dh+lib – Page 222 – where the digital humanities and librarianship meet

TEI and Libraries: New Avenues for Digital Literacy?

In this post, Harriett Green looks at how libraries can use TEI to advance digital literacy. For further reading, the author has also provided a list of recommended resources.

A prominent theme of the TEI 2012 Annual Members Meeting and Conference was how to make TEI an even more viable tool for scholarly discourse and analysis. This theme was quite fortuitous, because this was the focus on my paper presentation at the conference: I am exploring how libraries should expand their involvement in TEI beyond applying it in their digitized collections, and I proposed that libraries can approach the TEI as a method of promoting digital literacy.

The Text Encoding Initiative, better known as TEI, is one of the longest enduring and core sub-specialties of digital humanities scholarship, and was first developed in 1987 by scholars who sought to make their digitized texts more flexible for computational analysis and mining.[1] Since the mid-1990s, the presence of TEI in academic libraries has largely been found in digital collections. There is a long and complex history of libraries creating rich digital collections with extensive TEI mark-up, contributing to research initiatives, and developing best practices on the use of TEI.[2]

But I believe that the current and future potential for the TEI in humanities research and scholarship can only be fully realized if TEI mark-up skills are continually taught in order to build a growing base of users. As such, I presented a paper at the TEI Annual Meeting that explored the questions: How have libraries and information professionals helped to sustain the TEI user community, and what are the possibilities for the future?

For the initial study presented in the paper, I interviewed five librarians from research libraries at the University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and Indiana University who have been extensively involved in supporting and teaching the TEI at their libraries. From their responses, I outlined three particular facets of library support of the TEI: Teaching, tutorials, and tools. In the interviews, I learned that librarians teach TEI encoding and XML to their campus faculty and students in environments ranging from graduate seminars to campus-wide workshops. Other librarians have created online tutorials that provide widely-accessible portals to self-directed learning of the TEI for their campus community and the larger scholarly community. And other libraries are developing databases and tools that facilitate text mining with TEI.

[pullquote]The teaching of XML and TEI can be a crucial way for libraries to make new inroads with their constituents in digital and information literacies.[/pullquote]In my analysis, these interviews began to reveal that through these research services for the TEI, libraries can promote digital literacy: The dissemination of TEI through instruction and research services can be critically linked to concepts of digital literacy. The librarian interviewed from Virginia strongly felt that “I feel that TEI is still an important thing for faculty and students to know, and I still continue to support it.” The librarian from Indiana University also noted that in the English graduate course she taught on applying TEI for the Victorian Women Writers Project, the way that students read texts was transformed: “It changed the way they read,” she said. “You could see it when they were encoding that they were reading every single word and noting every punctuation mark, and that they were reading in a way they hadn’t before.” As such, faculty and students’ ability to translate texts into a format for digital use could be construed as a skill falling within the tenets of digital literacy.

Two definitions for digital literacy, drawn from among several working definitions, are most appropriate for this discussion. Education researchers Aharon Aviram and Yoram Eshet-Alkalai created a now widely-adopted 5-part holistic frame for digital literacy that contains the sub-areas of photo-visual literacy, reproduction literacy, information literacy, branching literacy, and socio-emotional literacy.[3] The other definition is a comprehensive framework proposed by the DigEuLit Project, which defines digital literacy as:

The awareness, attitude and ability of individuals to appropriately use digital tools and facilities to identify, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, analyse and synthesize digital resources, construct new knowledge, create media expressions, and communicate with others, in the context of specific life situations, in order to enable constructive social action; and to reflect upon this process.

In this light, the TEI is well positioned to be considered as a partner in outcomes for digital literacy. As more and more texts are digitized, TEI is a critical tool for digital publishing initiatives and facilitating the text mining research and distant reading of a corpus of thousands of digitized texts. The teaching initiatives, learning objects, and educational tools for TEI profiled in this paper as well as other existing ones, all empower students and faculty to build digital literacy skills in creating, analyzing, and preserving digital manifestations of texts and textual data they study in their research. As Jones-Kavalier and Flannigan articulate in an EduCAUSE Quarterly editorial, “Using the same skills used for centuries—analysis, synthesis and evaluation—we must look at digital literacy as another realm within which to apply elements of critical thinking”[4].

