I’ve uploaded the talk I gave last week at Digital Humanities 2009, “Library as Agent of [Re]Contextualization.” Its text is here [PDF], and the slides are available on SlideShare.
THATCamp: Libraries and Web 2.0
June 27th, 2009From Digital Humanities 09 to THATCamp, or The Humanities And Technology Camp. It’s an unconference: we (well, Jeremy Boggs, to whom profound thanks) came up with the schedule first thing in the morning. It’s a bare-bones event which apparently cost about $3500 to put on, and has about 100 participants. And we have everything we need — coffee, food, and rooms with projection. And smart people around the table. Note to self: a fairly large [un]conference is possible without a $100k investment, as long as someone (or five someones) is willing to put in a lot of organizational work.
The first breakout session I’m attending is, as will be obvious from the title, is Libraries and Web 2.0. People attending include “straight-up” librarians, digital humanists, a programmer at NCSA even. Let’s see if I can capture what we talk about.
DH09: Funding the Digital Humanities
June 25th, 2009Last session of the conference, and a good thing, because I’m just about burned out on the intense blogging for hours on end. The sadness over this exciting, inspiring, fun conference ending will set in in a few hours.
Claire Warwick makes an announcement about the poster competition: the award for outstanding poster goes to “Bringing Southern Oral Histories Online” by Natasha Smith and her group from UNC Chapel Hill! Congratulations!
Next up, Harold Short and Julia Flanders, presidents of ALLC and ACH respectively. They thank the organizers, it’s truly been a fantastic conference. Harold invites us to London in July 2010 for DH10! Kings College London will be hosting. KCL is situated right on the Thames, is culturally partnered with BL, BM, Tate, Globe, National Theatre, National Gallery, Guildhall School of Music & Drama… what’s not to like? Conf co-hosted by Centre for Computing in the Humanities and the Centre for e-Research; conference itself takes place on the Strand campus of KCL. Affordable student accommodations at $55/night! (Holy cats, that’s fantastic for the center of London!) All roads lead to DH10, 7-11 July. And check out the website.
The conference after that, Digital Humanities 2011, will be at 2011, with local hosts Glen Worthey and Matt Jockers.
Neil Fraistat presents the last dance: “we have the best chance of keeping you the longest if we put the money at the end.” Each panelist speaks for up to 7min, discussing an actual grantee or a few important challenges that their grantees have tackled, or identify what they see as the 2-3 most important challenges to the field at present. When presentations are done, floor will open for general discussion.
DH09 Thursday, session 3: terminology, text as gamespace, architecture
June 25th, 2009Walked in in the middle of Stuart Moulthrop’s talk; a big shame–I’d been looking forward to it. Right now he’s talking about cranky digital poets, like for example John Cayley who reportedly has a problem with people making distinctions between literature and the literary.
DH09 Thursday, session 2: computational stylistics, Memmott, Pynchon
June 25th, 2009Louisa Connors is up first; “Complementary critical tradition and Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam.”
Proposition: a computational stylistic analysis of function words in two sets of texts from the same period and related genres can support more traditional approaches to literary analysis of those texts.
DH09 Thursday, session 1: libraries!
June 25th, 2009The first paper was mine; naturally, I’m not going to blog it. But I’ll post a link to a PDF version of my talk here, and will Tweet it too. Stay tuned.
DH09 Wednesday, session 4: hermeneutics, transcription and dead projects
June 24th, 2009First up, Stan Ruecker and Alan Galey (Stan presenting), “Design as a Hermeneutic Process: Thinking Through Making from Book History to Critical Design.”
DH09 Wednesday, session 3: tools for text analysis
June 24th, 2009Oh, this’ll be good.
DH09: ACH general meeting
June 24th, 2009The Association for Computers and the Humanities wants YOU to be a member. You get an OUP journal subscription out of it! And ACH, one of the organizations putting on this conference, is funded by its membership dues. Do it, folks.
