Calling all readers! The dh+lib Review is resuming our summer “What Are You Reading” Series. During our regular summer break, we invite our community to share their summer reading choices. Guest editors will create brief posts to discuss what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. The series will run on a rolling basis pending the interest and availability of guest editors. Explore past posts to get a sense of the series.

If you’re interested in serving as a Guest Editor, email us at dhandlib.acrl@gmail.com.

Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Dr. Charlie Harper, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Case Western Reserve University.

For a long time my eye has been drawn to the eclectic disciplinary structures of modern academia and to one especially troublesome pattern: the institutionalized decoupling of the humanities and sciences. The estrangement of the humanities and sciences, which I view as equally important to a balanced and fruitful education, hasn’t always existed; it’s very much a construct that hardened during the rapid technological and scientific advancement of the 19th and 20th centuries. The resulting compartmentalization of education and disciplinary antagonism is an academic malady. I’ve come to see the purpose of libraries and digital scholarship as the curing of this malady… not simply in the promotion and facilitation of cross-disciplinary endeavours, but in the reworking of the intellectual fictions that segregate disciplines and degrees.

It’s in the field of machine learning that I see the greatest hope and direst need for the reunion of the humanities and sciences, because it’s here that philosophy, history, religion, linguistics, biology, mathematics, cognitive science, and physics, among so many more, all speak to the question forced upon us by our increasingly powerful and perceptive machines: What does it mean to be human? My summer readings have focused on problems that are foundational to this question, particularly the human and algorithmic nature of intelligence, perception, and freewill, and the ethical issues raised by technology.

Fry, H. (2019). Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Fry starts her must-read book with a simple observation: “Anyone who has ever visited Jones Beach on Long Island, New York, will have driven under a series of bridges on their way to the ocean” (p. 1). What’s special about these bridges is their exceptionally low clearance, sometimes only nine feet. The material connection that Fry makes between low bridges and modern algorithms is in the nature of their design and their ability to control behavior. In the 1920s, the urban planner, Robert Moses, purposefully designed these bridges with low clearance to prevent public buses, which poorer residence would have to take, from reaching Jones Beach. To get there, you’d instead need to be wealthy enough to own a car, which could easily clear the bridges.

Intentionally or otherwise, the algorithms of modern life reify ideas and societal structures through their design and they exert an often invisible control over our lives and choices. Fry takes a keen look at the many places in modern life that algorithms (frequently based in machine learning) are taking charge. Some of the stories she includes are simple, and horrifying, examples of unadulterated incompetence. For example, there’s the one about a budget tool implemented in 2012 by the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare that randomly cut vast amounts of medicaid funding for the disabled. When confronted about these unexpected and inexplicable cuts, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare i̶m̶m̶e̶d̶i̶a̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶e̶a̶r̶c̶h̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶c̶o̶r̶r̶e̶c̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶s̶u̶e̶  claimed their budget tool was a trade secret. A mere four years and four thousand plaintiffs later and Idaho’s super-secret budgeting tool was exposed as nothing more than a bug-riddled Excel spreadsheet. It took in numbers and spit out other inscrutable numbers, which then became the unchallengeable basis for peoples’ medicaid funding! Still other parts of her work illustrate the possible unintended, yet nefarious consequences of even beneficial algorithms, such as those that make health diagnoses and predictions. While such health predictions have immense power to help, they can also be used to prejudge people and deny medical care, employment, or any other number of services. For example, Fry hypothesizes that linking supermarket purchases with health data could provide a basis to deprioritize organ transplants for certain patients if a predictive connection was made between the foods they purchased and health outcomes. The NHS already deprioritizes smokers on the transplant list.

Overall, Fry divides her work into chapters on power, data, justice, medicine, cars, crime, and art. The chapters on justice, medicine, and crime are especially good, in my opinion, but this in no way is meant to detract from the perceptive scrutiny she exhibits in other sections. The book, like many current works on technology, raises key ethical problems that humanists and scientists need to solve collectively, namely how and when algorithms and humans should balance one another. For example, in self-driving cars, if a pedestrian steps in front of a moving vehicle, should the algorithm steer the car into a nearby wall and risk killing the passenger or does the car hit the pedestrian, possibly killing that person? How does the balance of this decision change if the pedestrian’s a child or if there are multiple passengers in the car? In the end, Fry demonstrates the wonderful potential and impending dangers of technology. She advocates keeping humans in the loop, ensuring there are efficient ways to redress algorithmic errors, and making clear that predictions made by algorithms are not unquestionable truths.

Levesque, H.L. (2017). Common Sense, the Turing Test, and the Quest for Real AI. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

When someone uses the term “artificial intelligence,” it’s frequently as a standing-in for the more specific term “machine learning.” Machine learning, in the sense of neural networks and decision trees, is powerful, but it’s not quite what the early pioneers of computer science had in mind as AI. Levesque’s work looks beyond machine learning to focus on what he calls Good Old-Fashioned AI, which is not the predictive intelligence of current algorithms, but the classical dream of common sense intelligence emerging in machines. 

His work is almost entirely non-technical and it’s only in the very last chapter that limited technological specifics emerge. This makes it highly accessible to many audiences. Instead of technical specifics, Levesque looks broadly at the question of what intelligence, knowledge, and common sense are. He also engages some more specific questions like how street and book smarts differ (and how does memorizing knowledge factor into intelligence in man or machine). The work is filled with intriguing thought experiments and situations that challenge the reader to carefully consider what does and does not count as intelligent action. While many works hail the miraculous advances of technology, Levesque’s text leaves a strong impression of just how far apart human and machine intelligence remain.

Heinlein, R. (1966). The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. New York: Putnam.

A classic sci-fi novel might seem like an odd choice to include here. Perhaps it is, but you should read it anyway! At its heart, Heinlein’s story engages the concept of true AI that Levesque examines in his book. So, according to Heinlein, what happens when a machine suddenly becomes intelligent and sentient? It wants to learn some jokes, of course! 

I won’t spoil the plot for you other than to say that the novel traverses typical Cold War era sci-fi tropes as an intelligent computer, named Mike, assists the Moon in its revolt against its colonial master, the Earth. Beyond my belief that this is Heinlein’s best work (sorry Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers), the central notion of humor and Mike’s desire to understand it is meaningful. Can we imagine a computer ever understanding humor, not simply producing it, but truly understanding it in the sense of Turing’s quip on a machine enjoying strawberries and cream? Humor is a strangely human phenomenon and it’s woven up in time and culture. Jokes don’t translate well between languages and even good jokes can fall flat if they’re beyond their audience. Like Levesque’s work, this enjoyable novel is a reminder of just how complicated the human mind is, and human language in particular, and how inadequate our current technology is at truly matching the intricacies of humanity.

Huemer, M. (2009). “Free Will and Determinism in the World of Minority Report” In Schneider, S. (Ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (pp. 103–112). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

The larger collection of essays from which this reading comes is filled with thought-provoking topics and it contains many chapters that offer rich sources of debate on issues raised by modern technologies. The fact that the collection was published a decade ago makes it all the more interesting, as many of its science fiction topics are now veering into the realm of science fact. Of these, Huemer’s “Free Will and Determinism in the World of Minority Report,” stood out to me as a particularly worthwhile read. 

