Library Research Showcase 2013 Program

The program from the 2013 Library Research Showcase at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, including a list of all presentations and brief descriptions.unpublishednot peer reviewe

Connecting people, places and things

Il numero 10 di AGATHÓN raccoglie saggi, studi, ricerche e progetti su Connessioni | Fisiche, Virtuali e Digitali per indagare sulla profonda transizione pervasiva e diffusa, che unisce dicotomie (analogico e digitale), esalta ossimori (intelligenza artificiale), ribalta assiomi (ubiquità), realizza paradossi (materialità dell’intangibile) coinvolgendo, indifferentemente, l’architettura, le scienze umane e sociali, l’antropologia, la sociologia, l’ecologia, la biologia, le scienze fisico-matematiche e le neuroscienze con impatti che – visibili già oggi, e accelerati in parte dalla condizione straordinaria di emergenza sanitaria mondiale – si renderanno ancor più evidenti a medio e lungo termine. Una trasformazione certamente ‘digitale’, che studiosi come Floridi (2020) e Galimberti (2020), ma anche Haraway (2018), Searle (2017) e Chomsky (2011), hanno posto su un piano innanzitutto ontologico ed epistemologico in quanto coinvolge l’essenza delle ‘cose’, il modo con cui le definiamo, il mondo che ci circonda e in particolare la nostra relazione con gli elementi che lo costituiscono.AGATHÓN issue number 10 is a collection of essays, studies, researches and projects on Links | Physical, Virtual and Digital to investigate the profound and widespread transition that combines dichotomies (analogue and digital), enhances oxymorons (artificial intelligence), overturns axioms (ubiquity), creates paradoxes (intangible materiality) by involving, without distinction, architecture, humanities and social science, anthropology, sociology, ecology, biology, physical-mathematical sciences and neuroscience whose impacts will become even more clear in the medium and long term. Although they are currently visible and accelerated in part by the global health emergency. A certainly ‘digital’ transformation, which scholars such as Floridi (2020), and Galimberti (2020), but also Haraway (2018), Searle (2017) and Chomsky (2011) have placed above all on an ontological and epistemological level as it involves the essence of ‘things’, the way we define them, the world around us and in particular our relationship with the elements that constitute it

Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis and Data Capsules (WCSA+DC): Laying the foundations for secure computation with copyrighted data in the HathiTrust Research Center, Phase I

The primary objective of the WCSA+DC project is the seamless integration of the workset model and tools with the Data Capsule framework to provide non-consumptive research access HathiTrust’s massive corpus of data objects, securely and at scale, regardless of copyright status. That is, we plan to surmount the copyright wall on behalf of scholars and their students. Notwithstanding the substantial preliminary work that has been done on both the WCSA and DC fronts, they are both still best characterized as being in the prototyping stages. It is our intention to that this proposed Phase I of the project devote an intense two-year burst of effort to move the suite of WCSA and DC prototypes from the realm of proof-of-concept to that of a firmly integrated at-scale deployment. We plan to concentrate our requested resources on making sure our systems are as secure and robust at scale as possible. Phase I will engage four external research partners. Two of the external partners, Kevin Page (Oxford) and Annika Hinze (Waikato) were recipients of WCSA prototyping sub-awards. We are very glad to propose extending and refining aspects of their prototyping work in the context of WCSA+DC. Two other scholars, Ted Underwood (Illinois) and James Pustejovsky (Brandeis) will play critical roles in Phase I as active participants in the development and refinement of the tools and systems from their particular user-scholar perspectives: Underwood, Digital Humanities (DH); Pustejovsky, Computational Linguistics (CL). The four key outcomes and benefits of the WCSA+DC, Phase I project are: 1. The deployment of a new Workset Builder tool that enhances search and discovery across the entire HTDL by complementing traditional volume-level bibliographic metadata with new metadata derived from a variety of sources at various levels granularity. 2. The creation of Linked Open Data resources to help scholars find, select, integrate and disseminate a wider range of data as part of their scholarly analysis life-cycle. 3. A new Data Capsule framework that integrates worksets, runs at scale, and does both in a secure, non-consumptive, manner. 4. A set of exemplar pre-built Data Capsules that incorporate tools commonly used by both the DH and CL communities that scholars can then customize to their specific needs.Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, grant no. 41500672Ope

Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis: Prototyping Project

Scholars rely on library collections to support their scholarship. Out of these collections, scholars select, organize, and refine the worksets that will answer to their particular research objectives. The requirements for those worksets are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex, both as humanities scholarship has become more interdisciplinary and as it has become more digital. The HathiTrust is a repository that centrally collects image and text representations of library holdings digitized by the Google Books project and other mass-digitization efforts. The HathiTrust's computational infrastructure is being built to support large-scale manipulation and preservation of these representations, but it organizes them according to catalog records that were created to enable users to find books in a building or to make high-level generalizations about duplicate holdings across libraries, etc. These catalog records were never meant to support the granularity of sorting and selection or works that scholars now expect, much less page-level or chapter-level sorting and selection out of a corpus of billions of pages. The ability to slice through a massive corpus consisting of many different library collections, and out of that to construct the precise workset required for a particular scholarly investigation, is the “game changing” potential of the HathiTrust; understanding how to do that is a research problem, and one that is keenly of interest to the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), since we believe that scholarship begins with the selection of appropriate resources. Given the unprecedented size and scope of the HathiTrust corpus—in conjunction with the HTRC’s unique computational access to copyrighted materials—we are proposing a project that will engage scholars in designing tools for exploration, location, and analytic grouping of materials so they can routinely conduct computational scholarship at scale, based on meaningful worksets. “Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis: Prototyping Project” (WCSA) seeks to address three sets of tightly intertwined research questions regarding 1) enriching the metadata in the HathiTrust corpus, 2) augmenting string-based metadata with URIs to leverage discovery and sharing through external services, and 3) formalizing the notion of collections and worksets in the context of the HathiTrust Research Center. Building upon the model of the Open Annotation Collaboration, the HTRC proposes to release an open, competitive Request for Proposals with the intent to fund four prototyping projects that will build tools for enriching and augmenting metadata for the HathiTrust corpus. Concurrently, the HTRC will work closely with the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) to develop and instantiate a set of formal data models that will be used to capture and integrate the outputs of the funded prototyping projects with the larger HathiTrust corpus.Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, grant no. 21300666Ope

Investigating how South African humanities researchers engage with digital archives

OBJECTIVE: Despite technological developments in the Digital Humanities space, it is unclear that the facilities offered by digital archives support the needs of Humanities researchers in developing countries. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how South African Humanities scholars use digital archives in their research as well as in teaching and other academic activities. METHODS: This thesis utilizes non-random convenience sampling. A feature determination study provided the sampling frame, defined the scope for the survey tool, and was used to uncover trends in digital archives development in South Africa. A self-administered online survey was conducted with Humanities researchers in South Africa to answer the research question. The thesis utilises basic descriptive statistics in its attempt to study and interpret the responses of participating researchers. RESULTS: 102 participants responded to the online survey. Despite many South African digital archives having the functionality to discover, browse and search collections, they are missing the features for collaboration, accessing and managing resources. Only 20% of the survey respondents are satisfied with South African digital archives' process of making content easy to find and accessible, whereas 48% of the respondents consider themselves users of complex digital resources, 44% have the knowledge and experience for using Digital Humanities tools and services, and more than 70% find technology to be useful for learning and teaching. CONCLUSIONS: The usage of archives and their functionalities vary widely. Users have stronger preferences for tools that support basic discovery and personal and collaborative research, but many consider existing support for basic features to be inadequate. In terms of advanced functionalities for managing digital resources, users are interested in these to varying levels, but the inadequate support means that these are still somewhat speculative

From historical railways to cycleways. Re-functioning the heritage of linear monuments

