In this post summarizing his Digital Humanities 2014 conference paper, Demmy Verbeke (KU Leuven) argues for a scholar-practitioner model of librarianship, with academic libraries structured to incorporate their own research and development.

Generally speaking, Digital Humanities practitioners agree that what they do is in essence a collaborative activity, which connects people in different positions – such as, for instance, researchers, software developers, project managers, and librarians. Naturally, the exact nature and form of the specific contribution of librarians to Digital Humanities projects at a particular academic institution will differ, depending on who else is already involved, the available staff and infrastructure, the research agenda of faculty members, their enthusiasm to collaborate with the library, and the ambitions and priorities of the institution in question. Possibilities range anywhere from offering basic information on existing tools for Digital Humanities research and negotiating access to infrastructure, to providing training in the use of Digital Humanities tools, or even creating “library-based skunkworks – or semi-independent, research-oriented software prototyping and makerspace labs” (Nowviskie 2013, 53).

[pullquote]the best way to prepare for future research needs is by being a forerunner in research[/pullquote]

My paper for the DH2014 conference illustrated my support for the skunkworks approach. This approach, in my opinion, should be the preferred route for any academic library wanting to maintain its position as an essential partner in research (besides realizing the other two traditional elements in its mission statement, namely to support learning and teaching). To me, it seems that the best way to prepare for future research needs is by being a forerunner in research. So I plead for an academic library, structured and staffed in such a way that it is not only able to support research initiated by others, but also to take the lead in particular domains (such as the development of advanced digitization tools and the creation and analysis of large digital corpora). In order to do this, libraries will need to find space for research & development within their own organization and aim to “set the conditions for the advancement of knowledge itself, through the fulfillment of research desires yet unknown, un-expressed” (Nowviskie 2014). In Leuven, we are trying to do this, for instance, in the context of our Digital Lab (partnering in projects such as RICH), and by joining the Support Action Centre of Competence in Digitisation (Succeed) with a view to contributing to the development of advanced OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and NER (Named Entity Recognition) technology.

The title of my paper was inspired by my conviction that the Digital Humanities create possibilities for libraries and their staff. They give librarians the chance to move beyond a rather passive role as supporters of research (if and when invited to do so), to take up a more active role as scholar-practitioners. At universities where the divide (frequently on more than one level) between academic and library staff is currently too big, the Digital Humanities can also warrant an upwards re-evaluation of the position of the latter group. In short, we are given the opportunity to reinstate the library as a visible, valuable (and valued) partner in research, which, in my experience, is essential at universities where the allocation of budgets is decided by academic staff who still spend most of their time doing research. The library’s value is thus proven, in a very direct manner and on an almost personal level, to the decision makers, which never hurts in the context of the never-ending struggle to secure sufficient funding.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Demmy Verbeke

Demmy Verbeke received his PhD in Classics from KU Leuven in 2005. He subsequently worked as project manager for Monumentenwacht Antwerpen (2006) and was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of History at Harvard University (2006-7), in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick (2007-9) and in the De Wulf-Mansion Centre for Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy at KU Leuven (2009-12). Dr Verbeke is now head librarian of the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven, where he teaches Heuristics in the BA program and Intellectual History of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the MA program.

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Glen Worthey joins The First Draft podcast hosts Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke (all of Stanford University) for an episode entitled “Humanities Savior Narrative.” Their lively, wide-ranging conversation touches on the recent Digital Humanities 2014 conference (including discussion of keynotes, #dhsheep, and multilinguality), the “big tent,”  the question of whether DH will save or become synonymous with the humanities, the bureaucracy and community of DH, DH graduate training, and the role of Twitter.

In one exchange, Meeks reflects on his evolving sense of what constitutes DH practice:

…I think publication is extremely important, interactive scholarly works are important. But … when I first started really thinking of myself as doing digital humanities… I derided this other kind of digital humanities, this engagement with digital objects, and this, sort of, this salon version of digital humanities where you got together with scholars and you looked at some digital object and you thought about it, and you were sort of critically engaged with it. Or other people who said: ‘Well, I’m, I do digital humanities, I’m on Twitter.’ And I thought: ‘Well, that‘s not really doing digital humanities.’ And, actually, as I’ve sort of matured in my understanding of it, it’s a realization that that is. That this tight integration of new mediums of communication, new mediums of collaboration. And also just the reappraisal of old methods of dealing with things to suddenly include digital objects … I think is all digital humanities. And so that’s part of that restoration of relevance, it’s not just sort of a popular thing that shows up in the New York Times and at least is on people’s radar … But also just that, in the practice, it’s taking place on Twitter, it’s taking place with digital objects, and that just makes it, by that very virtue, more part of the real world.

 

In the eleven days since the end of the international Digital Humanities conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, participants have been posting wrap-up reports, slides, and posters. We highlighted the first batch in last week’s Part 1. Further reports that have caught our attention in the intervening days:

DH2014 was a jam-packed conference, with more than two dozen pre-conference workshops, eight or nine paper and panel sessions running concurrently, two poster sessions, daily lunch meetings, and four keynotes. Notes kept by Geoffrey Rockwell (University of Alberta) and James Baker (The British Library) provide insight into some of the many paths one could take through the sessions. See the DH2014 Book of Abstracts for further details. Baker has also posted an overview of observations from DH2014.

