The Japan Disasters Digital Archive (JDA) is an advanced search engine for materials “from all over the web, individuals’ testimonials, tweets, prominently including content from international partners who are building digital repositories about the disasters” of 2011. In addition to facilitating searching through the archive’s materials, users can also use the site to create their own curated collections and interactive presentations. These collections can be shared with other users of the site, contributing to the collaborative, user-powered aspect of the site and its resources.

The site also contains a mapping feature, visualizing all materials tagged with geographic metadata in real time. The site’s documentation and tutorials are all very detailed, and provide solid background for anyone interested in taking advantage of the archive’s capabilities. All content on the site is available in both English and Japanese.

The archive provides an important digital space to collect materials from around the web on the disasters of 2011 in Japan, and will hopefully allow for the creation of additional content through its user-centered features.

Startwords, an online publication from Princeton’s Center for Digital Humanities, recently published its debut issue. From the issue’s announcement:

With an emphasis on exploration and creativity in both content and presentation, Startwords is “a forum for experimental humanities scholarship” that invites a broad audience to think about new or underexplored aspects of DH work. The title has three meanings: it references a computer science term for the words used to start a programming sequence, a literary term for the first time a genre appears in print, and a cheeky alternative to “stop words,” words discarded in the course of natural language processing.

Startwords aims to be “more experimental than an academic journal but more formal than a blog,” with the site open to content ranging from creative nonfiction, essays, and data journalism to writing that on new approaches to code and documentation, according to editor and CDH digital humanities strategist Grant Wythoff.

In addition to the site’s broad range of content–which currently includes items such as 3D models and a high-resolution interactive photo–it also features contextual note feature, which “showcases the interaction of development, design, and content creativity that is at the heart of the Startwords mission.” The publication will be of interest to the digital humanities community, both for its articles and its innovative design and supplementary materials.

The Medical Heritage Library is pleased to announce its 10th Anniversary Virtual Conference, to be held this Friday, November 13th from 11 – 5 EDT.  The conference features a broad range of presentations of interest to the digital humanities community, and is entirely free to attend. Presentations will be made via Zoom.

Registration for the conference is available at this link. The link to the event will be distributed to registered attendees on Thursday, November 12th.

From the announcement:

This position will directly administer and manage the library-specific information technology infrastructure for all library operations (other than those managed by the Student Tech Desk, LTS, or the University), including the integrated library system (ILS) that supports acquisitions, metadata services and cataloging, collection development, circulation and interlibrary loan, serials, and numerous administrative functions; internal systems such as leave management, and digital publication platforms and activities. The position will oversee the development and maintenance of the TALLONS catalog, providing leadership in the development, assessment, and implementation of best practices and procedures related to metadata creation and resource description and classification.

From the announcement:

Indiana University HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) at Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering has a postdoctoral fellow position to develop new methods for curating and studying digital library collections, along with research data derived from these collections, with a particular emphasis on historically under-resourced and marginalized textual communities. The position is part of the Scholar-Curated Worksets for Analysis, Reuse & Discovery (SCWAReD) project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Our project leverages human expertise and advanced technologies in the service of social justice by curating minority and other writings currently hidden among the vast collections of today’s digital libraries; the project will likewise explore the curation and preservation of research artifacts (methods, collections, derived data, research articles and reports) from the entire digital research lifecycle. These focused collections, or “worksets,” will be developed in collaboration with external collaborating researchers who will be selected through HTRC’s competitive Advanced Collaborative Support (ACS) program. The anticipated start date for the position is January 11, 2021.

On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance, a digital project from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries, uses collections as data and machine learning approaches to discover Jim Crow and racially-based legislation signed into law in North Carolina between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement. The project is in honor of Dr. Pauli Murray, a lawyer, Episcopal priest, and human rights activist who was also the co-founder for the National Organization for Women and author of States’ Laws on Race and Color (1951), a groundbreaking work for the civil rights movement.

From the project description:

On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance uses text mining and machine learning to identify racist language in legal documents, helping expose the wide-ranging effects of Jim/Jane Crow on the American South. We have coined the phrase “algorithms of resistance” in reference to Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018). If algorithms can reinforce racism, could we also use algorithms to fight racism? Instead of proliferating racist ideas, can algorithms help us better study the history of race and advocate for justice?

