All three have contributed to the project in various capacities: Sarah as a Review Editor (since 2017), John as editor of the Resources page (since 2015), and Patrick as lead editor of the dh+lib Review (since 2015). The incoming Editors-in-Chief reflect the collaborative spirit of dh+lib, and will work as a team of editors with a collective mission to provide a dedicated venue for librarians, archivists, and information professionals engaged in the digital humanities.

As founding (and now outgoing) editors, who have witnessed our “group blog” blossom into a community of practice, it is a bittersweet exit. We are thrilled to be able to pass the helm to this stellar group of editors, and we look forward to seeing the project grow and develop in new hands. In the meantime, we will remain involved in an advisory role.

Stay tuned for more information on what this editorial transition means for dh+lib, along with new opportunities for participation and community input.

Sarah Bond (University of Iowa) has written a blog post reflecting on a recent news item she reported in Hyperallergic discussing the proposed addition of over 2,000 hieroglyphs into Unicode.

In “The Gospel of Unicode: Digital Love Letter(s) and Art Through Numbers,” Bond gives a brief introduction into the development of Unicode and its use by academics, noting that “the creation of Unicode not only lead to the standardization of emoji (for which most people know it), it revolutionized the fields of Classics and Digital Humanities by allowing for movement from the stone to the screen in a standardized manner.” Bond also highlights its role in text encoding with the TEI.

Lukas Koster and Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer (both University of Amsterdam) have published an article in the Code4Lib Journal entitled, “FAIR Principles for Library, Archive, and Museum Collections: A Proposal for Standards for Reusable Collections“:

In this article[2] we propose a body of requirements for making LAM collections findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), as well as a set of recommendations for assessing existing institutional situations and for implementation of the requirements. These requirements and recommendations are based on the FAIR Principles for scholarly output (FAIR data principles [2014]) and adapted for cultural heritage collections.

The authors close with a roadmap for institutions looking to begin the process of making their collections “FAIR.”

The Semantic Lab at Pratt Institute has unveiled a new Named Entity Recognition (NER) toolchain and demo, in which six NER tools are combined into a single “dockerized” server to “lower the difficulty in leveraging them.”

The tools used are:

• DBpedia Spotlight
• Stanford NLP (using the english.muc.7class.distsim.crf.ser.gz classifier)
• NLTK trained on the Groningen Meaning Bank corpus
• SpaCy
• The OpeNER Project
• Tensorflow SyntaxNet: Parsey McParseface (POS tagger used to extract proper nouns)

The new NER toolchain is part of an IMLS funded project, DADAnalytics, a modular tool that performs supervised entity extraction from archival documents for generating linked open datasets.

The European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH) invites proposals for its inaugural annual conference, taking place December 7-9, 2018, at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

The conference theme is “Data in Digital Humanities,” and the organizers seek topics including (but not limited to):

• Historical perspectives on data
• Relationships between information, archives, documents and data
• Data and metadata
• The myth of raw data
• Critical data and data critique
• Data: dystopian and utopian
• Data and creativity
• Data science in digital humanities pedagogy

Proposals are due June 18, 2018.

The organizers of the 2018 Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference (October 5-7, 2018) have issued a call for proposals for presentations addressing the theme, “Digital Scholarship: Expanding Access, Activism, and Advocacy.”

Topics from the call include:

• Accessibility of digital platforms and technology
• Access to resources to engage in or produce digital scholarship
• Digital scholarship and social change
• Sustainability and future access to digital scholarship
• Digital scholarship and multimodal/interdisciplinary access
• Access to digital scholarship beyond the academy
• The public mission of digital scholarship
• Creating opportunities for diverse voices and perspectives
• Designing for access, activism, and advocacy

Submissions may take the form of interactive presentations, project demos, electronic posters, panel discussions, work-in-progress sessions, workshops, lightning talks, or other creative formats.

Proposals are due Friday, June 15th.

