Digital Humanities as Appendix

Editorial Commentary

Purpose – Digital humanities (DH) has become a much discussed topic among both humanities scholars and library professionals. The library and information science (LIS) community has taken efforts in providing new facilities and developing new services to meet humanities scholars’ changing research behaviors and needs employing digital tools and methods. How to effectively collaborate with the DH community has been a challenging task to LIS in their digital library (DL) development endeavors. The purpose of this paper is to discover productive ways for LIS to support DH scholarship, specifically, what DL components, including content, technology, and service, should and could be developed for digital humanists. Design/methodology/approach – As an initial effort of the Digital Humanities Interest Group at University of California, Irvine Libraries, the examination is primarily based on a cross-boundary environmental scan in both DH and DL fields. The environmental survey includes both a literature review and web and physical site visits. The survey results, especially a gap analysis between the behaviors and needs of humanities scholars and the digital content, technologies, and services currently offered by the DL community, are used to shape the proposed roles of DH librarianship. Findings – First, DH’s innovative approach to research and teaching practices brings opportunities and challenges. Second, DH research is collaborative work. Third, major channels are established for the DH community. Fourth, various tools and data sets are developed to support different types of projects. Fifth, DH community has unbalanced geographical and disciplinary distribution. Sixth, DH research output still lacks attention, integration, and sustainability. Finally, LIS professionals play unique roles in DH projects. Overall, the communities of DH and DL share common goals and tasks. Practical implications – This paper proposes these present and future roles of LIS professionals: creator and contributor; curator; messenger and liaison; educator; mediator and interpreter; host; partner; innovator; “hybrid scholar”; advocate; consultant. At the organizational level, libraries should demonstrate higher efficiency and effectiveness in the services by revamping organizational culture or structure to stimulate and realize more and deeper cross-boundary conversations and collaborations. On a larger scale, the DL community should strive to become more visible, valuable, and approachable to the DH community; and even better, become part of it. Originality/value – This paper examines both DH and DL fields critically and connects the two communities by discovering gaps and commonalities. Based on the findings, the authors recommend roles and actions to be taken by LIS professionals, libraries, and the DL community. This paper is valuable to both humanities scholars who are seeking support in their research using digital methods and LIS professionals who are interested in providing more effective and suitable services. The paper also helps library administrators and aspiring librarians better understand the concept of DH and grasp insight on the present and future of DH librarianship.

