ALA program organized by ACRL-LES at Annual Conference 2009
The panel explored the ways in which new media and digital technology were transforming how we do research and scholarship – and the place of the libraries in that transformation. All the presenters are all have background of English literature studies. As librarians and humanities faculty become increasingly involved in the creation and development of online resources, humanities librarians are strategically placed to use their knowledge, talents, and capabilities to create, organize, and exploit the resources. The presenters all involved with e-text creation and visualization projects, open-access journal publication, and resource development and discussed initiatives and issues in the burgeoning world of digital humanities.
Digital humanities and humanities librarians, or, another day, another new thing
Angela Courtney, Librarian for English Literatures, Indiana University, Bloomington
Angela firstly discussed the definition of digital humanities. She referred to the book “A companion to digital humanities” edited by Susan Schreibman, etc. and the Digital humanities manifesto 2.0 published on the website of UCLA. As the manifesto states, digital Humanities is an array of convergent practices where print is no longer the only medium but digital tools, techniques, and media have altered the production and dissemination of knowledge in the arts, human and social sciences. The Digital Humanities seeks to play an inaugural role to facilitate the formation of networks of knowledge production, exchange, and dissemination. And then she showed an experimental example of “Absalum, absalum! Electronic, Interactive! Chronology” by Stephen Railton, Dept of English, Univ of Virginia and Will Rourk, Digital Media Lab, Univ of Virginia. This resource is intended to use IT technology to help readers orient themselves inside the stories William Faulkner is telling in Absalom, Absalom! Angela then presented the Victorian women writers project, in which her home university, Indiana U got involved in. This project is to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century. Angela introduced some features of this project, including the metadata standards, search and browse functions and keyword assignment.
18thConnect, a scholar-directed information architecture
Laura Mandell, Professor of English Literature, Miami University of Ohio
Laura mainly talked about 18thConnect, which is a collaborative initiative by the Universities of Illinois, Miami-Ohio, and Virginia for providing a comprehensive research environment of the long eighteenth century (1660-1800). In partnership with NINES, 18thConnect will build on the open source for digital humanities research–Collex and Juxta. Another thing about 18Connect is that, as NINES, it also aggregates materials from those commercial vendor but only institutions who are subscribers of those commercial databases have the access. Laura also stated that 18 Connect just was granted by National Center for Supercomputing Applications to use supercomputer time to run a parallelized optical character recognition (OCR) program on pages of images of 18th century printed texts, made available through its collaboration with Gale Group. This OCR software has been designed for recognizing the special print format of 18th century literature. By converting a vast archive of images into machine-readable texts, this project will provide a model for adapting OCR programs to field-specific problems that must be solved in order to preserve the full range of our cultural heritage.
NINES, RaVoN and the Future of Academic Publishing
Dino Franco Felluga, Associate Professor, Department of English, Purdue University
Dino mainly talked about NINES, an open access digital humanities initiative. NINES is an initiative for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship. Dido firstly addressed the problems of current scholarly publishing. Commercial entities are ultimately concerned about profit; university presses are no longer driven exclusively by the intellectual value of the work but by what can sell; library acquisition are facing tighter budget because of the expensive subscriptions of e-resources. Based on the above problems, Dino posed a very positive attitude to open access. He stated that NINES reclaimed our own knowledge production, explored the emergent interpretive and social acts made possible by new technologies, established a coordinated network of peer-reviewed content and useful tools, decentralized scholarly work, allowed individuals and groups to work and archive scholarly materials in their own IT environments and at the same time integrate that work into a widely distributed network, provided content for free. NINES currently aggregate 404,268 objects, drawn from a variety of sources. Except MARC records, the majority of the research objects comes from free culture. NINES also aggregated all the Nineteenth-century articles archived by JSTOR and Project Muse, as well as collections by commercial enterprises like ProQuest and Gale. Now one can search all of above journals and databases from NINES, including full-text searching for all materials aggregated. The search engine, SOLR, allows faceted classification, so users can narrow their search by choosing certain facets. Folksonomy tagging allows objects to be dynamic and largely user-driven. The most exciting new feature of COLLEX is the ability now only to collect but also to exhibit and repurpose the objects in one’s “My NINES” collection. Finally, Dino talked about how did this impact university library. U of Virginia Library provides physical space and servers; NINES has inspired the library to develop a new open-source search interface; people in the NINES projects are playing important roles in digital research and implementation of the library.
Over The Fence: Overcoming resistance to digital humanities
Chad Curtis, Librarian for Literary Studies and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, New York University
Chad talked his experience with digital humanities and open access from the point view of a subject and liaison librarian of humanities. He stated that “The library is a crucial partner in planning and envisioning the future of preserving, using, even creating scholarly resources.” This “requires the combined expertise of technical, professional, and scholarly personnel.” He mentioned the resistance of digital technology for humanities librarians. He believed no matter which media are being used, research is just research. He also addressed the three key points of the involvement: time, money and knowledge and how a humanities librarian to prepare himself for digital humanities. He said that time is an obstacle regardless of the task. While careful time management is the best solution, one will see how a solution more directly tied to money and knowledge helps balance this obstacle. Secondly, academia is fortunate that many research programmers share their open source products, which save money for developers and hardware. Finally, he listed some key IT technology which he believed was essential for humanities librarians, such as data modeling, web design, computer science, systems analysis and project management. He gave an good example for humanities librarians starting their own open access web resources, which he called personal sandbox, by installing free software including Sun’s VirtualBox (an operating system within your current operating system), TurnKey Linux (an operating system provided with Drupal, a content management software). The later one also provided other free tools, like MediaWiki WorkPress, or a LAMP stack to combine applications and develop freely.