SGML, the initial mark-up language used for the TEI, was recognized early on as a critical tool for education and an 1996 Computers in Libraries article notes that “TEI gives students in today’s educational system access to historical and current information.” TEI, the article states, was among the types of SGML mark-up that “provide steppingstones to address issues of information access and reuse in education and research”[5]. Digital literacy strives to create learners who are critically thinking about the ways in which they engage and manipulate digital resources.

Melissa Terras notes in her study of the TEI By Example tutorials that “It is understood that much intellectual and temporal effort goes into marking up textual material with suitable granularity to facilitate in depth analysis and manipulation of textual material”[6]. Libraries are institutions that are committed to the promotion and teaching of information literacy, and the teaching of XML and TEI can be a crucial way for libraries to make new inroads with their constituents in digital and information literacies. Ultimately, I see libraries do have a role in helping educate users in the digital tools used for DH research, and ultimately, I believe we can help more and more scholars revise their research methodologies to adapt to digital scholarship.

[1] Richard Giordano, “The Documentation of Electronic Texts Using Text Encoding Initiative Headers: An Introduction,” Library Resources & Technical Services 38, no. 4 (1994): 389-402.

[2] See the recently-updated “Best Practices for TEI in Libraries,” Version 3.0, October 2011.

[3] Aharon Aviram and Yoram Eshet-Alkalai, “Towards a Theory of Digital Literacy: Three Scenarios for Next Steps.” European Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning (2006).

[4] Barbara Jones-Kavalier and Suzanne L. Flannigan, “Connecting the Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century,” EduCAUSE Quarterly 2 (2006): 8-10.

[5] SGML Open Staff, “SGML in Education: the TEI and ICADD Initiatives,” Computers in Libraries 16, no. 3 (1996): 26-28.

[6] Melissa Terras, Ron Van den Branden, and Edward Vanhoutte, “Teaching TEI: The Need for TEI by Example,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 24, no. 3 (2009): 297-306.

POST: When is Open Source Software the Right Choice for Cultural Heritage Organizations?

POST: When is Open Source Software the Right Choice for Cultural Heritage Organizations? An Interview with Peter Murray
An interview by Trevor Owens of the Library of Congress with Peter Murray of LYRSASIS on FOSS4Lib. The two discuss how libraries can decide whether open source software the right solution, different types of open source software (OSS) available and the costs of using such software, the role of OSS in digital preservation, and the future of OSS in cultural heritage organizations.

CFParticipation: Global Outlook::Digital Humanities

Global Outlook::Digital Humanities is the first Special Interest Group of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). GO::DH seeks to address barriers that hinder communication and collaboration among researchers and students of the digital arts, humanities, and cultural heritage sectors across and between high, mid, and low income economies.

The core activities of GO::DH are discovery, community-building, research, and advocacy. Its goal is to leverage the complementary strengths, interests, abilities, and experiences of participants through special projects and events, profile and publicity activity, and by encouraging collaboration among individuals, projects, and institutions.

Digital Humanities & Cultural Heritage, or, The Opposite of Argumentation

An attempt to storify the Twitter feed from the DH Topic Modeling Workshop (at least the second half of it)

Back in August, Miriam Posner’s post “What are some challenges to doing DH in the library?” initiated a wide-ranging conversation in the blogosphere examining the relationship between DH and libraries. As the dh+lib blog gets a’rolling, it seems useful both to revisit Miriam’s post, but also remind ourselves of the potential DH holds to enable new modes of discovery, knowledge, and interpretation, both for those in the academy and those in the broader field of cultural heritage.

Miriam cited a host of challenges to doing DH in libraries, including insufficient training, lack of authority, organizational stasis, overcautiousness, and lack of professional incentive. Along with a wealth of comments, the post also elicited responses by Michael Furlough, The Library Loon, and by Trevor Muñoz. As the Loon noted, many of the challenges described in these posts and the comments are issues applicable to any creative or forward-looking initiative within a library. Many readers here can no doubt attest to that truth.

The post that resonated most with me, however, was Trevor Muñoz’s assertion that DH is not just something librarians support through instruction or as liaisons or project managers, but is something that librarians themselves should be actively undertaking. As Trevor acknowledges, he has a unique occupational role straddling both a traditional academic library and a DH center; and as DH becomes more prevalent within academia, I imagine we will see more of his type of dual-appointment roles.

