Bethany Nowviskie

Skunks in the Library: A Path to Production for Scholarly R&D

ABSTRACT Library-based digital humanities “skunkworks” are semi-independent research-and-development labs staffed with librarians who act as scholar-practitioners. Their creation is an uncommon, yet uncommonly potent, organizational response to opportunities opened up by digital scholarship. This article describes the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library and asserts a critical role for library-embedded digital centers in forging new paths for knowledge work in the humanities.

Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene

This keynote address for the 2014 Digital Humanities conference is a practitioner’s talk, and—though the abstract belies it—an optimistic one. I take as given the evidence that human beings are irrevocably altering the conditions for life on Earth and that, despite certain unpredictabilities, we live at the cusp of a mass extinction. What is the place of digital humanities (DH) practice in the new social and geological era of the Anthropocene? What are the DH community’s most significant responsibilities, and to whom? This talk positions itself in deep time, but strives for a foothold in the vital here-and-now of service to broad publics. From the presentist, emotional aesthetics of Dark Mountain to the arms-length futurism of the Long Now, I dwell on concepts of graceful degradation, preservation, memorialization, apocalypse, ephemerality, and minimal computing. I discuss digital recovery and close reading of texts and artifacts once thought lost forever, and the ways that prosopography, graphesis, and distant reading open new vistas on the longue duree. Can DH develop a practical ethics of resilience and repair? Can it become more humane while working at inhuman scales? Can we resist narratives of progress, and still progress? I wish to open community discussion about the practice of DH, and what to give, in the face of a great hiatus or the end of it all.

Select Resources for Image-based Humanities Computing

What follows is by no means a complete bibliography of the rapidly-evolving practice of image-based humanities computing. I have assembled here a list of resources and tools broadly applicable to data visualization and graphical analysis in the liberal arts. Highly technical papers and genre-specific projects have only been indexed when their issues or methodologies illuminate image-based work across the humanities. Readers interested in computer vision and scientific visualization should consult the bibliographies in Section 4. Likewise, while digital imaging in library science and museum conservation is of interest to the humanities scholar, bibliographies and literature reviews for these fields are readily available. I have listed the most complete of these in sections 1 and 4 below. Among software and commercial websites, preference has been given to freely available or open-source applications. I have also included references to seminal works on representation, cognition, and visual semiotics in the hope that this resource list will be useful to researchers new to image theory.