Papel de la biblioteca y del bibliotecario en las Humanidades Digitales

As the Digital Humanities (HD) evolves, the role of libraries and librarians working in the field continues to develop. In this context, specialists in the field of university libraries, also known as links, are responsible for working with different disciplines, such as English or philosophy. In general, their work requires communicating with departments, providing bibliographic references and assisting in the development of research in a variety of formats, offering novelties, trends and collection management. Thus, these new functions may require the learning of new skills; thus, subject matter specialists working in the humanities are led to assume new roles as a result of interest in the digital humanities

The Digital Repository Service of the National Documentation Centre in Greece: a model for Digital Humanities data management and representation

Digital Humanities lie at the crossroads between technology and humanistic research. Contemporary technological advances significantly open up new avenues for humanities study and new ways to utilize the output of humanities endeavors for the communities that benefit from it, be it communities of practice, the education system, citizen scientists and society overall. The following article describes the development cycle of a new cloud service the Greek National Documentation Centre (EKT) offers to the domestic cultural and science organisations. The National Documentation Centre (EKT) is one of the most important digital content stakeholders in Greece, facilitating Humanities research through robust e-infrastructures and widening access to digital collections. The article describes the Digital Repository Service development from planning to delivery, describes the various components of the service and addresses the issues of engaging with the community of users to address their documentation needs and preferences. As part of designing the service and workflows, a survey was conducted in the GLAM sector organisations in Greece, in order to assess user needs and understanding of new and emerging technologies, as well as discern possible volume of digital content. Extensive literature and similar trends review took place and it was funneled into designing the documentation strategy used for the Repositories. The accompanying suit of services was developed (eLearning, eKnowledgeBase) and the project rolled out initially with some pilots, then managed to create 28 repositories with rich, varied content. The Repository Service was developed through national and EU funding during 2012-2015 and aims to support knowledge producers (in the fields of culture, education, science and research) to organize, document and disseminate their content on an open access basis. Overarching goal of the project was to aggregate quality science and cultural content and disseminate through search portals and aggregators such as Europeana

Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies

Digital Humanities remains a contested, umbrella term covering many types of work in numerous disciplines, including literature, history, linguistics, classics, theater, performance studies, film, media studies, computer science, and information science. In Traces of the Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies, Amy Earhart stakes a claim for discipline-specific history of digital study as a necessary prelude to true progress in defining Digital Humanities as a shared set of interdisciplinary practices and interests. Traces of the Old, Uses of the New focuses on twenty-five years of developments, including digital editions, digital archives, e-texts, text mining, and visualization, to situate emergent products and processes in relation to historical trends of disciplinary interest in literary study. By reexamining the roil of theoretical debates and applied practices from the last generation of work in juxtaposition with applied digital work of the same period, Earhart also seeks to expose limitations in need of alternative methods—methods that might begin to deliver on the early (but thus far unfulfilled) promise that digitizing texts allows literature scholars to ask and answer questions in new and compelling ways. In mapping the history of digital literary scholarship, Earhart also seeks to chart viable paths to its future, and in doing this work in one discipline, this book aims to inspire similar work in others

Using Archives and Metadata to Uncover Women\u27s Lives: Challenges and Opportunities for Scholarship through Archives and Digital Libraries

How can library and archives professionals work with digital humanities researchers to provide a more meaningful research experience? How does technology provide opportunities for new areas of growth? This panel will discuss the creation and challenges of two projects: the Hudson River Valley Heritage Omeka exhibition, Women of the Hudson Valley, and the Vassar Student Diaries project, using the Fedora/Islandora digital library system. The exhibition was a collaborative project produced by librarians, historians, and archivists from institutions across the region. It brought together a wide range of materials documenting the experiences of women of varying socioeconomic status in public as well as private spheres. The Vassar Student Diary Project has digitized 54 diaries from Vassar students dating from the 1860s through the 1920s, providing new opportunities for previously elusive research and classroom topics. As practitioners in archives and digital libraries, we see ways in which our own collaborations on these digital projects help satisfy complementary research and classroom needs, and seek to provide value‐added services to any collection of materials. We will discuss our approaches to using the traditional strengths of archival practice and humanities research, combined with current digital library trends, to build new trajectories for women\u27s history projects

Using Archives and Metadata to Uncover Women\u27s Lives: Challenges and Opportunities for Scholarship through Archives and Digital Libraries

