Libraries and the digital humanities: partnership, collaboration and shared agendas

Digital humanities is a rapidly growing global interdisciplinary field, reflected in a proliferation of conferences, events, journals, associations, research centres, grants, and courses. Digital humanities has a high profile because of its collaborative activity in building tools, developing services, carrying out projects, and producing ground- breaking research findings. There is a high level of interest from the library community in the digital humanities. This paper looks at the relationship between libraries and the digital humanities from an Australian perspective. The paper draws on the authors’ involvement within the digital humanities community, and especially their experience with developing HuNI: the Humanities Networked Infrastructure, a major digital infrastructure service for the humanities

Digital Scholarship and Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities: Lessons from the Text Creation Partnership

Electronic technology has changed the way scholars in the humanities do their work, creating two distinct groups of scholars: first, those who perform leading-edge humanities computing research (a relatively small number); and second, scholars who perform traditional humanities research with new electronic tools (a fairly large number). How is it possible to bring these two groups together? The Text Creation Partnership at the University of Michigan provides one way of providing services to both. And as the electronic publishing community looks for ways to provide reliable cyberinfrastructure in the humanities, the Text Creation Partnership provides a model for building large digital collections that meet the needs of future scholars

Digital Scholarship Needs Assessment: Binghamton University 2022

As digital scholarship and digital humanities (DS/DH) continue to grow on campus the libraries continue to collaborate with campus communities to ensure faculty, staff, and graduate and undergraduate students’ research, classroom, and learning experiences in these fields are supported. This needs assessment, carried out over the course of the Spring semester in 2022, investigated the current climate for using and teaching digital scholarship tools methods on Binghamton University\u27s campus. While Binghamton\u27s digital scholarship community continues to grow four major needs for support were identified by the community: access to DS/DH resources on campus, building a stronger sense of community, providing a better system of support for those starting and sustaining long-term projects, and creating a holistic approach to engaging in DS/DH research and pedagogy

Inclusive Pedagogy through Digital Scholarship: A Case Study

After a coordinated effort in 2019 to determine faculty activities and needs related to digital humanities, our library began offering outreach and support to faculty using digital humanities in research and teaching. In summer 2020, after two librarians facilitated a faculty development workshop on using digital humanities tools in the classroom, an instructor in educational leadership invited the librarians to help her incorporate multimodal publishing, data visualization, and mapping methods into one of her fall 2020 courses related to community building in K-12 education. The tools incorporated into the course allowed a range of collaborative possibilities between students, creating new working and communication spaces. The use of these open and accessible tools also challenged students to have important conversations about how they could be leveraged as a powerful means of outreach outside the higher education classroom. In this chapter we present a case study of our experience supporting a doctoral course’s use of freely available digital tools to complete a major group project. Specifically, we will cover how the collaboration started, librarian involvement in the course, successes and areas for improvement, analysis of digital tools for promoting inclusivity, and future plans

Project: Building a Research Collection

This is a digital project developed as part of the Spring 2019 MSU Digital Humanities Faculty Learning Community for use in an upcoming course on Soviet & East European Contemporary Art. The project equips students with the technical and conceptual tools for building and maintaining personal research collections for art history research

Pedagogy of the Digitally Oppressed: Practicing Anti-colonial DH Pedagogy and Research

This forum invites scholars, creative practitioners, activists, and community members to collectively discuss and develop strategies for refusing the damaging colonialities too often perpetuated within digital humanities teaching, learning, and research practices. Some of the topics that we hope to touch on in this discussion include:  1) how colonial ideologies and extractive research methods are naturalized within hegemonic DH principles and practices; 2) what anti-colonial DH pedagogies and insurgent research practices we might incorporate into individual contexts of digital humanities knowledge-making, especially given the uneven distribution of and access to digital infrastructures along the campus-community as well as the Global North-Global South spectrum, and; 3) how to sustain spaces for healing and community building within the realities of these uneven and dispersed infrastructures.  This forum will foreground an ethic of care and community building in imagining and identifying tactics that digital humanists can share and act upon to transform colonial ideologies and systems embedded within the conventions and protocols of digital humanities. Individually and collectively, we will create brief position statements where we will identify what is at stake in our communities, what the corresponding action plans might be, and at which scale(s) we might begin this work to realize the scope and limits of an anti-colonial DH praxis. As co-participants of this forum, we will imagine and reflect on the processes and challenges of bringing into being the anti-colonial possibilities of digital research and teaching for a bolder and more affirming environment for digital humanists inside and outside the academy

Příprava a provozování výzkumné infrastruktury jako doména informačních profesionálů

Příspěvek představuje změny ve vědecké komunikaci v souvislosti s Digital Humanities, tematizuje vztah Digital Humanities s knihovnictvím. Věnuje pozornost problémům při budování výzkumných infrastruktur, které vyplývají z teorií infrastruktur v informační vědě, v Digital Humanities, v mediálních a feministických studiích a v teorii údržby. Představuje výzkumnou infrastrukturu DARIAH a snahu o vytvoření jejího uzlu v České republice s přehledem vybraných zjištění o stavu výzkumných infrastruktur na Filozofické fakultě Masarykovy univerzity, která plánuje aktivní účast na budování lokálního uzlu sítě DARIAH. V závěru příspěvek na základě teorií infrastruktur a provedeného průzkumu popisuje roli informačního profesionála při designu, managementu a zajišťování služeb vědecké komunitě výzkumnými infrastrukturami.The paper introduces changes in scientific communication in context of Digital Humanities and its relationship with library science. It draws attention to the problems of building research infrastructures as described in infrastructure theories in information science, Digital Humanities, media and feminist studies, and maintenance theory. Then it presents the research infrastructure of DARIAH and the effort to create its node in the Czech Republic with an overview of selected findings on the situation of research infrastructures at the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University, which plans to participate actively in building the local node of the DARIAH network. In conclusion, the contribution on the basis of infrastructure theories and the conducted survey describes the role of an information professional in the design, management and provision of services to the scientific community through research infrastructures

Do DH Librarians Need to Be in the Library?: DH Librarianship in Academic Units

Michigan State University sought to bolster digital humanities pedagogy and research by hiring two digital humanities specialists to work within disciplinary units. The two specialists hired, one at the College level and another situated between two departments, are both librarians by training. Over the past two years, these two specialists, Kristen Mapes and Brandon Locke, have been practicing digital humanities in disciplinary units in a manner that is heavily imbued with the values of librarianship. Mapes and Locke bring a focus on literacy, scholarly communication, sustainability, ethics, and access and serve as advocates for libraries and librarianship. This piece is intended to examine the value of librarianship in disciplinary units, and to illustrate benefits of deeply embedded librarianship nested within academic units - either through librarians as specialists, hybrid positions, or embedded librarianship. This piece is also a call for more partnerships where librarians are an expected part of the process and are engaged throughout the life of the course or research project. Digital humanities librarianship can succeed in any unit through active participation in courses, community-building activities, and individual research consultations, all while promoting the central values of librarianship and librarians throughout the process

A Generative Praxis

Since 2016, the academic narrative emerging from the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities in Eatonville, Florida, has increasingly relied on a public scholarship model to bridge the gap between institutional practice and community knowledge. Inspired by Zora Neale Hurston’s legacy as an interdisciplinary scholar, these activities have turned toward generative digital practices to document, share, and preserve the scholarly and community knowledge associated with this event. This change reflects Edward L. Ayers’s call for a more robust and inclusively engaged scholarship that speaks to the need to identify the deeply rooted cultural questions traditional narratives all too easily overlook. By allying with the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community, Inc. (PEC), we leverage digital humanities practices to better understand the experiences of heritage communities. In this way, we see our work as building on Kim Gallon’s call for a digital humanities that seeks to apprehend the constructed nature of race and the impact of racism on society.1 Our praxis has evolved into a three-pronged strategy of public scholarship, digital pedagogy, and open educational resource curation designed to engage the public and shape scholarly narratives in new ways. The project spotlights a commitment to combine and amplify pedagogy and digital methodologies in order to create unique and sustainable archival materials for future research