The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has announced a new initiative to enable researchers to study Facebook data: Recent revelations about the abuse of Facebook data and spread of disinformation make clear that social media can have negative ramifications for society. Today the SSRC begins an extraordinary Social Data Initiative at the frontiers of digital ...

Beth Seltzer (Bryn Mawr College) has authored two posts on evaluating work in the digital humanities, as part of a series of MLA Committee on Information Technology blog posts. Part 1, “For Employees” and part 2, “For Employers,” focus on ways to evaluate the work of “alt-ac” and “other digital humanities professionals not working in traditional tenure-track ...

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has announced that the U.S. Congress has included funding for a $5 million open textbook grant program in its FY18 appropriations bill. The bill, signed into law on March 23, 2018, is Congress’s first funding for open textbooks: The $5 million will be awarded as competitive grants ...

Chris Bourg (MIT) has published a post on the value of preprints and their relationship with journal articles. The post, initially intended as Bourg’s discussion leader remarks for the National Academy of Sciences Journals Summit, details MIT’s perspective on preprints: …the current Open Access Task Force has as its charge to “lead an Institute-wide discussion ...

Roy Tennant (OCLC Research) has published a post on the Hanging Together blog entitled “Six Years of Tracking MARC Usage,” highlighting OCLC’s Ground Truthing the Use of MARC project and describing the reasons it was undertaken: If we are to make a smooth transition to a world of linked data, we need to know what we have ...

In a post at Hack Library School entitled “Visualize It: Uncertainty,” Sarah Davis discusses Alberto Cairo’s work in representing uncertainty in data visualization. Davis highlights Cairo’s treatment of “graphicacy,” and what creators of visualizations might assume about their audiences and the skills and attention they bring. It is easy it is to jump to conclusions in ...

The Digital Library Foundation announced last week that it will become a Strategic Affiliate to the Library Publishing Coalition. DLF is pleased to join the Library Publishing Coalition in promoting research and supporting vibrant digital publishing practices as a strategic affiliate. Central to DLF’s mission is advancing research, learning, social justice, and the public good through the creative ...

Trevor Owens (Library of Congress) has written a thoughtful post introducing some themes around simplicity and complexity in digital preservation, in the context of maintenance, repair and an ethics of care. In “Parsimony and Elegance as Objectives for Digital Curation Processes,” Owens positions “unnecessary complexity” as a threat to sustainability while framing minimalism as the ...

The ACRL Techconnect blog has published “Reflections on Code4Lib 2018,” featuring contributions from Ashley Blewer, Bohyun Kim, and Eric Phetteplace. The three authors each discuss presentations that resonated with them, and helpfully link out to recordings and slides when available. Brewer, discussing Amy Wickner’s presentation on web archives, notes: Wickner, citing Terry Cook, spoke of ...

Quinn Dombrowski (University of California, Berkeley) and Joan Lippincott (Coalition for Networked Information) have published an article in the Educause Review introducing ways library and IT departments can develop comprehensive support for digital humanities at the campus level. “Moving Ahead with Support for Digital Humanities” summarizes a recent Educause/CNI whitepaper, Building Capacity for Digital Humanities: ...

In a new post on his website, Thomas Padilla (University of Nevada Las Vegas) probes questions of how to “engage absence” within data, using his experience spearheading Collections as Data as a lens: Where the data exhibit significant informational paucity, indeterminate values, inordinate biasing, or limited scope it is common to cast them aside in pursuit ...