Reviewed by: Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists ed. by Arianne Hartsell-Gundy et al. Harriett E. Green Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists, ed. Arianne Hartsell-Gundy, Laura Braunstein, and Liorah Golomb. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), 2015. 291 pages. $68.00 (ISBN 978-0-8389-8767-4) From early on, academic libraries and library and information science programs have pioneered digital humanities (DH) projects and initiatives. These have included the Valley of the Shadow Project, a digital history project depicting the experiences of Confederate soldiers in the Civil War; the Text Creation Partnership, which produces digital editions of early print books; Documenting the American South, a collection of full-text digital sources on Southern history and culture; and the Walt Whitman Archive, which has writings and other materials about the American poet. Yet only in recent years has the role of librarians noticeably shifted from facilitating access to content to taking a more actively engaged role by collaborating with faculty and initiating DH projects. And this shift is necessary. As Tyler Walters and Katherine Skinner observe in New Roles for New Times: Digital Curation for Preservation (Chicago: ACRL, 2011, p. 72), “Libraries must also be concerned about losing ground within their campus environment by not meeting the digital needs of the scholarly community. If we do not seek to engage with the digital humanities, other entities will.” Featuring firsthand case studies of academic librarians engaging in DH research and teaching, Digital Humanities in the Library: Challenges and Opportunities for Subject Specialists explores the strategies necessary for taking a more active role in DH projects. This volume is divided into four sections: “Reasons for Subject Specialists to Acquire DH Skills”; “Getting Involved in Digital Humanities”; “Collaboration, Spaces, and Instruction”; and “Projects in Focus: From Conception to Completion and Beyond.” Chapters in each section describe in detail diverse projects, collaborations, and initiatives undertaken by librarians over the past decade. Practical in perspective and scope, the book pays particular attention to teaching and learning, providing case studies of collaborations between librarians and faculty in small and large colleges and universities. Other chapters cover strategies for outreach and engagement with stakeholders, researchers, and organizations. Still others offer insightful “how-to” approaches for building infrastructure to support DH scholarship, including digital scholarship centers and learning spaces, and for outreach and sustainability of library-centered digital [End Page 207] projects. The most impactful contributions in Digital Humanities in the Library cast a critical eye on the theory and practice of digital humanities and the role of libraries therein. These include Caro Pinto’s chapter “Construction and Disruption: Building Communities of Practice, Queering Subject Liaisons,” in which Pinto exhorts librarians to “disrupt toward solidarity and innovate toward communities of practice in digital humanities.” Another stimulating chapter is Liorah Golomb’s account of her own text mining project, “Dipping a Toe into the DH Waters: A Librarian’s Experience,” which illustrates the ways in which some librarians are already digital scholars. (p. 49) Many of the lessons in Digital Humanities in the Library could also apply to digital scholarship in the social sciences and sciences. In addition to providing a good overview of current library activity in digital humanities, this volume will be beneficial to librarians looking to become involved in DH and unsure about where to begin. Addressing a wide range of institutions, skills, and projects, Digital Humanities in the Library will help librarians explore the dynamic world of the digital humanities. Harriett E. Green University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Green19@illinois.edu Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize how digital humanities (DH) projects can be integrated into instructional services programs in libraries. The paper draws on three digital projects from the New York Public Library (NYPL) and explores how librarians can creatively utilize these resources to teach new digital literacy skills such as data analysis and data management. For patrons, they can learn about the content of these crowd-sourcing projects as well. By integrating DH projects into library instruction, the possibilities and opportunities to expand and explore new research and teaching areas are timely and relevant. Design/methodology/approach – The approach of this paper is to explore NYPL’s three digital projects and underscore how they can be integrated into instructional services: “What’s On the Menu,” “Direct Me NYC” and “Map Warper” all offer strengths and limitations but they serve as paradigms to explore how digital resources can serve multipurpose use: they are databases, digital repositories and digital libraries but they can also serve as instructional service tools. Findings – The paper conceptualizes how three DH projects can serve as teaching opportunities for instructional services, particularly teaching digital literacy skills. By exploring the content of each digital project, the paper suggests that users can develop traditional information literacy skills but also digital literacy skills. In addition, as crowdsourcing projects, the Library also benefits from this engagement since users are adding transcriptions or rectified maps to the Library’s site. Patrons develop visual literacy skills as well. The paper addresses how librarians can meet the needs of the scholarly community through these new digital resources. While the paper only addresses the possibilities of these integrations, these ideas can be considered and implemented in any library. Practical implications – The paper addresses positive outcomes with these digital resources to be used for library instructional services. Based on these projects, the paper recommends that DH projects can be integrated into such instructions to introduce new content and digital skills if appropriate. Although, there are limitations with these digital resources, it is possible to maximize their usage if they are used in a different and creative way. It is possible for DH projects to be more than just digital projects but to act as a tool of digital literacy instruction. Librarians must play a creative role to address this gap. However, another limitation is that librarians themselves are “new” to these resources and may find it challenging to understand the importance of DH projects in scholarly research. Originality/value – This paper introduces DH projects produced in a public research library and explores how librarians can use these digital projects to teach patrons on how to analyze data, maps and other content to develop digital literacy skills. The paper conceptualizes the significant roles that these DH projects and librarians can play as critical mediators to introducing and fostering digital literacy in the twenty-first century. The paper can serve as an interest to academic and public libraries with large research collections and digital projects. By offering new innovative ideas of integrating DH into instructional services, the paper addresses how DH projects teaching tools can support specific digital skills such as visual literacy and data analysis.

