Digital Humanities Commons^™

Building A Distributed Collaborative Model For Digital Scholarship Support At Liberal Arts Institutions, Iris Jastram, Austin Mason, Sarah D. Calhoun

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Much has been published on digital scholarship support models for large universities, but digital scholarship infrastructures for undergraduate colleges have received less attention in the literature. At Carleton College, we are in the process of developing a distributed collaborative model for support that involves librarians, academic technologists, faculty, undergraduate student workers, and other experts on campus. How can we capitalize on our unique institutional strengths as small liberal arts colleges while navigating the competing interests and expectations of diverse campus constituencies? This session allowed the participants to strategize and begin to build a framework for digital scholarship support at their …

Non-Algorithmic Inquiry In The Digital Age, Christopher Gilman, Jacob Alden Sargent

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

We notice, from our vantage point as alt-ac faculty who work in a digital scholarship center that students often confuse digital research with a rote process of “search and collect.” We propose that a successful deployment of undergraduate research at the course level requires a greater involvement from librarians in the design of the course structure and its assignments as well as greater intention from faculty in the curation of research materials. In this workshop we discuss case studies, present course design scenarios and suggest a collectively-developed protocol for working with faculty on courses involving class-wide research projects.

Omeka Mania, Megan Mitchell

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

The number of students whose Omeka work is supported in some way by the Oberlin College Library has gone from 5 in the spring of 2013 to 145 in the 2015-2016 academic year. Learn how the library went from managing a handful of Omeka-based projects in a three year period to seven classes in one year, covering growing awareness of the Omeka platform on campus, faculty consultations, student training, documentation, peer student support, and more.

At The Intersection Of Technology And Special Collections: A Program Approach To Collaborative Teaching And Student Engagement, Benjamin Panciera, Rebecca Parmer

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Staff from the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives discussed their participation in a program to facilitate the introduction of new technologies into the classroom. In 2014-2015 they engaged two East Asian history courses in a project to digitize, transcribe, and annotate a 19th century journal detailing the voyage of a young man from Connecticut to Hong Kong. The project was selected as an ideal means to connect students with tools and techniques critical to primary source research and to use emerging technologies to bring archival resources to new audiences.

The Next Thousand Days: Planning For Digital Scholarship Engagement Into The Future, Kris Macpherson

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

A discussion that focused on the incorporation of digital scholarship into reference/research and instruction departments, including if/how our new undertakings broaden our mission and learning outcomes, our roles and job descriptions, and the ways we collaborate with other groups in our libraries, IT and across campus. How does the inclusion of DS in campus courses complement, incorporate or compete with information literacy? How do we see ourselves moving forward -- what are we adding and what are we dropping, and how are we retraining ourselves to incorporate digital scholarship into our programs?

Beyond Finding And Managing: Extending Research Data Services At Liberal Arts Institutions, Ryan Clement

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

As more and more researchers seek utilize new methodologies, such as computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, data visualization, and text mining, academic libraries have begun to expand their support for these data services as well. In this working group, librarians who support data services, digital humanities, and digital pedagogy came together to discuss these growth areas in data services, how they are being supported at their institutions, opportunities for collaborative support across the Oberlin Group, and how liberal arts institutions can bring a unique perspective to these methods.

Sharing [True] Stories: Supporting And Sustaining Collaborative Digital Oral History Archives And Research, Rachel Walton, Charlotte Nunes

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

The grant-funded [True] Stories project aims to provide instructors from a variety of disciplines and on multiple campuses the critical resources and expertise needed to make student-driven oral history work possible, impactful, accessible, and a permanent part of collections. As such, the project PIs are committed to building and vetting a practical model for oral history classroom collaborations between smaller, moderately-funded college archives or libraries. In addition to the expected challenges of technological and interdisciplinary collaboration, the [True] Stories face critical digital preservation decisions and roadblocks: shared and sustainable digital storage solutions; a standard set of acquisition, processing, and curatorial …

Enriching Student Learning With Data Visualization, Adam Konczewski, Louis Johnston, Diana Symons, Bennett Frensko

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

In this workshop, participants were led through our collaborative process: how we divided up tasks; identified appropriate learning objectives; crafted assignments; selected data sets; and decided on software (Tableau). We discussed what’s worked, what still needs tweaking, and how we plan to expand data visualization support to faculty members in other departments. Participants left this session with a better understanding of how they can support data visualization in the classroom, and we’ll provide lists of resources and training opportunities that will help them get started.

