Multimedia from the 17th-Century Book to the 21st-Century Web: a playable digital edition of Michael Maier’s "Atalanta fugiens"

Poste

Glider: An Open Source Platform for Custom Display Wall Applications

Display walls have garnered significant interest in the library community as visible investments towards a digital, collaborative, visual approach to academic endeavors. However, once purchased, support staff realize that there are a limited number of out-of-the-box applications that showcase the utility of these significant investments. Brown University Library faced such a challenge with their display wall, installed in 2012. A series of experimental custom solutions led staff there to plan a generalized platform for developing display wall applications, called Glider. Glider is targeted at library staff with entry-level HTML skills, and offers increasing customization opportunities for those with CSS and Javascript expertise. This workshop will allow participants to discuss the opportunities and difficulties faced by libraries with display wall technologies, and will incorporate a presentation and hands-on demonstration of the Glider system in its current state of development. Participants will be invited to comment and provide feedback on this work-in-progress. Bring Your Own Device session

Public Humanities, Early American Studies, and the Digital Revolution

Can the digital turn in humanities scholarship produce more fruitful engagements between post-secondary institutions and the many publics that exist outside the academy? To engage this and related questions, this presentation will focus on Mapping Colonial American Publishing (http://cds.library.brown.edu/mapping-genres/), a collaborative project that uses library catalog data from two of Brown’s rare book libraries to visualize the history of publishing in the Americas before 1800. Our recent efforts at engaging audiences beyond the academy has produced as many questions as answers. We’ve wondered, for instance, what topics might draw readers to a subject that often draws more yawns than clicks, and how we might we use the digital to connect with the world outside the academy through partnerships with local historic sites, coordinating with museums and local public humanities groups, for instance, and/or elementary, middle, and/or secondary schools in order to advance the goals of all communities involved

US Black Maternal Health Advocacy Topics and Trends on Twitter: Temporal Infoveillance Study

BackgroundBlack women in the United States disproportionately suffer adverse pregnancy and birth outcomes compared to White women. Economic adversity and implicit bias during clinical encounters may lead to physiological responses that place Black women at higher risk for adverse birth outcomes. The novel coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) further exacerbated this risk, as safety protocols increased social isolation in clinical settings, thereby limiting opportunities to advocate for unbiased care. Twitter, 1 of the most popular social networking sites, has been used to study a variety of issues of public interest, including health care. This study considers whether posts on Twitter accurately reflect public discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic and are being used in infodemiology studies by public health experts. ObjectiveThis study aims to assess the feasibility of Twitter for identifying public discourse related to social determinants of health and advocacy that influence maternal health among Black women across the United States and to examine trends in sentiment between 2019 and 2020 in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. MethodsTweets were collected from March 1 to July 13, 2020, from 21 organizations and influencers and from 4 hashtags that focused on Black maternal health. Additionally, tweets from the same organizations and hashtags were collected from the year prior, from March 1 to July 13, 2019. Twint, a Python programming library, was used for data collection and analysis. We gathered the text of approximately 17,000 tweets, as well as all publicly available metadata. Topic modeling and k-means clustering were used to analyze the tweets. ResultsA variety of trends were observed when comparing the 2020 data set to the 2019 data set from the same period. The percentages listed for each topic are probabilities of that topic occurring in our corpus. In our topic models, tweets on reproductive justice, maternal mortality crises, and patient care increased by 67.46% in 2020 versus 2019. Topics on community, advocacy, and health equity increased by over 30% in 2020 versus 2019. In contrast, tweet topics that decreased in 2020 versus 2019 were as follows: tweets on Medicaid and medical coverage decreased by 27.73%, and discussions about creating space for Black women decreased by just under 30%. ConclusionsThe results indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic may have spurred an increased focus on advocating for improved reproductive health and maternal health outcomes among Black women in the United States. Further analyses are needed to capture a longer time frame that encompasses more of the pandemic, as well as more diverse voices to confirm the robustness of the findings. We also concluded that Twitter is an effective source for providing a snapshot of relevant topics to guide Black maternal health advocacy efforts

Research to Confront Climate Change Complexity: Intersectionality, Integration, and Innovative Governance

Climate impacts increasingly unfold in interlinked systems of people, nature, and infrastructure. The cascading consequences are revealing sometimes surprising connections across sectors and regions, and prospects for climate responses also depend on complex, difficult‐to‐understand interactions. In this commentary, we build on the innovations of the United States Fifth National Climate Assessment to suggest a framework for understanding and responding to complex climate challenges. This approach involves: (a) integration of disciplines and expertise to understand how intersectionality shapes complex climate impacts and the wide‐ranging effects of climate responses, (b) collaborations among diverse knowledge holders to improve responses and better encompass intersectionality, and (c) sustained experimentation with and learning about governance approaches capable of handling the complexity of climate change. Together, these three pillars underscore that usability of climate‐relevant knowledge requires transdisciplinary coordination of research and practice. We outline actionable steps for climate research to incorporate intersectionality, integration, and innovative governance, as is increasingly necessary for confronting climate complexity and sustaining equitable, ideally vibrant climate futures. Plain Language Summary Climate impacts are complex, and prospects for climate responses depend on difficult‐to‐understand interactions. Lived experiences are increasingly revealing limits to what we in the scientific community have successfully modeled and ongoing challenges in how we help others understand the complexity of climate impacts and support decision‐making. Here, we chart a path for confronting the complexity of climate change with actionable advances in equity and governance research. Key Points Climate impacts increasingly unfold in interlinked systems of people, nature, and infrastructure The cascading consequences are revealing sometimes surprising connections and complex, difficult‐to‐understand interactions We suggest a research framework for climate complexity prioritizing intersectionality, integration, and innovative governanc