In a post on the Digital Library Federation (DLF) blog, Julie Hardesty (Indiana University), Anna Neatrour (University of Utah), Bria Parker (University of Maryland), and Liz Woolcott (Utah Sate University) introduce the DLF Metadata Support Group, launched informally in 2016, as a resource for metadata and project management practitioners. DLF affiliation is not required for participating in the group.

The organizers have put together a Slack community, with “channels for linked data, python support, conferences, general questions and conversation and more.” They note that the Slack community is “the main focus of the group at this time.” Additionally, the group is “working on a collection of resources that we’re hoping will prove useful and grow in its usefulness over time.”

From the position announcement:

Harvard Library seeks a skilled, innovative, and collaborative professional to serve as Digital Collections Program Manager at Houghton Library.  The incumbent leads, coordinates, participates in, and/or collaborates on a series of initiatives and activities designed to build digital collections that facilitate access to and discovery of the library’s holdings, as well as new research and teaching methods utilizing digitized collections.  This position will help conceive and implement an evolving strategy designed to expand the library’s digital presence and to make Houghton’s extraordinary collections available in digital form, and in new and innovative ways.  On a day-to-day basis, the incumbent will coordinate processes to identify digitization priorities, and will plan, manage, and carry out projects, create workflows, and serve as a liaison to the Harvard Library Imaging Services, Digital Preservation Services, digitization vendors, and other partners on campus and off.  The successful incumbent will possess strong technical skills and knowledge, communicate effectively, work collaboratively and collegially with a broad spectrum of colleagues, and demonstrate the ability to grow and change.

Here’s an excerpt from the position announcement:

The Resident will serve as the Global Digital Humanities Librarian for the Research Services and Area Studies programs that lead the Libraries in creating new, engagement-centered research service models based in cross-university partnerships, user-oriented assessment, and long-standing success in advancing information literacy. As a member of the Research Services and Area Studies teams, the Resident will connect faculty and students in international and area studies departments with the Libraries’ growing digital humanities services through the Research Commons. The Resident will work collaboratively with colleagues across the Libraries to support this academic community throughout the research lifecycle from content generation/acquisition to data curation. The Resident will contribute to the Libraries’ ongoing efforts to deeply engage with and support digital humanities scholarship by acting as a liaison for multidisciplinary area studies research centers. Situated at the intersection of disciplines, resources, and services, this position will support the University’s efforts to create distinctive and internationally recognized scholarship and to facilitate knowledge exchange on a global scale. Reporting to the Digital Humanities Librarian, the Resident will enrich the Libraries’ support for the innovative research and teaching underway at one of the world’s most prominent research institutions.

Elizabeth England and Eric Hanson (both Johns Hopkins University) have authored a guest post on the Signal blog about the project England in working on during her National Digital Stewardship Residency at Johns Hopkins. England manages a digital preservation project focused on “a large backlog (about 50 terabytes) of photographs documenting the university’s born-digital visual history.”

England collaborated with Hanson, John Hopkins’ Digital Content Metadata Specialist, to develop and automate a processing workflow for the photograph collection; as England describes: “I’ve relied heavily on the electronic records accessioning workflow written by my mentor, the Libraries’ Digital Archivist Lora Davis, and worked with her to adapt the workflow for the Homewood Photography collection.” England relates:

All this to say, the collection is being processed at a more granular level than may be expected for its size. From the beginning, I knew that using scripts to manage bulk actions would be a huge time-saver, but as someone with essentially zero scripting experience, I didn’t have a good sense of what could be automated. While reviewing the workflow with Lora, I showed her how time consuming it was going to be to manually move the .NEF files in order to nest them directly below the descriptive job titles. She recommended I look into using a script to collapse the directory structures, and although I found some scripts that accomplish this, none could manage the variety of disc directory structures…I described the situation to Eric Hanson, the Digital Content Metadata Specialist here at the Johns Hopkins, knowing that he had experience with Python and might be able to help.

In addition to documenting the approach and process that England and Hanson developed for the project, the post reflects on the importance of collaboration when engineering new processes and encountering unfamiliar technology. As England concludes:

Eric’s role in the greater landscape of my project is to assist with metadata clean-up (much of which is still forthcoming), and I couldn’t have predicted how extensive this collaboration would become back when Lora suggested I look into a script to collapse directory structures. One of the biggest takeaways for me has been to reach out to colleagues in other departments, ask for help, and you both might learn a new thing or two. Our collaboration has been successful not just in producing these scripts to automate processing. When we began this process in January, I was rather intimidated by Python. I still have a ways to go with learning Python, but I’m now more intrigued than apprehensive because I have a better sense of its capabilities and potential use in processing large, digital archival collections.

England shares lessons learned and links to the scripts in GitHub.