At the same time, I think Trevor’s point can be extrapolated even further to encompass how DH tools, methods, and technologies have the potential to help enhance and evolve a wealth of professional practices beyond academia and across all of cultural heritage. It is this ability to reinvigorate the work of non-academics, such as librarians, archivists, and collection managers, that has many of us in cultural heritage excited about DH as an emerging idiom within memory institutions. As the work of DH centers like CHNM and MITH gain more exposure outside the confines of academia, the broader cultural heritage community will better understand how DH can, as the recent book Digital_Humanities asserts, “open up important new spaces for exploring humanity’s cultural heritage and for imagining future possibilities using the transmeta methods and genres of the digital present.”

But that’s the gauzy version — some examples please! The attendance of a number of librarians, archivists, and other cultural heritage workers at the recent Topic Modeling workshop at MITH (#dhtopic for the twitterati; GDoc of notes) was a good example of this community’s interest in the promise of topic modeling as a tool to enhance discovery and rethink many fundamental practices around collection management and accessibility. As one of the non-academics in attendance, I was there to better understand how the enviable work of the talented DHers in the crowd can be adapted or transplanted (or, hell, brick-through-window’ed) into everyday practices in libraries, archives, and museums.

What galvanizes many of us working in cultural heritage is how DH tools and practices will enable us to move beyond the traditional methodologies of description of, and access to, archival or cultural collections. These traditional practices, holdovers from a world of physical materials and all the attendant requirements of arrangement, bulk, and storage, have also been fundamentally subjective. Catalogs, finding aids, LCSH — all are products of interpretive biases. That inherent subjectivity engendered a minor, if ongoing, crisis of conscience once contemporary criticism called into question the façade of objectivity in the management of cultural and historical materials (see, for instance, in archival studies, the work of Terry Cook, Heather MacNeil, and David Bearman). But tools like topic modeling, text mining, data visualization, and other methods of distant reading have the power to obviate (or at least largely reduce) the interpretive imposition of the cultural heritage professional at the point of access. They will allow collection stewards to refocus their efforts on providing the tools necessary for users to interpret and understand materials instead of focusing on the descriptions and classifications that group or arrange them.

Because of this, when discussing topic modeling and its promise for cultural heritage at the workshop, I was less fretful of the fallibility of the algorithmic presumptions of Latent Dirichlet allocation and more interested in what I’ll call DH’s confrontational potential — something similar to Mark Sample’s declaration of “an insurgent humanities.” Trevor Owens, in his cogent post about the tweets from #dhtopic, captured something of this seeming divide, noting the assumed disjunction between the exploratory and the evidentiary and how DH dialogues often run on two parallel tracks, one focusing on the freewheeling use of DH tools for discovery and the other on the use of DH tools to validate a specific argument. Here, the “generative discovery” possible with computational tools (akin to Stephen Ramsay’s “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around“) is merely prologue to the overall process of building an evidence-based defense “against alternative explanations.”

But for librarians, archivists, and collection managers, there is no need to take that next step — enabling alternative explanations is entirely the goal of supporting accessibility and building or providing discovery tools. Argumentation or justification, while essential to scholarly knowledge production, is counter to the goals of the collection manager in describing and making available records. Our traditional methods of making materials available (taxonomic, ontological — the finding aid, the OPAC) are complicated by all sorts of logical or illogical interpretations and subjectivity. Tools like topic modeling offer the ability to bypass that interpolation, that annotative interruption, and hand users and researchers the tools to construct their own topics, queries, pathways, and meanings.

While subjectivity may be inescapable when it comes to archival appraisal and collection acquisition policies, librarians and archivists strive for anonymity and objectivity when creating systems of discovery. We strive for something beyond the influence of the idiographic. But even more than that it is the ability to enable simultaneous and, especially, contradictory means of discovery and interpretation. The more context we can provide the better; the more contradiction and interpretation we can enable, the stronger are our discovery tools. This is the opposite of argumentation. DH tools and methods offer, then, if not an antidote to the immutability of traditional descriptive and discovery methods, then at least a confrontational alternative and a substantive corrective.

That one collection of resources can give different users different outcomes and support contradictory arguments may sound too post-structuralist or relativist for some. But I think it signals a healthy reassessment for cultural heritage institutions who for too long have placed the collection manager — the librarian, the archivist, the collection manager — at the gate of discovery and access. The digital humanities have the potential to change the nature of that equation, to upset established methods of description and access, and to reaffirm the role of the cultural heritage professional as essential to preservation, accessibility, and usability of information and the cultural record. Here’s to making this blog and the dh+lib discussion group a place to explore how that affirmation is happening.

