A subject librarian's pedagogical path in the digital humanities

ABSTRACT

As academic libraries evolve with digital humanities scholarship, subject librarians may find themselves teaching in this new pedagogical landscape before colleagues with digital humanities expertise arrive on their campus. The author provides a practical pedagogical path specifically for the subject librarian for planning, providing instruction, and evaluating a course with a significant digital humanities component. An examination of an English course is offered in addition to a detailed background of the challenges and opportunities encountered in revisiting information literacy pedagogy through student-led projects in digital humanities.     

Teaching TEI to undergraduates: A case study in a digital humanities curriculum

ABSTRACT

This case study describes two iterations of a Digital Humanities (DH) “Studio” course on scholarly text encoding as a model for a DH curriculum at a small liberal arts college. Designed to accompany a three-credit humanities course, the one-credit DH Studios are taught by library faculty. The paired courses share a final project—a digital edition of a short work of literature encoded in the Text Encoding Initiative. The DH Studio creates a methodology-focused environment for students to practice information and digital literacies.     

Against the grain: Reading for the challenges of collaborative digital humanities pedagogy

ABSTRACT

This article provides a critical review of the past five years of literature in digital humanities pedagogy and faculty-librarian collaboration, commingled with reflections on personal practice, which extend findings from the literature. Faculty-librarian partnerships in DH pedagogy reflect a rapidly evolving area of engagement calling for expertise in teaching, subject knowledge, scholarly communication, digital technologies, and DH research methodologies. Although there is a rapidly expanding body of literature on these partnerships, the challenges of the work tend to be minimized. This article expands upon commonly encountered difficulties, and it points to potential solutions and best practices.     

Evaluating the landscape of digital humanities librarianship

ABSTRACT

As academic librarians strive to meet the needs of their users, it is important to understand the current and constantly changing landscape of digital humanities librarianship. The author of this article investigated areas in which current LIS professionals working in digital humanities came into their various roles, how they have been trained, how they feel about their opportunities for training, and where improvements can be made. The purpose of this study was to provide an overview of the digital humanities librarian skill set and to explore what training and infrastructure are needed in the field. Rather than looking to define digital humanities as a discipline, this study provides a current profile of digital humanities librarians, allowing for the profession to align with this evolving field's scholars and practitioners.     

Beyond the one-shot: Intensive workshops as a platform for engaging the library in digital humanities

ABSTRACT

This article explores how librarian participation as instructors in week-long intensive classes—a common workshop format in digital humanities (DH)—can advance a variety of library objectives, while also uniquely supporting the DH community. Intensive workshops fall between the one-shot session and credit course formats more commonly found in library instruction. Drawing on case studies from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) instruction at DH institutes at the University of California Berkeley and Purdue University, the authors explore the origins of librarian involvement, course topics, pedagogy, and library services. Based on their instruction experiences in the DH summer institutes and student surveys, the authors argue that intensive instruction workshops provide a good potential platform for library involvement in DH.     

Conversation as a model to build the relationship among libraries,digital humanities,and campus leadership

ABSTRACT

By committing to two conversation-based concepts, David Lankes's Mission for New Librarians and the “Scholarship as Conversation” Information Literacy Frame, Bethel University's Library has established a leadership role in advocating and implementing digital humanities at a midsized liberal arts institution. Aligning the services and strategy of the Bethel University Digital Library (BUDL), Bethel's institutional repository, with the lessons learned and relationships built through these conversations with administration, faculty, and staff has resulted in successful outcomes for the communication and implementation of innovative digital library and digital humanities initiatives.     

Digital humanities and the emerging framework for digital curation

ABSTRACT

Digital humanities (DH) represents an emerging framework for digital curation. This study focuses on the evolving relationship of the DH (including history) to digital curation and archives and describes the models of collaboration in the digital environment. A conceptual framework is presented, followed by discussions of scarcity and abundance, archival frameworks, models of collaboration, and a review of selected DH projects. Despite the semantic disagreements over the term archives, researchers and curators should consider each other's perspectives for continued collaboration.     

Shifting expectations: Revisiting core concepts of academic librarianship in undergraduate classes with a digital humanities focus

ABSTRACT

This article explores best practices for supporting digital humanities (DH) activity and pedagogy in the undergraduate classroom on campuses without a DH center in the library. By examining specific aspects of librarians' curricular engagements, with a particular focus on reference and instructional activity, we discuss how reenvisioning these services aids in the development of effective support for both faculty and students engaged in DH. An included case study illustrates how redefining “traditional” librarian liaison roles and shifting expectations of faculty from one-shot instruction sessions to embedded librarianship models can be put into practice in undergraduate classrooms with a DH focus. The article concludes with a discussion of the librarian as digital humanist and how this role can positively impact undergraduate curricula.     

