Marking the 20th anniversary of Zotero’s October 2006 launch, Dan Cohen (Northeastern University) recounts the reference manager’s early history in “The Slow Formation of Durable Software,” published in his Humane Ingenuity newsletter. Cohen describes the Center for History and New Media (now RRCHNM) at George Mason University in the early 2000s, where historians who coded “as a secondary rather than primary skill” built small tools for collecting history online. Two of those tools, Elena Razlogova’s Scribe, a desktop application for notes and citations, and Cohen’s own Web Scrapbook, a browser-based collecting tool, became the basis for an IMLS grant to build “SmartFox: the Scholar’s Browser for Digital Collections.” The project was pitched as a way to capture and organize materials from the growing number of digitized library and museum collections.

The post follows the project through its development on the newly released Firefox, the arrival of developers including Dan Stillman, who still leads Zotero’s development, and a long search for a name, which ended with an Albanian word meaning “to learn well or master.” Cohen contrasts the five years it took to arrive at a working prototype with today’s AI-assisted software development, arguing that the slow, collaborative process is part of why Zotero has lasted. Readers interested in what happened after launch can turn to Sean Takats’s companion post, “Zotero at Twenty.”

The IMLS-funded Responsible AI in Libraries and Archives project has published four new case studies, released in September 2026, that show how its Viewfinder toolkit works on real AI projects. Viewfinder is a participatory toolkit for ethical reflection on AI in libraries and archives, organized around different stakeholder perspectives. It was developed by librarians and technology ethicists at Montana State University, the University of Montana, James Madison University, and Iowa State University, based on research conducted from 2022 to 2025. The case studies cover a useful range of practice:

1. Robin Camille Davis on AI-generated device descriptions
2. Joshua Finnell on an organizational values inventory
3. Hannah McKelvey on evaluating AI features in licensed library resources
4. Erin Wolfe on newspaper collection metadata

Together they show what values-driven AI decision-making looks like in everyday library work, from vendor platforms to digital collections. Alongside the case studies, the project offers an interactive web version of Viewfinder, a print-at-home version on OSF, and a demo video of a sample session recorded in August 2026. Explore the case studies and toolkit.

Brandon Walsh (University of Virginia) has released Embedded Pedagogies: Digital Humanities Teaching and the Infrastructure of Change as an open-access volume through Open Book Publishers. From the book abstract:

This volume offers a timely and incisive exploration of teaching in an era of institutional instability and political pressure. Drawing on extensive experience as a digital humanities practitioner and administrator, Walsh argues that teaching does not occur solely in the classroom but is deeply shaped by the policies, structures, and values embedded within universities themselves.

Focusing on the concept of ‘embedded pedagogies’, the book reveals how institutional norms, such as claims to neutrality, intellectualism, and future-orientation, quietly shape what and how educators can teach. Walsh combines theory with practical insight, using case studies, digital projects, and firsthand reflections to demonstrate how these forces operate and how they can be challenged.

Organized around four core institutional values—knowability, neutrality, intellectualism, and the future—the book provides both critical analysis and actionable strategies. It offers guidance for educators seeking to navigate and transform hostile or resource-constrained environments, advocating for pedagogies grounded in transparency, collective care, and social justice.

Ultimately, Walsh presents a compelling vision of teaching as a form of institutional intervention. By making visible the hidden pedagogies of higher education, this book empowers educators to reimagine their roles and to work collaboratively toward more equitable, sustainable, and hopeful futures for universities and their communities.

This volume will be of particular interest of information professionals who teach as part of their work. UVA Libraries is hosting a book launch on October 5, 2026. The event will be virtual and free to attend, but there are a limited number of seats available.

In the July 2026 issues of the Journal of Palestine Studies, Maya Mikdashi (Rutgers University – New Brunswick) authored, “Archives, Prophecy, and Return: The Phoenix of Gaza,” an open-access review of the virtual reality project, The Phoenix of Gaza. Mikdashi explores multiple scenes from the project that serve as portals drawing in in her own personal stories from growing up in Lebanon, relating with her Ojibwe ancestry, and facing the contradictions of universities perpetuating legacies of settler colonialism. She explores the relationship between Indigenous studies and Palestine studies, and considers citational and historical conversation around archives, futurity, history, and colonial epistemology. She notes, “The Phoenix of Gaza is one of these acts of Palestinian storytelling, of ‘ordinary people narrating extraordinary things.’ This creation of an archive is a radical act of refusal against erasure, and it is also an insistent, prophetic announcement of futures that may still yet unfold.” Further:

