Pace of Change: A Preliminary YesWorkflow Case Study

YesWorkflow (YW) is a grassroots initiative that “aims to provide a number of the benefits of using a scientific workflow management system without having to rewrite scripts and other scientific software.” YW represents an improvement to workflow modeling by allowing scientists and scholars to bypass traditional workflow engines by utilizing a small suite of modeling annotations that can be integrated as comments directly into an existing script. To date, YesWorkflow is still in its prototyping and development phase, but a handful of early adopters have already begun piloting the tool in a variety of scientific domains. To test the potential of utilizing YesWorkflow in a digital humanities context, this case study explores Professor Ted Underwood’s research outlined in the 2015 article “How Quickly do Literary Standards Change”, co-authored with Jordan Sellers and posted to FigShare with a link to the project’s GitHub repository.Ope

Digital Humanities Data Curation

Digital Humanities Data Curation (DHDC) will engage scholars in sustained collaboration around issues of data curation in order to educate scholars on best practices and technologies for data curation and their relationship to scholarly methods. The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland will lead a collaboration partnering the Women Writers Project (WWP) at Brown University, and the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign that will foster innovation in digital humanities research by integrating recent advances in the research and practice of data curation to address the specific needs of humanities researchers. DHDC will serve as an opportunity for participants to receive guidance in understanding the role of data curation in enriching humanities research projects

Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis: Recommendations and Prototyping Project Reports

This document assembles and describes the outcomes of the four prototyping projects undertaken as part of the Workset Creation for Scholarly Analysis (WCSA) research project (2013 – 2015). Each prototyping project team provided its own final report. These reports are assembled together and included in this document. Based on the totality of results reported, the WCSA project team also provide a set of overarching recommendations for HTRC implementation and adoption of research conducted by the Prototyping Project teams. The work described here was made possible through the generous support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Grant Ref # 21300666).The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Grant Ref # 21300666)Ope

Humanities Collaborations and Research Practices: Investigating New Modes of Collaborative Humanities Scholarship

This paper presents preliminary findings from “Humanities Collaborations and Research Practices: Exploring Scholarship in the Global Midwest,” (HCRP), a collaborative project led by librarians at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Indiana University that examines how collaborative and experimental research practices in the humanities affects scholarly practices, scholarly communication, and research outcomes. The HCRP study examines a series of multi-institutional humanities research projects funded by the Humanities Without Walls (HWW) Global Midwest initiative, a Mellon Foundation-funded consortium of Midwest university humanities centers. We conducted 27 semi-structured interviews with scholars from diverse humanities disciplines who were HWW Global Midwest awardees. The interviews explore how scholars share data, build self-generated research environment infrastructures for supporting data sharing and communications, and frame their collaborations in the context of broader goals. This short paper will offer new perspectives on scholarly communications and data curation in the humanities, as it will share valuable insights into how information professionals can engage with collaborative, experimental, and multimodal research

Text Data Mining Beyond the Open Data Paradigm: Perspectives at the Intersection of Intellectual Property and Ethics

This poster highlights outcomes from an IMLS-funded National Forum project on text data mining with content that is subject to use conditions due to intellectual property rights. It argues that developing strong frameworks for conducting text mining with IP-limited data is an urgent priority for supporting responsible, sustainable research in the twenty-first century.Institute for Museum and Library Services (LG-73-17-0070-17)Ope

Data Mining Research with In-copyright and Use-limited Text Datasets: Preliminary Findings from a Systematic Literature Review and Stakeholder Interviews

Text data mining and analysis has emerged as a viable research method for scholars, following the growth of mass digitization, digital publishing, and scholarly interest in data re-use. Yet the texts that comprise datasets for analysis are frequently protected by copyright or other intellectual property rights that limit their access and use. This paper discusses the role of libraries at the intersection of data mining and intellectual property, asserting that academic libraries are vital partners in enabling scholars to effectively incorporate text data mining into their research. We report on activities leading up to an IMLS-funded National Forum of stakeholders and discuss preliminary findings from a systematic literature review, as well as initial results of interviews with forum stakeholders. Emerging themes suggest the need for a multi-pronged distributed approach that includes a public campaign for building awareness and advocacy, development of best practice guides for library support services and training, and international efforts toward data standardization and copyright harmonization.Institute of Museum and Library Services (LG-73-17-0070-17)Ope