Learning From Success: Approaching Data Management In The Humanities With Optimism And Good Cheer, Iris Jastram, Kristin Partlo, Sarah D. Calhoun

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Scientists and Social Scientists are well supported and accustomed to thinking about the life-cycles of their data and writing data management plans. The variety of humanities data and the novelty of managing it over its life-cycle often leads to confusion at best and chaos at worst during humanities research projects. In this discussion session we looked at a template for a humanities data management plan, successful data management plans for grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and discussed what humanities faculty at our institutions need to know about data management and what support structures they need in order …

Collaborating Across Units To Support Digital Scholarship, Alicia Peaker, Ryan Clement, Patrick Wallace

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

In this session, participants shared strategies and best practices for collaborating across units to support digital scholarship. The leaders briefly described two recent examples of successful collaborations at Middlebury College, instituting Omeka support & running a Liberal Arts Data Bootcamp, before opening up for broader discussions and brainstorming.

A Digital Quandary: Limited Vs Broadly Accessible Collections, Andrea Jackson, Christine Wiseman

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

The AUC Woodruff Library has been successful in creating digital collections open broadly and widely to anyone in the world with an internet connection. While substantially increasing the use of collections for digital humanities scholarship, archivists have noticed some frustration from researchers about limited accessibility of two of the repository’s most popular collections which are only accessible in the Reading Room – the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. and Tupac Amaru Shakur Collections. Staff from the AUC Woodruff Library’s Archives Research Center and Digital Services Unit discussed this quandary with conference attendees by sharing experiences, and best practices for …

Lever Press Panel, Rebecca Welzenbach, Teresa Fishel, Karil Kucera

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

This panel introduced and discussed the Lever Press, a new publishing initiative for peer-reviewed, open access, digitally native scholarly monographs supported by more than 40 liberal arts colleges.

• Rebecca Welzenbach, University of Michigan, "A Place to Stand: Fulcrum and Lever Press"
• Terri Fishel, Macalester College, "Lever Press: From Start to Present"
• Karil Kucera, St. Olaf College, "Publish or Perish: A Faculty Perspective on Digital Publishing"

Building Capacity For Dh Work In The Library And Beyond, Ashley Sanders

Digital Initiatives Symposium

Using the Claremont Colleges Library as a case study, this interactive, workshop-style presentation offers ideas and suggestions about how to build capacity within the library and the broader campus community to support and advance Digital Humanities (DH) projects, as well as digital scholarship more broadly. Through workshops, spring symposia, summer institutes, and introductory short courses for faculty, grad students, and librarians, the Claremont Colleges Library has become an integral part of the DH community and digital skilling process at the colleges.

To meet the needs of interested but inexperienced faculty members, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Dr. Ashley Sanders, offers a six-week …

Transcending Institutions And Borders: 21st Century Digital Scholarship At K-State, Rebel Cummings-Sauls, Rachel Miles, Ryan Otto, Charlene N. Simser

Nebraska Library Association: Conferences

Digital scholarship of the 21st century transcends institutions and borders with its freedom from print and physical locations. This case study reviews aspects of establishing a sustainable digital scholarship center, supporting open access through the institutional repository (K-State Research Exchange - K-REx) and an open access publishing platform (New Prairie Press – NPP) along with other outreach efforts. The Center for the Advancement of Digital Scholarship (CADS) at K-State Libraries serves our campus community, but digital scholarship extends K-State's impact far beyond Manhattan, Kansas. Highlighting the scholarship at our campus is only one small piece of the landscape. Collaboration on …

Getting Involved With The Digital Humanities In Theology, Biblical Studies, And Religious Studies, Kent Gerber

Librarian Publications and Presentations

Digital humanities are growing and thriving in higher education, and, in the spirit of the pioneering work of Father Busa, it is important for theological and religious studies libraries and librarians to consider our roles and involvement in the current milieu of challenge and opportunity. The library and digital humanities communities possess many shared values and goals, including providing wide access to cultural information, enhancing teaching and learning, making a public impact, and benefiting from the invigorating, though not salvific, effect of technology to their efforts.

