Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries

Purdue University Press has released Laying the Foundation: Digital Humanities in Academic Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

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.

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"Humanities Data in the Library: Integrity, Form, Access"

Thomas Padilla has published "Humanities Data in the Library: Integrity, Form, Access" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Digitally inflected Humanities scholarship and pedagogy is on the rise. Librarians are engaging this activity in part through a range of digital scholarship initiatives. While these engagements bear value, efforts to reshape library collections in light of demand remain nascent. This paper advances principles derived from practice to inform development of collections that can better support data driven research and pedagogy, examines existing practice in this area for strengths and weaknesses, and extends to consider possible futures.

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"Data Fluidity in DARIAH—Pushing the Agenda Forward"

Laurent Romary, Mike Mertens, and Anne Baillot have self-archived "Data Fluidity in DARIAH—Pushing the Agenda Forward."

Here's an excerpt:

This paper provides both an update concerning the setting up of the European DARIAH infrastructure and a series of strong action lines related to the development of a data centred strategy for the humanities in the coming years. In particular we tackle various aspect of data management: data hosting, the setting up of a DARIAH seal of approval, the establishment of a charter between cultural heritage institutions and scholars and finally a specific view on certification mechanisms for data.

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"Forging Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Importance of Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities"

Alex Poole's dissertation "Forging Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Importance of Digital Curation in the Digital Humanities" is available from the Carolina Digital Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

This exploratory qualitative study centered on the salience of digital curation to the digital humanities. A case study predicated upon semi-structured interviews, it explored the creation, use, storage, and planned reuse of data by 45 interviewees involved with nineteen Office of Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (SUG) projects. Similarly, the study sought to determine what digital curation skills had been employed in these projects and what digital curation skills project personnel felt were most important in doing such work. Interviewees grappled with challenges surrounding data, collaboration and communication, planning and project management, awareness and outreach, resources, and technology. This study sought to understand the existing practices and needs of those engaged in digital humanities work and how closely these practices and needs align with the digital curation literature. It established a baseline for future research in this area and suggested key skills for digital curation work in the digital humanities. Finally, it provided a learning model for guiding such education.

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"ARL Fall Forum Explores Research Partnerships in Digital Scholarship for the Humanities and Social Sciences—Overview and Slides Online"

ARL has released "ARL Fall Forum Explores Research Partnerships in Digital Scholarship for the Humanities and Social Sciences—Overview and Slides Online."

Here's an excerpt:

More than 170 librarians, publishers, scholars, and others spent an invigorating day discussing research partnerships in digital scholarship for the humanities and social sciences at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Fall Forum in Washington, DC, on October 8, 2015. . . .

The 2015 recipient of the Julia C. Blixrud Scholarship is Liz Hamilton, permissions manager and assistant to the director at Northwestern University Press. As part of the scholarship, Hamilton wrote an overview of this year's forum, which includes links to presentation slides.

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Open Library of Humanities Launched

The Open Library of Humanities has been launched.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

North Beach, San Francisco It is with great pleasure that we announce the launch of the Open Library of Humanities. Over two years in the planning and execution, the platform starts with seven journals, supported by 99 institutions. Our estimated publication volume for year one is 150 articles across these venues. The economics of this work out at approximately £4 ($6) per institution per open-access article.

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"The Digital Humanities Are Alive and Well and Blooming: Now What?"

Nancy L. Maron has published "The Digital Humanities Are Alive and Well and Blooming: Now What?" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

We sought to understand how institutions were handling DH projects: from conception to creation, then on to promotion and dissemination, and finally to ongoing support. Which units on campus currently "own" the different phases of support, and who should? Do the efforts contributed by different groups on one campus add up to a coherent plan for creating, supporting, and sustaining the impact of these works? And what sort of institutional model might best accomplish all of this?

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"Articulating a Vision for Community-Engaged Data Curation in the Digital Humanities"

Lydia Zvyagintseva has self-archived "Articulating a Vision for Community-Engaged Data Curation in the Digital Humanities."

