What’s new in Digital Humanities? Matthew Kirschenbaum tasked his undergraduate English class (ENGL668K) at the University of Maryland with a critical curation assignment “to provide primary and secondary documentation answering the question, ‘What has happened in digital humanities that hadn’t yet happened on January 22, 2013 (the day before we started our class)?'” The resulting website brings together myriad resources and interpretations, including a timeline of “significant events that took place in the history of libraries, archives, and museums” in early 2013 and a Zotero group library.

#668k Just tweeted link to the project site, hold on to your hats!

— Matthew Kirschenbaum (@ENGL668K) May 16, 2013

As Kirschenbaum comments: “This site strikes me as a “cabinet of curiosities” in the best tradition of the Web, that is rather than a unified, coherent body of content it is willfully (and necessarily) partial, eclectic, diversified, and subjective.”

April 18, 2013, marked the launch of the Digital Public Library of America. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, Harvard’s University Librarian and a DPLA founder, marked the occasion with an exclamation point–“The National Digital Public Library Is Launched!“– and framed the project as representative of “the confluence of two currents that have shaped American civilization: utopianism and pragmatism.” He continues:

How do these two tendencies converge in the Digital Public Library of America? For all its futuristic technology, the DPLAharkens back to the eighteenth century. What could be more utopian than a project to make the cultural heritage of humanity available to all humans? What could be more pragmatic than the designing of a system to link up millions of megabytes and deliver them to readers in the form of easily accessible texts?

Darnton describes the evolution of the DPLA, contextualizes it among other large-scale efforts, and provides a sense of how the project will progress.

Thus far, the DPLA provides discovery of select digital collections from NARA, Mountain West Digital Library, the Digital Library of Georgia, Harvard, NYPL, the Smithsonian, and a growing number of other content hubs. Partnerships fueling the library include content hubs, “large digital libraries, museums, archives, or repositories that provide a one-to-one relationship with the DPLA”; service hubs, “state or regional digital libraries that aggregate information” within their areas; and collaborators.

DPLA has made their API and Metadata Application Profile, “designed to build on the experience of the Europeana Data Model … to accommodate existing and emerging data models for library, archive, and museum resources,” publicly available. Indeed, the Search DPLA and Europeana app, developed by Jesus Dominguez, allows users to search across both platforms. Other tools, such as MetaLab‘s Library Observatory app  and Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab’s StackLife DPLA site, allow visualizations of searches and browsing across the collections. DPLA also features several themed exhibits, built using Omeka.

Writing in Library Journal‘s “The Digital Shift,” Matt Enis reported on public and librarian responses to be launch, observing:

Reactions on twitter were enthusiastic on Thursday. Rachel Frick, director of the Digital Library Federation Program, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) posted “#dpla experiencing half million views per hour. NICE.” Jonathan Zittrain, Co-Founder and Director for Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society tweeted that “The @dpla has geocoded its archives — http://dp.la/map is wonderfully addictive. (Zooming in shows more and more.)” And the official account of NYPL Labstweeted “And for nerds like us, not only does @DPLA offer a SICK API, but there’s a BULK DATA DOWNLOAD too!”

And it’s a handsome website to boot.

This past week, centerNet announced a new initiative around starting and sustaining DH Centers. A resources page, featuring “talks, articles, sample DH proposals, and other sources of information about ways to start and sustain DH centers,” has been added to the centerNet website. Additionally, a new centerNet listserv has been launched around the topic: DHCenterStartUp.

Lynne Siemens, centerNet’s Coordinator for Center Start Ups and an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria (BC), compiled the resources list. As Siemens wrote in an email to Humanist: “I am also putting in a call for other resources to supplement this page.  If you have proposals, talks, articles and other resources that talk about strategies, partnership models and other information needed to start a centre, please direct them my way.” Siemens can be contacted @lynnelynne53.

Adeline Koh, a visiting faculty fellow at Duke and assistant professor of literature at Richard Stockton College, and Roopika Risam, a PhD candidate at Emory, have launched a new site dedicated to “Global explorations of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability within cultures of technology.” The site includes Founding Principles (including alt genealogies of DH), a call for submissions, and a Mission Statement.

What is postcolonial DH? As Koh and Risam outline in the site’s mission statement:

Grounded in the literary, philosophical, and historical heritage of postcolonial studies and invested in the possibilities offered by digital humanities, we position postcolonial digital humanities as an emergent field of study invested in decolonizing the digital, foregrounding anti-colonial thought, and disrupting salutatory narratives of globalization and technological progress. We have three major goals: to define the postcolonial digital humanities, to locate ways postcolonial studies can and should shift in response to digital changes and challenges, and to write alternative genealogies of the digital humanities.

We note that defining the digital humanities is highly contested (Kirschenbaum, Fitzpatrick, Spiro, Svensson, Alvarado, Scheinfeldt, Gavin and Smith in Debates in the Digital Humanities; also see a community definition of the digital humanities in the Day of Digital Humanities 2012). For our purposes, our working definition of the digital humanities is a set of methodologies engaged by humanists to use, produce, teach, and analyze culture and technology.

Beyond the new Postcolonial Digital Humanities site, Koh and Risam administer the #DHPoco tumblr and can be found on Twitter @dhpoco.

The Boston DH Consortium, formed in August 2012 “to pursue shared funding opportunities; organize a series of events; network with digital humanities centers, organizations, and societies worldwide; and encourage local discussion of digital humanities and related topics,” has launched a new site. The Consortium describes itself as:

“an information association of educational and cultural institutions in New England committed to the collaborative development of teaching, learning, and scholarship in the digital humanities and computational social sciences.”

The site currently includes a calendar featuring upcoming events in the area, a list of consortial members, and information about joining the BostonDH mailing list. And– good news for DHers outside of New England– the group plans to extend membership beyond the Greater Boston area in Spring 2014.

Lib Pub, a new group blog on library publishing, launched in January 2013. As blog founder Melanie Schlosser, the Digital Publishing Librarian at Ohio State University Libraries, writes in an introductory post:

“Publishing efforts in libraries are becoming more and more common, but there aren’t yet a lot of venues for those involved to come together and share their thoughts and experiences. The Lib Pub is meant to be one.”

This week, Schlosser issued a call for those whose work involves both DH and library publishing to contact her. She writes:

“I’m curious about how many  of you have both publishing and DH in your job description, or have a humanities focus in your publishing program, or work with a DH center in some way.”

 

A new public group, EMDC: The Early Modern Digital Collaboratory, has launched on MLA Commons. Billed as “a venue for digital humanists studying early modern texts and culture (roughly 1450-1700), principally in the English language,” the EMDC “fulfills an idea that circulated at MLA 2013: what if early modernists using digital humanities tools and methods had a venue for our research collaborations?”

Other MLA public groups of potential interest to dh+lib readers include:

+Libraries and Research in Languages and Literatures
+Digital Humanities