Debates in the Digital Humanities

RESOURCE: Debates in the Digital Humanities

The open access version of the well-received book, Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, Director of the CUNY Academic Commons. Features essays by DH scholars and practitioners in an innovative online platform on a variety of current conversations in the field. The website also announces plans to expand the online edition to include new essays – watch for a forthcoming CFP!

Evaluating DH Work: Guidelines for Librarians

In this post, Zach Coble explores the benefits of creating guidelines for the evaluation of librarians’ digital humanities work for the purposes of hiring, appointment, tenure, and promotion, and offers a basic framework for what those guidelines might look like.

This post was published in the Journal of Digital Humanities, volume 1, issue 4.

Digital humanities (DH), as well as related fields such digital media studies and digital libraries, have presented many opportunities for libraries. These include the establishment of DH centers, the development of new data standards, new forms of scholarly communication, the creation of new resources (and novel ways of asking questions of those resources), and the development of new tools for scholarship and accessing collections.[1] However, traditional modes of evaluation do not address many of the key aspects of DH work. As librarians become more involved in DH and begin to take on the title of “Digital Humanities Librarian,” how can we ensure that their work will be appropriately reviewed? While some librarians work individually on personal DH projects or scholarship, most collaborate with faculty, fellow librarians, and information technologists across campus and across institutions. The collaborative nature of DH work often blurs the lines when it comes to defining individual’s responsibilities and contributions. Similarly, new forms of scholarly output, such as a website rather than a paper or presentation, present additional challenges for those tasked with evaluating DH work.

Written guidelines for evaluation ensure that projects are reviewed fairly and provide a clear path for job hiring and advancement. Libraries clearly understand the importance of assessment and evaluation. The ACRL has guidelines for the evaluation of tenure track librarians and for those without faculty status. In 2010, Megan Oakleaf made waves with her Value of Academic Libraries report, which utilized existing assessment measures, such as college students’ information literacy skills, to demonstrate the positive impact of libraries. As the field of DH continues to grow, libraries will increasingly be called upon to dedicate time and resources to supporting this work. In order to encourage more libraries to support DH, to provide a framework that will encourage individual librarians to participate in DH, and to acknowledge and reward excellent work, libraries should develop guidelines for evaluation of librarians engaging in DH work.

Although librarians are often cited as important collaborators in DH projects, librarianship as a profession lacks a coordinated approach to DH. There are many reasons for this, such as the broad interdisciplinarity and rapidly evolving nature of DH, which makes it difficult to articulate a large-scale response. Yet it also stems from the fact that library involvement in DH varies across institutions: some libraries at large research-intensive universities host active DH centers while many small schools (as well as public libraries, special libraries, and so forth) are only vaguely aware of DH, if at all. [pullquote]A framework for evaluating DH work performed by librarians would ideally be one piece of a program to address DH from libraries.[/pullquote]In a recent survey by the Association of College and Research Libraries Digital Humanities Discussion Group, most of the librarians who responded did not have DH in their job title or description. Equally diverse are the types of work that librarians contribute to DH projects. A 2011 report on DH in libraries by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) noted that DH projects often call upon librarians for consultation and project management, technical and metadata support, instructional services, and resource identification.

A framework for evaluating DH work performed by librarians would ideally be one piece of a program to address DH from libraries. Such a program, possibly from the Association of College and Research Libraries, might also include criteria for undertaking digital projects and best practices for doing DH work. As the 2011 ARL report notes, “The general lack of policies, protocols, and procedures has resulted in a slow and, at times, frustrating experience for both library staff and scholars. This points toward the need for libraries to coordinate their efforts as demand for such collaborative projects increases.” Without an organized response, librarians lack the incentives, resource support, institutional backing, and network of colleagues necessary to be successful.[2] On the other hand, a coordinated approach could encourage more librarians to get involved in DH, motivate individual libraries to adopt related policies specific to their local needs, foster greater participation among libraries in the DH community, and create the demand for increased training opportunities–both as continuing education for professionals and in library schools.

