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.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Sitemap

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.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

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.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

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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"Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?"

Edward L. Ayers has published "Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?" in the latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

Though the recent popularity of the phrase digital scholarship reflects impressive interdisciplinary ambition and coherence, two crucial elements remain in short supply in the emerging field. First, the number of scholars willing to commit themselves and their careers to digital scholarship has not kept pace with institutional opportunities. Second, today few scholars are trying, as they did earlier in the web's history, to reimagine the form as well as the substance of scholarship. In some ways, scholarly innovation has been domesticated, with the very ubiquity of the web bringing a lowered sense of excitement, possibility, and urgency. These two deficiencies form a reinforcing cycle: the diminished sense of possibility weakens the incentive for scholars to take risks, and the unwillingness to take risks limits the impact and excitement generated by boldly innovative projects.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary"

Matthew Kirschenbaum has published "The .txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary" in a preview issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

Here then are some specifics I have considered as to how digital humanities might usefully collaborate with those archivists even now working on born-digital collections:

  • Digital archivists need digital humanities researchers and subject experts to use born-digital collections. Nothing is more important. If humanities researchers don't demand access to born-digital materials then it will be harder to get those materials processed in a timely fashion, and we know that with the born-digital every day counts.
  • Digital humanists need the long-term perspective on data that archivists have. Today's digital humanities projects are, after all, the repository objects of tomorrow's born-digital archives. Funders are increasingly (and rightfully) insistent about the need to have a robust data management and sustainability plan built into project proposals from the outset. Therefore, there is much opportunity for collaboration and team-building around not only archiving and preservation, but the complete data curation cycle. This extends to the need to jointly plan around storage and institutional infrastructure.
  • Digital archivists and digital humanists need common and interoperable digital tools. Open source community-driven development at the intersection of the needs of digital archivists, humanities scholars, and even collections' donors should become an urgent priority.

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Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities

digitalculturebooks has released Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities, edited by Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Hacking the Academy both explores and contributes to ongoing efforts to rebuild scholarly infrastructure for a new millennium. This book poses important and timely questions about scholarship in the digital age.

  • Can an algorithm edit a journal?
  • Can a library exist without books?
  • Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms?
  • Can a conference be held without a program?
  • Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"Brief of Digital Humanities and Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Authors Guild v. Hathitrust"

Matthew Jockers, Matthew Sag, and Jason Schultz have self-archived "Brief of Digital Humanities and Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Authors Guild v. Hathitrust" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

This Amicus Brief was filed in the United States Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit in the case of Authors Guild v. Hathitrust on June 4, 2013. The case is on Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 11 CV 6351 (Baer, J.)

Amici are over 100 professors and scholars who teach, write, and research in computer science, the digital humanities, linguistics or law, and two associations that represent Digital Humanities scholars generally. . . .

The Court's ruling in this case on the legality of mass digitization could dramatically affect the future of work in the Digital Humanities. The Amici argue that the Court should affirm the decision of the district court below that library digitization for the purpose of text mining and similar non-expressive uses present no legally cognizable conflict with the statutory rights or interests of the copyright holders.

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Perception Analysis of Scholarly E-Books in the Humanities at the Collegiate Level

ACLS Humanities E-Book has released Perception Analysis of Scholarly E-Books in the Humanities at the Collegiate Level.

Here's an excerpt:

At present, there is significant market confusion regarding e-book selections in the academic marketplace, particularly in the humanities. University acquisition librarians, unsure of what the offerings actually are, have found themselves unsure of where to allocate funds, which has resulted in the postponement of e-book purchases. This paper provides a current assessment of the status of e-book offerings in the humanities.

Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap

"Keeping Up With…Digital Humanities"

ACRL has released "Keeping Up With…Digital Humanities"

Here's an excerpt:

Digital Humanities is not limited to any one field—it is highly collaborative, and draws contributors from many backgrounds—but it does have a solid base in academia. In recent years, related initiatives have emerged at universities (and elsewhere) worldwide. For academic librarians, the increasing prominence of Digital Humanities, its ongoing debates and the issues and opportunities associated with bringing it into the library, are worth noting. In this issue of Keeping Up With… we address some of the most significant "need-to-know" issues for academic librarians interested in Digital Humanities.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap |

2013 Digging into Data Challenge Grants

JISC has announced the 2013 Digging into Data Challenge grant program.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Today, the third round of the Digging into Data Challenge, a grant competition designed to help develop digital research in the humanities and social sciences launches in Canada, the Netherlands, the UK and the United States. . . .

