digital humanities research and academic librarian

Digital Humanities Research + the

Academic Librarian Research Collaborations

at the University of Illinois

Harriett E. Green July 25, 2014

HAB Wolfenbüttel

Libraries and DH: A History

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Digital humanities + the library

Library as support service?

Library as a humanities laboratory?

Library as research partner?

Different models in different places….

But at the heart are users.

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

People, not Projects “What if you saw that training period as an investment in healthy, long-lasting relationships? What if we saw digital humanities as a long-term investment in scholarly growth, not a short-term investment in projects?”

Miriam Posner, UCLA http://miriamposner.com/blog/commit-to-dh-people-not-dh-projects/#more-1687

Public Student Faculty/researcher

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Research and the DH Librarian

Digital Humanities Librarian

Library Support

Research Collaboration

Undergraduate Research

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

DH @ Illinois: A History of Research

IMLS Digital Collections and Content (IMLS DCC)

Digital library program: http://www.library.illinois.edu/dcc/

National Digital Newspaper Program

OpenEmblem Portal/Emblematica Online

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Emblematica Online

New phase, “Emblematica II” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Humanities Collections and Reference Resource program

New contributions of digitized emblem books from the University of Glasgow, Duke University, Utrecht, Getty Institute

Other key aspects of this phase: Revised portal with new functionalities and user engagement study

http://emblematica.grainger.illinois.edu

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Search Speed and Interface

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

New Tabbed Interface

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Institutional Branding

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Enhanced IconClass

User Engagement for Emblematica Online

Goals

Understand the research practices of humanities scholars working in literary studies, early modern studies, Renaissance history, emblem studies, and other humanities fields that draw upon emblem books for research.

Understand behaviors of researchers working with Emblematica Online and similar digital archives.

Gather input from researchers to assess the new functionalities and services added to Emblematica Online, and determine future functionalities that could further enhance the portal.

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

“While a greater reliance and dependency on digital resources is inevitable, the quality of the data and their organization and accessibility in service to teaching and scholarship are major concerns.

“Without the guiding voice of scholars, the tremendous effort now being devoted to digitizing our cultural heritage could in fact impede, not facilitate, future research.”

—Charles Henry, The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship

Why Users?

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

User Engagement Study Methodology: Semi-structured interviews with scholars

SO FAR: Importance of digitized emblems for use in the classroom; can promote increased research around emblems and visual cultures

TO COME: Develop usability testing protocol for conducting usability testing of Emblematica Online in the fall

Do you use Emblematica Online? Come talk to me!

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

What’s Next for Emblematica

Annotation Tool

Collection Building Tool

Improvements to IconClass navigation

Expansion of content and cataloging – addition of more digitized emblems and books, increased cataloging of emblems

http://emblematica.library.illinois.edu

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

HathiTrust Research Center

Research arm of the Hathi Trust Digital Library: Collaboration between University of Illinois and Indiana University

Goal: provide researchers with access to large-scale digitized text corpora (“big data”) for text mining

Conducting research on what researchers need to conduct large-scale text mining with mass corpora

Ultimate goal: Enable “non-consumptive” research on copyrighted works

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

http://hathitrust.org/htrc

Research Agenda

MONK text mining user study

Virtual Verse – e-literature access and

preservation

Scholarly use of digital collections

Digital curation of digital humanities resources

Usability of DH Resources

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Scholarly Commons

• Digital scholarship center in the library

• Consult for data services, GIS, digital humanities, copyright, scholarly communications, etc.

• Partner with: • Campus academic technology services • Research support: Survey Research Lab • Graduate College • Research institutes: Institute for Computing in

Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS)

http://www.library.illinois.edu/sc

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

DH + Undergraduate Research

Students publish their final research projects with digital publishing tools:

Omeka

Wordpress

Scalar

Other tools: Voyant, Easel.ly

OJS for publishing undergraduate research journals: https://ugresearchjournals.illinois.edu/index.php/ujlc

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

DH Research Collaborations in the Library

Build Connections

Project Collaborations

Consultations

DH centers

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Librarians’ Advantages to DH

Strong Faculty Relationships

Institutional Prominence

Information professional skills

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

DH Needs Us “Digital humanities offers a means by which disciplines such as bibliography, palaeography, diplomatic and museum studies can be brought back to the heart of the academy. . . . . By forming closer links with such curatorial disciplines as bibliography and palaeography, and connecting these with the theoretical insights of media and cultural studies, the digital humanities can reshape the academy and address those cultural imperatives which confront it.”

—Andrew Prescott, King’s College London @greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Not Just A Service…

Scholar Programmer Innovative DH Project!

Librarian

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Librarians in the DH Collaboratory

Scholar

Librarian Technologist

@greenharr green19@illinois.edu

Thank you!

Harriett Green

English and Digital Humanities Librarian

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

green19@illinois.edu

Twitter: @greenharr