Huemer looks at the central problem raised by the 2002 movie Minority Report: What does the prediction of future crime mean for the existence of human freewill? If you haven’t seen Minority Report, it revolves around three “pre-cogs”, whose ability to see the future is exploited to prevent crime by preemptively arresting individuals for “pre-crime”. In his discussion, Huemer notably hits on the historical roots of this type of predictive thinking in the concept of predeterminism, both in religion (e.g. Calvinism) and physics (i.e. classical Newtonian). This, too, immediately brought to my mind the antithetical concepts, which are perhaps more palatable to modern populations, of divine forgiveness and quantum uncertainty. Regardless, the existence of parallel concepts in a humanistic and scientific discipline is a reminder that the two need not be viewed as irreconcilable areas of study. Huemer goes on to explore the philosophical ideas of hard and soft determinism, and he highlights some interesting paradoxes that emerge when one attempts to reconcile determinism and freewill.

Huemer’s chapter is especially significant because the issues raised by it are no longer theoretical. Predictive machine learning technology is increasingly used by police departments and judicial systems to anticipate crime, set bail, and determine recidivism before parole hearings. In this way, the freewill-determinism debate endures, and the appropriate role of predictive technologies in criminal justice is an open, ethically-difficult question that requires broad societal participation. This is an excellent read in conjunction with Fry’s chapters on justice and crime.

Ungerer, F. & Schmid, H.J. (2013). An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

I’m currently in the middle of this text, but wanted to list it anyway because of the value it’s already had on my own thinking. Language is at the heart of human intelligence and consequently it plays a major role in both the humanities and sciences. This is exactly why Turing’s test of intelligent action in a machine was measured through language. 

Text analysis and natural language processing dominate many fields now, not just in the humanities, but also in places like medicine, where parsing text in electronic health records can help identify the trajectories of diseases over time. As unstructured textual data makes up perhaps 80% of the data we generate, knowing more about the cognitive basis of language is essential to moving forward with these problems. In my opinion, this is extremely valuable to digital scholarship, which historically has focused heavily on textual analysis projects. Deeper knowledge of the cognitive basis of language might help us break away from the sometimes repetitive, uncritical, and rote applications of common textual analysis methods like topic modeling and lead us to discover new avenues for exploration.

Charlie Harper

Charlie Harper is a Digital Scholarship Librarian at Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University. He holds a PhD in Classical Archaeology and prior to moving into digital scholarship, he worked as a Senior Archaeologist for the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research. His current inter-disciplinary research projects engage machine learning, text analysis, and GIS.

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Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Rebekah Cummings, Digital Matters Librarian at University of Utah.

Hello, dh+lib community! Summer is winding down, but we still have a few weeks (well, two for me, sob) to add readings to our fall syllabi or reading group schedules. While I hoped my readings would have a cohesive theme like humanities data curation, ultimately, I decided to discuss four completely unrelated readings that stood out to me the most this summer. Topics include a thoughtful critique of data cleaning, humanities video game scholarship, a must-read white paper on contingent labor in digital libraries, and a critique of computational literary studies. Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts in the comments or on Twitter!

Rawson, K., & Munoz, T. (2019). Against Cleaning. In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019. University of Minnesota Press.

“Against Cleaning” was originally posted in 2016, but its inclusion in the Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 made me revisit it this summer with fresh eyes. In my former life as a data management librarian, it was almost sacrosanct that good data is clean data. It wasn’t uncommon to hear researchers say that they spend the majority of their research time getting their data into a form that was usable or useful through the process of “tidying” up their data. In “Against Cleaning” Munoz and Rawson make a strong case that humanists need to quell the urge to KonMari our data or simply adopt data cleaning methods wholesale from the sciences and social sciences and consider the ramifications of stripping the diversity and nuance out of data, particularly in these early stages of DH work when methods and norms are still being established.

To unpack this idea, Rawson and Munoz look to Anna Tsing’s nonscalability theory, which resists the notion that everything is scalable. Rather, scalability is a quality that some things have and some things don’t. The example used in the article is data from NYPL’s What’s on the Menu? project, which contains both scalable and unscalable elements. In their project, Curating Menus, Rawson and Munoz aim to preserve data diversity and create scalability through the use of indexes for ingredients, cooking techniques, and meal structures. Norms and rules can be applied that allow “2 eggs and bacon” and “bacon and two eggs” to be conceptually bound while preserving meaningful difference between items that are truly distinct. This article is a refreshing reminder to the DH community that as we adopt and adapt methods from other disciplines, humanistic inquiry is still the goal, and we should be wary of privileging cleanliness over meaning.

Coltrain, J. & Ramsay. S. (2019). Can Video Games Be Humanities Scholarship? In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019. University of Minnesota Press.

One more from the new Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019! I have a confession that my personal interest in video games is virtually nil. As a text person through and through, it’s just not my preferred genre. However, it just so happens that the University of Utah, where I work, is home to the EAE (Entertainment, Arts, and Engineering) program, one of the top video game design programs in the country. My library even has an IMLS-funded project for archiving EAE theses, which are video games fraught with archival challenges like proprietary software, complicated authorship, and diverse file formats. So I feel as though the question of games as humanistic scholarship is relevant to my institution and my work in Digital Matters and is, therefore, a topic with which I should be familiar.

Coltrain and Ramsey acknowledge upfront that games are not, in most humanities departments, considered scholarship. But can they be? What are the necessary elements for something to be considered scholarly? If games are to cross the boundary from entertainment to scholarship, what new conventions would need to be developed for things like attribution? Do games even have the necessary features for analysis and interpretation? Ultimately, the authors make a compelling case for what a scholarly game might look like and the potential for scholarly games. Like other forms of digital scholarship, anticipated obstacles include adjusting the expectations of promotion and tenure committees and measuring impact of video game scholarship.

The rise of adjunct labor and shift to a gig economy over the past several decades has groomed many of us to think that short-term, grant-funded positions are a normal or even enviable way to enter the workforce. My personal experience mirrors this ideal. After graduating from library school, my first professional role was funded by a one-year subgrant from the Digital Public Library of America. While there was certainly a period of insecurity, it was an amazing opportunity and springboard to a tenure track position. While this narrative is brought out as the norm, the reality is that most contingent workers go on to more contingent work, half of contingent laborers make less than $40,000/year, and there is a startling lack of attention to the professional and personal futures of contingent workers.

The white paper sheds light upon the ways contingent labor disproportionately affects women and racial minorities and contributes to the overwhelming whiteness in our profession. It also highlights the disparity between the prestige and funding that grants brings to institutions and PIs while few of the benefits trickle down to the contingent labor fulfilling the work of the grant. If you are curious what institutions, funders, and workers can do to reverse this trend, read this excellent report and share it broadly with the decision-makers in your institution.

Da, N. Z. “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies,” Critical Inquiry 45, no. 3 (Spring 2019): 601-639. https://doi.org/10.1086/702594

The last reading I’ll put forward from my summer reading is “The Computational Case Against Computational Literary Studies” by Nan Z. Da. As a librarian who has lightly dabbled in text mining and topic modeling, I was a bit chagrined when I read her scathing but compelling critique. The article is clear at the outset that it is not a critique of DH writ large, just one prominent strand of DH, computational literary analysis, which Da defines as “running computer programs on large (or usually not so large) corpora of literary texts to yield quantitative results which are then mapped, graphed, and tested for statistical significance and used to make arguments about literature or literary history.”