This is the second paper of two from the Endings Project at the University of Victoria.The first paper, by Stewart Arneil, outlines the challenges of building a sustainable digital humanities (DH) project from the perspective of a programmer who has worked with researchers to build a number of DH project sites.This second paper, written by a librarian, considers the role of libraries as DH preservation partners.A recent special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, edited by the Endings Project team, provides an in-depth discussion of the many sustainability challenges faced by DH researchers (Holmes et al.).In 2018, the Endings Project undertook a survey of 127 DH projects with the goal of better understanding the various ways in which DH projects come to an end.The earliest projects represented in the survey began in the 1980s, but the vast majority were started after 2001.Of those projects, spanning a four-decade period, only 24% were considered by their principal investigators to be "complete," and only about 10% were archived in a stable, long-term environment with active preservation services ("Survey Results").As digital projects proliferate in the humanities, the question of preserving non-traditional research outputs like websites, databases, and software tools becomes a pressing one.Many researchers turn to academic libraries for solutions.A recent discussion on the Humanist listserv underscores the gap between faculty expectations and library capacity (Wall et al.).In most cases, faculty are hopeful that their libraries will adopt a project wholesale and agree to keep the entire software stack-all of the different applications and dependencies that allow the application to function-viable over the long term.This is not a scalable proposition for even very well-funded libraries.The gap between what is desired by faculty and what is sustainable for libraries creates a tension that is difficult to resolve in a way that is satisfactory to both parties.When we talk about the preservation of digital objects and platforms, we must first acknowledge that "persistence is a function of organizations, not a function of technology" (DOI Foundation).This may be a slight overstatement, because of course organizations do use technology in order to preserve digital content, but the point is that technology is just that-a set of tools that are developed and used by human beings who are funded by organizations to carry out specific functions.There is no technical design choice that will absolutely future-proof information containers, particularly over the very long term.GLAM organizations (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) are unique in their mission to collect, organize, and store information in ways that can preserve access to knowledge over hundreds or thousands of years.The deluge of digital information raises many new questions about what should be preserved, and about how libraries can organize their limited resources to take on this work.In this paper, we will examine six different approaches to digital preservation to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each, considering both technical and resource implications.The approaches are dark archiving, preserving objects and metadata in a repository, web harvesting, emulation, preservation of dynamic/social sites, and archiving static versions.

Sustainability and continued access to digital cultural heritage, digital humanities content and research materials can be challenging. For any research project, available resources and dependencies set the limits for what is possible. In the digital environment, consideration of these limitations can tend to focus on the technological aspect. However, it is not just technology that ensures the success of a project or long-term access to digital content. Using the Three-Legged Stool Model for Digital Preservation (Kenney and McGovern in Digital Preservation Management: Implementing Short-term Strategies for Long-term Problems, 2003 [38]) (and other relevant models) provides an important foundation to ensure that any digital cultural heritage or digital humanities project is approached holistically. In addition, digital stewardship (Lazorschak in The Signal, 2011 [44]) should also be considered as an essential building block for digital cultural heritage and the digital humanities. Historically, questions of sustainability and ongoing access are often brought to the fore only as funding streams near their end, or as research project champions retire. Sustainability of digital content has been a topic of debate for many years (Bodleian Libraries in Digital Humanities Archives for Research Materials, Oxford, [2], Cantara in Longterm Preservation of digital humanities in OCLC Systems and Services 22:38–42, 2006 [10]). In recent years, the importance of sustainability is being further recognised, with research funding bodies requiring plans for long-term preservation and access as a part of applications for project funding, such as requiring the inclusion of this information in Data Management Plans (DMP) (UK Research and Innovation—Arts and Humanities Research Council in Research Funding Guide, 2019 [61]). The author advocates for creating specific technical information necessary for long-term preservation, as well as borrowing and adapting from other disciplines. While long-term preservation and access may have been considered from the outset, the author also argues that not enough is done to establish a digital stewardship framework approach. The Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge (DPOC) project (2006–2018) (Digital Preservation at Oxford and Cambridge, 2016 [21]), provides the opportunity to look more holistically at how digitised and born-digital content is created, acquired, preserved and made available. At Cambridge University Library (CUL), a case study approach has been adopted, in order to better understand the needs of different ‘classes’ of digital content. Examples discussed include digitised fragments from the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection and the interactive data in the Kymata Atlas, illustrating two very different challenges of stewarding digital content. Through the case study research, the author and colleagues have identified that digital cultural heritage and digital humanities projects often develop a website or online resource as a mechanism for providing access to digital content project outputs. If not adequate planned for, digital content is at risk of becoming inaccessible after a project ends. Migration of files and various web archiving approaches are examined as possible preservation techniques, as well as other digital capture and documentation approaches more commonly used in contemporary art, time-based media and multi-platform archiving domains (Langley et al. in Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Electronic Art, ISEA 2013, 2013 [43]). Considering how to preserve and provide access to digital content right from the beginning of a project is essential. Taking a holistic digital stewardship approach—while learning from the lessons of past projects and borrowing from similar disciplines—can assist in better preparing for the end of a digital cultural heritage or digital humanities project.