Other organizations, such as the Modern Language Association, NINES, and 18thConnect, have recognized the distinct nature of DH work and adopted separate guidelines for the evaluation of digital projects.[3] Libraries would benefit from having a similar set of guidelines. Of course, every institution is different and no one set of guidelines will work for everyone. Also, the context and scope of a librarian’s contribution should be taken into account–a librarian asked to consult on metadata standards should not be faulted if the project fails to follow web design best practices. While acknowledging such nuances, there are certain baseline ideas that should be addressed. The following list draws upon existing guidelines for the evaluation of DH work and incorporates additional elements specific to libraries. It is intended to help generate conversation and is not meant to be comprehensive.

Peer Review

Traditional concepts of peer review still apply: review projects for impact, intended audience, originality, and excellence based on content, form, interpretation.
There are peer review groups specifically for DH projects (e.g. NINES, 18thConnect, MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions); qualified librarians could seek to join these groups or possibly to create a similar group comprised of librarians.

Nature of Digital Projects

How does the digital component contribute something that couldn’t otherwise be communicated?
The project should be evaluated in the medium in which it was created.
Reviewers should acknowledge the ongoing nature of digital projects (i.e. lack of a “finished product”).

Collaboration

Did the project consult outside experts to assess the project’s content and technical structure?
How does the project relate with other digital scholarship projects?

Usability

Is there an intentional and appropriate organization of information?
Does the project use accepted standards for web design, metadata, and encoding?
Is there interoperability with other sites, such as OAI-PMH?
Is there a thoughtful balance between design, content, and medium?

Sustainability

How does the project address issues of digital preservation?
Is there documentation or is the site code made available?

Other Considerations

Was the project grant funded?
Did the project result in any conference presentations or print publications?

References and Further Reading

[1] See Association of Research Libraries, Digital Humanities, SPEC Kit 326; Micah Vandegrift, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in the Library?“; Miriam Posner, “Digital Humanities and the Library: A Bibliography“; Matthew Gold, Debates in the Digital Humanities.

[2] For a discussion of barriers to DH in libraries, see Miriam Posner, “What are some challenges to doing DH in the library?” ; Trevor Munoz, “Digital humanities in the library isn’t a service“; Mike Furlough, “Some Institutional Challenges to Supporting DH in the Library“; The Library Loon, “Additional hurdles to novel library services.”

[3] See also University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries, Facilitated Peer Review Committee; Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Zotero | Groups > Digital Humanities > Library > Assessment and Evaluation; Modern Language Association, Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions; University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, Promotion & Tenure Criteria for Assessing Digital Research in the Humanities.

Assessment and Evaluation of Digital Humanities Work

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION!

DHNow has issued a call for writing on the assessment and evaluation of DH work. As indicated in the call, they are aiming both to expand their Zotero collection of existing publications, policies, and statements, and to provoke the publication of new work in this area. A selection of the latter will be published in the next issue of Journal of Digital Humanities.

The Editors are interested in gathering and soliciting work from the library perspective. Potential areas of inquiry include: How are librarians presenting their DH work to tenure and promotion committees– and how should they? How might the performance of a librarian newly-engaged with DH work be evaluated?

From the call:

1) We will build a bibliography of existing statements and institutional policies in the Digital Humanities Zotero Group Library. Group membership is open and we encourage DHNow readers to add materials and citations to the library.

2) We are soliciting new writing on critical assessment for the full breadth of DH scholarship. Work published online by December 3, 2012 will be considered for inclusion in the Journal of Digital Humanities. See How to Submit Your Work for more information.

Do You TEI? A Survey of Text Encoding Practices in Libraries

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION!

If you work in a library and have any experience with text encoding projects, from web development to project management, please consider participating in a new survey, available here.

Completing the survey should take no more than 30 minutes, and will help academic libraries develop strategic initiatives based on current practice.

From the announcement:

Following on papers, presentations and discussions that resulted from the theme of the 2009 Conference and Members’ Meeting of the TEI Consortium, “Text Encoding in the Era of Mass Digitization,” the launch of the AccessTEI program in 2010, and the recent release of the “Best Practices for TEI in Libraries” in 2011, it behooves us—stewards of text encoding initiatives in academic libraries—to better understand if and how text encoding practices have changed as a result of mass digitization by Google, declining budgets, and an increased emphasis on streamlined digital library services in support of speedier and more voluminous online content production and publishing.

