Kevin Smith (Duke University) has written a post introducing the new Fair Use Index released by the U.S. Copyright Office. The index, which will be updated and expanded by the Copyright Office, contains searchable summaries of approximately 170 fair use cases in U.S. courts and, as Smith notes, doubles as a learning tool: “the best ...

Celeste Sharpe and Jeri Wieringa (George Mason University) have written a post on the Association for Computers and the Humanities blog about their experience with DH Bridge, “an open curriculum and workshop framework for teaching computational thinking in the context of the humanities.” Taking a cue from Rails Bridge and Rails Girls, the project: set ...

Stacey Konkiel (Altmetric) has written a post reflecting on her recent efforts to understand how research in the humanities is evaluated, with an eye towards the digital humanities in particular. Observing that scholarly societies have begun to issue guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship projects, Konkiel notes that they: tend not to address newer types of ...

Charlotte Nunes (Southwestern University) has written a round-up of two Texas digital scholarship conferences: the Texas Digital Humanities Conference and the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries. Chock full of links to projects and presentations, Nunes’s post covers presentations from Tanya Clement, Rebecca Frost Davis, Liz Grumbach, Adeline Koh, Alan Liu, Bess Sadler, George Siemens, and ...

In a new post, Miriam Posner (UCLA) shares a low-threshold activity to introduce students to data visualization techniques. Students are guided through the process of creating a simple quiz, collecting data, formatting the data in three formats, and exploring different visualization tools. Posner includes links to a variety of tutorials to get started. dh+lib Review This post ...

Kalev Hannes Leetaru (George Washington University) wrote a post for The Signal exploring the landscape of statistical machine translation (SMT) and outlining the advances made in the last few years to move toward a more “post-lingual society.” Leetaru provides an overview of mass translation projects with a particular focus on GDELT Translingual (Global Database of ...

Melissa Levine, in collaboration with Alix Keener and Rick Adler (all University of Michigan), has compiled a thorough recap of the HathiTrust Uncamp, held March 30-31, 2015, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The event “featured a diverse range of perspectives, ideas, demos, and poster sessions all featuring non-consumptive uses of HathiTrust,” and Levine’s post provides both summary ...

In a post on The Signal, Mike Ashenfelder introduces the work of senior archives specialist Kathleen O’Neill (Library of Congress) and her team as they shepherd digital collections through the “chain of custody” that takes them from acquisition to researcher access. Written for a non-specialized audience, the post provides a useful introduction to the process ...

Trevor Owens (Institute of Museum and Library Services) authored a post about the invention and dissemination of the transparent GIF, noting: “These invisible files have a story to tell, and I think exploring there presence and traces in web archives can end up illustrating some ideas for modes of researching in web archives.” [sic] Owens ...

Scott Weingart (Indiana University) wades into the conversation about Syuzhet, distant reading, and “the great unread” in a recent blog post, “Not Enough Perspectives, Pt.1.” Syuzhet is an R package created by Matthew Jockers (University of Nebraska, Lincoln) and used to extract sentiment in text analysis, which became the subject of much discussion, in part ...

Merrilee Proffitt (OCLC) gives an overview of challenges currently faced by libraries working to digitize collections, as reported in a series of discussions hosted by OCLC Research. These challenges, which will inform future work from  OCLC Research, include: Metadata: Item-level description vs collection descriptions “…there is an inherent challenge in digitizing collections at the item or ...