Skip to main content

Digital Scholarship

Digital Scholarship is a term that could probably defined in a dozen different ways if you asked a group of people to define it. It's a somewhat elusive concept, but for me, it's finding new connections between ideas that were previously unknown, using a tools and techniques that were not previously available using a little expertise from programmers, digital librarians and an array of other folks. What does this look like?

I've put together a few samples below. Some make use of data analysis, while others apply newer metadata applications to bring an idea into a new level of understanding and research. This goes beyond a digital repository that simply provides access to material, but allows a whole new level of interpretation and use.

Here are a list of some of my favorites:

Belfast Group Poetry Networks: showing an interactive network of a group of writers, and how we can now make new mappings of the connections within the group

Linked Jazz: a research project that uses Linked Data to make connections between a group of jazz artists

Hidden Patterns of the Civil War: Mapping and text mining components surrounding the Civil War, using newspapers and other primary source documents

Willa Cather Digital Archive: A truly unique digital archive that has text analysis and mapping features to a single author's body of work

NYPL Map Warper: A tool that allows users to digitally align historical maps to a modern map




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sanborn fire maps

It has been a long time since I have written here, and my only excuses are the general life feeling that there are not enough hours in the day/week/month.... One excuse is that I did finish writing a short book last year that is now out! Framing Privacy in Digital Collections with Ethical Decision Making published by the lovely, lovely folks at Morgan & Claypool. I'm also working on a somewhat related writing project now on privacy and archivists that I hope to have finished up by late spring with colleague and friend Dr Jodi Kearns from the University of Akron. But recently, my colleague Michael Hawkins and I applied for a grant from the Ohio Local History Alliance, and were successful! We're in the early stages now of packing up the collection of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps and getting it prepared for digitization. Kent State is the holding institution for Ohio, and more general info on the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps can be found here . We're opting to outsou...
Post a Comment
Read more

Choose Privacy Every Day blog

I realized this week that I had not posted here in some time! Lots of reasons- many of which are not terribly exciting- feeling overwhelmed/busy/stressed, being a FT working mom with twins who just started kindergarten, pandemic, blah, blah, blah, but I have also been writing a monthly blog post for the ALA Choose Privacy Every Day blog. https://chooseprivacyeveryday.org/author/virginia-dressler/  This has been a super rewarding experience- I get to pick the topic, and lately it's been mostly interviewing current privacy and AI grant PIs and book reviews. Check it out, and if you feel the urge, you can subscribe on the homepage . I will post some job related project updates here shortly!   "robots" by Tarkowski is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Post a Comment
Read more

Accessibility requirements and digital collections

So, I have found recently it is possible to teach an old dog new tricks- For the first time in too long, I tackled an area that was completely new to me and have been diving into the world of accessibility requirements for digital objects. In part, this is coming as a response to a newer policy in place at Kent State addressing electronic and information technology accessibility . Or for other digital librarians, a colleague at another university said "OCR'd PDFs just aren't going to cut it anymore". This statement I think reflects how many of us have practiced a simple approach to textual documents in the past. Batch run OCR before ingestion, and TADA! Done, or at least we had hoped. But, as I have come to learn, this approach is does not fair well for screen readers or adapt for those with vision impairments. At Kent State, I've been fortunate to have some great folks in the Accessibility Office to offer advice and hands-on training (Thank you, Jason Piatt!...
Post a Comment
Read more