This paper proposes a reflection on the relationship between historical infrastructures and cycleways. In Italy, with the Law 2/2018, rules have been provided for the development of bicycle mobility and the creation of a national cycleway network. The recovery of historical infrastructures is particularly promoted. Among these, disused railway lines reveal a specific vocation for cycling reuse. Unlike highway infrastructures, whose design is bound to parameters that imply a substantial autonomy from the landform, historical railways show how the project of territorial infrastructures can stage the architectural geography of anthropic and natural landscapes. Moreover, recovered in view of slow mobility usage, they appear as linear monuments capable of restoring the identity and stratified memories of the territory. With particular reference to the international cycleways longitudinally crossing the peninsula, along the Apennines, this paper focuses on the description of the architectural characteristics of several historical railway infrastructures, selected according to different geomorphological contexts. Aim of these slow mobility infrastructures is also to contribute to the revitalization of ‘inner areas’ of the peninsula. The knowledge of historical infrastructure is, in fact, assumed as a prerequisite for the design of cycleways that are able to relate to the territories and the multiplicity of their settlement forms

DISEGNARE ROBOT Verso una cultura etica del progetto estetico/DESIGNING ROBOTS Towards an ethical culture of the aesthetic product

Negli ultimi anni i robot di servizio con applicazione in contesti sociali hanno sviluppato linguaggi comunicativi naturali e capacità di interazione sempre più sofisticate e intuiti- ve. Disegnati a somiglianza umana o come disegno di sintesi, questa tipologia di robot è oggetto di un’attività multidisciplinare in cui il Design è coinvolto nel processo progettuale insieme alle ingegnerie, con il supporto dell’antropologia e della psicologia. Il progetto di ricerca HERE intende fornire metodi di analisi quanti/qualitative e linee guida per una progettazione etica di servizi e di prodotti robotici con alto grado di accessibilità e accettazione da parte degli utilizzatori. Il laboratorio di ricerca riguarda gli spazi universitari, dove il robot di telepresenza è configurato come appendice virtuale di uno studente impossibilitato ad essere presente in loco. Over the last years, service robots with applications in social contexts have developed increasingly sophisticated and intuitive natural communication languages and social skills. Designed in human likeness or with synthetic designs, this kind of robot is the subject of a multidisciplinary activity, in which Design is involved in the design project together with engineering, and the support of anthropology and psychology. The HERE research project wants to give quantitative and qualitative analysis methods and guidelines for an ethical planning of robotic services and products with a high level of accessibility and acceptance by users. The research laboratory concerns university spaces, where telepresence robots are set up as virtual appendixes for students that could not be present

Nuclear Storytelling: Through Literary Figurations to Nuclear Literacy

Peer reviewe

Bilddaten in den Digitalen Geisteswissenschaften

Digitale Bilder sind in Zeiten des Internets, der Mobiltelefonie und der sozialen Medien fest in der Lebenswelt zahlreicher Menschen verankert. Auch in den unterschiedlichen Geisteswissenschaften ist die Nutzung von digitalen Bildern als Forschungsmaterial an vielen Stellen zum Alltag geworden. In Bilddaten in den Digitalen Geisteswissenschaften wird mit einer Auswahl von Anwendungsfällen und Lösungsansätzen aus Informatik und Informationswissenschaft, Architektur- und Kunstgeschichte, Philologie und Medienwissenschaft eine Bandbreite der je nach Disziplin und Gegenstand variierenden Anforderungen dargestellt, wobei auch zunächst eher technisch anmutende Aspekte betrachtet werden. In drei Abschnitten werden digitale Verfahren und ihre Anwendungen in einzelnen Teilgebieten der Geisteswissenschaften behandelt. Obwohl sich die einzelnen Beiträge in unterschiedlichem Maße auf informatische und geisteswissenschaftliche Interessen, Ansätze, Verfahren und Details konzentrieren, verweisen sie immer auch auf den jeweils anderen Aspekt, sodass sich die Fächer in diesen Darstellungen einander annähern. Bilder werden dabei nicht nur als Gegenstände von Wissen betrachtet, sondern sie werden in ihrer Relevanz für die Genese, die Repräsentation und die Dissemination von Wissen untersucht