Da asserts that computational literary analysis provides little explanatory power and shores up weak or inconclusive results with traditional literary criticism. She claims that the small amount of computing power (with the singular exception of large scale digitization efforts) required for computational literary analysis cannot justify the existence of literary labs and disproportionate funding towards the genre. The paper critiques the results of various high-profile CLS studies and divides them into two categories: papers that show no statistical results and papers that produce results but are wrong. The problem is not merely that the field isn’t mature enough or that methods are still being developed, but that the nature of the data does not lend itself to computation. According to Da, “Word frequencies and the measurement of their differences over time or between works are asked to do an enormous amount of work, standing in for vastly different things.” She concludes her argument by saying, “It may be the case that computational textual analysis has a threshold of optimal utility, and literature—in particular, reading literature well—is that cut-off point.” This compelling piece reminded me of another excellent reading on the nature of humanities data, Miriam Posner’s Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction.

Happy reading, and stay tuned for next week’s final installment of our “What Are You Reading This Summer?” series.

Rebekah Cummings

Rebekah Cummings is the Digital Matters Librarian at the University of Utah Digital Matters Lab. Her research interests include data management, digital humanities, and intellectual property.

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Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Amy Gay, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Binghamton University.

As I am still in the early stages of my career as a Digital Scholarship Librarian, and our digital scholarship services are still fairly new to the libraries, I have focused my summer reading on the wisdom of others who are involved with the Digital Scholarship and Digital Humanities communities. I like to mix it up with media formats and, although I love a good podcast, there are some valuable written works out there sharing DS / DH projects, tools, pedagogy, etc.

Mackenzie, A., & Martin, L. (Ed.) (2016). Developing digital scholarship: Emerging practices in academic libraries. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, an imprint of the American Library Association.

I decided to read this book because I have heard and seen it referenced by others frequently, and I am glad I did! The content of the book is broken into four parts: “A Review of the Landscape”; “The Agile Librarian”; “Digital Spaces and Services”; and “Communications and Social Networking”. Parts 1 and 2 shared multiple use cases, a majority of which were from Australia and the United Kingdom. While I enjoyed learning something from each of the sections, I found the last two sections to be the most valuable for the work and stage we are at with our digital scholarship services.

The third section, “Digital Spaces and Services”, offers detailed descriptions of what to think about when planning for a digital scholarship center (something we are currently in the process of doing) and how to build digital scholarship services that are adaptable and sustainable (something we have already started in our libraries but will continue to build upon as we move forward and grow our services).  The two uses cases include the center at the University of Notre Dame and services at the University of Salford.

The fourth section, “Communications and Social Networking”, contained useful advice for the outreach of digital scholarship services, particularly through social media sites. I recommended this chapter to our librarian who manages our social media account, as this is also a semi-newer territory for us. This section also touches on ways of staying connected in the larger digital scholarship community and suggestions for how to handle/respond to both positive and negative feedback received through social media.

Liu, A. (2018). Friending the past: The sense of history in the digital age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

This book was recommended to me by a professor in Medieval Studies who said it was a “must-read.” Liu discusses humanities’ relationship and sense of history across time, culminating with the thoughts of how society may sustain its own sense of history in the digital age. I found the last few chapters of particular interest, where Liu focuses on an in-depth look of various digital tools, including KnightLab’s TimelineJS, and terminology related to digital humanities.

Wheelan, C. J. (2014). Naked statistics: Stripping the dread from the data. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Ok, so I know this is not technically a “digital scholarship” type of reading. However, some chapters felt like it was. As someone who never took a statistics course, I was able to easily follow along through the content. Wheelan broke statistics down, for the most part, into plain language, and the data sets used as examples made the content more interesting to read. If you are interested in not reading the whole book (although, again, as a whole, it was useful for gaining a basic understanding of statistics), and would like to just check out the chapters that seemed to relate to work within digital scholarship, here are the ones I would recommend reading: Chapter 3 “Deceptive Description”; Chapter 4 “Correlation”; Chapter 5 1/2 “The Monty Hall Problem”; Chapter 7 “The Importance of Data”; Chapter 10 “Polling”; Chapter 13 “Program Evaluation”; and “Appendix: Statistical Software.”

Medium Articles

Since June, I have been down a rabbit hole of reading articles on Medium. Mainly, I have focused on projects with Python and Jupyter Notebooks, but there are many other topics covered that relate to digital scholarship and other topics of interest, such as creating healthy work environments, self-care, mindfulness, and others. I know there is a cap to how many articles you can read for free, but I decided to purchase an annual membership, choosing the topics I am most interested in following and sends me a daily email with articles from these categories.

What’s Next on the Reading List?

The next books on my list to finish this summer include to ARL SPEC Kit’s Supporting Digital Scholarship and Digital Humanities; Planned Obsolescence; and Digital Humanities in the Library

Amy Gay

Amy Gay is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Binghamton University. Her current research interests include digital humanities and pedagogy, primary source literacy, cultural heritage awareness, and community building through cultural heritage institutions.

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Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Villanova University.

I recently completed a two-year fellowship at the NCSU Libraries, where a major part of my work was teaching digital scholarship workshops and collaborating with creative residents funded by the Immersive Scholar Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant on the development of open-source digital scholarship projects for large-scale visualization environments. One of the aims of the grant is to share these projects across institutions, with the goal of overcoming technical and resource sharing barriers. As I start a brand new Digital Scholarship Librarian position at Villanova University in a few weeks, my readings this summer build off of the work I was doing at the NCSU Libraries and revolve around questions of reproducibility, sharing, and sustainability of digital scholarship projects. I’ve also been reading articles and guidebooks on best practices for teaching digital tools to users of varying skill levels and backgrounds, with an eye towards improving my pedagogical practice and new library services in the upcoming academic year. 

Battershell, C. and Ross, S. (2017). Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom: A Practical Introduction for Teachers, Lecturers, and Students. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

While teaching digital scholarship workshops and consulting with faculty on digital assignments this past year, I found myself recommending and returning this summer to this introductory guidebook on approaches to teaching digital humanities methods and tools in the classroom. Claire Battershell and Shawna Ross have put together a very practical handbook. The first chapter covers overcoming fears of failure and resistance to learning new technologies. They note, “failure is just a fact of life” and experimentation is an essential part of the learning process and should be valued just as much as the end-product. In Chapter 5, the authors provide different examples of classroom activities that vary in length, from 10 minutes to a single class, to a week’s worth of learning exercises. These different classroom activities and allotted time frames have been most useful to me when advising faculty on how much time they will need to teach a specific tool or provide a lesson plan. In Chapter 8, there are some useful sample grading rubrics for different kinds of digital assignments provided, such as developing mapping and timeline projects. In addition to providing sample class activities, grading rubrics, and examples of digital assignments and projects, the authors have created a helpful web companion to their book, which is hosted in Scalar and updated every academic year with more digital resources and classroom assignments on these topics. The book also includes chapters on ensuring accessibility for individuals with disabilities, syllabus design, developing digital assignments, and evaluating digital projects.