From the announcement:

The UC Santa Barbara Library seeks a collaborative, dynamic, service-oriented librarian to foster excellence in digital scholarship and teaching through the delivery of innovative reference and instructional services to the campus community in the areas of social media, textual, numeric, and demographic data. The successful candidate will support data- and computation-intense researchers in the Interdisciplinary Research Collaboratory (“Collaboratory”), UCSB Library’s new digital scholarship and data support center, and serve as the Library’s expert on the lifecycle of social media data. The expected effective date of the position is July 1, 2018 or later.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Reporting to the Director of the Collaboratory, the Data Services and Digital Scholarship Librarian develops and implements programming that supports data-centric research across the disciplines, including workshops, online learning objects, and course-connected instruction; develops the Library’s research social science data collection; provides consultation services for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates in all Collaboratory areas, including but not limited to social science, spatial, and social media data; engages in extended project work with faculty researchers; consults on scholarly communication issues, particularly in regards to appropriate use and stewardship of research data; and maintains active Software Carpentry trainer certification (https://software-carpentry.org/).

Trevor Owens (Library of Congress) has written a thoughtful post introducing some themes around simplicity and complexity in digital preservation, in the context of maintenance, repair and an ethics of care. In “Parsimony and Elegance as Objectives for Digital Curation Processes,” Owens positions “unnecessary complexity” as a threat to sustainability while framing minimalism as the common thread of parsimony and elegance.

Further defining these terms, Owens clarifies his idea:

That is, our workflows, processes, and systems are parsimonious to the extent that they use “minimal number of assumptions or steps.” They are elegant to the extent that they are characterized by “minimalism and intuitiveness while preserving exactness and precision.” This isn’t to say that this infrastructure won’t become complex, but to say that it should only be as complex as it absolutely needs to be.

Owens ends by summarizing some of the “axioms” from his recent book, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation, that are most relevant to the notion of minimalism.

The ACRL Techconnect blog has published “Reflections on Code4Lib 2018,” featuring contributions from Ashley Blewer, Bohyun Kim, and Eric Phetteplace. The three authors each discuss presentations that resonated with them, and helpfully link out to recordings and slides when available.

Brewer, discussing Amy Wickner’s presentation on web archives, notes:

Wickner, citing Terry Cook, spoke of the “care and feeding of archives” and thinking about appraisal as storytelling. I think this is a great way to make a big internet seem smaller, understanding the importance of care in appraisal while acknowledging that for web archiving, it is an essential practice. Representation in web archives is more likely to be chosen in the appraisal of web materials than in other formats historically.

Other topics of discussion from the conference include a breakout session on machine learning and Matthew Reidsma’s auditing algorithms talk. The complete conference live stream recording is also available.

Quinn Dombrowski (University of California, Berkeley) and Joan Lippincott (Coalition for Networked Information) have published an article in the Educause Review introducing ways library and IT departments can develop comprehensive support for digital humanities at the campus level. “Moving Ahead with Support for Digital Humanities” summarizes a recent Educause/CNI whitepaper, Building Capacity for Digital Humanities: A Framework for Institutional Planning, which tackles issues ranging from “infrastructure and roles and capabilities,” to conducting an environmental scan.

Meaningful engagement with DH may require service owners to rethink the conditions under which a service can be offered or the kinds of support that they are willing to provide to users who are less familiar with the technology. This can spur discussions of what funding and institutional investment—also addressed in the white paper—looks like from a central IT or library perspective.

The post goes on to discuss ways to get involved on campus, emphasizing that “understanding both the broad DH landscape and the local institutional context is important in developing a plan for support.”

LIBER‘s (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche – Association of European Research Libraries) Digital Humanities & Digital Cultural Heritage Working Group closes out their “Digital Humanities Reading List” series with a fourth and final post on the role of libraries:

This theme examines a challenging question: what is the role of libraries in digital humanities? Is it to provide advice and guidance, to provide services that support these activities or to be a fully-fledged partner in digital humanities activities?

The answer is as varied as the different types of research libraries, and the literature highlights some of these tensions. It is clear, however, that libraries have a key place within digital humanities because of the collections which they hold. These collections often form the starting point of digital humanities projects and — when it comes to the outputs — libraries have a role in publishing, preserving and making these accessible.

As with earlier installments of this series, we are pleased to note that the latest piece includes our very own 2016 special issue, Digital Humanities In the Library / Of the Library.