Digital Humanities in Academic Library: Creating Narratives through Spatial Data

Abstract

A growing trend in digital humanities has been digital scholarship and the emphasis on usage of digital tools and methods in research, teaching, and publishing. Academic libraries as laboratories for humanities scholars (Christine Borgman) need to keep up with these changes. Digital humanities (DH) have become an important area of librarianship and demand for librarians with skills and expertise in metadata creation and control, digital repository management, information organization, intellectual property rights management, research data preservation, and visualization has been on the rise. This paper focuses on the English-language literature presenting visualization of spatial and temporal data in DH projects through rich narratives involving text, interactive maps, and map-enabled spatial data services. Using the examples of digital mapping projects developed and implemented in a large academic library, the article shows a case of big academic library on how spatial and temporal data visualization can be employed to tell stories, promote, and inform about cartographic resources of relevance to DH scholars, and provide self-help tools to empower users.