Stefan Sinclair, chair of the ACH jobs effort, is putting on a jobs slam! Like speed-dating, but different. Job seekers are going to spend 30 seconds each presenting themselves, and perhaps they’ll get hooked up with jobs. But first, job opportunities:
DH09 Wednesday, session 1: managing information
June 24th, 2009First up, Melissa Terras of University College London. “Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitization”
Melissa has spent a lot of time studying images, and in most cases was studying images in/from institutions. But what about collections (of all sorts, not just images) created by people who aren’t affiliated with institutions? They’re actually quite interesting, and Melissa studied them using the following methods:
DH09 Tuesday: Christine Borgman keynote
June 23rd, 2009[note to self: read Gibson's Spook Country.]
[OK, I'll admit: I'm tired and punchy. Hopefully, I'll do some justice to Borgman's talk.]
“Scholarship in the Digital Age: Blurring the boundaries between the sciences and the humanities.”
Borgman’s Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet was published by MIT Press in 2007. Well received and worth reading. What’re you waiting for? Here it is! Encourage your local library to get a copy! And now, on to the talk.
DH09 Tuesday, session 4: collaboration, XML geekDOM, collaborative modeling
June 23rd, 2009Oooh, late to the Julia Flanders talk, “Dissent and Collaboration.” I’ll do what I can.
We have an implicit contract with future scholars, who need to know how we did what we did.
Is there a conduit through which collaborative negotiation can take place? There’s data itself, potentially a schema for the data; hopefully documentation of both; and an implicit agreement (social contract) to use a common language, and to use it according to its accepted usage.
These agreements, in a human world where scholarly expression has a high value and standards are still being developed, aren’t enough to ensure perfect collaboration. So what we need is not a common language but a common mechanism for the creation of such a language. TEI provides this: it’s a mechanism not for collaboration but for the creation of a common language.
DH09 Tuesday, session 3: Use Cases Driving the Tool Development in the MONK Project
June 23rd, 2009MONK Project is “a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. The MONK project has been generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, from 2007-2009. All code produced by the project is open source. MONK has a publicly available instance with texts contributed by Indiana University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Virginia, and Martin Mueller at Northwestern University.” So now you have context.
DH09 Tuesday, session 2: Supporting the Digital Humanities: Putting the Jigsaw Together
June 23rd, 2009[OK, not putting information copied from slides in quotes: no time. Thank you, panelists, for concise wording in your slides! If you want specific attribution, let me know.]
The big questions to be addressed by the panelists, as Martin Wynne proposes in his introductory remarks:
1. What specific problems have you identified, and how are you seeking to address them?
2. What services, if any, will you provide?
3. How might you link with other related initiatives?
4. What are the further elements of the jigsaw puzzle which are needed to create a coordinated and more complete research infrastructure?
Read the rest of this entry »
DH09 Tuesday, session 1: Preserving Virtual Worlds: Models & Community
June 23rd, 2009[Again, live blogging with all its pitfalls and disclaimers. I almost certainly won't get most or all of the live discussion, in particular; if you remember the Q&As, please put those in comments.]
This panel is put on by members of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, a multi-institutional collaboration “funded by the Preserving Creative America initiative under the National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) administered by the Library of Congress.” (quoted from the PVW site) Read the rest of this entry »
DH09: opening plenary by Lev Manovich
June 22nd, 2009I’m in College Park, MD, at Digital Humanities 09, the annual international digital humanities conference put on by the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations. It’s my home conference; I first attended it in 2001, and have been in love with this crowd ever since. It’s the most fantastically supportive bunch of people I’ve found in academe. More: this year’s conference is hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, and the mood so far is downright festive.
BU STH materials make their way onto archive.org
June 19th, 2009Here at the School of Theology Library, we’ve been digitizing our Missions collection—for now, just what’s out of copyright. Student assistants Christina (Mo) Geuther and Carolyn Frantz have been working tirelessly, and we’re starting to see results. Exciting! And more on the way.