Project outputs include two publicly accessible, plain-text corpora, a git repository, a short white paper, the website linked above, and presentations to local and national audiences. An Association of Southeast Research LibrASERL webinar about the project can be viewed at this link.

Digital Humanities at McGill has announced a virtual speaker series, Spectrums of DH. Inspired by Professor Stéfan Sinclair’s legacy of DH Initiatives, the series features talks from renowned DH scholars and researchers from around the world. All events are free and open to the public via Zoom.

The series will run from September 17th, 2020 through April 22nd, 2021. The first talk in the series features Dr. Roopika Risam (Associate Professor of Secondary and Higher Education and English at Salem State University), “Abolitionist Digital Pedagogies: Beyond ‘Decolonizing’ the Classroom.” It will be held Thursday, September 17 at 1pm-2pm EST.

Additional details may be found on the official McGill Digital Humanities Facebook page (linked above) or on Twitter @mcgilldigihum. The poster featuring dates and speakers of events in the series may be viewed at this link.

The Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, in conjunction with the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries and the University of Pennsylvania, will host a virtual symposium, Silences in the LAMS: Digital Surrogacy in the Time of Pandemic, on Monday, October 12, 2020 from 1-4pm EDT. The event will be held via Zoom, and the access link will be distributed to registered attendees on October 11th.

Registration and full event details, including the speaker lineup and session titles, are available at the link above.

From the announcement:

Marquette University Raynor Memorial Libraries seeks a Digital Scholarship Librarian. The library’s Digital Scholarship Lab supports the growing number of Marquette faculty and student research projects involving web development, digital posters, mapping, data analysis, text visualization, open scholarship, and other means of digital knowledge production and communication. This person will play a key role in supporting digital scholarship needs on campus and serve as the liaison librarian to departments in the Humanities. This position reports to the Assistant Dean for Digital Scholarship.

From the announcement:

The Digital Collections Librarian manages the intake, maintenance, and sustainability of digitized materials that support the Schaffer Library digital collections program. As part of the Content & Digital Library Systems department, the incumbent works closely with colleagues to manage selected digital repository and digital preservation platforms, ensuring both a high degree of functionality, and that digital objects are available for research use in a variety of formats. This librarian serves as a resource for repository development and standards, and ensures that digitized and born-digital objects can be curated and maintained for short- and long-term access.

This project write-up from Susanna at indigenous.engineering highlights an important contribution to digital humanities research, particularly as it relates to the ways in which DH practice intersects with social justice work. The project uses computational methods to examine ways in which the misappropriation of Indigenous identities actively works to negatively impact contemporary Indigenous communities, and situates this theft of identity within the historical framework of the Dawes Act and its authorization of the seizure of Native American land.

The author used word clouds to examine ways in which the use of the term “Cherokee” on Twitter changed after Elizabeth Warren’s appearance in the Democratic debate on February 7^th.  While an initial word cloud generated immediately after the debate features words focused on the Cherokee Nation’s donations of culturally vital seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, another word cloud created twelve hours later led to very different results, with many additional hashtags focused on the debate and Warren’s representation of her identity. As the author writes:

Interestingly, the tweets do not even seem to directly refer to Warren herself, but rather other candidates in the debate–presumably vis a vis their performance relative to Warren. This is further evidence that Warren’s cultural misappropriation is in fact cultural theft: the name of a group of living human beings to whom she bears no relation or community ties is now taken for granted as a shorthand for her political brand such that it can even reference her opponents.

It should be noted that on February 8th, 2020, the 133rd anniversary of the signing of the Dawes Act, Cherokee identity was again demonstrably hijacked by a white politician–this time not thought direct legislation, but rather words & actions in the social sphere.

The author conducted additional searches to determine how positive and negative representations of Cherokee people were represented in tweets, and found that negative, stereotypical-themed tweets far outnumbered the positive ones. Finally, they examined tweets focused on Cherokee citizenship, combining the terms “Cherokee” and “citizen” to reference tribal citizenship in one of the three Cherokee tribes. They found that these tweets were focused on Cherokee sovereignty more than any other subject. As the author writes, “The data shows that as in the real word, Cherokee identity and tribal sovereignty remain inextricably linked online.”

This project will be of interest to any practitioner of digital humanities interested in the ways in which DH work can highlight and resist injustice while contributing to social justice work, and how computational methods can be used to reveal cultural biases and trends. The code for the project can be found on GitHub at this link.