The Engaged Graduate Experience: The First Year Of The Mala Program, Liana Colleen Bayne, Caroline Clare Hamby

Showcase of Graduate Student Scholarship and Creative Activities

This poster will illustrate the interdisciplinary, engaged learning and creative activities that have taken place during the first year of the new MALA (Madison Academic Library Associates) graduate assistantship program. Liana Bayne and Caroline Hamby are JMU Libraries’ first dedicated graduate assistants, and have spent the 2015-16 school year piloting the program. The two-year program’s curriculum includes library school-inspired learning modules alongside hands-on, project-based activities monitored and mentored by varying divisions of LET (Libraries & Educational Technologies) staff. Bayne and Hamby look forward to completing large-scale capstone project work in the second year of this program. Bayne and Hamby work …

Friends Of Musselman Library Newsletter Spring 2016, Musselman Library

Friends of Musselman Library Newsletter

From the Dean (Robin Wagner)

Library Receives 9/11 Commission Papers (Fred Fielding '16)

Library News

Digital Scholarship Fellows

From Paupers to Presidents

Fair Use Week

Reading About Race

Student Workers Save the Day (Nadia Romero Nardelli '19)

Life in the Fishbowl (Brittany Barry '17)

In Memory of Douglas R. Price; Former Aide to Eisenhower

Special Purchases

From the Piano Bench (Jay P. Brown ’51, Doug Brouder ’83, Julie Caterson ’84 and Mr. & Mrs. Michael Fiery)

Research Reflections: The Spirit of Gettysburg (Timothy Sestrick)

Gift of Art

Old Gettysburg Back to Thee (Jenna Fleming '16, Avery Fox '16, Melanie Fernandes …

Introduction To Textual Analysis, Gabrielle Kirilloff, Mikal Eckstrom

Digital Humanities Student Association: Materials and Presentations

This workshop provided an overview of the growing field of text analysis. We discussed the purpose of this type of research, explored example projects, and examined easy to use tools for beginners.

Laying The Foundation: Digital Humanities In Academic Libraries, John W. White, Heather Gilbert

Purdue University Press Books

Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries examines the library’s role in the development, implementation, and instruction of successful digital humanities projects. It pays special attention to the critical role of librarians in building sustainable programs. It also examines how libraries can support the use of digital scholarship tools and techniques in undergraduate education.

Academic libraries are nexuses of research and technology; as such, they provide fertile ground for cultivating and curating digital scholarship. However, adding digital humanities to library service models requires a clear understanding of the resources and skills required. Integrating digital scholarship into existing models calls …

Metadata Services In The Context Of Digital Humanities, Sai Deng

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Part II of the University of Central Florida Libraries hosted research lifecycle session at THATCamp Florida 2016. The Research Lifecycle at UCF presents a unified model of campus-wide support and services available to UCF researchers. This model was designed by the UCF Libraries’ Research Lifecycle Committee with inspiration from OpenWetWare’s Research Cycle. This presentation aims to explore the services and resources that UCF Libraries currently provides to researchers, while exploring how digital humanities research, specifically, can utilize such tools.

Documenting Spatial And Temporal Information For Heritage Preservation: A Case Study Of Sri Lanka, Chiranthi Wijesundara, Shigeo Sugimoto, Bhuva Narayan

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Cultural Heritage Properties (CHPs) around the world have been altered or destroyed due to various unforeseen factors, both natural and human-made. Consequently, as a preparedness approach around such disasters, documenting the CHPs are crucial to any efforts to repair, rebuild or relocate them. With advancements in digital technologies, integrating them into our documentation to improve heritage preservation has become a common approach. Here the main concern is on Spatial and Temporal (ST) information and the paper proposes that with recent developments in the field of Geospatial technologies, heritage preservation can be enhanced and improved by documenting ST information parallel to …

3d Scan Data For Caddo Ceramic Vessels From The George C. Davis Site (41ce19), Robert Z. Selden Jr.

