The Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library conference took place last week in Charleston, South Carolina. The conference featured keynotes from Riccardo Ferrante (Smithsonian Institution), Emily Gore (Digital Public Library of America), and Trevor Muñoz (University of Maryland), workshops, a day and a half of sessions, and a lively Twitter feed.
In a write-up for the Davidson College Archives & Special Collections blog that incorporated responses from fellow presenters/attendees Jan Blodgett and Craig Milberg, Caitlin Christian-Lamb identified several themes of the conference. Christian-Lamb cited a presentation by Brian Rosenblum (University of Kansas), summarizing his description of “DH librarians as ‘nodes,’ whose main job duty is to centralize digital activities on campus and push them forward.”
Similarly, James Baker (British Library) provided his own summary, reporting on Muñoz’s keynote as “positioning librarians as collaborators in rather than supporters of research activity, arguing in favour of a DH librarianship resistant to notions of administrative and programmatic service, and teasing at the key points of connection, – evident in the history of librarianship pre-dating the digital – between core library work and humanistic scholarship.”
Papers and keynote presentations delivered at the conference will be published by Purdue University Press in 2015. In the meantime, you can find slides and references from Muñoz’s keynote “Data Driven but How Do We Steer This Thing?” and Harriett Green’s (University of Illinois) talk on “Libraries and Digital Pedagogy” posted online.
