A Welsh

Enabled backchannel: conference Twitter use by digital humanists

Purpose – To date, few studies have been undertaken to make explicit how microblogging technologies are used by and can benefit scholars. This paper aims to investigate the use of Twitter by an academic community in various conference settings, and to pose the following questions: Does the use of a Twitter‐enabled backchannel enhance the conference experience, collaboration and the co‐construction of knowledge? and How is microblogging used within academic conferences, and can one articulate the benefits it may bring to a discipline?Design/methodology/approach – This paper considers the use of Twitter as a digital backchannel by the Digital Humanities (DH) community, taking as its focus postings to Twitter during three different international 2009 conferences. The resulting archive of 4,574 “Tweets” was analysed using various quantitative and qualitative methods, including a qualitative categorisation of Twitter posts by open coded analysis, a quantitative examination of user conventions, and text analysi...

Enabling Complex Analysis of Large-Scale Digital Collections: Humanities Research, High Performance Computing, and transforming access to British Library Digital Collections

Although there has been a drive in the cultural heritage sector to provide large-scale, open data sets for researchers, we have not seen a commensurate rise in humanities researchers undertaking complex analysis of these data sets for their own research purposes. This article reports on a pilot project at University College London, working in collaboration with the British Library, to scope out how best high-performance computing facilities can be used to facilitate the needs of researchers in the humanities. Using institutional data-processing frameworks routinely used to support scientific research, we assisted four humanities researchers in analysing 60,000 digitized books, and we present two resulting case studies here. This research allowed us to identify infrastructural and procedural barriers and make recommendations on resource allocation to best support non-computational researchers in undertaking ‘big data’ research. We recommend that research software engineer capacity can be most efficiently deployed in maintaining and supporting data sets, while librarians can provide an essential service in running initial, routine queries for humanities scholars. At present there are too many technical hurdles for most individuals in the humanities to consider analysing at scale these increasingly available open data sets, and by building on existing frameworks of support from research computing and library services, we can best support humanities scholars in developing methods and approaches to take advantage of these research opportunities.

Oral History and the Hidden Histories project: towards histories of computing in the humanities

This article demonstrates that the history of computing in the humanities is an almost uncharted research topic. It argues that this oversight must be remedied as a matter of urgency so that the evolutionary model of progress that currently dominates the field can be countered. We describe the ‘Hidden Histories’ pilot project and explore the origins and practice of oral history; in the corresponding issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, five oral history interviews that we carried out during the project are presented. We conclude that the selection of interviews presented here demonstrate that oral history is an important and productive methodology in such research. The five oral history interviews form primary sources, which can be used in the writing of a history of computing in the humanities; furthermore, they contain new information and interpretations, which cannot be gleaned from published scholarly articles, for example, information about the varied entry routes into the field that have existed and the interrelationship between myth and history in the narratives we create about the emergence of digital humanities.

Mind the [trans-Atlantic] gap, please: awareness and training needs of UK catalogers

Methodology: Action research. Analysis of emails sent to an e-forum on RDA in the UK in April 2011. Emails were assigned tags based on contents. Email addresses were analyzed for sector. The resource list co-created by participants was analyzed for format and country of creator(s). Findings: More than 200 people subscribed and received 195 emails sent by 38 individuals about current actions; training; training needs; the hybrid catalog and cataloger judgment; implementation; productivity; the RDA Toolkit; MARC and FRBR. Topical concerns were found to be the same as for U.S. RDA testers, although accompanied by “vague concerns” about whether they were acting quickly enough.

The Rare Books Catalog and the Scholarly Database

ABSTRACT The article is a researchers eye view of the value of the library catalog not only as a database to be searched for surrogates of objects of study, but as a corpus of text that can be analyzed in its own right, or incorporated within the researchers own research database. Barriers are identified in the ways in which catalog data can be output and the technical skills researchers currently need to download, ingest, and manipulate data. Research tools and datasets created by, or in collaboration with, the library community are identified.

Trading Stories: an Oral History Conversation between Geoffrey Rockwell and Julianne Nyhan

This extended interview with Geoffrey Rockwell was carried out via Skype on the 28th April 2012. He narrates that he had been aware of computing developments when growing up in Italy but it was in college in the late 1970s that he took formal training in computing. He bought his first computer, an Apple II clone, after graduation when he was working as a teacher in the Middle East. Throughout the interview he reflects on the various computers he has used and how the mouse that he used with an early Macintosh instinctively appealed to him. By the mid-1980s he was attending graduate school in the University of Toronto and was accepted on to the Apple Research Partnership Programme, which enabled him to be embedded in the central University of Toronto Computing Services; he went on to hold a full time position there. Also taking a PhD in Philosophy, he spent many lunch times talking with John Bradley. This resulted in the building of text analysis tools and their application to Humes Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, as well as some of the earliest, if not the earliest, conference paper on visualisation in the digital humanities community. He reflects on the wide range of influences that shaped and inspired his early work in the field, for example, the Research Computing Group at the University of Toronto and their work in visual programming environments. In 1994 he applied, and was hired at McMaster University to what he believes was the first job openly advertised as a humanities computing position in Canada. After exploring the opposition to computing that he encountered he reflects that the image of the underdog has perhaps become a foundational myth of digital humanities and questions whether it is still a useful one.

Early modern Oxford bindings in twenty‐first century markup

Purpose – The Bodleian Binders Book contains nearly 150 pages of seventeenth century library records, revealing information about the binders used by the library and the thousands of bindings they produced. The purpose of this paper is to explore a pilot project to survey and record bindings information contained in the Binders Book.Design/methodology/approach – A sample size of seven pages (91 works, 65 identifiable bindings) to develop a methodology for surveying and recording bindings listed in the manuscript. To create a successful product that would be useful to bindings researchers, it addressed questions of bindings terminology and the role of the library in the knowledge creation process within the context that text encoding is changing the landscape of library functions. Text encoding formats were examined, and a basic TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) transcription was produced. This facilitates tagging of names and titles and the display of transcriptions with text images.Findings – Encoding was f...