O’Sullivan, J. (2019, July 9). The humanities have a reproducibility problem. talking humanities, Curated by the School of Advanced Study, University of London, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/g1j7-w527

Reproducibility is a core tenet of the scientific process that dictates the replication, transparency, and accuracy of research results and methods. In this blog post, James O’Sullivan discusses open research practices and the shortcoming of reproducibility within the digital humanities. Unlike scientific research, O’Sullivan notes humanities scholars often “accept the findings of their peers without access to the data from which discoveries are drawn.” This is a huge problem as humanities scholarship continues to develop and engage in more computational criticism. While access to data is only one part of the problem, “the relative obscurity of computer-assisted techniques” are a huge contribution to the rise of the reproducibility problem within the digital humanities. Although some computational work is sensitive and relies on literary datasets that are still under copyright and make things difficult to share, O’Sullivan argues we could be doing a better job at documenting our research methods and data workflows. He stresses that we need to work harder at making our DH research methods more transparent and reproducible if we want our research to be interdisciplinary and reach wider audiences. In his commentary, he emphasizes, “We need to dispel the mysticism embedded in digital humanities. Scholars with technical proficiencies have a responsibility to explain their methods more clearly, while the less technical need to increase their familiarity with new practices. It is frustrating that there are still journals that will not consider articles for peer-review because ‘the method has not been fully explained.’” 

The topic of reproducibility has been popping up more and more within the DH community. At the DH2017 conference in Montreal, Alan Lieu, Scott Kleinman, Lindsay Thomas, Ashley Champagne, and Jamal Russell also discussed the challenges of reproducibility within DH. In their panel, “Open, Shareable, Reproducible Workflows for the Digital Humanities: The Case of the 4Humanities.org ‘WhatEvery1Says’ Project,” they discussed the “lack of widely shared technical conventions and appropriate scholarly and publishing practices” in the digital humanities that make it difficult to answer reproducible questions. They also talked about the 4Humanities.org WhatEvery1Says (WE1S) project, which is working towards developing a more “open” and replicable “digital humanities methodology.” According to the panelists, the WE1S project will address “a growing need for ways to share and reproduce data workflows in digital humanities research in order to make DH comparable to ‘open science.’” As this project and the conversations around the reproducibility problem evolves, I’ll be interested to see how these issues are addressed. O’Sullivan makes some valid points that there is an increasing need for more transparent documentation and reproducibility within the digital humanities in order for our research methods to be improved, replicated, and built upon in the future.

Butler, Brandon, Shepherd, A., Visconti, A., and Work, L. (2019). Archiving DH Parts 1-4, Scholar’s Lab, University of Virginia Library. 

While I was working on the Immersive Scholar Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, there were many discussions on archiving digital scholarship projects and what that should even look like. This summer I started reading the Scholar’s Lab blog posts on Archiving DH and have found them to be very useful in terms of thinking through best practices for preserving DH projects. The blog posts are broken up into 4 parts and offer some potential solutions. Part 1 – The Problem provides a general overview of some of the problems we face when archiving DH projects. Not surprisingly, one of the biggest challenges facing archiving DH projects is a lack of institutional support and the constant change of technology. With frequent software upgrades and versioning, the authors note that there is very little infrastructure in place for supporting DH projects for the long term. Another major problem is not knowing when a DH project should be sunsetted or archived.

In Part 2 – The Problem in Detail and Part 3 – The Long View, they suggest thinking through these issues at the very early stages of a project and emphasize the importance of considering the cost of a project and the hidden fees with sustaining a DH project. Some of these include server costs, technical support, maintenance, security patches, software upgrades, and yearly costs of domain names. By thinking through these hidden costs and fees early,  the authors advise that it will be easier to assess how much time you want to invest and how long you want to maintain the project. In addition to knowing when to retire a DH project, they discuss the importance of having a data policy in place and clear guidelines about how you intend users to access, reuse, or not reuse your data. 

The final post, Part 4-the Solutions sums up the topic and offers some potential solutions. The authors stress that DH archived projects do not necessarily equate to “a fully functional, live, continuously developed project.” Since there “is no established, tried and true process or infrastructure for building a DH project that will last for centuries,” the goal of archiving a DH project should be to “keep the intellectual knowledge” of the project “accessible to the user in as close to the original format as possible.” Some of the solutions listed include using command line tools like wget and curl to create a static version of old DH projects built in static HTML, CSS, and JS pages, but they advise this solution is not “future proof” and does not come without its errors. Other options include containerization, depositing project files into an academic repository, abandoning the project altogether, or using web archivers like Archive-It and Webrecorder, among others. The authors note that we are “still in the early days of figuring out and building the infrastructure to support the long term accessibility of digital objects,” and there is no “one-box fits all” method for preserving DH projects. Throughout their blog posts, they reference other publications on this topic, while sharing their own insightful experiences and challenges with archiving DH projects.

Erica Hayes

Erica Hayes is a Digital Scholarship Librarian at Villanova University, where she supports faculty and students interested in integrating digital tools and methods into their research. Prior to joining Villanova University, she was the Project Manager on the Immersive Scholar Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant and an NCSU Libraries Fellow based in the Copyright & Digital Scholarship Center and User Experience Department.

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Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Bobby Smiley, Interim Director of the Divinity Library and the Religion & Theology Librarian at Vanderbilt University.

Mixing theoretical and professional, this summer’s reading has traversed everything from Stranger Things and white nostalgia to mathematics and critical theory, with stops on the history and state of librarianship and digital humanities in between. Months away from starting my research for a Ph.D. in digital humanities at University of London (School of Advanced Study) and just over a week into a new position (Interim Director of the Divinity Library at Vanderbilt starting July 1), I’ve been concentrating on ways to nuance theoretically my ideas about data, while also casting a critical eye on my profession’s own complicity in histories and current practices of exclusion and marginalization.

Greenhall, M (2019). Digital Scholarship and the Role of the Research Library. Research Libraries UK (RLUK) Report.

When I was first “on the market” in 2013, I looked to the Research Libraries UK (RLUK) report Re-skilling for Research as a resource to help me identify and cultivate skills useful for digital scholarship. And while I’m no longer involved departmentally with digital scholarship, I’m still engaged in library efforts to promote digital scholarship (specifically in the humanities), whether through pedagogy, workshops, boot-camps, or guest lectures, as well as project consultation or collaboration. So when one of my future thesis advisors, Jane Winters, sent me a link to this latest report, I was keen to get a comparative perspective. As it turns out, there are few, if any, areas of marked divergence, and the report’s findings reminded me in many ways of the 2014 Ithaka S+R report, Sustaining the Digital Humanities, despite being sourced from surveys and interviews conducted from January to April of this year. Based on I conversations I’ve had with colleagues in the U.S., many of the new RLUK’s report key takeaways echo similar features we’ve observed here as well: the growing import of digital collections and curation, the ambiguity and elasticity of “digital scholarship,” project driven scholarship complicating sustainability, consolidation of library resources, infrastructure, or professional staff working in digital scholarship, or what the report terms “the mixed economy of support,” with various stakeholders across campus and different departments within the library. Of that mixed economy, one point of departure between ARL libraries and those surveyed by RLUK is the greater role played by non-librarian library staff in collaborations on digital projects. Among librarians, however, digital scholarship remained firmly within the ambit of “digital” staff in similarly branded departments. (As a shameless plug, I write about this in my chapter for Debates in Digital Humanities 2019.)

Zeffiro, A. (2019). “Towards A Queer Futurity of Data,” Journal of Cultural Analytics. doi: 10.31235/osf.io/3kfs5 [PDF]

Currently, all my friends seem to be posting digitally enhanced, artificially aged pictures of their future faces, and I’m wondering what Andrea Zeffiro might think of this latest trend. Zeffiro’s article offers a critique of current data cultures, as well as an alternative framework for reconsideration. Looking to the work of Lee Edelman,  Zeffiro argues that the logic undergirding data culture can be read through “reproductive data futurism”; that is,

[a] [f]uture in reproductive data futurism is outlined by a technosocial order that must be preserved and defended because it is the space in which data will be anchored to reaffirm [or reproduce] the logic of the present. Data, much like the figure of the child evoked by Edelman, is a political trope through which we are coerced into the promise that more data collected now will lead to a better and brighter future.

