The Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library conference took place last week in Charleston, South Carolina. The conference featured keynotes from Riccardo Ferrante (Smithsonian Institution), Emily Gore (Digital Public Library of America), and Trevor Muñoz (University of Maryland), workshops, a day and a half of sessions, and a lively Twitter feed. In a write-up ...

Kevin Smith (Duke University) has written a post on the Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog about the recent Authors Guild v. HathiTrust decision, which Smith describes as “another important win for libraries and fair use.” Smith discusses a technical but important aspect of the decision: The oddity about this remand is that it does not actually question the conclusion that digitization for ...

Responding to the #esrworkshop (Evolving Scholarly Record and Evolving Stewardship Ecosystem workshop, preceding a meeting on Libraries and Research: Supporting Change/Changing Support), Jennifer Schaffner (OCLC Research Library Partnership) has written a post on the “evolving scholarly record.” Schaffner considers the changing nature of archival collections in the digital age as “components of the ‘scholarly record.'” Schaffner discusses how context ties ...

In a post to The Signal, Kate Murray (Library of Congress) summarizes a recent meeting of the NDSA Standards and Practices Working Group, focused on issues around preserving digital and software-based artworks. Presenters from the Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian’s Time Based Media Art initiative, and the San ...

Paige Morgan (University of Washington) has written a post summarizing the advice she shared while leading an unconference session at DHSI 2014. “How to Get a Digital Humanities Project off the Ground” includes 15 points of general and specific recommendations. Though some address issues that are specific to graduate students, many could be useful for librarians ...

In a post introducing the African American Theater History Project, Cecily Marcus (University of Minnesota Libraries) introduces the collaboration between the Penumbra Theater and the University of Minnesota Libraries aiming to increase access to “the primary materials that document African American theater and cultural history.” In developing the IMLS-funded project, the participating institutions will be: 1. working with leading African ...

In a post prompted by the release of the Carter Cables by WikiLeaks, Ed Summers asks the question: What if instead of trying to build the ultimate user experience for archival content, archives focused first and foremost on providing simple access to the underlying data first? Responding to the “URL inspection” that is necessary to ...

Amanda Visconti (University of Maryland), who recently posted about her digital dissertation, “Infinite Ulysses,” has written a post introducing the organizational technique of affinity mapping. She explains: It’s a way to take a bunch of separate ideas and visually map out how they’re related (thus, “affinity”); this helps your areas of focus (or paper section headings) ...

Elijah Meeks (Stanford University Libraries) has posted notes from his talk at the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium’s First Annual Conference, Networks in the Humanities (#txdhc). Among several topics, Meeks addresses the notion of scholarly “interlopers” with respect to the digital humanities: I think interloping, more than computational approaches or the digital broadly construed as the object of ...

Adeline Koh (Stockton College) announced on ProfHacker that the Open Library of the Humanities, under the direction of Martin Paul Eve (University of Lincoln) and Caroline Edwards (University of London), has received “a substantial Mellon Foundation grant to build its technological platform, business model, journal and monograph pilot scheme.” In an interview with Koh on ProfHacker this week, Eve explains the origins ...

In a post on the British Library’s Digital Scholarship Blog, James Baker (Curator, Digital Research) poses the question, “What do historians need to do good digital research?” In his answer, Baker laments the lack of basic training in statistical and quantitative methods offered to historians in undergraduate programs: As someone who was trained during the ...