dismantling Racism in Collaborative Collections, Shanee Murrain (Digital Public Library of America), Penelope Shumaker (State Library of Ohio), Leanne Finnigan (Temple University), and Ann Hanlon (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
• High Fidelity: Connecting information for Better Research Reproducibility, Peter Oxley and Terrie Wheeler (Cornell University)
• How Do We Measure Up? A Capabilities Model and Benchmarking Baseline for Research Computing and Data, Patrick Schmitz (Semper Cogito Consulting) and Claire Mizumoto (UC San Diego)
• Infusing Technology with Pedagogy: An Academic Library’s Partnership with IT and Academic Affairs, Katy O’Neill and Matthew Treskon (Loyola University Maryland)
• Instructional Resilience: Leveraging an OER Initiative to Support Instruction in the Era of Covid-19, Mike Chee and Kari Weaver (University of Waterloo)
• Mining ETDs for Trends in Graduate Research, William Ingram (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
• Next Generation Machine Learning: The Evolution of the Library as Research Partner, Project Catalyst and Digital Integrator, James Lee and Xuemao Wang (University of Cincinnati)
• Professional Development and the Development of a Profession: a Research Computing and Data Community, Lauren Michael (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Scott Yockel (Harvard University)
• Sourcery: Remote Access to Archives During the Pandemic, Wes Hamrick and Garrett McComas (University of Connecticut)
• Summarizing Web Archives through Storytelling with the Dark and Stormy Archives Project, Shawn Jones (Los Alamos National Research Library)
• Using Newspapers as Data for Collaborative Pedagogy: A Multidisciplinary Interrogation of the Borderlands in University Classrooms, Megan Senseney, Mary Feeney, Jeffrey Oliver, and Anita Huizar-Hernández (University of Arizona)

The Price Lab Podcast, from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, is “a series focused on the people who are building, using, and critiquing the digital tools and techniques transforming the humanities.” Episodes feature conversations with different scholars about their projects and the tools they use to complete them. Topics of these interviews range from the presence of digital humanities in European academia to integrating digital humanities into the classroom to using coding as a tool to explore digital humanities. The podcast presents a varied look at digital humanities as a diverse and growing field.

Alison Mudditt, PLOS Chief Executive Officer, recently published a post about reimagining scholarly communications as more equitable and just. In her post, she reflects on the particular challenges of 2020, noting her own privilege: “I can comfortably work from home, my organization has proven itself to be creative and resilient, and my close circle of family and friends are all doing fairly well. At the same time, there have been many moments when events have pierced that bubble of security and I’ve felt wrong-footed, uncomfortable, frustrated, angry, guilty and deeply saddened.”

Hearing the call for racial justice following the murder of George Floyd this summer, she notes the importance of open access while calling for scholarly communication organizations to work towards “broad-scale systemic change” through a “deep engagement with our role (individually and organizationally) in perpetuating inequity.” She urges organizations, including libraries, to move beyond merely pledging “equity and diversity in our organizations and a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.” She argues,

The current system of scholarly communication was created by the Global North and for the Global North. Not surprisingly, this has created deep inequities that reflect historic power structures. Unless we examine our part in this, we are not doing enough. We need to act to permanently and fundamentally disrupt the status quo.

She points out how the drive to promote Gold OA and the concomitant APC model “risks hardwiring the exclusion of many researchers, especially in the Global South. Far from being ‘transformative’, these deals run the risk of locking in the high cost of subscriptions into an open future and of reinforcing the market dominance of the biggest players as subscription funds simply flow in full to new deal models, further entrenching existing inequalities.”

Mudditt urges publishers to interrogate the ways they perpetuate systemic inequalities, and she calls for shared values and purposes and to be more meaningfully community-centered — to truly listen and listen to those we serve.

This post is of interest to DH library professionals similarly engaged in self-reflection about the ways we reify structural inequality — from the tools we use and teach to the handling of digitized cultural heritage materials.