What/Where/How is Digital Scholarship?:

An Overview of the CLIR Colloquium, Digital Humanities 2009, and THATCamp

Sarah TotonLibrarians Assembly

July 21, 2009

http://disc.library.emory.edu/clircolloquium09/(clir, emory)

Emory University, April 17th -18th

#FoDS

Importance: We need to redefine the focus of scholarship from a product model and move towards considering a service-based model. This means we must reconceptualize scholarly endeavors to include a dedication to service rather than personal accomplishment. Scholarship is part of a collaborative process rather than a discreet product.

Roles:To produce digital scholarship: several roles are needed: including 1.project management2. Information management 3. Creative 4. Outreach Coordinator.

This differs from the notion of required skills because individuals on a team may have many similar skills but must divide the workload.

Pedagogy: Problem: Are we hindering our digital humanities students by NOT training them in digital technologies and computational sciences?

Teach fundamental concepts, rather applications and tools (teach Video Editing skills rather than teaching a student Final Cut or iMovie)

Example 1: UNL’s 2 courses-- graduate theory of digital scholarship and applications for digital scholarship. UNL also creates “on-the-job” training for graduate students, including internships, and positions with digital scholarship projectsExample 2: Digital history curriculum for public historians. develop skills and practices in students to take into the field (museum, historical society or library) http://www.digitalhistorycurriculum.org/

Lab Space:A space where students can meet, partner, work, and self-learn. A laboratory based on collaboration as well as convergence.

http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/

#dh09 (over 2500 tweets for #dh09)

Useful Blogs:

South Jersey Digital: http://titania.stockton.edu/sjcdhDigiLib: http://digilib.bu.edu/blogs/digilib/2009/06/

Keynote: Lev ManovitchMuseums and libraries have put numerous collections online. Individuals are producing massive amounts of data of cultural interest. Tools to study these data have followed close behind. There are now great tools for visualizing very large data sets.

This data comprises the global “cultural brain”

Keynote: Lev Manovitch“cultural analytics: the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.”

Check out: http://lab.softwarestudies.com/

Keynote: Christine Borgman, “Scholarship in the Digital Age: Blurring the boundaries between the sciences and the humanities.” Read: Scholarship in the Digital Age http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11333.

1) Scholarly information infrastructure: we can build it but it’s also emergent.

2) Science and, or, vs the humanities: Digital publication is largely the same, currently, as print publication. Except access/preservation/curation, which is expanded to library, publisher’s server, repository and homepage.

Example: http://arXiv.org An OAI compliant archive of electronic preprints in physics, mathematics, computer science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics

Borgman’s Call to Action:• Publication practices: Use online and open access publishing to increase

the speed and scope of dissemination.• Data: Define, capture, manage, share, reuse.• Research methods: Adapt practices to ask new questions. Stop asking the

same questions faster.• Collaboration: Find partners with expertise that complements yours.

Listen, learn and be patient.• Incentives: Identify best practices for documenting, sharing and licensing

content.• Learning: Establish Cyber-Literacy early on.

http://thatcamp.org/

George Mason University, June 27 – 28

#THATCamphttp://digilib.bu.edu/blogs/digilib/2009/06/

thatcamp-libraries-and-web-20/

European Navigator: http://www.ena.lu/

Chronicling Americahttp://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

Summary of Libraries and Web 2.0 Discussionhttp://digilib.bu.edu/blogs/digilib/2009/06/

thatcamp-libraries-and-web-20/

Take-Aways: • Link to other objects and make sure you can link

your own objects• Incorporate OpenID or something similar so your

users don’t have to sign up for another account. • Use machine-friendly, machine-readable

encoding.• Annotate your own source code and view other

people’s source code.

What now?

Review conference websites and blogs chronicling specific conferences.

Ask me questions (DH – Ask Alice, Future of Digital Scholarship – Ask Erika)

Contact presenters – most have blogs, and many of them are on Twitter. Steve Ramsey – sramsay; David Chudnov is dchud;Matthew Kirschenbaum is mkirschenbaum;Beth Nowviskie is nowviskie I’m stoton