Digital Humanities Within a Global Context: Creating Borderlands of Localized Expression

Digital Humanities as Appendix Robert K. Nelson (bio) “The Geographic Imagination of Civil War–Era American Fiction.”By Matthew Wilkens. American Literary History 25 ( Winter2013): 803– 40. “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston.”By Cameron Blevins. Journal of American History 101 (06 2014): 122– 47. Sometimes the digital humanities can seem like an inversion rather than a branch of the humanities. Self-described digital humanists often emphasize, even celebrate, how their practice differs from that of their disciplinary colleagues. Whereas most humanities scholars do their research more or less in isolation, digital humanists typically collaborate in teams that include technologists, librarians, and students. While the quintessential product of most humanities research is an interpretation presented in a monograph or an essay, digital humanists more often experiment with form, developing broad archives, interactive maps, and computer-generated models. Books and essays usually go through peer review before appearing with the imprimatur of a university press or scholarly journal; digital humanities projects are evaluated at a later point, undergoing, to borrow a couple of phrases from Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “crowdsourcing review” to receive (or not) “community imprimatur.” 1Finally, digital humanities projects often are not organized around substantiating an argument but instead prompt their audiences to independently investigate a subject through a more participatory, open-ended, and nonlinear process. While experimentation with alternative ways to practice and present the humanities can be exhilarating, there are of course trade-offs. Many humanities scholars continue to look askance at digital humanities work. Because such work often does not foreground specific arguments, many digital humanities projects can seem peripheral to the debates and questions that animate their own research. Take, as evidence, the differences between book and digital history reviews in the Journal of American History. The JAHhas shown a greater interest in encouraging digital scholarship than many journals, as the [End Page 131]presence of the digital history reviews section attests. But these reviews can make digital humanities scholarship seem preparatory to or distinct from the kinds of historical research assessed in book reviews. Whereas reviews of books almost always critically assess the contributions of an argument, that is very seldom the case in the digital history reviews. Much more often those review online archives, evaluating their utility in providing scholars with easy access to important materials or providing instructors a teaching resource for their students. Judging by these reviews, many humanists might understandably think that digital humanists produce valuable public humanities projects and useful tools for research but not necessarily, taking arguments and interpretation as the measure, scholarship. If the two articles under consideration here are any indication, that opinion is likely to change. Matthew Wilkens’s “Geographic Imagination of Civil War–Era American Fiction,” published in American Literary Historyin 2013, and Cameron Blevins’s “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” published in the JAHin 2014, signal that digital humanists and digital humanities methods are beginning to yield significant arguments. They are two examples of how digital humanities methods and digital humanities research are increasingly paying interpretative dividends, generating insights that will be of interest and value to humanities scholars who have little if any specific investment in DH qua DH. These two articles share a remarkable amount in common. Wilkens and Blevins both sketch and analyze the cultural construction of space in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Wilkens seeks to survey the “geographic imagination” (804) of Civil War–era American fiction, Blevins the “imagined geography” (124) constructed by one Texas newspaper, the Houston Daily Post, around the turn of the twentieth century. The transposition of noun and modifier does suggest one important difference in their approaches and their preoccupations. Blevins is primarily interested in readers, not actual but imagined ones. He argues that the number of times people encountered particular place-names in the paper’s pages helped determine the ways they negotiated and navigated geographic space. In his account, the imagined geography of the Houston Daily Postwas first and foremost a commercial geography that both reflected and helped actively shape economic activity in the region...

Editorial Commentary

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 article explores precarious academic employment’s effect on the work of doing digital humanities work, specifically in the context of Moravian studies. The article documents the author’s experience of working on a digital humanities project. It focuses on the Moravian’s Boarding School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The article explores how the work of the digital humanities cannot be done without the broad support that comes from academic employment and access to resources, both technical and monetary. The author situates these issues within the context of how precarious academic employment will potentially affect the field of Moravian studies.