Spatial information literacy for digital humanities: The case study of leveraging geospatial information for African American history education

ABSTRACT

The rise of “digital humanities” and the “spatial turn” in the humanities has generated many new insights in the study of culture, history, literature, and arts. Within this research trend, the library's geospatial service can play an active role by introducing spatial information literacy and technology. In this article, we use the information literacy framework to explore the library's role in supporting digital humanities by introducing a successful collaboration involving a librarian and history and education researchers in hosting a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded summer institute for school teachers. Our results suggest that the framework has opened a new way to facilitate collaborations between librarians and multidisciplinary researchers.     

Building an ethical digital humanities community: Librarian,faculty, and student collaboration

ABSTRACT

This article examines work building a digital humanities community at Salem State University's Berry Library. The initiatives are comprised of a three-pronged approach: laying groundwork to build a DH center, building the DH project Digital Salem as a place-based locus for digital scholarship, and launching an undergraduate internship program to explore ethical ways of creating innovative research experiences for undergraduate students. Together, these initiatives constitute an important move toward putting libraries at the center of creating DH opportunities for underserved student populations and a model for building DH at regional comprehensive universities.     

Community-Enhanced Repository for Engaged Scholarship: A case study on supporting digital humanities research

ABSTRACT

Building digital curation and sustainability into digital humanities project development is challenging, and engaging digital humanities researchers fully as partners in curation practices with the library is even more so. How can we represent the longevity and sustainability of digital humanities research projects as a shared responsibility between faculty and student researchers and library staff? Northeastern University Libraries Digital Scholarship Group has designed a series of tools and workflows to ease the burden of sustainable development, support community engagement with digital materials, and enable the library and its partners to work together to build sustainable digital projects.     

Process and collaboration: Assessing digital humanities work through an embedded lens

ABSTRACT

To assess the implications of supporting and participating in a digital humanities project team as embedded subject librarians, those involved must examine the dynamic of the group responsible for the work and the processes or infrastructure employed to support this work. Using the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) method with interview questions based on the American Historical Association's “Career Diversity Five Skills,” this case study interviews respondents involved in “‘A Shaky Truce’: Starkville Civil Rights Struggles, 1960–1980,” a digital public history project created in 2015 by a team of subject librarians, history graduate students, history faculty, and undergraduates.     

They think all of this is new: Leveraging librarians' project management skills for the digital humanities

ABSTRACT

This article will explore how to develop the holistic project management planning (PMP) mindset in different parts of the library when undertaking digital humanities (DH) projects. PMP skills do exist within libraries and librarians, but organizational alignment typically does not allow for the most effective applications of librarians' PMP skills to DH projects. This article will explore how the skills of public services librarians, technical services librarians and administrative librarians align with the PMP phases and the challenges that each kind of librarian has to overcome in completing successful DH projects.     

Reading in the digital age: A case study in faculty and librarian collaboration

ABSTRACT

This article describes a collaborative partnership of two librarians and an English professor who created a unit for a senior capstone seminar on “The Digital Turn in English Studies.” After reading Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” in both print and digitized versions, students completed a survey on reading preferences and provided feedback on an experimental eTextReader allowing for annotation. Students also did blog postings providing a fuller picture of attitudes toward digital texts. We situate quantitative and qualitative findings in three contexts: the field of digital humanities, reading in the digital age, and tool development.     

From service to synergy: Embedding librarians in a digital humanities project

ABSTRACT

Definitions of the term digital humanities vary, and its place in the academic library is still being explored. Yet exploration is indeed taking place, at large research institutions as well as, increasingly, at smaller colleges and undergraduate libraries. This article details an innovative digital humanities project carried out at an institution of 2,300 undergraduates, where a creative institutional partnership was the key to its success. The project has provided an outstanding opportunity to address the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, while embracing the growing trend on many campuses to showcase student research.     

数字人文视角下的红色档案资源建设——以沂蒙红嫂档案为例

红色档案作为传承弘扬红色精神的重要载体,其建设向来为社会各界所重视,然而当前传统红色档案资源建设已经陷入了瓶颈期:新形势下档案开发转型困难、开发模式饱和、开发人员思维固化等问题紧紧束缚着它的发展,而数字人文这一新方法的引入则为红色档案资源建设提供了崭新的模式和广阔的思路。笔者将以沂蒙红嫂档案建设为例从数字化存储、数字化挖掘、数字化呈现着手进行新形势下红色档案资源建设方法的探析。     

面向数字人文的声像档案信息资源组织利用的研究

以数字人文为目标,开展声像档案资源开发利用,需要了解数字人为的含义及其满足这一目标的基础设施建设等内容。本文探讨了声像档案在现有管理方式下信息利用的主要阻碍与壁垒,面向数字人文,除了满足声像档案藏与用等基本功能,还需要满足人文领域研究。在分析声像档案用户需求和特征的基础上,提出面向数字人文的声像档案资源组织方法,构建从数字采集到精准服务利用的模型,透过数字人文的蓬勃发展,拓宽数字声像档案在人文学科的大量应用。