Category: Reports

We were surprised to hear during the December 16, 2011 NITLE web seminar on undergraduate digital humanities (DH) instruction a recurring motif along the lines that coding (markup and programming) is so difficult that undergraduates trained in the humanities cannot learn it quickly or successfully, and so potentially alienating and anxiety-provoking that it should be regarded as too advanced to be considered a core component of the undergraduate DH curriculum. As two undergraduate humanities majors (English Literature and Linguistics) with no prior technical background, we would like to share our own experiences with learning and using computational tools. We hope that our very positive experience will encourage faculty elsewhere to give their undergraduate students the opportunity to become deeply and seriously involved with this exciting and rewarding aspect of DH.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released “The Digital Dilemma 2: Perspectives from Independent Filmmakers, Documentarians and Nonprofit Audiovisual Archives” (registration required).

When discussing orphan works, two basic definitional questions arise: (1) exactly what is the “orphan works” problem?, and (2) what is the size of this problem? The answers to these two questions are central to understanding how proposed solutions work to remedy the situation. Though both questions have long been posed, the answer to the first (what is the “orphan works”; problem) can vary based on the type of work or the particular user, and the answer to the second (what is the size of the problem) remains difficult to state with precision. This paper explores both and identifies areas where further research is needed.

How might projects combining digital storytelling and mapping help students learn?  Digital storytelling has become a prevalent pedagogy at small liberal arts colleges, as we explored in a previous impromptu videoconference discussion.  Aggregating

This study considers the effect of large-scale deposit on scholarly research publication and dissemination (sharing of research outputs), beginning with the analysis of publishers and institutions managing repositories and their sustainability. The study associates costs with specific activities, performed by key actors involved in research registration, certification, dissemination and digital management: authors, the scholarly community, editors, publishers, libraries, readers and funding agencies. Contrary to most of the existing literature, the study analyses cost structures of individual organizations. The focus of this study is therefore to provide context for the costs to specific organizations and to their choices in terms of scale and scope.

OCLC Research has released Social Metadata for Libraries, Archives, and Museums. Part 2: Survey Analysis.

General conversation about the cloud focuses on third-party cloud storage providers. As the results below suggest, adoption of these cloud storage providers remains relatively small. However, when we consider cloud storage alongside several related ways of distributing and using storage as a service, some interesting trends emerge. The results illuminate both the widespread acceptance of some digital preservation storage practices and the continuing uncertainty regarding others.

Institute fuer Dokumentologie and Editorik (I-D-E) workshop for Tools for Digital Scholarly Editions was held at the University of Cologne, Germany.

An updated the sample output from Collatex shows output from user-specified witnesses in the form of (1) an alignment table based on user-specified order, (2) an extracted text of a base text (taking the first specified witness is the base text), (3) generating an apparatus.