POST: Research Data Sharing without Barriers…Get Involved?

Rachel Bruce (JISC) introduces the Research Data Alliance (RDA) by summarizing the group’s first plenary meeting that took place in Washington, D.C. from September 16-18th, 2013. Some of the areas that the groups are tackling: metadata & a metadata standards directory; legal interoperability; data citation; a community capability model; persistent identifiers; practical policy; data foundation ...

POST: Keeping the “L” in Digital: Applying LIS Core Competencies to Digital Humanities Work

In an article in The Journal of Creative Library Practice, Kaetrena Davis Kendrick of the University of South Carolina Lancaster places “many core activities of [Digital Humanities] squarely in the domain of modern librarianship.” Reviewing the ALA Core Competencies of Librarianship, Kendrick “reveals how LIS competencies have been applied to a Korean popular culture DH project at ...

POST: Creating Themes in Omeka 2.0

Margaret Heller (Digital Services Librarian, Loyola University) has written a brief introduction to creating custom themes in Omeka 2.0 on the ACRL TechConnect blog. For libraries that already have Omeka installed, have access to the code, and have multiple groups requesting Omeka sites, creating a theme template can be a useful way to scale what your library ...

POST: Crowdsourcing Best Practices for Experimental Journals: Transparency

Drawing on her recent experience working with the Journal of Digital Humanities, Adeline Koh (Assistant Professor of Literature, Stockton College) has invited input on best practices for increasing transparency in the publication process for academic journals. Starting with ideas offered by Roopika Risam and Scott Weingart, Koh seeks to develop practices that take into consideration ...

POST: How Did They Make That?

Miriam Posner has crafted a useful introduction to some exemplary digital humanities projects, outlining the tools and technology used to create each and giving helpful pointers to resources for getting started with them. She writes: Many  students tell me that in order to get started with digital humanities, they’d like to have some idea of ...

POST: No Holds Barred Advice from Tom Scheinfeldt

Tom Scheinfeldt shares some thoughts about how he evaluated a “venerable cultural heritage institution’s” digital program. Scheinfeldt’s appraisal offers cultural heritage institutions a useful roadmap for considering what digital programs need to be successful and relevant, such as an integrated social strategy and mobile strategies. Above all, Scheinfeldt reminds us that “Digital is not a revenue ...

POST: A Kind of Skepticism Humanists Should Hold On To

Ted Underwood, Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, continues his examination of some of the areas of overlap between the humanities and more quantitative disciplines. Underwood’s main concern is that numbers tend to distract the eye. If you quantify part of your argument, critics (including your own internal critic) will tend to ...

POST: Refining the Problem — More work with NYPL’s open data, Part Two

In part II of his experiment to create an index of items using the New York Public Library’s What’s on the menu? data set, Trevor Muñoz discusses his work with the data and some of the lessons he learned. Muñoz used the Open Refine tool and, finding the NYPL data set too large to easily ...

POST: What IS on the Menu? More Work with NYPL’s Open Data, Part One

Part of making the argument for open collections data is showing what can be done with it. Trevor Muñoz’s recent blog post, in which he plays with the NYPL’s open data from the “What’s on the Menu?” project, explains how he uses the collection data as a testbed for data curation work. As Muñoz states: ...

POST: What’s a Nice English Professor Like You Doing in a Place Like This: An Interview With Matthew Kirschenbaum

Trevor Owens has posted a terrific interview with Matt Kirschenbaum (Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities). In it, they discuss his involvement in the digital archives and digital forensics communities, the hurdles that born digital materials create, BitCurator, and ...

POST: From Trees to Webs: Uprooting Knowledge through Visualization

Scott B. Weingart has posted a preprint [pdf] of “From Trees to Webs: Uprooting Knowledge through Visualization,” in which he discusses the shift from visualizing the classification of knowledge as hierarchical and linear (tree) to the modern conception of knowledge as rhizomatic and networked (web). In the blog post announcing the work, which also contains ...