Digital Humanities Commons^™

Visualizing Scholarly Communication, Nina Collins, Matthew Hannah

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

University libraries across the country are investing in Digital Humanities and digital scholarship initiatives, providing support for research and teaching using digital tools and methods. Because digital scholarship offers scholars new ways to visualize and analyze their research, which communicates such research in new ways, it has clear lines of connection with scholarly communications. Combining these two unique areas of library activity offers opportunities for new library research by leveraging methods from DH to tackle problems in scholarly communications. Researchers at Purdue are collaborating on just such a project by applying digital tools to the analysis of predatory publishing. In …

A Critical Look At The Digital Scholarship Corpus: How Access Influences The Questions We (Can) Ask, Gesina A. Phillips

Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference

Access to research materials is an issue that cuts across disciplines and impacts most researchers as they gather information. For a digital scholar in need of a textual corpus, however, these challenges may be particularly acute. Those studying mid-to-late 20th century works may find themselves in uncertain territory with regard to copyright and licensing. Those studying historically marginalized populations may have trouble finding a pre-compiled corpus, or finding texts at all. Researchers at smaller institutions or in underfunded departments may find that existing datasets are not available to them due to cost, or that they run into copyright and licensing …

Using Chronicling America’S Images To Explore Digitized Historic Newspapers & Imagine Alternative Futures, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

This presentation situates the work of the Aida team broadly as well as hinges this work on some very specific challenges for digital libraries. In doing so demonstrate the many types of questions and domains to be explored in digitized newspapers.

Cultural Memory In Danger: Sustainable Information, Preservation, And Technology In The Humanities: A Theoretical Approach, Casey D. Hoeve

Collaborative Librarianship

Abstract

Management of library collections is an inherently collaborative process. Spanning multiple generations, materials are selected that support user communities, striving for the optimization of storage and access at the lowest cost.[i] While established partnerships are crucial for the survival of libraries, within any cooperative network, there exist opportunities for divergent practices. Alternative initiatives may have progressive intentions, but competing systems and groups have the potential to disrupt recognized standards and infrastructure, some of which can prove detrimental to information organizations.

Abrupt format changes and technological advancements have altered the way in which materials are currently acquired, accessed, and …

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 …

Software Of The Oppressed: Reprogramming The Invisible Discipline, Erin R. Glass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a critical analysis of software practices within the university and the ways they contribute to a broader status quo of software use, development, and imagination. Through analyzing the history of software practices used in the production and circulation of student and scholarly writing, I argue that this overarching software status quo has oppressive qualities in that it supports the production of passive users, or users who are unable to collectively understand and transform software code for their own interests. I also argue that the university inadvertently normalizes and strengthens the software status quo through what I call …

The Consequences Of Framing Digital Humanities Tools As Easy To Use, Paige C. Morgan

Library Articles, Papers, and Presentations

This article examines the recurring ways in which some of the most popular DH tools are presented as easy to use. It argues that attempts to couch powerful tools in what is often false familiarity, directly undermines the goal of encouraging scholarly innovation and risk taking. The consequences of framing digital tools as either easy or more difficult shapes the relationship between librarians and the students and faculty whose research they support, and, more broadly, the role and viability of libraries as spaces devoted to skill acquisition.

Creating A Digital Theatre Collection, Sarah L. Whybrew

Library Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This presentation documents the project undertaken in 2017-2018 to digitize 60 years of Otterbein University Theatre History and create a web based online special collection in the Institutional Repository. It includes a discussion of how collaboration and partnerships were developed as well as a detailed description of the methods used to manage the project, student workers, and volunteers.

Transformed, I'M Sure: A (Polite) Introduction To Fair Use In Dh, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This presentation looks at how the words "including" and "such as" in the fair use section of United States copyright law (i.e., Section 107 of Title 17 of the United States Code) allow for unforeseen fair uses, including transformative works made by digital humanists.

Students And Digital Projects At Wmu: Working And Learning Together, Marianne Swierenga

University Libraries Faculty & Staff Presentations

Western Michigan University Libraries uses undergraduate and graduate students in many stages of their digital projects, from finding aid creation and translation, to scanning and editing digital images. Using the recent digitization and description of a WWI German soldier’s scrapbook, we will examine how students are incorporated into the overall workflow, often bringing needed skills to the project and gaining valuable hands-on experience with archival materials, scanning equipment and software, and metadata creation.

