Reliable Witnesses: Integrating Multimedia, Distributed Electronic Textual Editions into Library Collections

The Reliable Witnesses project addresses current vulnerabilities of distributed electronic textual editions and integrates such projects into library collections through workflows for acquisition, description, and preservation. Electronic editions of unique manuscript materials represent an important part of our cultural heritage, providing access to materials otherwise inaccessible to most users, serving as incubators for cutting-edge scholarship, and providing a platform for technological innovation. However, e-text projects frequently employ infrastructures from a variety of resources, and such innovative, distributed designs can result in projects that are not easily integrated into library collections, which consist primarily of traditional print and subscription digital resources. The Reliable Witnesses project will result in local best practices for meeting these challenges as well as a generalized life-cycle model that other institutions can adapt to their needs

Religious Reasons for Campbell's View of Emotional Appeals in Philosophy of Rhetoric

This is the author's accepted manuscript.Reading Campbell's Philosophy of Rhetoric from a rhetorical perspective--as an attempt to address issues relevant to religious rhetoric--I argue that Campbell's aims of preparing future ministers to preach and defending the authority of revealed religion shaped, first, his conception of inventing and presenting emotional appeals and, second, his key assumptions about reason and passion. The essay adds a chapter to accounts of the relationship between reason and passion in sacred rhetorics and in rhetorical traditions more generally, and addresses the question of what Campbell's theory of rhetoric may aim to inculcate or cultivate emotionally and why

Reducing the environmental impact of surgery on a global scale: systematic review and co-prioritization with healthcare workers in 132 countries

Abstract Background Healthcare cannot achieve net-zero carbon without addressing operating theatres. The aim of this study was to prioritize feasible interventions to reduce the environmental impact of operating theatres. Methods This study adopted a four-phase Delphi consensus co-prioritization methodology. In phase 1, a systematic review of published interventions and global consultation of perioperative healthcare professionals were used to longlist interventions. In phase 2, iterative thematic analysis consolidated comparable interventions into a shortlist. In phase 3, the shortlist was co-prioritized based on patient and clinician views on acceptability, feasibility, and safety. In phase 4, ranked lists of interventions were presented by their relevance to high-income countries and low–middle-income countries. Results In phase 1, 43 interventions were identified, which had low uptake in practice according to 3042 professionals globally. In phase 2, a shortlist of 15 intervention domains was generated. In phase 3, interventions were deemed acceptable for more than 90 per cent of patients except for reducing general anaesthesia (84 per cent) and re-sterilization of ‘single-use’ consumables (86 per cent). In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for high-income countries were: introducing recycling; reducing use of anaesthetic gases; and appropriate clinical waste processing. In phase 4, the top three shortlisted interventions for low–middle-income countries were: introducing reusable surgical devices; reducing use of consumables; and reducing the use of general anaesthesia. Conclusion This is a step toward environmentally sustainable operating environments with actionable interventions applicable to both high– and low–middle–income countries

Writers Talk Featuring Cindy Selfe and Louie Ulman

Interview featuring Cindy Selfe and Louie UlmanOhio State University. Center for the Study and Teaching of Writin

CODE: Codified Objects Define Evolution

On March 20, 2013, the Humanities Institute and the Digital Arts and Humanities Working Group at the Ohio State University hosted a panel discussion convened by Lewis Ulman (Digital Media Studies, the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), English). The panel explored the role of “coding” in the digital arts and humanities. The panel offered insights into what markup, scripting, and procedural programming languages are most useful to arts and humanities scholarship, suggested different ways scholars and teachers in the arts and humanities can engage with coding and considered what role coding plays in the education of arts and humanities students. Panel members included Trey Conatser, Susan Delagrange, and Ken Rinaldo."Name of Talk Here" (Trey Conatster) -- "Name of Talk Here" (Susan Delagrange) -- "Name of Talk Here" (Ken Rinaldo) -- Panel Discussion: The Role of "Coding" in the Digital Arts and Humanities (Lewis Ulman, Trey Conatser, Susan Delagrange, Ken Rinaldo