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

Reviewed by: Entornos digitales: Conceptualización y praxis ed. by Beatriz Trigo and Mary Ann Dellinger Margaret Boyle Trigo, Beatriz, and Mary Ann Dellinger, editors. Entornos digitales: Conceptualización y praxis. Editorial de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, 2017. Pp. 213. ISBN 978-8-49451-063-2. In Entornos digitales: Conceptualización y praxis, editors Beatriz Trigo and Mary Ann Dellinger bring together, through nine essays and an introduction, a range of approaches to the theory and practice of Digital Humanities within Hispanism. Topics vary widely, including for example, representations of technology within a variety of literary and filmic texts, the impact of digitization projects, the place of technology in the classroom, and more. Digital technology, the book argues, does not only have the potential to alter methodology and approach to scholarship within the humanities, but can also serve to contextualize or bolster the value of humanities within a world increasingly reliant on statistics and quantifiable data. Additionally, the book points to the ways in which digital humanities has increased interdisciplinary collaboration within and across universities. Part one “La digitalización de las humanidades” describes a variety of perspectives concerning the “digitalization of the humanities” and the manifestations of this development within a variety of academic settings today. The first essay, “Las humanidades digitales: qué, quién, cómo,” by Beatriz Trigo, is focused on how digital humanities work has shaped scholarly approaches within Hispanic Studies, arguing that digitalization and quantification of information through technology has served to increase accessibility, collaboration and breadth of scholarship. One of the most innovative contributions of this volume, in fact, is Trigo’s ability to succinctly summarize and translate into Spanish recent developments within Digital Humanities, signaling the ongoing need for digital representation of non-Anglophone cultures, as well as the creation of academic venues that could better support multilingual digital humanities projects. This part also includes an interesting contribution by Daniel Escandell Montiel on the intellectual diaspora of the twentieth century. Part two “Transmedialidad” is focused on the varying interpretations of “transmediality” as a concept, meaning the confluence of different medias relating to one topic and its effect on twenty-first-century audiences. Authors of chapters in this second part are Jonatán Martín Gómez, Nuria Ibáñez-Quintana, María Cristina C. Mabrey, Thomas Deveny, Mary Ann Dellinger, and Michele C. Davila Gonçalves. While all chapters are certainly worth reading, likely of most interest to audiences of Hispania is the concluding essay of the volume, titled “Youtube como antídoto contra la ansiedad durante el proceso de adquisición del español como segunda lengua,” which examines the efficacy of visual aids in facilitating or impeding oral communication within the classroom. David-Ross Gerling and Mary Ann Dellinger compare the various responses of Spanish language learners who are presented with YouTube videos in which protagonists [End Page 147] converse in varying degrees of Spanish language fluency. The study presents two groups of students: Classroom X and Classroom Y with two kinds of Spanish language videos: Classroom X only saw videos in which Spanish was spoken colloquially and Classroom Y only saw videos in which Spanish was spoken in “linguistic perfection” (204). Exams were then conducted daily following exposure to the videos. Controls included time of day, frequency of screenings during the week, kind and frequency of examinations given, and the length of the study. Results of the study were not conclusive, although in some cases there was a correlation between regular exposure to colloquial Spanish, and reduced anxiety and proficiency in the target language. The authors concluded that regular use of YouTube videos within class is an efficient method of making use of what they call the “silent period,” a time when students internalize the language (207). Further, the authors insist that students expecting to work in the Spanish-speaking world have much to gain from exposure to multiple dialects and situations of communication that can be found on You Tube or through comparable digital means. The study even tried to incorporate students’ various professional interests into classroom conversations and themes, such as discussing the publications of state and federal environmental agencies for students interested in conservation, or discussing...

Song in the Sumatran Highlands

As digital infrastructures and methods increasingly shape how cultural memory is preserved, accessed, and interpreted, questions of collaboration and participation have become central to both research and pedagogical practices in digital humanities and cultural heritage contexts. This panel explores the promises and challenges of participatory approaches to digital humanities and cultural heritage work. Bringing together five speakers in various domains of digital humanities, community archives, and digital curation, this panel offers multiple perspectives on how to engage different communities of interest, such as students, interdisciplinary scholars, librarians and practitioners, as well as local communities, in participatory digital humanities and cultural heritage work. Following the individual presentations, panelists will facilitate open discussions with attendees, seeking to collectively explore questions including how to design participatory work in digital humanities and cultural heritage practices, how to engage communities and collaborators in participatory work, and how to address the challenges that emerge in participatory processes. Through this collaborative and interactive approach, this panel seeks to advance knowledge production practices of digital humanities and cultural heritage, advocating for a “participatory future” of digital humanities and cultural heritage work. This panel will be sponsored by ASIS&T SIG‐AVC if accepted.

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.

Big Digital Humanities has its origins in a series of seminal articles Patrik Svensson published in the Digital Humanities Quarterly between 2009 and 2012. As these articles were coming out, enthusiasm around Digital Humanities was acquiring a great deal of momentum and significant disagreement about what did or didn’t “count” as Digital Humanities work. Svensson’s articles provided a widely sought after omnibus of Digital Humanities history, practice, and theory. They were informative and knowledgeable and tended to foreground reportage and explanation rather than utopianism or territorial contentiousness. In revising his original work for book publication, Svensson has responded to both subsequent feedback and new developments. Svensson’s own unique perspective and special stake in the Digital Humanities conversation comes from his role as director of the HUMlab at Umeå University. HUMlab is a unique collaborative space and Digital Humanities center, which officially opened its doors in 2000. According to its own official description, the HUMlab is an open, creative studio environment where “students, researchers, artists, entrepreneurs and international guests come together to engage in dialogue, experiment with technology, take on challenges and move scholarship forward.” It is this last element “moving scholarship forward” that Svensson argues is the real opportunity in what he terms the “big digital humanities,” or digital humanities as practiced in collaborative spaces like the HUMlab, and he is uniquely positioned to take an account of this evolving dimension of Digital Humanities practice.