Voices Of Notators: Approaches To Writing A Score--Special Issue, Teresa L. Heiland

Journal of Movement Arts Literacy Archive (2013-2019)

In this special issue of Voices of Notators: Approaches to Writing a Score, eight authors share their unique process of creating and implementing their approach to notating movement, and they describe how that process transforms them as researchers, analysts, dancers, choreographers, communicators, and teachers. These researchers discuss the need to capture, to form, to generate, and to communicate ideas using a written form of dance notation so that some past, present, or future experience can be better understood, directed, informed, and shared. They are organized roughly into themes motivated by relationships between them and their methodological similarities and differences. …

Researcher Access To Born-Digital Collections: An Exploratory Study, Julia Y. Kim

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

While a small, but growing number of institutions offer access to born-digital collections, there is scant literature documenting researcher interaction with these materials. This paper addresses this gap through documenting and analyzing researcher interactions to portions of born-digital collections at New York University (NYU) Libraries, with the cooperation of NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collection and the Digital Library and Technology Solutions Department, as well as the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) program. From September 2014-May 2015, NYU Libraries began implementing an “access-driven” born-digital workflow for their 3 archives: Fales Library and Special Collections, NYU University Archives, and the Tamiment …

Review Of The Shelley-Godwin Archive, Stacey L. Kikendall

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Review of The Shelley-Godwin Archive

Patterns, Collaboration, Practice: Algorithms As Editing For Historic Periodicals, Elizabeth Lorang

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

This presentation positions my recent work on the algorithmic “discovery” of poetic material in historic newspapers within the contexts of my various roles as an editor of periodical literature and also consider how duplicative processes and algorithms encode principles and values and function as editorial acts. Ultimately, I hope to pose a range of questions to prompt discussion around the place (or not) of machine learning in identifying and selecting texts and bodies of work; what ideas we’re actually exploring/are able to explore when we enlist technology in stages of this work; and the stakes of these activities, whether human …

Community Engaged Digital Initiatives: Building Academic Library Services And Infrastructure With Faculty And Community Collaborators, Shannon Lucky, Craig Harkema

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Community collaborations have become key drivers for the development of our library’s digital initiatives (DI) program. While collaborative partnerships can complicate the process of getting DI work completed, they can also positively contribute to decision making around digitization projects, metadata use, user interface (UI) design, and infrastructure development. This presentation outlines possibilities for iteratively developing digital infrastructure and service offerings to support community engaged research and discusses key issues to consider when developing such a program. We will describe how we have adapted DI systems to support a range of projects from photography collections to oral histories, to locally created …

New Perspectives: Reno Street Art In Virtual Reality, Amy J. Hunsaker, Laura Rocke

Digital Initiatives Symposium

UNR Libraries’ Digital Initiatives Unit and Digital Media Technology Department partnered with an art historian, local art organizations, and Reno street artists to create an online archive, exhibit, and virtual reality experience highlighting the explosion of urban street art in Reno. The Libraries assembled a team that photographed the art using traditional 2D digital cameras, and captured 360 VR footage of the art and of several artists creating interior and exterior murals. The team conducted on-camera interviews of prominent street artists in Reno; collected permission forms; generated metadata; preserved the images and created an archive using CatDV, the Libraries’ media …

Getting To Know Our Web Archive: A Pilot Project To Collaboratively Increase Access To Digital Cultural Heritage Materials In Wyoming, Amanda R. Lehman, Bryan Ricupero

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The University of Wyoming is the only four year higher education institution in the state, a unique position amongst colleges and universities in the United States. Given this unusual status it is especially important that the university libraries use their resources to identify and partner with communities around the state to build collections that preserve their cultural heritage. An Archive-It subscription was purchased in 2016, with an initial goal of capturing university related materials. In an effort to expand the scope and meaningfulness of the web archive, a project has been undertaken to use university and statewide relationships to build …

From The Trenches: Cross-Campus Digital History Collaboration, Amy E. Lucadamo, Ian A. Isherwood, R.C. Miessler, Jenna Fleming, Meghan E. O'Donnell

All Musselman Library Staff Works

In September 2015, our team launched The First World War Letters of H.J.C. Peirs (www.jackpeirs.org), a digital history initiative built on collaboration between faculty, students, and library staff. The project is founded on amazing primary source material, but with limited financial support and little dedicated staff time. We leveraged the creativity and hard work of our team members to build a website that is maintained by students and enhanced whenever possible with features and commentary from faculty and staff. Members of #TeamPeirs discussed the evolution of the project, the nature of our collaboration, and the intersection of audiences …

3 Secrets Of The Digital Humanities That You Never Knew, Jennifer Hootman

Library Presentations

No abstract provided.

You Built It, But Can You Talk About It?, R.C. Miessler, Carrie Pirmann, Courtney Paddick

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Gettysburg College and Bucknell University have adopted library-led summer research fellowships for undergraduates that focus on teaching research skills with digital methods. In the summer of 2017, Gettysburg and Bucknell's student cohorts met to learn how to create elevator speeches for their research topics; R.C. Miessler (Gettysburg), and Carrie Pirmann and Courtney Paddick (Bucknell), talk about the structure and goals of their summer programs, with a focus on their combined session and the importance of helping students learn how to talk about their research.