This year saw the inaugural meeting of the GeoHumanities special interest group, an introductory workshop on GIS, and many presentations that incorporated spatial aspects. An excellent overview by Susanna Ånäs (Wikimedia Suomi) highlights and categorizes these sessions, concluding with her picks of “very interesting projects presented at the conference.”

Additional links to papers and reflections:

• Bethany Nowviskie (University of Virginia) has posted slides & audio from the DH2014 keynote, “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene,” read at DH2014 by Melissa Terras (University College London). Though she was unable to present the talk in person at the conference, Nowviskie created a recording of her own reading.
• Demmy Verbeke (University of Leuven) has shared slides from his paper, “The opportunistic librarian: A Leuven confession.”
• Élika Ortega (CulturePlex Lab, University of Western Ontario) and Silvia Gutiérrez (Universitat Wurzburg) have posted the slides and paper for their project, “MapaHD: Exploring Spanish and Portuguese Speaking DH Communities.” In their survey of practices among Spanish and Portuguese speaking DHers, Ortega and Gutiérrez asked participants to indicate all the disciplines they associated their work with. Their results showed that participants who reported working on LIS consistently picked more disciplines than others, suggesting that their work not only tends to be more interdisciplinary but also they are more aware of this interdisciplinarity.
• A collaborative paper on last year’s One Week | One Tool experience, “Play as Process and Product: On Making Serendip-o-matic,” was presented in three parts, and notes/slides from each have been posted by Scott Kleinman (California State University, Northridge), Mia Ridge (Open University), and Brian Croxall (Emory Center for Digital Scholarship).
• Élika Ortega describes a grassroots program to translate conference sessions in her recent post, “Whispering/Translating During DH2014: Five Things We Learned.”

The international Digital Humanities 2014 conference was held last week in Lausanne, Switzerland. Martin Grandjean and Yannick Rochat have created a visualization of the DH2014 network on Twitter; and ADHO has compiled a Storify with an overview of the conference. The full program of abstracts is available online. Dario Rodighiero has distributed his stunning visualization of DH2014 presentation keywords. Videos of plenaries by Bruno Latour, Ray Siemens, Bethany Nowviskie, and Sukanta Chaudhuri have been posted.

Wrap up posts and links to slides and text from plenaries, papers, panels, and posters are just beginning to filter out. Given the nature of the conference, myriad sessions were of interest to the dh+lib community. Readers may be particularly interested in works that focused more explicitly on the relationship between dh and libraries; these included Scholars’ Lab’s Bethany Nowviskie’s community keynote, “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene”; MITH’s Trevor Muñoz and Jen Guiliano’s paper on “Making Digital Humanities Work”; Pratt’s Chris Allen Sula’s poster, “Visualizing the Bibliography of Philosophy”; and British Library’s Adam Farquhar and James Bakers’ poster on “Interoperable Infrastructures for Digital Research: A proposed pathway for enabling transformation,” among many others. A preconference workshop led by Jacqueline Hettel (Stanford), Purdom Lindblad (Scholars’ Lab), James Baker (British Library), Padraic Stack (NUI Maynooth), Alex Gil (Columbia), Laura Miller (Scholars’ Lab), and Chris Bourg (Stanford) focused on “Methods for Empowering Library Staff Through Digital Humanities Skills.”

We’ll post a part 2 to this post next week, as more content from DH2014 presenters and attendees makes its way online.

A call for proposals for Digital Humanities 2014, in Lausanne, Switzerland, has been issued in 11 languages. From the announcement:

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) invites submissions of abstracts for its annual conference, on any aspect of the digital humanities. This includes but is not limited to:

• humanities research enabled through digital media, data mining, software studies, or information design and modeling;
• computer applications in literary, linguistic, cultural, and historical studies, including electronic literature, public humanities, and interdisciplinary aspects of modern scholarship;
• the digital arts, architecture, music, film, theatre, new media, digital games, and related areas;
• the creation and curation of humanities digital resources;
• social, institutional, global, multilingual, and multicultural aspects of digital humanities
• and the role of digital humanities in pedagogy and academic curricula.

We particularly welcome submissions on interdisciplinary work and new developments in the field, and encourage proposals relating to the theme of the conference.

Presentations may include:

• posters (abstract max of 750 words);
• short papers (abstract max of 1500 words);
• long papers (abstract max of 1500 words);
• multiple paper sessions, including panels (regular abstracts + approximately 500-word overview);
• and pre-conference workshops and tutorials (proposal max of 1500 words)

The deadline for submitting poster, short paper, long paper, and sessions proposals to the international Program Committee is midnight GMT, 1 November 2013. Presenters will be notified of acceptance by 7th February 2014. Workshop and pre-conference tutorial proposals are due at midnight GMT on 21st February 2014, with notice of acceptance by 17th March 2014.