Visualizing "Big Data" in the Arts and Humanities

Visualizing "Big Data" in the Arts and Humanities recorded in four parts. [Part One:] Reading Big Data as a Humanist: The Humanities Visualization Studio (David J. Staley). This presentation explored the concept of a Humanities Visualization Studio for The Ohio State University and its potential role in leveraging "Big Data" to bring new insights and knowledge building in the humanities. Staley offered analysis of the unique approaches humanists might bring to working with large data sets and developing patterns of interpretive insight. He presented the concept of distant reading or macro-level reading as a methodology that is growing in relevance, initiating radical transformation of texts and enabled by emergent technologies. Staley further suggested the important role a Humanities Visualization Studio would have in bringing people together to collaborate, pool resources and move forward in concert. [Part Two:] Stanford’s Digital Humanities Labs (Jessie Labov). Labov shared her experience with Stanford’s Humanities Lab (http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/admin/directory.html), Beyond Search (https://beyondsearch.stanford.edu/) and Stanford Literary Lab (http://litlab.stanford.edu/) as examples of how digital humanities labs can address issues involved in working with humanities big data. These initiatives are explored as examples of how such efforts to bring a humanities community together can work (or not). Labov suggested three lessons to be learned from Stanford’s experience: there is a risk in developing digital humanities spaces and equipment stores which are not solidly based in viable research projects, that more successful efforts are built around researchers and their existing work and interests and that an institution needs to let these environments evolve as communities and community centers. [Part Three:] Thinking Metaphorically about Data (H. Lewis Ulman). Ulman offered examples of different humanities visualization projects as way of examining the concept of "big data" and how we might set an agenda for a visualization studio. Interrogating the concepts of "close," "distant," "wide," and "deep" reading, he suggests that it is not the size of the data set but the broadness of the opportunities for investigation that should determine the kind of projects to be addressed by the humanities visualization studio. Ulman demonstrated how applying visualization techniques that provide a "wide" view of the data found in the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives can offer new insights and conclusions. Similarly, investigating single words in Louisa A. Doane's Journal of Two Ocean Voyages (1850-52) against the "wide" canvas of the Google Books database increased students understanding of historical context and meaning. He suggested that archival finding aids can be made more understandable and facilitate research more effectively by employing visualization tools. Finally, by exploring the process of transforming "deep" text-encoding markup into reading or "surface" versions of texts, Ulman showed how electronic textual editions in themselves are visualizations of complex or "big" data. In these ways, data sets that seem small in size can have larger meaning through data visualization. [Part Four:] Visualization Q&A session. A portion of the Q&A session following the presentations of the panel for Visualizing "Big Data" in the Arts and Humanities records audience insights into the meaning behind the term "big data" and how we might develop initiatives at The Ohio State University.Panelists David Staley (Associate Professor, The Ohio State University Department of History), Jessie Labov (Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures), and H. Lewis Ulman (Associate Professor, The Ohio State University Department of English) explored the place of data visualization as a form of humanities scholarship, with visualization as the hermeneutic act that allows humanists to read "big data." The panel described the concept of a Humanities Visualization Studio at The Ohio State University to conduct such humanistic readings of big data. Questions centered around defining "big data" in the context of the humanities, how humanists read big data, how our interests and goals with reading big data differ from that of scientists, and how visualization and visual hermeneutics is critical to the effort to read that data. As we read our texts, humanists seek not better models or predictive certainty, but rather patterns of interpretive insight. Reading big data is an occasion for humanists to assert our approach to knowledge: to champion the value of meaning, interpretation and insight in contrast to the logic of scientific prediction and control.Reading Big Data as a Humanist: The Humanities Visualization Studio (David J. Staley) -- Stanford’s Digital Humanities Labs (Jessie Labov) -- Thinking Metaphorically about Data (H. Lewis Ulman) -- Visualization Q&A session

Stories That Speak to Us

Stories That Speak to Us—a digital collection of scholarly, curated exhibits—is designed to investigate literacy narratives from a number of perspectives: to explore why they are important, what information they carry about reading and composing, why they might be valuable, not only for scholars and teachers, but also for librarians, community literacy workers, individual citizens and groups of people. As the editors and authors collectively suggest, literacy narratives are powerfully rhetorical linguistic accounts through which people fashion their lives; make sense of their world, indeed construct the realities in which they live. Literacy narratives are sometimes laden so richly with information that conventional academic tools and ways of discussing their power to shape identities; to persuade, and reveal, and discover, to create meaning and affiliations at home, in schools, communities, and workplaces, are inadequate to the task. For this reason, the collection focuses on the work of both narrative theorists and literacy educators. The curated exhibits in Stories That Speak to Us provide analyses of narratives selected by the author/scholars from among the more than 3,500 narratives preserved in the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), a publicly available online archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that recount contributors’ literacy practices and values in their own words. The motif of exhibits and curators is employed in part to suggest the relationship between the narratives “on display” in this particular project and the much larger collection of narratives in the DALN as a whole—the narratives “on display” here constitute less than two percent of the entire archive. The Stories That Speak to Us collection allows visitors to study the literacy narratives in the exhibits directly via links to the DALN, while the essays in this collection constitute something analogous to exhibit catalogs. The individual exhibits examine themes such as “betweenity,” scaffolding, digital divides, ethnolinguistic vitality, ludic literacies, black women’s literacy narratives, the convergence of local and global discourses about literacy, feminism and digital literacy, and transnational “thirdspaces” of literacy. At the end of the collection, we suggest some ways to explore, and provide some tools for exploring, these and other topics in the entire archive