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this study was to identify critical elements in a conceptual model for a community-engaged data curation in the digital humanities, to propose a set of evaluation criteria that would act as guiding principles in pursuing such work in the future, and to explore ways in which community-engaged data curation practice can further the mission of public digital humanities.

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New Online Digital Public Humanities Certificate

The George Mason University Department of History and Art History, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and the Smithsonian Associates are offering an online Digital Public Humanities Certificate.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This one-year, 15-credit certificate program includes 3 online courses:

  • Introduction to Digital Humanities (Fall 2015; 3 credits)
  • Digital Public History (Spring 2016; 3 credits)
  • Teaching Humanities in the Digital Age (Spring 2016; 3 credits)

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NEH Grants: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

The National Endowment for the Humanities has released guidelines for Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grants.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) program supports projects that provide an essential underpinning for scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities. Thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country maintain important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, and digital objects. Funding from this program strengthens efforts to extend the life of such materials and make their intellectual content widely accessible, often through the use of digital technology. Awards are also made to create various reference resources that facilitate use of cultural materials, from works that provide basic information quickly to tools that synthesize and codify knowledge of a subject for in-depth investigation.

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University of Minnesota Press and GC Digital Scholarship Lab Get $732,000 Mellon Grant for Manifold Scholarship

The University of Minnesota Press and GC Digital Scholarship Lab of Graduate Center of the City University of New York have received a $732,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for Manifold Scholarship.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Moving beyond the digitization of scholarly books, based primarily in siloed, read-only analogues to print such as Adobe Acrobat PDF and Epub, Manifold will define and create the next phase of scholarly publishing: monographs that open the boundaries of separate formats like "print" and "e-book." Foreseeing an emerging hybrid environment for scholarship, Manifold will develop, alongside the print edition of a book, an alternate form of publication that is networked and iterative, served on an interactive, open-source platform. . . .

In Manifold, a digital scholarly work would not be a static replication of the print book. From the beginning it is dynamic, revised, and expanded to reflect the evolution of academic thought and research, incorporating access to primary research documents and data, links to related archives, rich media, social media, and reading tools. Manifold seeks to encompass the growth and refinement of academic work as it is discussed, reviewed, and analyzed.

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Digital Humanities: "CSDH/SCHN Cyberinfrastructure Conversations Summary"

CSDH/SCHN has released the "CSDH/SCHN Cyberinfrastructure Conversations Summary."

Here's an excerpt:

This is a high-level summary of the outcome of a series of conversations regarding the CFI Cyberinfrastructure Initiative among Canadian Digital Humanists. The conversations emerged from CSDH/SCHN consultations that began in the Spring of 2014. The document tries to reflect the priorities and areas of emphasis that have emerged from these discussions, and suggests several areas of focus for broad-based collaborative cyberinfrastructure that would serve the needs of many in the digital humanities research community. The diversity of work in the digital humanities makes it impossible to mention every need, but in the view of the CSDH executive, this summary covers a number of pressing needs from a range of research groups across the country, and balances the need to serve existing researchers with that of expanding access to important datasets and cyberinfrastructure to leading humanities researchers who are experimenting with advanced research computing.

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University of Rochester Libraries Get $100,672 Mellon Grant for Digital Humanities Institute for Mid-Career Librarians

The University of Rochester Libraries has received a $100,672 Mellon Grant for a "21st Century Skills: Digital Humanities Institute for Mid-Career Librarians" pilot program.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The pilot institute will provide a three-day residential immersion experience and a yearlong online component for 20 mid-career librarians. Participants will develop proficiency in three core competencies-project management, copyright and fair use, and metadata literacy-while enhancing their technology toolkits and exploring diverse areas of digital humanities scholarship. University of Rochester faculty, River Campus Libraries staff, UR Mellon fellows in digital humanities, and CLIR postdoctoral fellows will serve as instructors. Interested mid-career librarians from across the United States and Canada are invited to apply to the institute through a competitive process.

