Library as Agent of [Re]Contextualization

Paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference in College Park, Maryland

Announcement: Open Access Week 2016 Events: Join Us!

This October, for the sixth year running, BU is pleased to participate in the international Open Access Week. We have organized several events leading up to, and during, the week of October 24th. We’d love for you to join us; please register for as many as you like. All events are open to the public (registration helps us plan refreshments), and will take place in the Mugar Library Estin Room, 771 Commonwealth Avenue, Rm 302, Boston MA 02215. [Originally announced on the BU Libraries website: http://www.bu.edu/library/news/2016/10/03/oaweek2016/

Library as Agent of [Re]Contextualization

Paper presented at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference in College Park, Maryland

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities; Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes

In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging in the humanities, particularly those associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, the authors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subject classification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features of classification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrent themes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, we suggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subject classification systems to support research in the humanities.NEH Office of Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51166-10

Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities

Interdisciplinary research in the humanities requires indexing that represents multiple disciplinary perspectives. Most literature has been indexed using traditional models for subject analysis that are either too broad to be helpful or represent a single disciplinary perspective. We question whether traditional print models of subject analysis serve humanistic researchers' needs in working with digital content. It is beyond the capacity of libraries to re-index this body of literature relying on human indexers. We need to develop scalable tools to both re-index extant bodies of literature and newly created literature. Web-scale searching, computational text analysis, and automated indexing each hold promise for addressing various aspects of the problem, but none seem to fully address the problem. This project will gather a group of scholars with expertise in the humanities, computational analysis of texts, and library and information science, to design an approach to the problem

Copyright and Creator Rights in DH Projects: A Checklist

This checklist is an offering to the digital humanities community by participants of the Digital Humanities 2017 panel “Copyright, Digital Humanities, and Global Geographies of Knowledge.”* Do you have suggestions for improving it? Please email vzafrin at bu edu. *https://www.conftool.pro/dh2017/index.php?page=browseSessions&form_session=291&presentations=sho

Collaborative Meaning Making in DS Services

Digital scholarly practice has been gathering steam for almost a decade at Boston University, but support for it has only been formalized in the last year and a half — and infrastructure building is ongoing. At University of Maryland, both the support and the scholarly practice are well institutionalized. However different our two institutional contexts are, we and others who support digital scholarship have been tentatively reaching out to each other for conversation. In particular, for many of us this work is informed by the current U.S. political climate, and by digital humanities\u27 and digital libraries\u27 response to it. We will give a brief overview of ways in which our intersecting fields have engaged with political aspects of knowledge production, then open the floor for conversation about workshop participants\u27 current projects, and begin to collaborate on an online list of useful resources for a socio-politically active framing of our work

Open Access Week 2013 Materials

These are some of the materials used at the Open Access Event held at Boston University on October 23, 2013. If you presented and would like us to make your materials available here, please get in touch

#Alt-Academy: Alternative Careers for Academic Scholars

This e-book is the first volume of the online publication #Alt-Academy. Edited by Bethany Nowviskie, this volume contains all 24 essays published by the 32 authors who contributed to #Alt-Academy's initial collection. The following text, also by Nowviskie, is from the 2011 website launch: #Alt-Academy was created by and for people with deep training and experience in the humanities, working or seeking employment — generally off the tenure track, but within the academic orbit — in universities and colleges, or allied knowledge and cultural heritage institutions such as museums, libraries, academic presses, historical societies, and governmental humanities organizations. The work of such institutions is enriched and enabled by capable “alternative academics.” Although they are rarely conventionally-employed as faculty members, the people contributing to #Alt-Academy maintain a research and publication profile and bring their methodological and theoretical training to bear every day on problem-sets of great importance to higher education. For some, keeping their considerable talents within the academy can feel more difficult than making a switch to private-sector careers. Class divisions among faculty and staff are profound, and the suspicion or (worse) condescension with which so-called “failed academics” are met can be disheartening. For all that, these authors love their work. Many on the #alt-ac track describe the satisfaction of making teams (and systems, and programs) work, of solving problems and making or enabling breakthroughs in research and scholarship in their disciplines, and of contributing to and experiencing the life of the mind in ways they did not imagine when they entered grad school. #Alt-Academy is for everyone building skills and experience in precisely those areas of the academy that are most in flux, and most in need of guidance and attention by sensitive, capable, imaginative, and well-informed scholar-practitioners