Humanities scholars face many problems when trying to design, build, present, and maintain digital humanities projects. To mitigate these problems and to improve the user experience of digital humanities collections, it is essential to understand the problems in detail. However, we currently have a fragmented and incomplete picture of what these problems actually are. This study presents a wide systematic literature review (SLR) on the problems encountered by humanities scholars when adopting particular software tools in digital humanities projects. As a result of this review, this paper finds problems in different categories of tools used in digital humanities. The practice barriers can be divided into four types: content, technique, interface, and storage. These results draw a full picture of problems in tools usage, suggest digital humanities discipline further improve tools application and offer developers of software designed for humanities scholars some feedback to make them optimize these tools.

Song in the Sumatran Highlands

PurposeTo describe how academic libraries can support digital humanities (DH) research by leveraging established library values and strengths to provide support for preservation and access and physical and digital spaces for researchers and communities, specifically focused on cultural heritage collections.Design/methodology/approachThe experiences of the authors in collaborating with DH scholars and community organizations is discussed with references to the literature. The paper suggests how research libraries can use existing expertise and infrastructure to support the development of digital cultural heritage collections and DH research.FindingsDeveloping working collaborations with DH researchers and community organizations is a productive way to engage in impactful cultural heritage digital projects. It can aid resource allocation decisions to support active research, strategic goals, community needs and the development and preservation of unique, locally relevant collections. Libraries do not need to radically transform themselves to do this work, they have established strengths that can be effective in meeting the challenges of DH research.Practical implicationsAcademic libraries should strategically direct the work they already excel at to support DH research and work with scholars and communities to build collections and infrastructure to support these initiatives.Originality/valueThe paper recommends practical approaches, supported by literature and local examples, that could be taken when building DH and community-engaged cultural heritage projects.

As scholars have begun the digitization of the world’s cultural materials, the understanding of what is to be digitized and how that digitization occurs remains narrowly imagined, with a distinct bias toward North American and European notions of culture, value and ownership. Humanists are well aware that cultural knowledge, aesthetic value and copyright/ownership are not monolithic, yet digital humanities work often expects the replication of narrow ideas of such. Drawing on the growing body of scholarship that situates the digital humanities in a broad global context, this paper points to areas of tension within the field and posits ways that digital humanities practitioners might resist such moves to homogenize the field. Working within the framework of border studies, the paper considers how working across national barriers might further digital humanities work. Finally, ideas of ownership and/or copyright are unique to country of origin and, as such, deserve careful attention. While open access is appealing in many digital humanities projects, it is not always appropriate, as work with indigenous cultural artifacts has revealed.

The study examines how open data can be used to generate meaningful insights into the cultural, historical, and geographical features of India and can be the best tool for digital humanities researchers, allowing them to access large datasets about the country’s diverse landscape and interpret the data in meaningful and creative ways. An attempt is made to explore the potential of open data in digital humanities projects and discuss the need to create a comprehensive digital humanities platform that caters to the needs of different stakeholders as well as the advantages and challenges of open data and government initiatives in digital humanities. Additionally, the implications of open data and government initiatives in terms of improving access to digital humanities resources, increasing collaboration, and enhancing the quality of digital humanities projects and their contribution to creating a vibrant digital humanities community in India. The paper concludes that open data can be a powerful tool for digital humanities researchers in India, allowing them to access large datasets about the country’s diverse landscape and to interpret the data in meaningful and creative ways.

Digital Humanities projects have shown to be projects of collaboration and interdisciplinary cooperation. As digital humanities researchers are creating and discovering new methods of collaboration, libraries have been reflecting on how they can best support and nurture such collaborations. This paper aims to demonstrate a practical case of what the University of South Florida Digital Collections has done to support the accessibility and discoverability of a new archaeological dataset in collaboration with a Digital Humanities research facility on campus. This paper is a case study to showcase the process employed by the University of South Florida Libraries in its partnership with an on campus digital humanities institute in the creation of a new digital collection. The partnership resulted in a prototype archaeological data repository named the Andean Archaeological Data Project, and a digital collection that was successfully housed in the existing digital library platform, through which public access to the material is natively enabled through the library web pages. The authors have come to the conclusion that with the proper infrastructure and the appropriate skill sets, a digital library can be a long-term platform for dynamic digital humanities research data.