Note from dh+lib Review editors: This post was edited after publication to correct inaccuracies in the description of the automation project, to provide links to the full set of scripts, and to indicate that the project is ongoing. Thanks to Elizabeth England for bringing this to our attention. Our apologies for the problems with the initial post.

Compute Canada / Calcul Canada has published,”High-powered computing: It’s not just for astrophysics anymore,” a post reflecting on the use and application of the Voyant tool. The post includes quotations from  scholars using Voyant in their research, including Diane Jakacki (Bucknell University) and Susan Brown (University of Guelph; University of Alberta).

200,000 unique visitors a year navigate to Voyant, a free, web-based tool developed by Compute Canada for text analysis. As Stefan Sinclair (McGill University), co-creator of Voyant, notes in the post: “‘Voyant has been on Compute Canada’s server for nearly 10 years, so it’s almost like it normalizes high-powered computing in ways that people don’t realize … It’s part of infrastructure that’s operating on a advance computing cloud.'”

Owen Stephens (Open University) has authored a post documenting the development of the Google Refine Expression Language (GREL) extension he wrote to add functionality to OpenRefine.

[W]hile OpenRefine extensions could be complex, writing one that simply added a new GREL function was quite straightforward with a little boilerplate code and the actual GREL function written in Java – and even with very little (pretty much zero) experience of writing Java I could manage to write a new function and bundle it in an extension with very little effort – this is my attempt to document that process – any corrections or additions to what I’ve written here are very welcome via the comments.

Stephens cites multiple documentation sites and users that will be helpful to practitioners consider their extensions and use of OpenRefine.

Todd A. Carpenter (National Information Standards Organization) uploaded “What Constitutes Peer Review of Data: A Survey of Published Peer Review Guidelines” to the Cornell University Repository to download. The paper reviews the policies around publication of data sets and how to understand peer review and data sets. Carpenter writes:

The process of peer review of articles varies from title to title, but it usually consists of two stages: an editorial assessment by the journal’s editor or editorial team, then an external evaluation by several peer reviewers…If a paper moves passes this initial test, it is then sent to independent reviewers for consideration. These reviewers usually provide a deeper analysis and critique of the paper, a step that, according to Walker and Rocha da Silva, involves factors such as study design and methodology, soundness of process and results, data clarity, interpretation of results, completeness of the study, novelty and significance, ethical issues, and other journal-specific criteria. Of course, this process isn’t without its critics, its faults, its troubles, or its resulting errors.

George Williams (University of South Carolina, Upstate) authored a post on ProfHacker about a resource he recently learned about during his institution’s project “to get all of our digital pedagogical resources to adhere to federal regulations regarding accessibility,” called the DIAGRAM Center (Digital Image and Graphic Resources for Accessible Materials). Williams highlights some of the most valuable resources:

Making Images Accessible: “[R]esources developed by the DIAGRAM Center to help content creators provide image descriptions.”

3D Printing, Tactiles and Haptics: “New technologies for creating tactiles and tactile experiences [to convey] spatial information”

Born Accessible Publishing: “[R]esources to help publishers and the myriad of other new, digital content creators understand the basics of how to make content born accessible”

Research projects: Descriptions of several different DIAGRAM Center research projects with links to examples, demos, and further information.

DIAGRAM Center will be of particular interest to GLAM professionals working on digital projects with an eye to accessibility and user experience.

Ed Summers (University of Maryland) has published a post on his blog about his collaborations with Matt Kirschenbaum’s Critical Topics in Digital Studies course. The goal of the collaboration between Summers and Kirschenbaum is to “provide a gentle introduction to the use of network analysis, aka graphs, in the digital humanities, while providing the students with some hands on experience using some tools.”

Summers breaks down how working with the demonstration visualizations he created, using MITH’s Research Explorer data, as well as sharing some of his inspiration for the class project (such as Miriam Posner’s Cytoscape tutorials, and a recent conversation with Posner, Thomas Padilla, and Scott Weingart on network visualization pedagogy).

From the announcement: 

The Senior Developer will consult with faculty and students to advance research projects and training; evaluate scholarly needs and define project goals for research projects; provide input on appropriate deliverables and reasonable schedules for completion; write, test, and debug original software code for applications that enable scholars and library users to collect, manage, produce, manipulate, or analyze digital information resources. The Senior Developer will modify existing applications to improve their functioning or achieve broader and more effective use and engage with new technologies to help researchers find their use and interest for research.

From the announcement:

This individual will be responsible for leading efforts to advance Kansas State University Libraries’ unique collections with enhanced discovery through digitization. The incumbent will lead and participate in the strategic development of innovative, scalable, and sustainable digital collections. The individual will lead the Digital Initiatives Unit and directly supervise 2 FTE, coordinate digitization work between Library units and departments and serve as a member of the Metadata, Preservation, & Digital Initiatives Management Team.