conferences

August 24, 2016, Filed Under: Events

Enhancing Digital Archives and Collections: Report from SAA

During the first week of August, the Society of American Archivists (SAA) held its annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia. As the new Reading the First Books project GRA, I participated in a lightning round at the Students and New Archives Professionals (SNAP) Roundtable meeting. The goal of the presentation was to provide a brief overview of the Reading the First Books project to members of the archival community and show how digital humanities scholars are using digital archives in their research. As the shift from analog to digital records continues to transform the landscape of the archival profession, digital archiving, curation, and preservation are becoming crucial concerns. Several conference sessions focused on digital collections such as the Digital Archives in Action research forum and the Archival Records in the Age of Big Data education session. To address digital archiving issues on both a practical and theoretical level, archivists are increasingly collaborating with information technology professionals, computer scientists, and scholars in the digital humanities.

Using the Reading the First Books project as a case study, our presentation specifically discussed how digital humanities projects have the possibility to not only use but also enhance digital archives by increasing discoverability and accessibility. We are producing tools to improve machine-reading of historical documents and using these tools to produce transcriptions of books held in the Primeros Liberos de las Américas Collection. Our goal is not simply to create and refine automatic transcription tools but to integrate transcriptions created using these tools back into the digital collection they were derived from. Soon, users will be able to access both the digital facsimiles of the books in the Primeros Libros Collection as well as full transcriptions that are a product of this research. It was a great opportunity to speak with archival professionals about this project since it is this type of digital humanities work that is advocating for both innovative uses and enhancements of digital collections.

May 31, 2016, Filed Under: Events

The Digital Editing of Colonial Texts: report from LASA

The Latin American Studies Association International Congress, held in May 2016 in New York City, brought together scholars from across the Americas to share their research in the humanities and social sciences. Digital Scholarship was well represented among the thousands of participants (and dozens of panels) held over four days, including research about digital communities, digital projects, and digital tools for academic publishing and analysis. RedHD, the Mexican network for digital humanities, was particularly well-represented.

The Reading the First Books project was invited to present as part of a workshop on “The Electronic Edition of Colonial and Nineteenth-Century Latin American Texts.” Scholarly editing is the practice of producing new editions of historical texts for students, scholars, or a general public. Digital scholarly editing explores new ways of imagining these publications using digital platforms. [See our slides]

The LASA panel brought together four projects representing four stages in the production of a digital edition. In addition to our project, Elizabeth Grumbach from the IDHMC at Texas A&M University (and a collaborator on this project) spoke about developing communities for the peer review of digital projects. She described how the Advanced Research Consortium has developed a set of standards and practices for the evaluation of scholarly digital work, providing support for a number of thematic “nodes” oriented around nineteenth century literature, medieval studies, and other categories of engagement. She left the audience to consider whether an ARC node dedicated to colonial Latin American scholarship would be beneficial to this community.

Nick Laiacona, the president of Performant Software Solutions, spoke about Juxta Editions, a tool for the collation, transcription, and markup of historical books and manuscripts. A partner software to Juxta Commons, a digital space for collating and sharing historical documents, Juxta Editions enables the uploading and collation of multiple witnesses, and offers a user-friendly approach to TEI encoding. It can also host published editions on its webspace.

Finally, Ralph Bauer spoke about the Early Americas Digital Archive, a website hosted by WordPress that brings together scholarly editions of historical American texts. The project represents one approach to the digital scholarly edition of a colonial American collection of texts.

The stated purpose of the workshop was to start a conversation and develop a community of scholars interested in supporting the production of digital scholarly editions of historical Latin American texts. Interested scholars are invited to contact the workshop’s organizer, Clayton McCarl, to join the ongoing conversation. We hope that the Reading the First Books project can support this initiative by helping scholars to produce the first stage of transcription for historical printed texts.

September 28, 2015, Filed Under: Events

Report from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities

Thirty-three projects including “Reading the First Books” were represented at the Office of Digital Humanities Project Directors Meeting, held last week at the new National Endowment for the Humanities headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The annual meeting brings together recipients of ODH funding from around the country to share projects and learn more about the NEH. Attendees reflected the diversity of the department’s funding priorities, which include start-up projects, international collaborations, digital humanities institutes, and implementation grants.

The keynote speaker for this year’s event was Bethany Nowviskie, Director of the Digital Library Federation. Dr. Nowviskie’s talk, “On Capacity and Care,” proposed a turn towards the feminist concept of “care” in the digital humanities as a counterbalance to the emphasis on big data that currently predominates. With the term care, which evokes pedagogy, human interaction, and a careful attentiveness to detail, Dr. Nowviskie reminded us that this kind of work is also central to digital scholarship, even when handling a massive amount of data.

In the “Reading the First Books” project, we find that the concept of care resonates with our approach to language. Ocular, the OCR tool that we are using, treats language as data; at the same time, to analyze and transcribe language properly we must be closely attuned to the fact that language is both social and cultural, even when it’s being internalized by a machine.

The afternoon featured a lightning round of presentations representing the full scope of ODH funding. One predominant theme was diversifying American history, including projects on slavery, Africana/Black Studies, immigration, and female writers. Innovative projects on the topics of medicine and music were also featured. The “Reading the First Books” project was represented by project Principal Investigator Dr. Sergio Romero and project coordinator Hannah Alpert-Abrams. [Slides]

In addition to “Reading the First Books,” two projects focused primarily on Latin American topics. Jonathan Amith from Gettysburg College presented a project on “Comparative Ethnobiology in Mesoamerica,” which seeks to develop an online database or “portal” that will bring together scholars working on ethnobiology across contexts and regions. And Steven Wernke of Vanderbilt University presented his project “Deep Mapping the Reducción,” which will use spatial representation tools to bring together archaeological, geological, and cartographical evidence of the General Resettlement of the Indians in the colonial Andes. Both projects use digital platforms as a way of bringing together fragmented information to improve opportunities for collaborative Latin American scholarship.

A full list of this year’s grant recipients can be found on the NEH website.