Digital Humanities Commons^™

Reading Critically From The Archives: James Merrill Linn’S Diary As A Gateway To The Past, Carrie M. Pirmann, Courtney Paddick

Faculty Contributions to Books

Archival research and reading from the archives have long been embraced as a scholarly research practice in humanities disciplines. While scholars may spend weeks or months poring over hidden treasures found in archives, undergraduate students are often not exposed to these materials in a hands-on way. However, college and university libraries often have archival collections tucked away that can facilitate learning when used in thoughtfully crafted assignments. In this chapter, we discuss how we used Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and archival materials to provide students with an opportunity to engage in a close and critical reading of excerpts from the …

It Matters Who Does This Work: An Interview With Tonia Sutherland, Sophia Ziegler

Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship

Tonia Sutherland (she/her) is assistant professor in the Library and Information Science Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She serves on the SAA Council, and is author of the forthcoming book Digital Remains: Race and the Digital Afterlife. Dr. Sutherland holds a Ph.D. and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Computing and Information, as well as a BA in history, performance studies, and cultural studies from Hampshire College. Her work focuses on the interactions of technology and culture, and emphasizes critical work within the fields of archival studies, digital studies, and science and technology studies. …

Mapping Renewal: How An Unexpected Interdisciplinary Collaboration Transformed A Digital Humanities Project, Elise Tanner, Geoffrey Joseph

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Funded by a National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Foundations Grant, the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture’s “Mapping Renewal” pilot project focused on creating access to and providing spatial context to archival materials related to racial segregation and urban renewal in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, from 1954-1989. An unplanned interdisciplinary collaboration with the UA Little Rock Arkansas Economic Development Institute (AEDI) has proven to be an invaluable partnership. One team member from each department will demonstrate the Mapping Renewal website and discuss how the collaborative process has changed and shaped …

Review Of Feminist Histories And Digital Media, Biz Gallo

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The edited volume, Feminist Histories and Digital Media, sets out to explore the ways in which the field has grown and changed since the advent of the first reminist archival research projects 20 years ago. Intended as a signpost by the editors for future research in the field, the volume succeeds in informing, inspiring, and inciting researchers to move forward with using digital archives in feminist scholarship.

The Afterlives Of Government Documents: Information Labor, Archival Power, And The Visibility Of U.S. Human Rights Violations In The “War On Terror”, Rachel Daniell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is about access to information.

It examines the different ways that access to U.S. government records related to the “War on Terror” is generated through the intersection of law, bureaucratic policy and procedure norms, and the everyday work of archivists and transparency advocates. I argue that, both through their labor pushing for access to government records via complex records searches, Freedom of Information Act requests, and legal action, and also through their labor layering those records with new forms of metadata in public digital circulation platforms, these individuals, in the context of their organizations, generate new forms of …

Final Presentation To The Library Of Congress On Digital Libraries, Intelligent Data Analytics, And Augmented Description, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Yi Liu, Chulwoo Pack

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Conference Presentations and Speeches

This presentation to Library of Congress staff, delivered onsite on January 10, 2020, presents a tour through the demonstration project pursued by the Aida digital libraries research team with the Library of Congress in 2019-2020. In addition to providing an overview and analysis of the specific machine learning projects scoped and explored, this presentation includes a number of high-level take-aways and recommendations designed to influence and inform the Library of Congress's machine learning efforts going forward.

On The Reactionary Treatment Of American Radicals By J. Edgar Hoover's Fbi, Sonia Potter

Student Projects from the Archives

African Americans, who had been systematically oppressed from the very beginning of their time in the United States, were calling more and more loudly for freedom and equality in the mid-twentieth century. Compounded with the fear and hatred of communism was also a fear of black Americans ascending to the same societal plane as white Americans, especially among individuals and groups of people who held racist views and had reservations about equality between blacks and whites.

One of the groups of people who seemed to have reservations about such a concept was the United States’ own Federal Bureau of Investigation …

Document Images And Machine Learning: A Collaboratory Between The Library Of Congress And The Image Analysis For Archival Discovery (Aida) Lab At The University Of Nebraska, Lincoln, Ne, Yi Liu, Chulwoo Pack, Leen-Kiat Soh, Elizabeth Lorang

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

This presentation summarized and presented preliminary results from the first weeks of work conducted by the Aida research team in response to Library of Congress funding notice ID 030ADV19Q0274, “The Library of Congress – Pre-processing Pilot.” It includes overviews of projects on historic document segmentation, document classification, document quality assessment, figure and graph extraction from historic documents, text-line extraction from figures, subject and objective quality assesments, and digitization type differentiation.

Lightning Talk: Re/Mapping The Archives: Repository Content For The Digital Humanities And Cartographer, Michael R. Howser

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The print map, once seen as a unique and preservation worthy collection treated uniquely as a collection housed within a separate library or library space, has seen a precipitous decline in usage since Google Maps and other online tools emerged on the scene starting in 2005. With many print map collections experiencing declines in researcher requests per year, this inevitable decline of print map usage underscores the difficulty in discovering maps via the library catalog, search engines, and/or via finding aids. As collection space is pinned against demands for student space, print map collections are targets for capturing additional space …

Libraries & Librarians In The Aftermath: Our Stories & Ourselves, Ashley R. Maynor

Collaborative Librarianship

Following her experience of the Virginia Tech campus shooting in 2007, filmmaker and librarian Ashley Maynor set out to explore the phenomenon of temporary memorials and so-called “grief archives” using both documentary filmmaking and other qualitative research methods. She subsequently published her findings about Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and other public tragedies as Response to the Unthinkable: Collecting & Archiving Condolence & Temporary Memorial Materials Following Public Tragedies, to help fill a large gap in LIS literature about the best practices for libraries in responding to crises in their communities.

