Europe’s leading scientists have pledged to embrace and expand the role of technology in the Humanities. In a Science Policy Briefing released today by the European Science Foundation (ESF), they argue that without Research Infrastructures (RIs) such as archives, libraries, academies, museums and galleries, significant strands of Humanities research would not be possible.
Although the MARC-based infrastructure is extensive, and MARC has been adapted to changing technologies, a major effort to create a comparable exchange vehicle that is grounded in the current and expected future shape of data interchange is needed.
One of the greatest hinderances for collaborative digital work is a cultural obsession with individualism. This is why I feel the digital humanities should essentially be about activism and advocacy. We need to not only assign and engage in collaborative digital projects, but also by create an environment where such projects are valued. Kathleen Fitzpatrick already wrote an amazing article about the need for faculty to back graduate students who risk their graduate careers by engaging in digital work. I also really like what Natalia Cecire said about the political stakes of DH work in an already transforming academic labor market:
[D]igital humanities and ‘the job market’ as it now manifests isn’t a narrow, merely administrative sliver of life of interest solely to junior
The general assumption is that in the 2.0 era the user was at the centre, the produser took control and the cult of the amateur was born. The web was being flooded with what seems an infinite amount of user generated content. Big platforms, such as Flickr and Facebook managed to centralize and collect some of these efforts effectively. The result of is a big, fragmented and messy dataset. Enter web 3.0; the iteration of the web which can be read and understood by machines, where the dots will be connected and contribute to an open sphere of knowledge, something that the current pragmatics of the web don’t easily allow for. The philosophy here is, bluntly put, that this connected sphere is more than the sum of its parts.
I’m always surprised when I hear people attack open access publishing. There are no rational arguments as to why print based texts and journals are superior to open access texts, but there are plenty of rational reasons for open access publishing. Some seem to think that open access publications are less reputable and should count less towards tenure. Personally I think if you’re writing and speaking for tenure you might be in the wrong line of work, but that’s another matter. Such people seem to forget that Harvard went open access back in 2008. Perhaps Harvard is a second rate institution, but that seems like a difficult case to make. All that should matter is the peer review process. Are the editors qualified to peer review the material handed
The Recommendation asks Member States to step up their efforts, pool their resources and involve private actors in digitising cultural material and making it available through Europeana.
In particular, the Recommendation invites Member States to put in place solid plans for their investments in digitisation, make available through Europeana 30 million objects by 2015, get more in-copyright material online, and reinforce their strategies and adapt their legislation to ensure long-term preservation of digital material.
The Collaboratory is a valuable tool for people with digital humanities experience who need a free and easy way to collaborate and publish their work on keywords
A place to discover and learn, contribute your own content and share the story of your Wales with the world.
Earlier this month, I attended the ASIS&T 2011 Annual Meeting where, much to my delight, the paper I co-authored with Miles Efron and Katrina Fenlon was selected for the Best Paper Award.
In Building Topic Models in a Federated Digital Library through Selective Document Exclusion, we presented a way to improve the coherence of algorithmically derived topical models.
The work stems from topic modeling we were doing, first with PLSA and later LDA, on our IMLS DCC research group. The system we are working with brings together cultural heritage content from over a thousand institutions and, as a result contains quite diverse and often problematic metadata.
In June 2011, Stanford University hosted a group of librarians and technologists to examine issues and challenges surrounding the use of linked data for library applications. This report summarizes the activities and discussions that took place during the workshop, describes what came out of the workshop, outlines next steps identified by the participants, and provides contextual and background information, including preliminary reports and biographies of workshop participants. The workshop report was produced and edited by the participants and staff at Stanford University Libraries.