The Phoenix of Gaza offers a trespass into a capacious feeling of the familiar, from Lebanon to the United States. It offers a detour from the archives of states in search of the paper that accumulates and is inherited, the paper that lives in expectation of becoming evidence, the paper and videos and photographs that speak to the corrosive need for evidence to prove that your life and death, and that of your people matter. As its cocreator Ahlam Muhtaseb relayed yesterday, it is crushing to create an archive of life in Gaza only for it to be used as an archive of war crimes and genocide—only for it to become evidence. So many of the sites we visit through the portal of The Phoenix of Gaza—historic sites and lived sites—have been destroyed. And yet, The Phoenix of Gaza also shows us how they will be rebuilt, that life and death are woven together through everyday experience and everyday acts of commitment.

Mikdashi’s review affirms how virtual reality digital humanities projects can intervene in the digital cultural record through decolonial digital storytelling, bridging transformative personal and embodied experiences with archives and preserving memory for the future.

Recently published in the Journal of Visualization and Interaction, Sofia Cretaio and Chiara L. Remondino (both at Polytechnic of Turin, Italy), have authored their peer-reviewed article, “Greetings From. . . A Workshop to Visualise Unexpected Stories of a Place Through Data Postcards,” which addresses their workshop, “Greetings from Naples,” and their exploratory workshop format developed at the Innovation Design Lab in Turin that uses data visualization as a tool for critically examining urban spaces, and their realities, sounds, scents, and rhythms. Drawing on Systemic Innovation Design Methodology, the format guides participants through a process of data collection, mapping, and visualization to produce a collective Databook of a given territory.

In particular, Cretaio and Remondino share how the communicative and emotional value of data visualizations. The piece presents a case study from a three-day workshop in Naples’ Quartieri Spagnoli neighborhood, where students from diverse backgrounds gathered and visualized local data using postcards as their medium. The resulting collection offers a multivocal portrait of place and demonstrates the format’s potential as a replicable model for urban research and community-centered design. Their data pedagogy included goals for participants to: “learn visual synthesis of data visualization to convey a meaningful message; explore the diversity of data visualization and data language, and how its use can highlight otherwise undetectable connections and insights; create a method and starting point for the design process to define needs and potentialities of a chosen context; and to enhancing the multidisciplinary approach to frame the context of analysis and its dynamics in an entirely and objective manner.”

This work will be of interest to digital humanities library professionals interested in the intersections of embodied data visualization and data literacy, along with the #dhmakes movement. The authors have made their materials freely available on OSF, including workshop materials to iterate it in your local setting, as well as images of the participants’ resulting postcards.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) seeks feedback on its newly released draft of the Carbon Footprint Toolkit. The toolkit has been being developed by the DPC Carbon Footprint Task Force over the past year to create a resource for organizations to correctly and efficiently calculate the carbon footprint of their digital collections and preservation work. The toolkit includes best practices, instructions, and a Carbon Footprint Calculation Tool to make that work as accessible as possible for any size organization or institution that might benefit from it.

Alicia Wise, the Executive Director of CLOCKSS and task force chair was quoted in the call for participation:

“The DPC’s 170+ members in 20+ countries identified environmental sustainability of digital preservation as a key topic of shared interest, and it has been an honour to chair the talented task and finish group convened to develop a toolkit on calculating the carbon footprint of digital preservation activities. We drew on experience from Canada, Finland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US to deliver a guide that will help you no matter what stage of the journey you are on. Please join us on this journey, and we will be delighted to evolve the toolkit based on your implementation experiences!”

Everyone is welcome to add comments and suggestions to the draft Google doc linked above. Additionally, the task force is also putting together a small working group of members from various institutions and types of organizations to use the toolkit and participate in monthly meetings to discuss their experiences and findings. Anyone interesting in participating as part of that small working group can fill out the expression of interest form by April 10, 2026.

If you have any questions about the toolkit or the testing and feedback phase of the project you can reach out to the task force through their feedback form.

Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association (AHA), has published an article, “What Altering Historical Images Can Teach Us About History” by Mary D. Lewis (Harvard University). Lewis’s piece discusses generative AI, noting that the August 2025 Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in History Education included an “appended chart suggesting that students could ‘ask generative AI to produce a historical image for a paper or presentation.'” Lewis expressed shock, noting that “AI cannot produce historical images, only simulations thereof.”

