South Jersey Digital

So today is the final day of DH09. The festivities keep going all day and will finish with a round table about funding opportunities for digital humanities by representatives of the main funding agencies in the US and abroad. Sessions are starting slightly late because of an accident near campus that snagged traffic from the hotels. It’s an odd sort of bookend to the conference. The first day was marred by a fatal accident on the Metro Red Line.

Today’s first session is focused on the role of library in digital humanities. It starts with Vika Zafrin of Boston University on the Library as an Agent of Recontextualization. What is role of library when ordering principles can be divorced from actual objects? At BU, they view the library as a “programmatic space” rather than a storage space. BU Theological library has a site on the history of Protestant missions and one on Fichte. They are doing so with the goal of fulfilling ACLS report on cyberinfrastructure.

The second papers is by William Kretzschmer and William Potter from the University of Georgia on library collaboration with large digital projects. Kretzschmer is an English Professor and Potter is a Librarian. Kretzschmer is presenting on how they collaborated. Argument is that the library is the only realistic option for long-term sustainability of digital humanities projects. Most large projects rely on a single developer. Continuity depends on continuing interest of that developer and funding. His example is Linguistic Atlas Project, started as analog project in 1929 and beginning to move digital in the 1980s. Raises the question, how large is “large”, or does it even matter if it is “large” rather than “small”? Library can house content long term, but staff from the project will have to be responsible for tools.

The final paper is by Rick Furuta of Texas A&M on supporting the creation of scholarly bibliographies through social collaboration. To get a project collaboration going you need someone interested in computing, someone who specializes in an academic discipline, and someone who works in the library. Papers that aren’t available digitally are becoming increasingly invisible. Old bibliographic model takes too long. So can bibliographies benefit from input of users? Few projects are thinking about multi-language scholarship. Texas A&M is home to Cervantes Bibliography, which is adding social citation characteristics. Includes moderation function by chief editor. Workflow of this kind of moderation is trickier than it looks. Types of groups able to moderate have strengths and weaknesses: private, closed, open. Use a process of assigning ranks to collaborators.