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

Privacy and digital collections

This past October, I put in a book proposal on the topic of ethical decision-making around privacy issues in digital collections. It has been accepted by Morgan and Claypool, and I am cranking to meet a May 1st deadline to get this into print by November.

It's exciting, but also nerve-wracking and perhaps a little terrifying for a few reasons. Ethics is head space that I very much enjoy- This work will include a nod to an essay from Martin Heidegger, which oddly enough I used a different Heidegger essay in my museum studies MA thesis on the ethics of art conservation. The philosophy aspect in ethics is probably the most enjoyable part for me, but it's also unbelievably murky waters. I spent many years rejecting absolutes in my early twenties, though at some point I have to put the pen to the paper and just write. (Funny sidenote- This digital girl still prefers the analog. I write primarily on my laptop and then print out draft and edit by hand. I also hate, hate, hate e-book…
Post a Comment
Read more

Tenure track, twins and prenatal loss

Life of late has been crazy busy. Technically the tenure clock is paused this year as I toll, yet the 2 year NHRPC grant kicked off last September as I returned from maternity leave, and I continue to make a stab at research and writing in the interim. But my life has changed quite a bit (and as such, the intermittent absence of the blog).

We welcomed twins last May, who are currently inches away from walking and continue to keep me on my toes in a daily whirlwind of activity. They came into this world exactly a year and a day after our devastating full term loss in 2015. Life is strange and odd, and often I find that I am still reeling when I think about the unexplained loss of our first. It has been difficult to move on, and feel a huge part of my heart remains with that baby. There are constant reminders- friends who had successful births around the same time remind me of the huge, gaping hole in our lives when I see their little one, or walking by the tree my amazingly thoughtful…
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! My …
Post a Comment
Read more