Between a Book and a Hard Place: Translating the Value of Digital Humanities in a Reconfigured Library

Situated in the Scholars’ Lab, a small, research-oriented unit within the University of Virginia Library, we have come to expect the question, “What is digital humanities and why is it in the library?” We have excellent resources and responses to engage that question as well as questions about digital humanities (DH) more broadly. Those questions ...

Do DH Librarians Need to Be in the Library?: DH Librarianship in Academic Units

Many pieces on libraries and digital humanities focus on the library as a space, an organization, and an institution, with the roles of librarians typically understood as functioning primarily within that space.[1. Among the examples are the excellent essays collected in White, J. W., & Gilbert, H. (2016). Laying the foundation: Digital humanities in academic ...

Not Your DH Teddy-Bear; or, Emotional Labor is Not Going Away

Last year, I had a conversation where I felt especially articulate about the collaborative aspects of my work. “I don’t write code for people,” I explained, “but it’s important to me to work with them; not only because I enjoy that, but also because my goal for them to be able to learn about technology/digital ...

What Does Digital Feminist Curation Look Like?

In The Archival Turn in Feminism, Kate Eichhorn notes that “…what might be properly described as ‘women’s archives’ or ‘women’s collections’ have long been governed by the teleological assumptions upon which most archival collections are structured, there is nothing necessarily teleological about the development of explicitly feminist archives and special collections” (Eichhorn, 2013, p.31). One ...

Cross-disciplinarity at the Crossroads

Support for digital humanities, either through a dedicated physical center or a collection of skilled positions under the “digital scholarship” banner, are increasingly found in libraries, rather than in departments. It is often argued that this is a practical move, since libraries facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. While the disciplines move to the library’s physical space, few ...

Developing Research Tools via Voices from the Field

Introduction Whose voices are missing from the digital humanities (DH) and libraries discussions? The users. Both DH and librarianship are inherently connected with users, yet user voices, especially those arising from empirical studies, are often missing from planning, developing, and implementing initiatives related to digital scholarship. Humanists’ data management across the research lifecycle is a ...

When Metadata Becomes Outreach: Indexing, Describing, and Encoding For DH

How can metadata become the most cutting-edge type of library outreach? In this article, we explore how engagement in collaborative library-based digital humanities (DH) projects is proving just that at the University of Alabama. In traditional scholarship, researchers encounter, rely on, and benefit from the work of metadata librarians every day as they access catalogs ...

Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library

What are the points of contact between digital humanities and libraries? What is at stake, and what issues arise when the two meet? Where are we, and where might we be going? Who are “we”? By posing these questions in the CFP for a new dh+lib special issue, the editors hoped for sharp, provocative meditations on ...

POST: Looking for Open Digital Collections

In a post entitled “looking for open digital collections,” Sarah Werner (@wynkenhimself) returns to the problem of digital access to special collections, to detail the complexities of locating and working with digital images from the collections of libraries, archives, and museums. What I need for my work are images able to be freely used, whether because they ...

POST: Co-Hosting a Datathon at the Library of Congress

In a post on the The Signal, Jaime Mears (Library of Congress) reflects on the June 2016 Archives Unleashed 2.0: Web Archive Datathon. With support from the National Science Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Internet Archive, Rutgers University, and the University of Waterloo, the workshop presented “an opportunity to collaboratively unleash our ...

RESOURCE: Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy

Earlier this month, Open Humanities Press released the new volume Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy, edited by Roberto Simanowski. The observations shared in this book take the form of conversations about digital media and culture centered around four distinct thematic fields: politics and government, algorithm and censorship, art ...