During the first two rounds of the Challenge, held in 2009 and 2011, nearly 150 teams, representing universities from across Canada, the Netherlands, the US, and the UK, competed to demonstrate how innovative research methods could be used to address questions in the humanities and social sciences. Twenty-two of those teams were awarded grants during those earlier rounds, each of them demonstrating new methods for analysing vast digital resources used for humanities and social science research, like digital books, survey data, economic data, newspapers, music, and other scholarly, scientific, and cultural heritage resources that are now being digitised on a huge scale.

Due to the overwhelming popularity of the earlier rounds, two additional funders have joined for round three, enabling this competition to have a world-wide reach into many different scholarly and scientific domains.

| Research Data Curation Bibliography, Version 2 (XHTML website; over 200 entries) | Digital Scholarship |

Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics

Open Book Publishers has released Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics.

Here's an excerpt from the ad:

The first section offers views on the practical realities of teaching digital humanities at undergraduate and graduate levels, presenting case studies and snapshots of the authors' experiences alongside models for future courses and reflections on pedagogical successes and failures. The next section proposes strategies for teaching foundational digital humanities methods across a variety of scholarly disciplines, and the book concludes with wider debates about the place of digital humanities in the academy, from the field's cultural assumptions and social obligations to its political visions.

| Digital Scholarship Overview | Digital Scholarship |

Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians

Ithaka S+R has released Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians .

Here's an excerpt:

In History, the Ithaka S+R project team found a discipline in transition. An expansion in the nature of the field over the past 50 years has introduced new sources, both in terms of subject coverage and international scope. However, only a comparatively small share of the primary sources required by historians has been made available digitally, tempering the opportunity for new methods to take hold.

Even if the impact of computational analysis and other types of new research methods remains limited to a subset of historians, new research practices and communications mechanisms are being adopted widely, bringing with them both opportunities and challenges.

| Digital Scholarship's 2012 Publications | Digital Scholarship |

Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: The Balanced Value Impact Model

King's College London has released Measuring the Impact of Digital Resources: The Balanced Value Impact Model.

Here's an excerpt:

This document synthesizes information from the whole Impact Assessment sector and then proposes the Balanced Value Impact Model as a means to effectively carry out an Impact Assessment relating to the benefits of digitization and digital resources in general. It seeks to help the communities identified above to provide a compelling argument for future work. Thus, you will find in this document information on:

  • Where the value and impact can be found in digital resources,
  • Who are the beneficiaries gaining from the impact and value,
  • How to measure change and impact for digital resources,
  • What makes for good indicators of change in people’s lives,
  • How to do an Impact Assessment using the Balanced Value Impact Model, and
  • How to present a convincing evidence-based argument for digital resources?

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

"Brief of Digital Humanities and Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Authors Guild v. Google"

Matthew L. Jockers, Matthew Sag, and Jason Schultz have self-archived "Brief of Digital Humanities and Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Authors Guild v. Google" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

The brief argues that, just as copyright law has long recognized the distinction between protection for an author's original expression (e.g., the narrative prose describing the plot) and the public's right to access the facts and ideas contained within that expression (e.g., a list of characters or the places they visit), the law must also recognize the distinction between copying books for expressive purposes (e.g., reading) and nonexpressive purposes, such as extracting metadata and conducting macroanalyses. We amici urge the court to follow established precedent with respect to Internet search engines, software reverse engineering, and plagiarism detection software and to hold that the digitization of books for text-mining purposes is a form of incidental or intermediate copying to be regarded as fair use as long as the end product is also nonexpressive or otherwise non-infringing.

| Google Books Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Digital Humanities: Where to Start"

Jennifer L. Adams and Kevin B. Gunn have published "Digital Humanities: Where to Start" in the latest issue of College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

As an emerging field, DH has, thus far, had a broad characterization. As technology and our understanding of it change, so do the limits of DH. There has been some debate as to whether DH constitutes a discipline of its own or is simply an application of new technologies to existing disciplines. In either case, DH can be understood as the place where traditional humanities research methodologies and media/digital technologies intersect. DH is more than the digitization of existing processes, documents, and artifacts. It is often data-driven, answering humanities research problems with multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and cross-disciplinary approaches within the digital/IT realm. The current challenge for DH lies in establishing itself in traditional academic environments. . . .

There are many useful resources available online, including general sites as well as e-publications, tools, tutorials, and organizations. We have tried to include a representative sample of those we feel are most important or could be most useful for librarians getting started in the digital humanities.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |