5,233 research outputs found

    Digitization and the Changing Roles of Libraries in Support of Humanities Research: The Case of the Harrison Forman Collection

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    Objective – this article examines the role of libraries in expanding access to primary sources through digitization and in providing support for humanities research. Research method – the author analyzes the literature on information behavior of humanist scholars in light of the increased use of digitized primary sources. Next, using the example of the digitized photographs and diaries from the Harrison Forman Collection, the author explores the emerging role of libraries in creating a new source of scholarly materials and supporting research in humanities. Results and conclusion – digitization increasingly matters not only for practical reasons of ease of use and access but also by offering a new potential for humanistic research. Digitization projects provide enhanced intellectual control of primary resources, offer an opportunity to uncover hidden collections, and bring together scattered materials. Digital collections in their present design demonstrate some limitations in supporting scholars’ browsing behavior and in providing contextual information. Creating digital collections in support of humanities research requires the transformation of library roles and collaboration with digital humanities scholars

    Country-scale infrastructure for creation of full text versions of historical documents from Polish Digital Libraries

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    HagaPresented at Interedition Symposium Scholarly Digital Editions Tools and Infrastructurehttp://www.interedition.eu/?page_id=21

    The TXM Portal Software giving access to Old French Manuscripts Online

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    Texte intégral en ligne : http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/13.ProceedingsCultHeritage.pdfInternational audiencehttp://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/13.ProceedingsCultHeritage.pdf This paper presents the new TXM software platform giving online access to Old French Text Manuscripts images and tagged transcriptions for concordancing and text mining. This platform is able to import medieval sources encoded in XML according to the TEI Guidelines for linking manuscript images to transcriptions, encode several diplomatic levels of transcription including abbreviations and word level corrections. It includes a sophisticated tokenizer able to deal with TEI tags at different levels of linguistic hierarchy. Words are tagged on the fly during the import process using IMS TreeTagger tool with a specific language model. Synoptic editions displaying side by side manuscript images and text transcriptions are automatically produced during the import process. Texts are organized in a corpus with their own metadata (title, author, date, genre, etc.) and several word properties indexes are produced for the CQP search engine to allow efficient word patterns search to build different type of frequency lists or concordances. For syntactically annotated texts, special indexes are produced for the Tiger Search engine to allow efficient syntactic concordances building. The platform has also been tested on classical Latin, ancient Greek, Old Slavonic and Old Hieroglyphic Egyptian corpora (including various types of encoding and annotations)

    Conference on Grey Literature and Repositories: Proceedings 2018

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    THE WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY

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    The World Digital Library is a partnership project, led by the Library of Congress and supported by UNESCO, in which libraries, archives, and museums contribute high resolution digital versions of their most important cultural and historical documents. The main purpose of the project is of preserving copies and information contained in documents at risk of destruction. Here is reported on the 2014 Annual Partner Meeting held in Rome focused on the educational aspects of the World Digital Librar

    Books as informational artefacts

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    The article focuses on the model based on the information levels of books as artefacts and the importance of information levels for preservation strategy. The historical and museological approaches to books as objects will be discussed. Books are artefacts just like any other objects made, modified, or used by human beings. Different authors have presented various approaches for describing the information architecture of artefacts. Th is study is based on a three-level model, according to which three different information levels are identified: structural information or structural properties; functional information or functional properties; context and the object’s relationship to it. Preservation is not a passive activity from the point of view of the information structure of the artefact. While choosing preservation strategies it is essential to consider the information structure of the artefact, especially when using information reformatting technologies, which create a new object with a specific information structure (photocopies, microforms, digitisation, etc.). The preservation of artefacts presumes the prior identification of the set of information to be preserved. Keywords: artefact, information, models, book, preservatio

    Past and Present Milwaukee Civil Rights Education: the Significant Arenas of Community Activism and Current Digital Archival Collection Assessment

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    This thesis explores civil rights education as practiced by civil rights activists from the 1960s to the present day using the city of Milwaukee as a geographical focus. The first part of the thesis focuses on the civil rights historical narratives employed throughout the second half of the twentieth century, with a focus on activists in Milwaukee. The first chapter describes the various social realms in which activists employed civil rights education including law, religious organizations, and schools. The second chapter uses 1964 Milwaukee Freedom School curricula as a case study to analyze a historically significant form of civil rights education. The second part of this thesis analyzes the more recent creation of a digital collection as an effective and increasingly relevant educational tool. The final chapter uses the March on Milwaukee Civil Rights Project collection as a case study to consider how digital archival collections can become effective educational tools in academic institutions and beyond. The final chapter contributes to existing literature by modeling assessment methods specific to a digital archival collection. The thesis argues that the March on Milwaukee digital collection is distinctive because of its community outreach initiatives, which have extended a target audience beyond the confines of higher education to at-risk high school students. This thesis finds that local activists, teachers, and scholars have used civil rights narratives to educate and motivate people residing in cities such as Milwaukee, WI, to actively reflect on the causes of racial inequality as well as possible solutions. The case studies involving the 1964 Milwaukee freedom school curricula and the current March on Milwaukee digital collection provide specific evidence of community-driven education that have successfully engaged people who have traditionally been underserved by academic libraries and archives. The thesis analyzes a wide range of primary sources, including archival documents and newspapers, in addition to germane secondary works relevant to the history of race relations in Milwaukee and the United states. This thesis also uses interviews, historical scholarship, and current assessment models relating to digital collections. The evidence gathered from March on Milwaukee developer interviews and secondary scholarship on digital collections supports the idea that Milwaukee civil rights histories have evolved and continue to be relevant in 2014. The thesis concludes that the success of future digital archival collections will depend not merely on making information available to site visitors but also on the ability of librarians and archives to reach out to communities through partnerships and collaborations similar to those associated with the March on Milwaukee Civil Rights Project. Assessment of engagement efforts of this kind will require librarians and archives to complement quantitative measures with qualitative approaches that consider not just how many people access a site for how long, but also the extent to which people engage meaningfully with the information and find it useful and relevant for their own lives

    Publication practices in motion: The benefits of open access publishing for the humanities

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    The changes we have seen in recent years in the scholarly publishing world - including the growth of digital publishing and changes to the role and strategies of publishers and libraries alike - represent the most dramatic paradigm shift in scholarly communications in centuries. This volume brings together leading scholars from across the humanities to explore that transformation and consider the challenges and opportunities it brings

    Adam Scriveyn in Cyberspace: Loss, Labour, Ideology, and Infrastructure in Interoperable Reuse of Digital Manuscript Metadata

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    This chapter seeks to demystify invisible work at the heart of manuscript digitization. Descriptive metadata and its curation are the unseen elements upon which image discoverability—and later reuse—depends. Seeing and taking seriously that labor, I contend, is fundamental to developing a more rigorous understanding of medieval manuscripts in our increasingly digital age. The chapter begins by connecting major challenges facing manuscript interoperability to the deeper disciplinary histories of codicology, library studies, and digital humanities. Next, it progresses through three case studies, each of which illustrates different challenges in digital manuscript studies. Studying the Walters Art Museum metadata, I emphasize how change (mouvance, variance) is inevitable in digital manuscripts. Working with Parker on the Web, I reveal how and why data curation is a process not just of preservation, but also of loss. Finally, in ecodices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland, I connect individual curatorial choices to larger debates about access, audience, and the problematic monolingualism of the digital humanities. Throughout, I argue that creation and curation are not neutral acts. I repeatedly highlight how my medievalist roots shaped specific curatorial practices and use medieval poets to theorize my work on digital manuscripts. By foregrounding my own narrative of growth as a digital humanist, I seek to show how often-unseen laborers profoundly influence digitizations--and, through them, digital humanities more broadly. Ultimately, I argue that a more just digital humanities must include digitizers in its histories, presents, and futures
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