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"Penn Receives $7 Million Gift to Create Price Lab for Digital Humanities"

The University of Pennsylvania has released "Penn Receives $7 Million Gift to Create Price Lab for Digital Humanities."

Here's an excerpt:

Funded by a generous $7 million gift from alumnus and SAS Overseer Michael J. Price and his wife, Vikki, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities will be the centerpiece of the "Humanities in the Digital Age" initiative of SAS's recently released strategic plan, and will provide the technological hardware and technical support staff necessary for a robust program that reaches across the University. . . .

The Price Lab will facilitate collaborations with the Penn Libraries; the Penn Museum; the Digital Media Design program in the School of Engineering and Applied Science; the Center for Visualization of Digital Information; the Penn Institute for Computational Science; Penn Medicine's Cartographic Modeling Lab; and SAS's Linguistic Data Consortium.

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Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grants

The NEH has released information about Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grants.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

These NEH grants support national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars and advanced graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities. Through these programs, NEH seeks to increase the number of humanities scholars using digital technology in their research and to broadly disseminate knowledge about advanced technology tools and methodologies relevant to the humanities.

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NC State Offers Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities

NC State University is offering a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The graduate certificate in digital humanities allows degree or non-degree seeking graduate students to design a curriculum of interdisciplinary study at the forefront of digital methods in the humanities. Digital humanities (or "DH") comprises a big tent of diverse disciplinary and technical pursuits, and our certificate program is premised on curricular flexibility to allow students to pursue, with the support of certificate staff and faculty, the innovative opportunities they see for creative, critically-informed, media-inflected research and teaching pursuits in their fields, from the humanities to colleges across the university. Including digitization of cultural heritage materials, studies in media history and technologies, analysis and critique of digital culture, applied programming for analysis and visualization, project management, interface design and user experience, and/or digital pedagogies, the certificate features abundant contexts and skills-training in which to define next-generation teaching and research.

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Digital Scholarship Centers: Trends and Good Practice

CNI has released Digital Scholarship Centers: Trends and Good Practice.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The purpose of this workshop was to explore the varying models of supporting digital scholarship in higher education, focusing on those that involve partnerships with, or a strong role for, libraries and information technology units. Participants were selected to represent a range of scholarship center models, different types of higher education institutions, and a variety of roles, including senior leadership, heads of centers, faculty closely affiliated with centers, and graduate students with close ties to centers.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future

Martin Paul Eve has published Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future with Cambridge University Pres.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

I am extremely pleased to announce that my book, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future has today been published by Cambridge University Press. The book offers a background to open access and its specifics for the humanities disciplines, as well as setting out the economics and politics of the phenomenon. It also has a very fine preface by Peter Suber! You can download the book for absolutely free (under a CC BY-SA license) at the official website (click the green "open access" button). You can also buy an extremely good value paperback copy, with all my royalties going to Arthritis Research UK, from the usual suspects.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Librarians and Scholars: Partners in Digital Humanities"

Laurie Alexander et al. have published "Librarians and Scholars: Partners in Digital Humanities" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

Key Takeaways

  • Libraries have numerous capabilities and considerable expertise available to accelerate digital humanities initiatives.
  • The University of Michigan Library developed a model for effective partnership between libraries and digital humanities scholars; this model contributes to both a definition and redefinition of this emergent field.
  • As the U-M experience shows, using the digital humanities as a key innovation tool can help libraries and their host institutions transform the way research, teaching, and learning are conceptualized.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host-Institution Support beyond the Start-Up Phase

Ithaka S+R has released Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host-Institution Support beyond the Start-Up Phase.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In this study, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Ithaka S+R explored the different models colleges and universities have adopted to support DH outputs on their campuses. . . .

Over the course of this study, Ithaka S+R interviewed more than 125 stakeholders and faculty project leaders at colleges and universities within the US. These interviews included a deep-dive phase of exploration focused on support for the digital humanities at four campuses”Columbia University, Brown University, Indiana University Bloomington, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. This research helped us to better understand how institutions are navigating issues related to the sustainability of DH resources and what successful strategies are emerging.