Zeffiro examines Facebook apps, Mark Zuckerburg’s 2017 post on corporate responsibility and his initiatives for wider internet access, as well as Google’s smart cities efforts and suite of educational tools to unpack this logic, tracking how these tools and networks have been transformed into infrastructure. For Zeffiro, the constructive counternarrative project wold involve “working through” and “working toward” reading reproductive data futurism by embracing a “queer politic that begins with a rejection of ‘straight time’, what José Estebon Muñoz describes as … ‘the only futurity promised is that of reproductive majoritarian heterosexuality’”—which, Zeffiro contends, “inscribes contemporary data cultures.” In turning to queer theory, Zeffiro helps make manifest the heteronormative reproductive futurity that animates popularly received ideas about data and its uses, and offers us a way to trouble and reconceive that logic.

Hernandez Linares, R., & Cunningham, S.J. (2018). “Small Brown Faces in Large White Spaces.” In Chou, R. & Pho, A. (Eds.), Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS (pp. 253-271). Sacramento: Library Juice Press.

I was recently researching academic library diversity residency programs when I came across Rosalinda Hernandez Linares’s and Sojourna J. Cunningham’s “Small Brown Faces in Large White Spaces,” which is a chapter in Rose L. Chou’s and Annie Pho’s truly excellent and trenchantly powerful edited collection, Pushing the Margins. Linares’s and Cunningham’s chapter should be mandatory reading for any library administrator already overseeing or exploring diversity residency programs. Using grounded theory and interviews with women of color librarians, Linares and Cunningham illustrate how the rhetoric of multiculturalism has silenced and constrained librarians of color even as it was designed to empower. By muting or ignoring the voices of librarians of color, pipeline residency programs have gestured at diversity without furnishing a supportive environment or a sustainable way to foster diversity in the profession. As someone who has worked with library administration on efforts for greater diversity and inclusion, “Small Brown Faces in Large White Spaces” enjoins all librarians to pause, and take seriously what libraries are really trying to accomplish through these initiatives, and begin the process of revaluation and critical reflection. “If we consider our current bodily presence in the field in light of these failed projects,” Linares and Cunningham write in their conclusion, “turning towards the lived, intersectional experiences of women of color librarians can help us work through the ways in which our present is informed by our past.”

Bobby Smiley

Bobby Smiley is the Interim Director of the Divinity Library and Religion & Theology Librarian at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include tracking historiographical trends in American religious history, disciplinary information literacy, and historicizing the relationship between digital humanities and academic librarianship. His recent publications include chapters in Debates in Digital Humanities 2019 and The Grounded Instruction Librarian, and he is currently editing a volume on information literacy and religious studies librarianship for Atla Press.

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Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Andy Boyles Petersen, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries.

After returning from another year of terrific conversations at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Surveillance and the Critical Digital Humanities course, my summer reading list continues our discussions on surveillance of the marginalized. In particular, I am drawn to the ways in which recent texts in critical surveillance studies are making visible the structures that underpin our current digital identities, ranging from exposés on human interactions with the surveillance machine to explorations of racialized surveillance systems. As I delve into preparations for the upcoming year, these readings provide theories and strategies that will continue to inform and enrich my understandings of surveillance culture and its implications for both my research and teaching.

Roberts, S. T. (2019). Behind the screen: Content moderation in the shadows of social media. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Since its recent release, I’ve been eagerly devouring Sarah Roberts’ Behind the Screen, which focuses on the workers responsible for social media content moderation by bringing them “out of the shadows, out from behind the screen, and into the light” (222). In doing so, it challenges the invisibility often leveraged on this work by social media sites and their governing bodies. Historical discussions, interviews with workers, and future speculations about content moderation pair to paint a scene fraught with dehumanization, obfuscation, and marginalization. In an interview with The New Yorker, Roberts states, “It’s worrisome to see those kinds of colonial traditions and practices picked up again, especially in this digital marketplace, this marketplace of the mind that was supposed to be deliverance from so many of the difficult working conditions of the twentieth century.” For those of us who are actively embroiled in social media and the platform economy, this text asks us to reexamine the ways we engage with technology—both in our personal lives as well as in the classroom. As such, it helps make visible many of the underlying mechanisms that control our daily interactions, offering a gateway into discussions about new social structures and speculative surveillance futures.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York: PublicAffairs.

After glowing review from several of our students at DHSI, I’ve also settled down to read Shoshana Zuboff’s text on the capitalist foundations of our modern surveillance economy. Written in an accessible, quasi-journalistic style, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism weaves surveillance theory and scholarship with personal anecdotes, grounding the inequities and dehumanization inherent to surveillance capitalism in our lived experiences. Zuboff details how consumer convenience technologies, when paired with the monetization of aggregated personal data, markedly blur personal and private lives. This focus lends an urgency to the text, particularly when Zuboff notes: “if industrial civilization flourished at the expense of nature and now threatens to cost us the Earth, an information civilization shaped by surveillance capitalism will thrive at the expense of human nature and threatens to cost us our humanity” (347). Most importantly, Zuboff carefully traces the path of surveillance capitalism to its logical end—increased marginalization, indifference for morality, and the centralization of power. As a final call to action, Zuboff states “friction, courage, and bearings are the resources we require” to fight back against surveillance capitalism, asking readers to intervene in harmful surveillance structures and defend social and communal values (524).

Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. Durham: Duke University Press.

Browne’s foundational text explores the long history of surveillance mechanisms used against black bodies, from lantern laws to the Book of Negroes to biometric technologies. Through these examples, Browne introduces us to racializing surveillance, “a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is in or out of place’” (16). This work shifts the field of surveillance studies by providing a new frame with which to understand and analyze the surveillance experiences of marginalized groups. For the past few years, Dark Matters has been a cornerstone of both our DHSI course and my work in surveillance studies, particularly in regards to Browne’s discussions of biometric technology, sousveillance, and security theater. I’m eager to once again return to Browne’s text this summer, fresh with new ideas, theories, and strategies, in order to consider them through her focus on racialized surveillance and dark sousveillance.

Petty, T., Saba, M., Lewis, T., Gangadharan, S. P., Eubanks, V. (2018). Our data bodies: reclaiming our data.

Last on my summer reading list is the Our Data Bodies project’s 2018 interim report. This project provides an excellent entry point into the lived experiences of marginalized communities most heavily impacted by surveillance culture, investigating the effect of data collection and data-driven systems on their livelihoods. In particular, Petty, et.al include real stories from individuals across the United States who describe the difficulty in acquiring fair access to housing, social services, and employment. Interviewing residents of communities in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Charlotte highlights that these injustices are systemic, affecting marginalized communities across the U.S. Moreover, the Our Data Bodies project encourages readers to think carefully about their own data stories and the many ways in which surveillance culture—with admittedly different contexts and outcomes—affects us all. Overall, this text serves as a great introduction to critical surveillance studies and offers models of data storytelling and ethical community engagement to our students and colleagues.

