Events

August 5, 2017, Filed Under: Events, News

Looking Back on the Reading the First Books Symposium

As the “Reading the First Books” project draws to a close this fall, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the symposium celebrating the project that was held at LLILAS Benson at the University of Texas at Austin on May 30, 2017. The First Books project began in 2015 as an effort to develop tools and resources for the automatic transcription of early colonial printed books. The day-long symposium brought together scholars, librarians, developers, and students to discuss the project’s accomplishments and challenges, the future of the digital materials it developed, and how digital scholarship will facilitate further engagement with colonial Latin American materials more broadly.

Tweets from the event have been preserved in a Storify and under #FirstBooksDH. Slides summarizing the project are available online, and readers are invited to view sample transcriptions from the First Books project.

The symposium featured two keynote addresses and three roundtables addressing the developing field of digital scholarship and colonial Latin American studies. Brook Danielle Lillehaugen, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Haverford College, gave the opening keynote address on the promise of digital scholarship to increase access, inclusion, and opportunity in the study of indigenous language texts. Drawing from her experience as a linguist developing a digital corpus of Colonial Zapotec texts for the NEH-funded Ticha project at Haverford, Lillehaugen discussed how access to digital indigenous texts can be a form of linguistic activism. She illustrated how digital projects can serve as opportunities to co-learn and to engage with the expertise of stake holding communities. She also described the importance of institutional support and cross-departmental collaboration for sustaining digital humanities projects.

Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, gave the closing keynote. As the creator of Ocular, the OCR software at the center of the First Books project, Berg-Kirkpatrick provided insights on some of the essential programming frameworks behind Ocular and discussed how Ocular makes the unsupervised analysis of Early Modern documents possible. He also described how the development of Ocular fits with broader research concerns in the fields of natural language processing and machine learning, showing how similar principles can be applied to the automation of sound transcription and of bibliographical analysis.

A central goal of the symposium was to bring to the fore the collaborative work of librarians, developers, and researchers on the First Books project. A roundtable on lessons learned from the project featured the ways in which interface development, data management, and web display have all been fundamental facets of the project that have depended on guidance from information professionals at the University of Texas Libraries (UTL), the Benson Latin American Collection, and the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) at Texas A&M University.

The final two roundtables showcased a selection of digital scholarship projects engaging with Latin American colonial material and a discussion concerning the role of digital scholarship in graduate student research. The Digital Scholarship Panel highlighted projects ranging from online dictionaries and digital repositories to research in bibliography and machine learning, with an emphasis on the risks and rewards of collaboration across disciplinary and national borders. Some of the institutions and projects featured included the Wired Humanities Projects based at the University of Oregon, bibliographic research at the John Carter Brown Library, and the innovative digital projects developed at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). While many of the speakers spoke positively about the utility of digital resources in advancing scholarly research, others warned about the ethical concerns of creating and transforming digital resources that are also cultural heritage.

The Graduate Student Roundtable brought together students from an array of fields including literature, colonial studies, indigenous studies, religious studies, and information studies to describe their experiences with digital scholarship. A take-away from this discussion was that in order to support graduate student interested in digital scholarship, libraries and writing centers can lead the way in helping students access resources to develop the technical skills necessary for integrating digital tools into their research projects.

The First Books symposium provided a productive, multi-institutional space to discuss the developing field of “digital scholarship and colonial Latin American studies” in its own right. One central outcome of the symposium was to bring together a community of practitioners to consider the role of transnational collaboration, multilingual data curation, and digital scholarship in the field of colonial Latin American Studies. We hope that this conversation continues well beyond this symposium and inspires other collaborative, interdisciplinary projects in the field.

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.