The study is being conducted by Michelle Dalmau, Digital Projects and Usability Librarian for the Indiana University Digital Library Program, and Kevin Hawkins, Head of Publishing Production for MPublishing, University of Michigan Library.

Responses to our dh+lib survey: digest version

In March 2012, a conversation bubbled up on the newly-created ACRL Digital Humanities discussion group (DH DG) listserv about the need for a blog or online resource for those of us “big tent” information professionals– librarians, archivists, curators, and students–engaged with digital humanities. When the group assembled at the June 2012 ALA Annual conference in Anaheim (Bob Kosovsky, in attendance, has helpfully shared his notes), the conversation around how this resource might take shape deepened. Not wanting to restrict these decisions to those in attendance at ALA, we circulated a link to an informal survey on the DH DG listserv over the summer of 2012 to gauge preferences. A more thorough account of those results can be found here; what follows is a digest.

Who responded?

Librarians were the top respondents to the survey; of the 83 submissions, 65 identified themselves with this category. Additionally, most respondents did not have “Digital Humanities” as part of their job descriptions or titles. A slender majority of respondents hailed from institutions that either host or plan to host dedicated DH facilities; curiously, an impressive 21% noted that these facilities were “under development.” A desire for resources, then, is coming in part from those based in institutions with emergent DH initiatives, or from professionals engaged with DH outside of the bounds of dedicated centers or facilities.

Source preferences

The survey attempted to gauge whether the community had a preference for the source of content–aggregated or original– in addition to what themes and stories might be included.

The group assembled at ALA in June responded strongly to the question of source, indicating a preference for original blog posts rather than aggregated content. Additionally, we heard requests for content aimed at profiling and spotlighting the work being done in DH in collaboration with libraries. There was a particular interest in case studies around project management.

Source was not as prevalent a concern for survey respondents. While 75% of those who indicated a preference voted for original content, this number represents only 48% of survey respondents. 36% of those responding reported “No preference.”

Content preferences

Asked to express a preference for the topics to be covered–whether through original or aggregated content, respondents favored:

+ Case studies or write-ups of projects
+ Reviews or write-ups of tools
+ Articles on best practices around DH librarianship
+ Announcements and calendar of DH trainings, events, and conferences
+ Links to papers, presentations, and talks on DH librarianship published elsewhere

More than 80% of respondents indicated that these features would be “very important” or “important” to their work. Lagging slightly behind these leaders, “Recommendations and guidelines on project management” garnered a 71% positive response.

A surprising dud of the features list was “Profiles of DH librarians,” which 10% of respondents singled out as “Not helpful.”

Beyond the rankings of features we suggested in the survey, about a quarter of you responded to “What resources not listed above would you like included?’ with thoughtful suggestions (the full range of which can be found here).

What kind of blog are you?

A range of interesting descriptions were provided as freeform in response to the request to “describe the blog you would most want to read, recommend to colleagues, and contribute to.” 37 responses were recorded. Some took the opportunity to emphasize a preference for original content, an aggregation of current events, a practical or theoretical focus, or a regular posting schedule. Others were thoughtful about the spread of the blog, calling for a resource offering “tiers of accessibility,” with “appeal to the humanities librarian who has been thrown into the digital humanities cauldron and also to the librarian/IT specialist who has been given an assignment to support the digital humanities,” expressing “the diversity of DH librarianship.”

One respondent requested “non-English-language efforts and reportage.” We also saw some themes around a need for advocacy and commentary that went beyond standards and announcements, including:

+ calls for “critical” content that “rais[ed] difficult questions with space for discussion”;
+ “Something with ‘meat’– thoughtful/analytical content”;
+ “thoughtful writing that consistently balances hype and hope”; and
+ “frank discussion of the difficulties” around DH projects.

Several respondents emphasized the value and potential of a resource specifically focused on DH and information professionals. One wrote: “ideally, the blog would foster an actual community.” Another wrote: “It seems obvious, but I’d like the site to make sure it fully covers the library angle.” We saw an eagerness for content that would help librarians do DH well– and better.

For those who requested more specific content, we will be soliciting along those lines, in an attempt to meet your demand. If you are interested in suggesting a topic or post, whether you want to write it yourself or toss it to another author, please use our contributors form or contact us directly.

-Sarah Potvin and Roxanne Shirazi