In the years since, her opinions and perspective on …

Visualizing Archives And Library Collections, Thomas Cleary

Publications and Research

Archivists and special collections librarians have struggled for a long time with how to show patrons what we have in our holdings. Collections have been made accessible through container lists, finding aids, and collection and content management systems such as ArchivesSpace, Islandora, and CONTENTdm. Each of these documents and systems also has its own learning curve and different functions, but even then the scale of some topics in collections or the connectedness between collections is not always apparent.

This article showcases two projects the author has worked on to assist in creating data visualizations in a library/archives context. The GLAMViz …

Remix The Medieval Manuscript: Experiments With Digital Infrastructure, Laura Braunstein, Michelle R. Warren, Baylauris Byrnesim

Dartmouth Library Staff Publications

Remix the Manuscript: A Chronicle of Digital Experiments is a collaborative research project that takes up this challenge. It brings together academics, librarians, technologists, conservators, and students to study the many permutations of a single manuscript—a fifteenth-century Middle English prose chronicle of Great Britain, commonly referred to as the “Prose Brut.” Our project raises fundamental questions about the digital research environment. How is today’s code configuring tomorrow’s historical knowledge? How do digital technologies affect our access to and understanding of material culture? By investigating these broad questions through the example of one manuscript, we define a limited yet infinitely …

Community Heritage Day - Bowling Green, Kentucky (Fa 1130), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

FA Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Folklife Archives Project 1130. Collection contains flyers and digital photographs taken at the Community Heritage Day event held on 4 November 2017 at the Kentucky Building in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The event—sponsored by the Kentucky Folklife Program, WKU Library Special Collections, the Kentucky Museum, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage grant—invited the general public to bring in items that were “significant to your family or our community story.” Materials were digitized, uploaded onto flash drives, and given to participants for personal, long-term accessibility. Note that Item 29 and Item 30 are duplicate images.

Looking Forward To Look Back: Digital Preservation Planning, Jennifer Brancato, Kayla Harris

Jennifer Brancato

Digital information resources are a vitally important and increasingly large component of academic libraries’ collection and preservation responsibilities. This includes content converted to and originating from digital form (born-digital). Preserving digital material, such as social media and websites, is essential for ensuring that future generations know everyone’s story, especially those groups which have been historically underrepresented in official records. This presentation will detail the steps undertaken by a digital preservation task force to first assess the weaknesses in current practice, and then develop a plan to implement a digital preservation policy and workflow. As part of the project, the task …

Looking Forward To Look Back: Digital Preservation Planning, Jennifer Brancato, Kayla Harris

Kayla Harris

Digital information resources are a vitally important and increasingly large component of academic libraries’ collection and preservation responsibilities. This includes content converted to and originating from digital form (born-digital). Preserving digital material, such as social media and websites, is essential for ensuring that future generations know everyone’s story, especially those groups which have been historically underrepresented in official records. This presentation will detail the steps undertaken by a digital preservation task force to first assess the weaknesses in current practice, and then develop a plan to implement a digital preservation policy and workflow. As part of the project, the task …

Looking Forward To Look Back: Digital Preservation Planning, Jennifer Brancato, Kayla Harris

Marian Library Faculty Presentations

Digital information resources are a vitally important and increasingly large component of academic libraries’ collection and preservation responsibilities. This includes content converted to and originating from digital form (born-digital). Preserving digital material, such as social media and websites, is essential for ensuring that future generations know everyone’s story, especially those groups which have been historically underrepresented in official records. This presentation will detail the steps undertaken by a digital preservation task force to first assess the weaknesses in current practice, and then develop a plan to implement a digital preservation policy and workflow. As part of the project, the task …

Bringing Special Collections To Life: Open-Source Tools For Digital Exhibit Creation, Andrew Welp

Scholarship and Professional Work

In 2014, Butler University Libraries received an institutional "Innovation Fund" grant to implement a large-scale digitization project to facilitate access and discovery of unique institutional holdings. Today, the Butler Digital History Initiative [digitalhistory.butlerlibraryservices.org] is comprised of several digital collections and interactive "digital exhibits" providing additional context and accessibility to archival materials to external and internal stakeholders. This program will highlight the open-source tools, procedures, and partnerships that enabled Butler University Libraries to bring their special collections to life.

From Print To Digital And Back Again: Using The Campus Newspaper To Explore Historical Events And Academic Culture, Jill Crane, Marcella Lesher

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Digital Humanities Imperative: An Archival Response, Pauleena Macdougall, Katrina Wynn

Maine Policy Review

The authors offer a look at how as archivists at the Maine Folklife Center they are using new digital tools to both preserve historical resources and improve public access to them.

Metastatic Metadata: Transferring Digital Skills And Digital Comfort At Umass Amherst, Jeremy Smith, Robert Cox, Danielle Kovacs, Rebecca Reznik-Zellen, Aaron Rubinstein

University Libraries Publication Series

Discusses efforts by the Digital Strategies Group and Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to enlist all library staff to create metadata for a group of historical photographs from the University archive.

Genre, Database, And The Anatomy Of The Digital Archive, Elizabeth J. Vincelette

English Theses & Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to define shared characteristics of literary digital archives, specifically to explore how conceptual and structural qualities of such archives express generic qualities. In order to describe digital media such as database or digital archives, scholars resort to metaphors, and this study offers the metaphor of anatomy as a generic inscription with historical and methodological implications. The definition of the anatomy genre draws from Northrop Frye's in Anatomy of Criticism, in which Frye describes how anatomies are characterized by proliferating lists, the mixing of prose and non-prose forms, and self-reflexivity--under the guise of knowledge …