Elsevier gets sneaky
June 19th, 2009The large and influential academic publisher Elsevier seems to have quietly changed its publication agreement. From the sample agreement [PDF link]:
Assignment of publishing rights
I hereby assign to <Copyright owner> the copyright in the manuscript identified above (government authors not electing to transfer agree to assign a non-exclusive licence) and any supplemental tables, illustrations or other information submitted therewith that are intended for publication as part of or as a supplement to the manuscript (the “Article”) in all forms and media (whether now known or hereafter developed), throughout the world, in all languages, for the full term of copyright, effective when and if the article is accepted for publication. This transfer includes the right to provide the Article in electronic and online forms and systems. No revisions, additional terms or addenda to this Agreement can be accepted without our express written consent. Authors at institutions that place restrictions on copyright assignments, including those that do so due to policies about local institutional repositories, are encouraged to obtain a waiver from those institutions so that the author can accept our publishing agreement. (Emphasis mine.)
So, first they imply that institutions with institutional repositories restrict their faculty’s publishing opportunities by placing “restrictions on copyright assignments.” Not true: most institutions aim to educate their faculty about copyright and make sure that their researchers don’t sign away all rights in perpetuity without knowing exactly what they’re doing. It’s understandable that Elsevier wouldn’t like this, as they want exclusive copyright on work they didn’t perform (though, to be fair, are publishing).
Then Elsevier encourages authors to opt out of an enterprise that is proving to be a significant boon to academics (first and foremost providing them with visibility), implying that this is required for the authors to accept Elsevier’s apparently immutable publishing agreement. No contract is immutable before it is signed, but the language here does strongly suggest this, counting on most people just going along with it because they are unaware, or because they want to publish and don’t have time to pursue this with Elsevier.
It’s true that the very next paragraph, and its continuation later in the document, have different implications:
Retention of Rights for Scholarly Purposes (see Definitions below)
I understand that I retain or am hereby granted (without the need to obtain further permission) rights to use certain versions of the Article for certain scholarly purposes, as described and defined below (“Retained Rights”), and that no rights in patents, trademarks or other intellectual property rights are transferred to the journal.The Retained Rights include the right to use the Pre-print or Accepted Authors Manuscript for Personal Use, Internal Institutional Use and for Scholarly Posting; and the Published Journal Article for Personal Use and Internal Institutional Use. [...]
[definition of scholarly posting] Voluntary posting by an author on open Web sites operated by the author or the author’s institution for scholarly purposes, or (in connection with Pre-prints) pre-print servers, provided there is no Commercial Purpose involved. Deposit in or posting to Special Repositories (such as PubMed Central) is permitted only under specific agreements between Elsevier and the repository and only consistent with Elsevier’s policies concerning such repositories. If the author wishes to refer to the journal in connection with such posting, the Appropriate Bibliographic Citation should be used.
Further confusing: a scholar may post pre-prints to the websites that fit the italicized definition above, which would seem to include institutional repositories. Except Elsevier mentions repositories twice, and both in a permission-denied context: the second one is the Special Repositories such as PubMed.
Seems like language designed to mislead and bully, to me. Elsevier, would you please clarify?
Resources: World Digital Library
April 28th, 2009Have you seen the World Digital Library yet? It’s fantastic. In the creators’ own words, the WDL “makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.” The interface, developed by the Library of Congress with support (including financial) from worldwide entities, is slick. Navigation tools are available in several languages including Arabic and Russian. You can browse primary materials by place of origin, time period, owner institution, topic, and type of item. The specific technologies used to create the WDL site are not clear, though a quick look at the home page source suggests just JavaScript and CSS – anyone know for sure?
Events: Zotero trainers workshop at Emory this August
April 28th, 2009From the Zotero blog:
We are now accepting applications for the second Zotero trainers workshop, to be held July 30-31st at Emory University in Atlanta. At this info-packed and fun-filled two-day event, participants will acquire a solid understanding of Zotero’s capabilities and how those capabilities can best meet their users’ needs. Beyond acquiring a detailed understanding of the program, participants will learn: best-practices for demo-ing and supporting Zotero at their institution; approaches for developing institution-specific documentation; and steps for migrating user data to and from other research management tools.
Cost: $350. Application deadline: May 31. One or two people from a single institution will be accepted. More at the link above.