**For those interested in exploring these themes further, Michele Gilman and Rebecca Green’s The Surveillance Gap: The Harms of Extreme Privacy and Data Marginalization is a fantastic companion resource to this article. Additionally, as the Our Data Bodies project is ongoing, be sure to keep an eye on their site for further developments.

Andy Boyles Petersen

Andrew Petersen is a Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Michigan State University Libraries where he supports faculty, students, and staff interested in exploring digital pedagogy and research. He is co-founder of the Makers by Mail and SurvDH projects, and his research centers on issues surrounding surveillance, data ethics, and maker culture.

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Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Kristen Mapes, Assistant Director of Digital Humanities in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University.

As summer shifts into fall planning, I find my reading oriented toward articles that I may assign to my students alongside writings that speak to the DH values I try to put at the center of my work as a practitioner. After reading these three articles and providing a bit of a summary, I have noticed a common thread: we are still working out what DH really means in practice. What rhetoric do we use to frame our relationships to each other, or how we introduce people to our practices? What infrastructures shape what is possible and how we carry things out? And truly at the center of it all: how can we avoid being spread too thinly, whether on committees, in consultations, or across methodologies?

Morgan, P.C. (2018). The consequences of framing digital humanities tools as easy to use. College and Undergraduate Libraries, DOI: 10.1080/10691316.2018.1480440 (Pre-print available at https://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/librarypapers/3/)

Morgan challenges librarians working in digital humanities to look closely at the way we teach and frame DH tools when giving workshops, presenting in classrooms, and conducting consultations. Too often, we characterize DH tools as ‘easy’ without thinking through what is ‘easy’ about them and forgetting that ‘easiness’ is a relative concept for each learner we encounter. By framing a tool as ‘easy’, we hide the challenging data modeling and methodological work that underlies the work behind the tool.

Morgan posits that librarians rely on ‘easy’ DH tools due to issues of scalability in DH infrastructure. By placing the burden of learning to the learner and relying on the ‘easiness’ of the tool and pre-existing documentation for it (often created by the tool-creators themselves), we are doing two things: making up for the lack of time and support we can give to each person or project, and shifting the risk of success or failure to the learner. This shift of responsibility leads learners to blame themselves if they have trouble with the tool. Morgan points out that this decision to shift risk and rely on ‘easy tools’ is understandable in the labor contexts in which librarians operate, and it is often necessary considering the non-scalability of humanities projects due to the humanities’ complicated relationship to data.

If we want to grow participation in DH, we need to think carefully about how we frame introductions to its methods and tools by keeping in mind the situatedness of “ease” and the future infrastructures available to support nonscalable DH projects.

Risam, R. (2018) Diversity work and digital carework in higher education. First Monday 23.3 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i3.8241

In this article, Risam critiques the academic environment, in the form of the neoliberal university, by applying the theoretical frameworks of affective labor and digital carework to the field of digital humanities. Risam argues that diversity work is a form of affective labor that is disproportionately taken on—willingly or unwillingly—by women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and others whose labor writ large has been traditionally unseen and undervalued. Affective labor is baked into DH through expectations of ‘niceness’ and interdisciplinary collegiality. Digital carework—“a form of affective labor that relies on the deployment of affect through digital media to remediate inequalities within higher education”—is also baked into DH through expectations of community building, mentoring, and collaboration.

DH is seen as an opportunity to expand the archive and provide inclusivity by breaking canon, and yet the work of challenging the archive and challenging systems of oppression is itself disruptive and not “nice.” The promise of DH as functioning to support diversifying the archive and/or the academy is in direct odds with the rhetoric around DH as “nice” and the expectation that people performing DH work take on the affective labor of building community and being “friendly” and “supportive.” Risam returns several times to the critique that diversity initiatives in academic settings expect inclusion to be “visible but not transformational,” that diversity and inclusion are seen as boxes to check but that the academy has no real interest in shifting academic culture to live out those values. Risam centers her concern around the people undertaking this labor, asking us to consider at what point the labor of community building and visible representation venture into exploitation and where the balance between waged and unwaged labor lies in the academic context.

Caplan, L. (2016) Method without methodology: Data and the digital humanities. E-flux 72 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/72/60492/method-without-methodology-data-and-the-digital-humanities/

This article is a critique of the Selfiecity project, and while not particularly new, something I just discovered. Caplan pushes against the tendency of digital and/or statistical projects to prioritize experimentation and visualization over analysis. Referring to Borges’ warning against creating a map the size of the place it is intended to represent, Caplan shares the context of Durkheim’s introduction of statistics into sociology and the revolution (albeit flawed) in method that followed. Big data, which at once provides granular, detailed data about individuals and operates on an unprecedented scale, tempts researchers into projects that seek to create such a doomed map.

The critique of Selfiecity focuses on the scale of data explored in the project. Caplan makes a strong point about the role of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in the data processing from a labor ethics and humanistic perspective.

While Caplan discusses Selfiecity (as well as Phototrails) in particular, the caution against projects that lack methodological grounding and focus could be applied to many DH projects, large or small. This critique touches on a tension around the field of DH, as most practitioners find themselves encountering and embarking upon new methodologies which require new training and backgrounds before they can be fully engaged with.

Kristen Mapes

Kristen Mapes is Assistant Director of Digital Humanities in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State University where she collaborates with colleagues from across departments and around campus. In particular, she is on the planning team of the Digital Scholarship Lab in the MSU Libraries and is a Core Faculty member in the DH@MSU program, teaching introductions to DH for undergraduates. Kristen’s research interests include academic communities online and exploring new ways of visualizing digitized cultural material. She also runs the Global Digital Humanities Symposium and is committed to finding ways for DH to advance social justice and equity in the academy.

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Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Tierney Gleason, Reference and Digital Humanities Librarian at Fordham University Libraries.

My reading list this summer has focused on issues of labor, web accessibility, and the use of archives in digital humanities, with an eye towards seeking out new research partnerships, improving technical skills, and developing new projects and workshops in the coming academic year.

Risam, R., & Edwards S. (2018). Transforming the landscape of labor at universities through digital humanities. In R. Kear & K. Joransen (Eds.) Digital humanities, libraries, and partnerships : a critical examination of labor, networks, and community (pp. 3-17). Cambridge, UK: Chandos Publishing. (Pre-print available at https://digitalcommons.salemstate.edu/library_facpub/2/)

Written by an English professor and a librarian, this article documents the partnership between Roopika Risam and Susan Edwards to create the Digital Scholars Program for undergraduates at Salem State University. Situating their work in institutional and economic context, the authors describe their challenges engaging in DH scholarship in the library at a regional comprehensive university amidst shrinking budgets, a reduction in library staff, heightened research benchmarks for tenure and promotion, and new responsibilities created by digital projects outside of traditional job descriptions. Through naming multiple points of tension that place unequal expectations of labor on librarians, Risam and Edwards explain how positioning labor issues at the center of their DH work allowed them to explore a collaboration that championed student success, highlighted the university’s special collections, connected with the local community, and provided guidance for taking direct action to cultivate equitable research partnerships between contributors. I appreciated the mention of project charters, especially A Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights from UCLA, since that is something I often stress to graduate students, as well as the example of Risam finding a way for Edwards to receive compensation for her work on a grant-funded project. With quotes from scholars and/or scholar librarians Lisa Spiro, Miriam Posner, Micah Vandegrift, and Stewart Varner, this is a great article for librarians working at schools with smaller budgets looking to renew their inspiration for what ethical collaboration in DH can and should look like for everyone involved.

