Late last week, the IMLS announced 45 grants (totaling $8,155,005) to libraries and other information organizations. These include awards to many digitally-inflected projects including The Democratic Knowledge Project at Harvard University, The Trustees of Indiana University’s Shared BigData-Gateway for Research Libraries, and The Digital Library Federation (DLF) and HBCU Library Alliance. Information on all of the ...

Sarah Bond (University of Iowa) has written a blog post reflecting on a recent news item she reported in Hyperallergic discussing the proposed addition of over 2,000 hieroglyphs into Unicode. In “The Gospel of Unicode: Digital Love Letter(s) and Art Through Numbers,” Bond gives a brief introduction into the development of Unicode and its use ...

Dan Cohen (Northeastern University) has just published a blog post about Northeastern University’s new grant from the Mellon Foundation to establish a Boston Research Center (BRC). Cohen writes that The BRC will seek to unify major archival collections related to Boston, hundreds of data sets about the city, digital modes of scholarship, and a wide ...

The Open Access In Media Studies blog published an interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Michigan State University) conducted by Jeroen Sondervan (Utrecht University and OA Media Studies) and Jeff Pooley (Muhlenberg College). The interview covers Fitzpatrick’s work on open access initiatives in the humanities, and touches on the roles of academic libraries and librarians in that ...

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Profhacker column has published a post by Lee Skallerup Bessette (University of Mary Washington) entitled Tropy: A Tool I Wish I Had When Writing My Dissertation. In the piece, Bessette highlights the research photo management tool released by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason ...

As part of their forthcoming book, The Teaching Archive: A New History of Literary Study, Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore College) and Laura Heffernan (University of North Florida) have published an article in Modernism/Modernity that highlights the work of Josephine Miles, a founding scholar of computational methods in the humanities. They argue that, rather than credit ...

Sharon Leon (Michigan State University) has posted a version of her panel talk at the Organization of American Historians‘ annual meeting, focusing reviewing digital public history projects. We can and should do our best to create a culture of reviewing that is humane and constructive. In that effort we might turn the groundbreaking work of the HuMetricsHSS ...

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 ...