Interim Performance Report, Lg‐71‐16‐0152‐16, Extending Intelligent Computational Image Analysis For Archival Discovery, February 2018, Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, John O'Brien

CDRH Grant Reports

No abstract provided.

Copyright Considerations For Digital Storytelling, Sarah A. Norris

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Presentation given to ASH 4932 students on January 29, 2018.

This session covered a variety of copyright considerations when considering digital projects. This included basic aspects of copyright. It focused primarily on copyright considerations for digital historians, including examples of public domain and Creative Commons Licensed images and media that students can use practically in their projects.

Increasing Our Vision For 21st-Century Digital Libraries, Elizabeth M. Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh

University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries: Presentations

This presentation

1. Reads digital library interfaces—or their "main door" interfaces—as glimpses into what we have thus far valued in the development of digital libraries
2. Frames a visual way of thinking about textual materials
3. Introduces the work of our research team—where we are now, and where we're headed
4. Draws some connections between the parts

This presentation is very much a look into thinking in process and work in progress and proposes the following ideas:

1. As a community, we can do much more with the digital images we're creating of textual materials than we've heretofore done.
2. We aspire to have additional layers …

Copyright Considerations For His 6165: Tools For The Digital Historian, Sarah A. Norris

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Presentation given to HIS 6165 students on January 24, 2018.

This session covered a variety of copyright considerations when considering digital projects. This included basic aspects of copyright. It focused primarily on copyright considerations for digital historians, including exploring fair use, digital humanities and history projects, creative commons licenses, and other copyright-related topics.

Pheon: Practicing Problem Solving And Gaining Museum Literacy From Transmedia And Alternate Reality Games In Museums, Jes A. Koepfler, K. Tierney Sneeringer, Georgina Bath Goodlander

Journal of Interactive Humanities

The Luce Foundation Center of the Smithsonian American Art Museum ran a transmedia game, called PHEON, as an in-museum scavenger hunt-style game from October 2010 through September 2011. Players took on missions that sent them throughout the Museum's collections. From a summative evaluation of the game, we learned that PHEON supported problem solving skills, increased museum literacy, and help players connect with the Museum and its resources. Players also identified opportunities for improvement related to the game materials and its narrative. The paper offers a summary of lessons learned for others hoping to deploy an ARG or transmedia game …

Digital Humanities As Community Engagement: The Digital Watts Project, Melanie Hubbard, Dermot Ryan

Librarian Publications & Presentations

The Digital Watts Project was a graduate-level English class taught in summer of 2016 that focused on the 1965 Watts “Uprising” or “Riots.” The class worked with the Southern California Library (SCL) to make available, through a digital public humanities project, primary sources intended to expand the narrative around the events of 1965, and to situate them in a broader context of the history of race and racism in Los Angeles. Exploring the ways in which our background in the humanities could positively enrich our work with the SCL, Melanie Hubbard, a Digital Scholarship Librarian at Loyola Marymount University, and …

Rethinking The Potential Of Documentation Of Culture As A Data Gathering Practice, Tomasz Umerle

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In this article, I examine the documentation of culture (DoC). This is the practice of gathering and producing the information and data relevant to intangible cultural phenomena. DoC is generally practiced by teams of documentalists generally outside GLAM institutions (i.e., galleries, libraries, archives and museums). As such, it differs from the preservation and description of concrete objects of cultural heritage done within those institutions. I examine how DoC finds it increasingly difficult to clearly define and communicate its role: a) in relation to LIS; b) to the broader academic community; and c) in digital age of information overload. In this …

[For The System, Alternate Title: If It Sort Of Looks Like A Duck: Reflecting On Bad Photographs And Chains Of Custody], Jodi Kearns, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Though the system will not permit it, our abstract is an out-of-focus photograph of ducks at 1900 pixels wide and black and white, which is approximately 20% the size of the original color photograph we use for our title. By most technical standards, it is a bad picture. Straightening the horizon, cropping the image to emphasize the two foremost ducks, brightening the image to highlight the feet, and adding a caption that indicates activity might yield a “better” picture for some viewers. This piece captures nearly 20 years of conversations about good and bad pictures, and continues the conversation from …

Open Humanities: Strategies For Creating Open Access Course Materials, John Venecek, Christian Beck, John Raible, Sarah A. Norris, Lily Flick

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

As textbook affordability and access to information become important topics on university campuses and within the population more generally, finding ways to decrease book costs in a humanities classroom while providing the best possible resources for students emerges as a multi-disciplinary strategy that requires cooperation across campus. Open Access texts are a way to offer content for free, but humanities assembling this type of text in the humanities is often restricted by copyright and intellectual property. Utilizing materials found in public domain or with a Creative Commons license, however, provides an opportunity to create Open Access texts. In spring 2016, …

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 …