CRHR: Archaeology

On June 8, 2015, the intact and reconstructed vessels from the George C. Davis site (41CE19) were scanned (3D) in advance of an analysis of 3D geometric morphometrics. These data were collected using a Creaform GoSCAN50 running VXElements via the scanner direct control function in Geomagic Design X. All data associated with this project are available in Zenodo under a Creative Commons Attribution license, where they can be downloaded for use in additional projects. These data have the capacity to augment numerous research designs in the digital humanities and ceramic studies, as well as a wide range of comparative research …

Interactive Visualization Of Bibliographic Information From Library Databases: A Digital Humanities Project, Dr. Xue-Ming Bao

Visualization of Bibliographic Information from Library Databases

Outline

Project Objective and Questions

Literature Review

Visualization Tools

Visualization Examples

E-Book Reading Practices In Different Subject Areas: An Exploratory Log Analysis, Robert S. Freeman, E. Stewart Saunders

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Print books pose inherent difficulties for researchers who want to observe users’ natural in-book reading patterns. With e-books and logs of their use it is now possible to track several aspects of users’ interactions inside e-books, including the number and duration of their sessions with an e-book and the order in which pages are viewed. This chapter reports on a study of one-year of EBL user log data from Purdue University to identify different reading patterns or ways in which users navigate within different types of e-books—authored monographs vs. edited collections--and in e-books in different subject areas. The analysis of …

Digitization And The Changing Roles Of Libraries In Support Of Humanities Research: The Case Of The Harrison Forman Collection, Krystyna K. Matusiak

Library and Information Science: Faculty Scholarship

Objective – this article examines the role of libraries in expanding access to primary sources through digitization and in providing support for humanities research. Research method – the author analyzes the literature on information behavior of humanist scholars in light of the increased use of digitized primary sources. Next, using the example of the digitized photographs and diaries from the Harrison Forman Collection, the author explores the emerging role of libraries in creating a new source of scholarly materials and supporting research in humanities. Results and conclusion – digitization increasingly matters not only for practical reasons of ease of use …

The New Gatekeepers: How Blogs Subverted Mainstream Book Reviews, Rebecca E. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Book reviewing has a fraught history in the United States. Reviewers have long been accused of not being analytical enough. It should be no wonder then with the emergence of social media that online book reviewing has become increasingly popular. Online reviewers, especially book bloggers, are no literary gatekeepers in their own right, shaping the tastes of readers across the world. Book blogs in particular pay special attention to titles which have long been derided by institutions such as libraries, academia, publishers, and bookstores. These literary gatekeepers typically ignore romance, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, young adult fiction, comic books, and …

The Half-Life & After-Life Of New Media, Nancy Austin

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

It is fitting to think of the half-life of new media using the time-based metaphor of radioactive decay. As a metaphor, an object’s half-life can be a useful way to talk about the potent technological modernity of new media and, like Walter Benjamin’s well-known notion of the aura, call attention to an object’s performativity. However, Benjamin’s aura remains a constant reminder of irrevocable originality whereas remarking on half-life references a quality that changes over time. But what happens after the rhetorical impact of being new has run its course? What is the life expectancy of once-new media and what of …

Forging Connections And Building Collections: The Mass. Memories Road Show At Umass Boston, Jessica R. Holden

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

In this presentation, I explored three aspects of the Mass. Memories Road Show: the public event, the digital collection, and the archival record of Massachusetts communities. I discussed bringing archival resources out into communities (rather than vice versa), and thus reaching new audiences, as well as building new partnerships within those communities.

The Mass. Memories Road Show is a state-wide digital history project that documents people, places, and events in Massachusetts history through family photographs and stories. In partnership with teams of local volunteers, we organize public events to scan family and community photographs and record “the stories behind the …

Measuring Success: The Value Of Our Work Can’T Always Be Captured In A Spreadsheet, Tom Radko, Mary Rose Muccie, Fredric Nachbaur, Mark H. Saunders, Darrin Pratt

Cinema & Media Studies

This year we were fortunate in encouraging directors of four university presses—Temple, Fordham, Virginia, and Colorado— to carve a chunk of time out of busy winter schedules in order to share their perspectives on the university press enterprise.

Documenting Ferguson: Capturing History As It Happens, Sonya Rooney, Jennifer Kirmer

WashU Libraries Presentations

This poster chronicles a novel archive project—the Documenting Ferguson Project at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL). Our poster highlighted our steps in the documentation and preservation of materials created in the course of and surrounding events in Ferguson, Missouri following the shooting death of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014. WUSTL created a committee, consisting of University Archives and other library staff, faculty, and additional university staff, to coordinate the efforts to capture the history as it happened. The Documenting Ferguson Project Team was called together in August 2014, soon after the death of Michael Brown and the first …