Instead of asking her students to use generative AI to create “simulations” of historical images, Lewis created an assignment for her modern French history course that focused on encouraging critical thinking about the nature of images and media:

Rather than “produce a historical image,” which would be ahistorical, I want students to think about the historicity of real historical images and to reflect on how easily they can be manipulated. Concerned with the alteration of images I had seen on social media, I created an assignment in a fall 2024 lecture course that instructed students to modify a real historical image and then reflect on how manipulating it affected their understanding of the original image.

While this assignment did not use generative AI in the iteration discussed in this piece, Lewis expects that more students will choose to use AI tools as she reuses this assignment in future. As Lewis explains, while her students didn’t create historical images, “They manipulated one. And learned much more about history—and dare I say about the pitfalls of simulation—by analyzing that manipulation.”

A new special issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities was published in January 2026 on the topic of E-Lit, or Electronic Literature. Guest editors Samya Brata Roy (GITAM Hyderabad), Reham Hosny (University of Cambridge), and Leah Henrickson (University of Queensland) note that, as defined by the Electronic Literature Organization, E-Lit or “literature produced for the digital medium” has become a focus for DH scholars who engage with video games, interactive media, social networks, and digital storytelling. They further note:

“It [E-Lit] is not merely a subject of study but a medium in itself — a way for people to interrogate, explore, and engage with digital culture.”

The special issue features four reviews of projects that include theorizations on the digital humanities, arguments about critical making, and a showcase of E-Lit practices, representing a global selection of digital projects. Reviews in Digital Humanities is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal; find other issues and a digital humanities project registry at reviewsindh.pubpub.org.

Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship, edited by Anna-Maria Sichani (University of London), Michael Donnay (Software Sustainability Institute), is a new open access volume published by University of London Press. This volume asks “if there is value in failure in digital scholarship, how do we create the space to fail ‘better’?” By positioning failure as an ordinary part of digital scholarship, and indeed all scholarship, the volume seeks to create a “critical, constructive and compassionate vocabulary for failure” and normalize failure as part of the process of engaging in digital humanities. From the book description:

Failure is ordinary. From technological failures and computational obsolescence to rejected applications and challenging collaborations, failure is an unavoidable part of any scholarly endeavour. This is especially true for digital scholarship, as the everyday risk of failure is compounded by the challenges of interdisciplinary research and fragility of digital technology.

Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship tackles what failure – in all its messy but immensely valuable complexity – means for the digital humanities community head-on. It brings together a diverse, interdisciplinary and international group of scholars and practitioners that each offer short personal and professional reflections on the failed, broken or challenging aspects of scholarly practice. It provides a critical perspective on the ways institutional and material conditions are intractably linked to approaches to digital research, and how those conditions differ within and across national contexts.

The team behind America’s Essential Data, with support from the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Public Environmental Data Partners (PEDP), and The Impact Project, has curated a list of United States federal datasets, variables, and data tools which have been terminated or removed from public online access in 2025.

This resource – briefly renamed “Dearly Departed Datasets” during Halloween 2025 – attempts to capture losses to federal data that go beyond routine updates or removals, and is a direct response to federal agencies’ move to comply with White House executive orders since January 2025 that are aimed at removing language related to gender, DEI, and climate change from the public record.

A longer blog post authored by Denise Ross (Federation of American Scientists, former U.S. Chief Data Scientist) provides a more in-depth look at the methodologies used to identify threatened data and the broader implications of their removal.

Last year, the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) received a grant to digitize “655 pages of letters, notebooks, and photographs created by formerly enslaved people.” As part of that initiative, AAS created a new digital resource, “Letters from Freedom,” which features digitized and transcribed letters written between 1863 and 1870 by formerly enslaved students in the American South. According to a post on the American Antiquarian Society’s blog, Past is Present, the central collection is the Chase Family Papers, which focuses on a Massachusetts Quaker family and includes letters from students taught by Lucy and Sarah Chase in freedmen’s schools throughout the South. Each digitized letter in the collection is accompanied by full transcriptions and background contextual information about the letter writer. Materials written by formerly enslaved people from this era are rare, making this collection a valuable primary source for Black history and Reconstruction-era studies.