How can library and archives professionals work with digital humanities researchers to provide a more meaningful research experience? How does technology provide opportunities for new areas of growth? This panel will discuss the creation and challenges of two projects: the Hudson River Valley Heritage Omeka exhibition, Women of the Hudson Valley, and the Vassar Student Diaries project, using the Fedora/Islandora digital library system. The exhibition was a collaborative project produced by librarians, historians, and archivists from institutions across the region. It brought together a wide range of materials documenting the experiences of women of varying socioeconomic status in public as well as private spheres. The Vassar Student Diary Project has digitized 54 diaries from Vassar students dating from the 1860s through the 1920s, providing new opportunities for previously elusive research and classroom topics. As practitioners in archives and digital libraries, we see ways in which our own collaborations on these digital projects help satisfy complementary research and classroom needs, and seek to provide value‐added services to any collection of materials. We will discuss our approaches to using the traditional strengths of archival practice and humanities research, combined with current digital library trends, to build new trajectories for women\u27s history projects

Accessibility and Usage of Digital Technologies among Academics for Research: A Case of Selected Humanities and Social Sciences Faculties in Sri Lankan Universities

The Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) involve understanding the human experience and the relationships between individuals and groups in society. The adoption of digital technologies has challenged the discipline of HSS, creating an entirely new environment for the study of human activities. This research aims to explore the employment of digital tools, resources and services in HSS research. Further, the use of digital methods (DM) throughout the research process; the impact of COVID-19 on the use of DM in research; the constraints of using DM in research were tested. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from Colombo, Kelaniya and Sri Jayewardenepura universities targeting academics in Economics, English, English Language Teaching, Geography, History and Archeology, Buddhist Studies, Political Science, Sinhala, and Sociology. Considering the digital infrastructure facilities, most of the academics rated email (45.6%) and LMS services (46.7%) as excellent but maintenance provided by the institute was not adequate. Most academics rated good on access to data storage (37.9%); reference management software (27.5%); plagiarism detection software (29.1%); institutional repository (35.2%); and support to online publications (39.6%) provided by their institutes. 55.7% of surveyed academics in SS often use digital data collection methods while in the Humanities it was 43.4%. Online publishing was most often used by SS (50.9%) and only 39.5% by the Humanities. 53.8% of SS academics and 43.4% of humanities academics often use cloud storage. Findings confirmed the expansion of using digital research methods during the pandemic compared to the early pandemic situation. Collaborative research works, virtual conferences, citation databases and digital indexing were identified as popular trends. DOI: http://doi.org/10.31357/fhss/vjhss.v08i02.0

Re-contextualizing the standing Sekhmet statues in the Temple of Ptah at Karnak through digital reconstruction and VR experience

Recent trends in the Digital Humanities – conceived as new modalities of collaborative, transdisciplinary and computational research and presentation – also strongly influence research approaches and presentation practices in museums. Indeed, ongoing projects in museums have considerably expanded digital access to data and information, documentation and visualization of ancient ruins and objects. In addition, 3D modelling and eXtended Reality opened up new avenues of interacting with a wider public through digital reconstructions that allow both objects and sites to be presented through visual narratives based on multidisciplinary scholarly research. The article illustrates the use of 3D digital reconstruction and virtual reality to recontextualise standing statues of Sekhmet in the Temple of Ptah at Karnak, where they were found in 1818. Today, they are on display at Museo Egizio, Turin. The theoretical framework of the research and the operational workflow – based on the study of the available archaeological, textual, and pictorial data – is presented here

Competing Ideologies of Collaborative Research

Digital humanities meets linguisticsCollaboration advocacy is born both of perceived necessity and ideology. Necessity, since for in situ language research, community partnerships and interdisciplinary work have resolved problems of non-collaborative research (e.g. fraught communication, lack of access, limitations of data, theory, or methodology). But this advocacy also reflects ideologies of “empowering research” (Cameron et al. 1992). Strenuous objections to collaboration have been raised by a few within documentary linguistics and within the humanities in general. Some scholars are concerned that political correctness is overwhelming academic concerns (Malik 2000, Crippen and Robinson 2011). Some humanists view collaborative approaches entailing larger data sets as a covert rejection of contemporary literary analysis (Golumbia 2012). The pushback against collaborative approaches is ideological, rather than methodological or theoretical, and mirrors larger trends in the humanities. Do ideologies of collaboration create new obstacles to research? If so, what approaches could mitigate such effects? Identifying both methodological and ideological barriers enables better practice in linguistics, from research design through data analysis