Aim: This research note narrates existing and continuing potential crossover between the digital humanities and writing studies. I identify synergies between the two fields’ methodologies and categorize current research in terms of four permutations, or “valences,” of the phrase “writing analytics.” These valences include analytics of writing , writing of analytics , writing as analytics , and analytics as writing . I bring recent work in the two fields together under these common labels, with the goal of building strategic alliances between them rather than to delimit or be comprehensive. I offer the valences as one heuristic for establishing connections and distinctions between two fields engaged in complementary work without firm or definitive discursive borders. Writing analytics might provide a disciplinary ground that incorporates and coheres work from these different domains. I further hope to locate the areas in which my current research in digital humanities, grounded in archival studies, might most shape writing analytics. Problem Formation: Digital humanities and writing studies are two fields in which scholars are performing massive data analysis research projects, including those in which data are writing or metadata that accompanies writing. There is an emerging environment in the Modern Language Association friendly to crossover between the humanities and writing studies, especially in work that involves digital methods and media. Writing analytics accordingly hopes to find common disciplinary ground with digital humanities, with the goal of benefitting from and contributing to conversations about the ethical application of digital methods to its research questions. Recent work to bridge digital humanities and writing studies more broadly has unfortunately focused more on territorial and usability concerns than on identifying resonances between the fields’ methodological and ethical commitments. Information Collection: I draw from a history of meta-academic literature in digital humanities and writing studies to review their shared methodological commitments, particularly in literature that recognizes and responds to pushback against the fields’ ostensible use of extra-disciplinary methods. I then turn to current research in both fields that uses and critiques computational techniques, which is most relevant to writing analytics’ articulated focus on massive data analysis. I provide a more detailed explanation, drawing from my categorization of this work, of the conversations in digital humanities surrounding the digital archives that enable data analysis. Conclusions: A review of past and current research in digital humanities and writing studies reveals shared attention to techniques for tokenizing texts at different scales for analysis, which is made possible by the curation of large corpora. Both fields are writing new genres to compose this analysis. In these genres, both fields emphasize process in their provisional work, which is sociocognitively repurposed in different rhetorical contexts. Finally, both fields recognize that the analytical methods they employ are themselves modes of composition and argumentation. An ethics of data transformation present in digital humanities, however, is largely absent from writing studies. This ethics comes to digital humanities from the influence of textual studies and archival studies. Further research in writing analytics might benefit from reframing writing corpora as archives—what Paul Fyfe (2017) calls a shift from “data mining” to “data archaeology”—in its analyses. This is especially true for analyses of text, which in particular foreground writing and analysis of writing as acts of transformation. Directions for Further Research: I recommend that future efforts to find crossover between digital humanities and writing studies do so by identifying their common values rather than trying to co-opt language and spaces or engaging in broad definitional work. I further provide a set of guiding principles that writing analytics might follow in order to pursue research that draws upon and contributes to both digital humanities and writing studies. These research projects might consider and account for the silences of writing corpora—unseen versions of documents, and documents’ elements not described in structured data—while attending to the silences that these efforts might in turn (re)produce.

PurposePublic-funded research in digital humanities (DH) enhances institutional and individual research missions and contributes open data to a growing base of globally networked knowledge. The Digging into Data 3 challenge (DID3) (2014–2016) is an international, interdisciplinary and collaborative grant initiative, and the purpose of this paper is to explore skills that faculty and students brought to projects and others they acquired and shared on collaborative teams.Design/methodology/approachRooted in the naturalistic paradigm, this qualitative case study centers on semi-structured interviews with 53 participants on 11 of the 14 DID3 projects. Documentary evidence complements empirical evidence; analysis is constructivist and grounded.FindingsHailing from diverse academic research institutions, centers and repositories, participants brought 20 types of discipline-based or interdisciplinary expertise to DID3 projects. But they reported acquiring or refining 27 other skills during their project work. While most are data-related, complementary programming, management and analytical skills push disciplinary expertise toward new frontiers. Project-based learning and pedagogy function symbiotically; participants therefore advocate for aligning problem-solving skills with pedagogical objectives at home institutions to prepare for public-funded DH projects. A modified content analysis juxtaposes DID3 skills with those advanced in 23 recent DH syllabi to identify commonalities and gaps.Originality/valuePedagogy has an important yet under-researched and underdeveloped role in public-funded DH research.

From collection curation to knowledge creation: Exploring new roles of academic librarians in digital humanities research