Williams, G. H. (2012). Disability, universal design, and the digital humanities. In M.K. Gold (Ed.), Debates in the digital humanities (pp. 202-212). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

I have returned to this article as I move towards including web accessibility as a core component of my teaching on digital tools and the creation of born-digital scholarly communications. Williams challenges DH scholars to examine universal design principles in their work to reach the widest possible audiences. He recounts working on a project building an accessible website at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) in 2001 and describes how a blind person demonstrating screen-reading software led him to reevaluate his perspectives on disability. He began to see how traditional ways of accessing technology were socially constructed and conclude that “All technology is assistive, in the end.” (204) Besides exploring the importance of universal design principles, Williams recommends digital scholars begin exploring resources from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), stresses the need for free and open source accessibility tools to work in tandem with content management systems like WordPress and Omeka, provides an example of how the tool Anthologize aids readers who are blind or experience low vision, and suggests tools to crowdsource and produce captions, subtitles, and transcripts. I look forward to researching what tools and plugins have been developed since this article was published to meet these needs since I have colleagues who are interested in producing digital editions in the coming year. As a librarian working in DH, I see incorporating web accessibility into my information management skill set as an opportunity for advocacy and inclusion within my libraries and broader communities. For those who are interested, resources on understanding How People with Disabilities Use the Web from the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) along with the Introduction to Web Accessibility from Web Accessibility In Mind (WebAIM) serve as useful companion resources to this article.

Jules, B., Summers, E., & Mitchell, V., Jr. (Apr 2018). Ethical Considerations for Archiving Social Media Content Generated by Contemporary Social Movements: Challenges, Opportunities, and Recommendations [White Paper]. Documenting the Now.  https://www.docnow.io/docs/docnow-whitepaper-2018.pdf.

This white paper covers the work of the Documenting the Now project to create “new digital tools to facilitate the collection, analysis and preservation of tweets” with a focus on “social media content created by participants in the recent wave of African-American activism in response to police shootings” (2).  The findings and recommendations in this report stem from research, data collection, software development, ethical questions, and most importantly community conversations, and come together to make this report a thought-provoking read for archivists, librarians, and researchers. The authors describe their work over a two-year period grappling with ethical issues ranging from Twitter’s Terms of Service, police surveillance of Black communities, discovering a fake account run by Russian operatives posing as a #BlackLivesMatter activist, and how professional archival practices can cause harm to Black communities. One of my biggest takeaways (and there are many!) from this paper is to increase efforts to challenge researchers to think more critically about social media data in my role as a librarian, particularly in terms of examining the data closely and encouraging complementary research to “educate oneself about a movement and its actors” (5). The other important takeaway is to encourage fellow librarians and archivists “to apply traditional archival practices such as appraisal, collection development, and donor relations to social media and web materials” (12). The internet may provide to the opportunity to scrape content from the web (3), but this content is most meaningful when collected ethically with community participation, needs, and safety as central to the archival process, and the collection is contextualized by personal engagement and additional sources to provide a fuller picture of the lives and activism of social media content creators.

Chaudhuri, N., Katz, S. J., & Perry, M. E. (Eds.). (2010). Contesting archives: finding women in the sources. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/460058258

I had read two of the articles in this collection in the past introducing me to the feminist research method of “reading against the grain” but chose to read the whole book cover to cover this summer. As a feminist practitioner of DH, my personal research aims to question archival records and look for new ways to circumvent archival silences. Additionally, honing these critical skills to think about different pathways for exploring the histories of marginalized groups (women, people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ communities, poor and working-class communities, people with disabilities, etc.) sharpens my ability to advise researchers on how and where to search for for specific sources.  This anthology contains twelve papers from a diverse set of critical feminist historians describing their methodologies for stitching to together various archival sources to recover women’s histories from around the world addressing “the tired assumption that an archive is simply an immutable, neutral, and ahistorical place where historical records are preserved” (xiii). While this book does not directly engage with digital humanities or the library profession, it provides useful insights regarding feminist methodologies, challenges posed by archival records within the research process, and provides models on how to creatively interpret and recover information to develop scholarship about the lives of everyday women through traces in historical documents. Framing the difficulties in archival records as an opportunity rather than a deficiency, this book would be valuable background reading for those thinking about creating a feminist DH project from a fragmentary archive.

Tierney Gleason

Tierney Gleason is a Reference and Digital Humanities Librarian at Fordham University Libraries where she provides reference and instruction services along with developing specialized research services to support faculty and graduate students on digital scholarship, copyright, and scholarly communication. She manages her own digital humanities projects in order to strengthen her reference, teaching, and technical advising skills. Her current interests focus on using digital research methods and tools to explore 19th century New York City history, particularly Magdalen institutions and the relationship between poor laws, citizenship, policing, and the rapid expansion of the city’s social welfare infrastructure. She is also interested in DH pedagogy, #critlib, web accessibility, and examining social media as one of the many tools of movement building.

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Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. This post is from Anna Kijas, Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian at Boston College.

My current reading list focuses on issues of gender, privilege, and canon building in libraries, archives, and humanities disciplines—in particular, music. As a digital scholarship librarian I am especially interested in how these issues are being explored and addressed in digital humanities by GLAM professionals and scholars. The issue of reifying canon in digital library collections and digital humanities projects, especially those engaged with recovery of texts or music, is one that I have been exploring for a while through my own research and projects, and several of the readings in my list were critical during my preparation for a keynote that I gave at the Music Encoding Conference in May 2018 at the University of Maryland.

Caswell, Michelle (2017). “Teaching to Dismantle White Supremacy in Archives,” The Library Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1086/692299

In this article, Michelle Caswell reflects on an exercise she developed and used with her students in which they identify examples of embedded white privilege in archives, as well as many ways that they can dismantle this privilege through their professional praxis as future archivists. Caswell argues that faculty (in this case, library and information science faculty) should model behaviors of critique and resistance for their students in order for them to believe that they can disrupt existing oppressive structures. I can see how the actions and outcomes presented by Caswell can also be applied by faculty in disciplines outside of LIS, especially those whose students use archives as part of course projects or dissertation work. Caswell’s call to action—“We get the world we make, we get the classrooms we make, we get the archives we make. Let’s all work to make them more just”—is one that those of us engaged with social justice and critical librarianship have been hearing more loudly and frequently (especially during the past two years!), and it is one that we should all be working towards together.

Earhart, Amy E. (2012). “Can Information Be Unfettered? Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon,” Debates in the Digital Humanities. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/16.

Amy E. Earhart’s essay is one that I read when it was first published in the Debates in the Digital Humanities volume, but I recently returned to it when I was preparing my keynote draft on gender and canon in digital musicology. In her essay, Earhart examines canon building and digital texts, taking the reader on a deep-historical-dive to the 1990s and early 2000s when digital recovery was at it most active. She identifies a number of projects from this period that fall into one of two scholarly groups. The first group produced small, generally unfunded projects created mostly by individual scholars or collectives, while the second group—primarily consisting of large centers, libraries, and cultural heritage institutions—produced larger-scale projects. Earhart argues that the small-scale projects often focused on non-canonical texts and works by people of color, whereas the large-scale and institutionally-led projects reinforced canonical bias. Earhart notes that large corpora are generally located at major universities or receive grant funding. I’m struck by the similarity between the musicology and literary studies communities: privilege has determined who has entered the canon and who maintains the canon. It is crucial to ensure that our representation does not continue to exclude works by women, people of color, and other marginalized groups.

