Wendy Hsu (City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs) asks in the final post of a four-part On Digital Ethnography series for Ethnography Matters, “If ethnography is an investigation of how a group of people sense and know their world, then how do we express that while staying true to its structure of epistemology?” Hsu ...

Historian Tim Hitchcock has posted the text and images from his recent keynote at the CVCE (Centre Virtuel de la Connaissance sur l’Europe) Conference on “Reading Historical Sources in the Digital Age,” which took place on December 5-6 in Luxembourg. The talk, “Big Data for Dead People: Digital Readings and the Conundrums of Positivism,” explores ...

Adeline Koh has posted the text of and slides from her talk at the recent HumLab workshop in Umeå, Sweden (“Sorting the Digital Humanities Out“).  Koh frames the talk as a “provocation” to the field of postcolonial studies: “a discussion of some of the potential opportunities that digital forms of publication offer to postcolonial studies, ...

Amanda Visconti has a new post on Literature Geek that asks readers,  “Who holds the intellectual property (IP) rights to your digital dissertation?” Taking her own work on the Infinite Ulysses project as an example, Visconti considers the many elements and sources of a typical digital humanities dissertation, noting: I’d like to think that good ...

Scott Weingart has compiled a collection of statements from digital humanities scholars in an attempt to come to “A Working Definition of Digital Humanities.” Spurred by a conversation on Twitter, Weingart sought out recommendations for courses that an aspiring (undergraduate) digital humanist should take. Responses from Ted Underwood, Johanna Drucker, Melissa Terras, John Walsh, and ...

Kenneth Crews has written a post summarizing the main points about the recent Google Books ruling that represents a significant victory for library services: The basic facts of the case are recounted in many places, but the Google Books project has involved building a digital library of millions of full-text books, many still under copyright ...

The DLF Community Spotlight recently highlighted ScholarSphere, Penn State’s institutional repository. Authors Mike Giarlo and Patricia Hswe discuss how ScholarSphere differs from other IRs: “Having refrained from jumping on the IR bandwagon in the early 2000s, Penn State was an outlier among R1 university peers. The deliberation, however, allowed us to leverage lessons learned in hindsight from ...

Mark Sample has written a post challenging the recent New York Times article tracing the decline in humanities majors at American universities using data collected by Ben Schmidt of Northeastern University in this interactive graph. While Schmidt’s data is in the aggregate, one can break down the data more granularly to better understand trends in ...

Kenneth Crews (Director, Copyright Advisory Office at Columbia University) has shared his notes from the October 30th appellate hearing of the Authors Guild v. HathiTrust case. As Crews notes in an earlier post on the original ruling, the case has important implications for fair use in libraries: [T]he judge ruled on motions for summary judgment, finding ...

Thomas Padilla (Graduate Research Assistant, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) has written a brief post on using Topic Modeling Tool to aid with archival arrangement and description. Padilla reviews a test application of the popular text analysis technique to the Carl Woese Papers, finding that: The University Archives’ application of topic modeling to the electronic ...