Purpose – This paper seeks to provide a description and reflection on some of the structural problems and challenges faced when developing a digital humanities (DH) project in a Mexican public university.Design/methodology/approach – As DH is a relatively new field and practice in Mexican academia, this article is based on a case study of developing the Biblioteca Digital de Pensamiento Novohispano (Digital Library of New Hispanic Thought). This is one of the few DH at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), the largest public university in the country.Findings – It was found that there were three central problems for developing a DH project in a Mexican public university: existing technical knowledge and abilities at the UNAM will be challenged by DH projects; projects are the place to train human resources in DH methodology; and researchers need to consider different long‐term infrastructure and hosting solutions, with or without using institutional infrastructure, at the same time researche...

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.

PurposeThis article aims to understand how social enterprises adopt crowdfunding in digital humanities by investigating the mission drifting, risk sharing and human resource practices.Design/methodology/approachThis exploratory study uses a qualitative method by observing five different social ventures in Indonesia. The case study involves observation of social enterprises that concern digital humanities projects and interviews with those who manage the crowdfunding for financing the projects as the key respondents. The analysis uses an interpretative approach by involving the respondents to explain the phenomena.Findings(1) Adopting the crowdfunding platform encourages social enterprises to reshape social missions with more responsive action for digital humanities. (2) Crowdfunding allows social enterprises to share the risk with stakeholders who focus on fostering the social impact of digital humanities. (3) Crowdfunding stimulates social enterprises to hire professional workers with flexible work arrangements to attract specific donors and investors.Originality/valueThe result extends the principles of social enterprises by introducing some concepts of crowdfunding in digital humanities. This study also explains the boundary conditions of digital humanities projects and how crowdfunding can support the projects by adopting the principles of the social enterprise that works on digital humanities projects.

This chapter begins with underlining the need to reimagine the humanities undergraduate student’s curriculum to equip the humanities researcher of tomorrow. We survey the programmes and courses offered in a few prestigious public universities in India to determine whether there are any interdisciplinary courses offered that have digital humanities studies or its equivalent as a component. The result shows a certain dearth of digital humanities pedagogy courses in the universities’ curriculum except a few institutions which recently implemented digital humanities studies in their programmes. We then highlight some of the reasons for this lack of diversity in programmes including the expense of accessing digital tools. We also accentuate the necessity for more open-access resources in publishing; databases as well as open source tools that can initiate scholars on a discovery of these resources and its usefulness in humanities research. We give a short but important list of such available tools in a section we call the “Digital Humanities Tool Box”. Lastly, we offer a small overview of a digital publishing project at Indian Institute of Technology Indore that is a Digital Humanities Project which attempts to put into practice the principles of open access that we believe are crucial to Digital Humanities as a discipline and philosophy.

Integration of information and communication technology platforms is one of the incentives for the development of Digital Humanities (DH) projects abroad in their increasingly close interaction with academic, primarily University libraries. The purpose of the article is to analyze the deepening interaction of libraries with DH projects within the single digital paradigm, as well as to analyze new services for project management, data curation, organization of online publications, preservation and exchange of databases, etc. In the era of digital convergence, large scientific libraries abroad are actively developing new models of cooperation with DH projects, forming special service packages for continuous servicing of scientists on the basis of the integrated approach.The article discusses the new concept of library services for DH projects, draws attention to the problem of classification and ranking of library services in order to streamline the work and improve its efficiency, describes the existing multi-level service models developed in the library systems of the major US Universities. In the context of formation of the new package of library services within the framework of DH projects, the article considers the new practices and operational models on which they are based. The author describes the experience of University libraries in the Netherlands and Canada. Under the innovation pressure in the field of library technologies, the service package offered by scientific libraries in developed countries is constantly expanding and modernizing. It includes not only digitization of printed materials, computer assistance, but also management of databases, preservation and exchange of scientific data, organization of digital publications, consultations in the field of copyright protection, etc. Development of new practices in the field of digital services management changes the organizational paradigm of library work, puts forward new standards of professional activity, which require continuous training to meet, i.e. launches an institutional rebranding of the library.