Enhancing Cultural Heritage Collections by Supporting and Analyzing Participation in Flickr

Cultural heritage institutions can enhance their collections by sharing content through popular web services. Drawing on current analyses from the Flickr Feasibility Study, we report on the pronounced increase in use of the IMLS DCC Flickr Photostream in the past year, trends in how users are engaging with the content, and data provider perspectives on participation in Flickr through the DCC. In addition to users providing comments and tags for images, they are increasingly integrating historical images from libraries and museums into new digital objects and special collections. Intermediary services can fill a key role in lowering the burden for institutions to engage in Web 2.0 initiatives and broadening public access to cultural heritage content. To extend the scope of the current DCC services, we propose a feedback framework for transferring user-generated information to institutional data providers.IMLS LG-06-07-0020published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Humanities scholars and library-based digital publishing: New forms of publication, new audiences, new publishing roles

The rise of library-based digital scholarly publishing creates new opportunities to meet scholars’ evolving publishing needs. This article presents findings from a national survey of humanities scholars on their attitudes toward digital publishing, the diversification of scholarly products, changing perceptions of authorship, and the desire to reach new audiences. Based on survey findings, the authors offer recommendations for how library publishers can make unique contributions to the scholarly publishing ecosystem and support the advancement of digital scholarship in the humanities by accommodating and sustaining more diverse products of digital scholarship, supporting new modes of authorship, and helping scholars reach broader audiences through interdisciplinary and open access publishing.Ope

Using a Computational Study of Hydrodynamics in the Wax Lake Delta to Examine Data Sharing Principles

In this paper we describe a complex dataset used to study the circulation and wind-driven flows in the Wax Lake Delta, Louisiana, USA under winter storm conditions. The whole package bundles a large dataset (approximately 74 GB), which includes the numerical model, software and scripts for data analysis and visualization, as well as detailed documentation. The raw data came from multiple external sources, including government agencies, community repositories, and deployed field instruments and surveys. Each raw dataset goes through the processes of data QA/QC, data analysis, visualization, and interpretation. After integrating multiple datasets, new data products are obtained which are then used with the numerical model. The numerical model undergoes model verification, testing, calibration, and optimization. With a complex algorithm of computation, the model generates a structured output dataset, which is, after post-data analysis, presented as informative scientific figures and tables that allow interpretations and conclusions contributing to the science of coastal physical oceanography. Performing this study required a tremendous amount of effort. While the work resulted in traditional dissemination via a thesis, journal articles and conference proceedings, more can be gained. The data can be reused to study reproducibility or as preliminary investigation to explore a new topic. With thorough documentation and well-organized data, both the input and output dataset should be ready for sharing in a domain or institutional repository. Furthermore, the data organization and documentation also serves as a guideline for future research data management and the development of workflow protocols. Here we will describe the dataset created by this study, how sharing the dataset publicly could enable validation of the current study and extension by new studies, and the challenges that arise prior to sharing the dataset

Conceptualizing worksets for non-consumptive research

The HathiTrust (HT) digital library comprises 4 billion pages (composing 11 million volumes). The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) – a unique collaboration between University of Illinois and Indiana University – is developing tools to connect scholars to this large and diverse corpus. This poster discusses HTRC’s activities surrounding the discovery, formation and optimization of useful analytic subsets of the HT corpus (i.e., workset creation and use). As a part of this development we are prototyping a RDF-based triple-store designed to record and serialize metadata describing worksets and the bibliographic entities that are collected within them. At the heart of this work is the construction of a formal conceptual model that captures sufficient descriptive information about worksets, including provenance, curatorial intent, and other useful metadata, so that digital humanities scholars can more easily select, group, and cite their research data collections based upon HT and external corpora. The prototype’s data model is in being designed to be extensible and fit well within the Linked Open Data community.ye