DHNow

Author: Colleen Nugent

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Digital Museums Reconsidered: Exploring the Walker Art Center Website Redesign

Last week, the Walker Art Center launched a major website redesign, which museum geeks are hailing as “a potential paradigm shift for institutional websites,” (Seb Chan) and an “earth-shaking game changer” (Museumnerd). Here’s what I see: a website as a unique core offering–alongside, but not subservient to, the physical institution. Walkerart.org is not about the Walker Art Center. It is the Walker Art Center, in digital form.

The new site resembles an online newspaper, featuring articles written by Walker staff alongside stories from the greater world of art reporting on the web.

Job Announcements, News

Job: Web Applications Developer at HyperStudio, MIT Comparative Media Studies

WEB APPLICATIONS DEVELOPER, Comparative Media Studies-HyperStudio Team, to build the front and back ends of scalable web applications. Will be part of the core team responsible for the design and development of online tools for information visualization and user collaboration in the humanities and social sciences. Will provide system design, prototyping, implementation, functional verification, debugging, and deployment on Mac OS X and UNIX server platforms; and occasional system administration support. Will work closely with a team that includes developers, designers, graduate and undergraduate students, and faculty.

CFPs & Conferences, News

CFP: Rare Books & Manuscripts Section of ACRL 2012 Preconference

The Rare Books & Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Preconference (San Diego, California: June 19022, 2012) will explore a multiplicity of futures for the rare book, manuscript, and special collections community. How are special collections materials being discovered and used today? How will they be discovered and used tomorrow? Who will our users be, and what will they need? What forms will special collections materials take? Join us to learn, discuss, share, and contemplate. Now is the time to shape and prepare, because the future is now.

CFPs & Conferences, News

CFP: DHCommons’ Open MLA 2012 Project Mixer

Projects looking for collaborators and collaborators looking for projects, come mix and mingle in this informal project poster session that offers a face-to-face DHCommons experience. The mixer will take place at the MLA Annual Convention, Thursday, January 5, 2012, 1-4 pm in Convention Center, rooms 3A & 3B. Representatives from projects looking for collaborators or just wanting to get the word out will share information and materials about their projects. This forum will also offer great opportunities for one-on-one conversations about pursuing projects in the digital humanities. If you would like to share your project, please sign up here, but otherwise there is no need to register.

Job Announcements, News

Job: Research Associate, Digital Humanities & Transferable Skills Training, Cambridge University

CRASSH is seeking a postdoctoral Research Associate to lead a six-month project on the digital humanities and Transferable Skills Training (TST). The project focuses specifically on the transferability of digital skills, and aims to increase awareness among early-career researchers  of how the digital skills they have learnt in one context (social, academic or professional) can be applied in another.

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: “Beautiful” in Shakespeare

A common problem in search and exploration interfaces is the vocabulary problem. This refers to the great variety of words with which different people can use to describe the same concept. For people exploring a text collection, this makes search difficult. There are only a limited number different queries they can think of to describe that concept, but they may be missing many other instances that use different words. This is an important issue for humanities scholars. Often, the very first step of a literature analysis is to comb through text, trying to find  thought-provoking examples to study later.

In this post, I give an example of how our project WordSeer, a text analysis environment for humanities scholars, can be used to overcome this problem.

Job Announcements, News

Job: Web and Emerging Technologies Librarian at Oakland University School of Medicine

The Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine seeks an innovative, collaborative and service-oriented librarian to join a new medical library. The Web and Emerging Technologies Librarian has overall responsibility for the design, development and management of the Medical Library web site, web applications, social media and mobile interfaces. The primary goals of this position are to continuously improve web delivery of information to students, faculty, staff and the wider community and to support the integration of information technologies and resources into the curriculum.