Noble, Safiya Umoja (2018). Algorithms of Oppression. How search engines reinforce racism. New York University Press. http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/987591529

Safiya Umoja Noble deconstructs the ways in which search engines, social media platforms, and artificial intelligence are driven by algorithms that privilege whiteness and are explicitly racist and sexist against people of color. The entire book is required reading, but chapter 5, with its focus on classification systems, may be specifically of interest to LIS professionals. Noble discusses a well-known 2014 case, where Dartmouth College students who worked with librarians and faculty to ban the use of “illegal aliens” as a subject term in the library catalog. Subsequently, the Library of Congress dropped the term from its subject heading authorities in 2016. She uses this case study to discuss the ways in which people have been classified and represented within the LIS field and how this has led to “continued biased practices in current system designs, especially on the web” (137). Through her research, Noble demonstrates how it is imperative that LIS professionals do not accept classification systems as a given, but rather “examine the beliefs about the neutrality and objectivity of the entire field of LIS and moving toward undoing racist classification and knowledge-management practices” (138). I wish that this text had been available and part of the curriculum when I was an LIS student!

Padua, Sydney (2016). The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage. Penguin Books.

I love Sydney Padua’s graphic novel about Ada Lovelace! My “lighter” reading at the moment, the graphic novel cleverly juxtaposes biographical narrative about Ada Lovelace’s contributions to the first computer (Analytical Engine) with a science fiction story based on Charles Babbage’s writings about an alternate universe. Did you know that Charles Babbage designed an error pop-up (an actual plate would appear with the word “wrong”) for his computer?! Padua’s illustrations and text bring Lovelace’s story to life in a creative medium that makes it accessible to a wider audience who may not be interested in reading full-length biographies or be familiar with Ada Lovelace’s contribution to computing. Issues around invisible labor, librarians and service, as well as feminization of labor are important to me, so I make it a priority to seek out narratives that prominently feature women in all aspects of tech, libraries, and academia. In addition to Lovelace, there are many more prominent women in computing that are only now gaining recognition through the recovery work of scholars, writers, historians, and others.

Anna Kijas

Anna Kijas is Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian at Boston College Libraries where she experiments with the application of digital humanities tools and methods, focusing as much on the process, as on the final product. She is a member of the Digital Scholarship Group and also manages the Digital Studio located in O’Neill Library. Anna’s main scholarly interests include music criticism and reception studies of women musicians during the 19th through early 20th centuries, exploring and applying digital humanities tools or methods to research and praxis in music, history, and social justice.

Note: As the dh+lib Review editors work behind the scenes this summer, we have invited a few members of our community to step in as guest editors and share with us what they are reading and why the dh+lib audience might want to read it too. We close out the series with a post from Rebecca Dowson, Digital Scholarship Librarian at Simon Fraser University Library.

My current reading list revolves around questions of sustainability and capacity for digital scholarship. A major focus of my work in the past year has been coalescing existing and emerging services, expertise, and institutional structures via our newly established research incubator, the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab. This summer I am taking a step back to reflect on the areas of strength for the lab and challenges to address in the coming year. The readings below have informed my thinking on several key elements of a robust digital scholarship program, including: institutional support, professional development, pedagogical practice, and organizational structures.

Building Capacity for Digital Humanities

Anne, Kirk M., et al. Building Capacity for Digital Humanities: A Framework for Institutional Planning. ECAR working group paper. Louisville, CO: ECAR, May 31, 2017. 

This joint paper from the Educause Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) “outlines a practical framework for capacity building to develop institutional digital humanities support.” The framework articulates benchmarks for early, established, and high-capacity stages of DH/DS support using the following measures: funding, governance, infrastructure (human, technical, physical), roles, communication, and engagement. In addition to the discussion of each measure and associated benchmarks, the authors provide many illustrative examples from institutions engaged in DS research support and actionable suggestions to move forward in building capacity locally.

I found the benchmarks very useful in considering my institution’s current strengths in support for DS, as well as areas that require sustained attention in the coming year. I also appreciate the care the authors took to write for a broad audience with varying experiences with DS. Growing institutional capacity for DS requires support at all levels of administration and across units that may not have previously collaborated. This paper serves as an accessible starting point to engage campus stakeholders and provides a solid foundation on which to build a strategic approach to supporting sustainable and robust digital scholarship.

Re-skilling for the Digital Humanities

Bakkalbasi N., Jaggars, D., & Rockenbach, B. (2015). Re-skilling for the digital humanities: measuring skills, engagement, and learning. Library Management, 36(3). DOI:10.1108/LM-09-2014-0109  

Developing an approach to building capacity for digital scholarship often includes formal and informal training opportunities. In considering training models to support the DS aligned professional development goals of my colleagues, I find myself returning to the Developing Librarian project at Columbia University Libraries. This project, detailed here and previously in a dh+lib post, is a collaborative and project-based training program that provides librarians the opportunity to develop a digital humanities research project as a team and to “learn about new tools in a sustained manner that parallels the way other humanities researchers are likely to use them.” In this article, the authors provide an overview of the project objectives and design, as well as a discussion on assessment. The findings demonstrate that ongoing assessment captured incremental learning and shaped future stages of the project. Additionally the results played a significant role in “identifying and implementing appropriate training opportunities for librarians supporting emergent research activities and for understanding what skills and professional preparation are needed for new staff recruited into the organization.” The Developing Librarian project offers a model for sustained engagement of a community of practice interested in emergent DS research practices and tools. I particularly appreciate the project’s focus on learning in context, centering the role of librarian as researcher, and privileging the process as ongoing and generative.

Challenges of Collaborative Digital Humanities Pedagogy

Giannetti, F. (2017). Against the grain: Reading for the challenges of collaborative digital humanities pedagogy. College & Undergraduate Libraries. DOI:10.1080/10691316.2017.1340217

In this article, Giannetti reflects on her own practice and reviews recent literature in digital humanities pedagogy and faculty-librarian collaboration to identify challenges in developing a collaborative approach to digital pedagogy. Giannetti addresses issues of navigating disciplinary barriers and organizational power dynamics, making visible the underlying labor involved in DH work, managing complexity, and balancing technical choices and theoretical understandings.

My professional practice has benefited immensely from colleagues sharing their pedagogical approaches to digital scholarship and collaborative teaching. However, as Giannetti points out, critical reflections on the challenges of this work have not yet been a focus of scholarship. This gap in the literature is a shame as I often learn the most  from experiences that presented unexpected difficulties or where things didn’t necessarily go as planned. I hope others will take up Giannetti’s call to share our failures with each other “to advance pedagogical praxis by building a foundation of shared knowledge upon which others can build.” One real-time mechanism to continue the discussion could be via the DLF Digital Library Pedagogy Group’s regular Twitter chats, using the hashtag #DLFteach.

Montoya, R. D. (2017). Boundary Objects/Boundary Staff: Supporting Digital Scholarship in Academic Libraries. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 43(3), 216-23. DOI:10.1016/j.acalib.2017.03.001

Rebecca Dowson

Rebecca Dowson is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Simon Fraser University Library. She works with researchers at all levels in the areas of open access publishing, scholarly communication, and integrating digital methods and tools into scholarly practice. She is also a founding member of the SFU Digital Humanities Innovation Lab.

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