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"The ‘Digital’ Scholarship Disconnect"

Clifford Lynch has published "The 'Digital' Scholarship Disconnect" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

Still, in all of these examples of digital scholarship, a key challenge remains: How can we curate and manage data now that so much of it is being produced and collected in digital form? How can we ensure that it will be discovered, shared, and reused to advance scholarship? We are struggling through the establishment of institutions, funding models, policies and practices, and even new legal requirements and community norms—ranging from cultural changes about who can use data (and when) to economic decisions about who should pay for what. Some disciplines are less contentious than others: for example, astronomy data is technically well-understood and usually not terribly sensitive. Reputation, rather than commercial reward, is wrapped up in astronomical discoveries, and there is no institutional review board to ensure the safety and dignity of astronomical objects. On the other hand, human subjects and their data raise an enormous number of questions about informed consent, privacy, and anonymization; when there are genetic markers or possible treatments to be discovered or validated, serious high-value commercial interests may be at stake. All of these factors tend to work against the free and convenient sharing of data.

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"The University Library as Incubator for Digital Scholarship"

Bryan Sinclair has published "The University Library as Incubator for Digital Scholarship" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

The campus of the future will be increasingly connected and collaborative, and the library can be the community center and beta test kitchen for new forms of interdisciplinary inquiry. Libraries have always been in the business of knowledge creation and transfer, and the digital scholarship incubator within the library can serve as a natural extension of this essential function. In an age of visualization, analytics, big data, and new forms of online publishing, these central spaces can facilitate knowledge creation and transfer by connecting people, data, and technology in a shared collaborative space.

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"Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing"

Johanna Drucker has published "Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing" in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Here's an excerpt :

In the end, no special effects, dazzling displays, augmented realities, or multimodal cross-platform designs substitute for content. Scholarship, good scholarship, the work of a lifetime commitment to working in a field—mapping its references, arguments, scholars, sources, and terrain of discourse—has no substitute.

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Encouraging Digital Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities: White Paper

The University of North Georgia has released Encouraging Digital Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities: White Paper.

Here's an excerpt:

This project, led by the University Press of North Georgia, and funded by a Digital Start-Up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities focused on exploring the peer review process and increasing its usefulness to presses and scholars publishing digitally. By exploring this issues we have made recommendations for best practices in digital publishing, specifically for small academic presses. Through surveys and a workshop of key stakeholder groups (press directors, college administrators, humanities faculty, and library/technology center directors), we found a strong investment in the "gold standard" of double- or single-blind peer review. Working within the current academic publishing structure (including publishing in print) was a priority, even to presses and faculty members who were actively exploring digital publishing and open access models. On closer inspection, we realized that the various stakeholders valued the current peer review process for different reasons. And we found that the value of peer review goes beyond vetting the quality of scholarship and manuscript content. Based on these findings, we considered ways to obtain these benefits within the current academic structure through innovative peer review processes. At the same time, we looked for ways of offsetting potential risks associated with these alternative methods. We considered cost effective ways to accommodate the needs of the disparate constituencies involved in academic publishing while allowing room for digital publishing. While our findings focus primarily on small academic presses, they also have significant implications for the open access community.

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New Roles for New Times: Transforming Liaison Roles in Research Libraries

ARL has released New Roles for New Times: Transforming Liaison Roles in Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

The liaison role in research libraries is rapidly evolving. An engagement model in which library liaisons and functional specialists collaborate to understand and address the wide range of processes in instruction and scholarship is replacing the traditional tripartite model of collections, reference, and instruction. New roles in research services, digital humanities, teaching and learning, digital scholarship, user experience, and copyright and scholarly communication are being developed at research libraries across the country, requiring professional development and re-skilling of current staff, creative approaches to increase staff capacity, the development of new spaces and infrastructure, and collaborative partnerships within libraries, across campus units, and among research institutions.

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