Digital Humanities Data Curation Workshops

Readers may be interested in the following announcement:

Digital Humanities Data Curation, a series of three-day workshops, will provide a strong introductory grounding in data curation concepts and practices, focusing on the special issues and challenges of data curation in the humanities. Workshops are aimed at humanities researchers — whether traditional faculty or alternative (alt-ac) professionals — as well as librarians, archivists, cultural heritage specialists, other information professionals, and advanced graduate students.

Applications are now being accepted for the second Digital Humanities Data Curation Institute workshop, to be held at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland, October 16-18, 2013. Visit the Institute website (http://dhcuration.org/institute) to complete an application by August 7.

As the materials and analytical practices of humanities research become increasingly digital, the theoretical knowledge and practical skills of information science, librarianship, and archival science — which come together in the research, and practice of data curation — will become more vital to humanists.

Carrying out computational research with digital materials requires that both scholars and information professionals understand how to manage and curate data over its entire lifetime of interest. At the least, individual scholars must be able to document their data curation strategies and evaluate those of collaborators and other purveyors of humanities data. More fully integrating data curation into digital research involves fluency with topics such as disciplinary research cultures, publication, information sharing, and reward practices, descriptive standards, metadata formats, and the technical characteristics of digital data.

Organized by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Women Writers Project (WWP) at Brown University, and the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at GSLIS, this workshop series is generously funded by an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Megan Senseney

Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship

Graduate School of Library and Information Science

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Phone: 217-244-5574

Email: mfsense2@illinois.edu

Visit the website at http://dhcuration.org/institute.

We would welcome hearing about these workshops from participants.

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Text Encoding Initiative Seminar at Brown

Readers may be interested in the following announcement from Julia Flanders about a special NEH-funded “Taking TEI Futher” institute.  Additional information is available at the WWP’s webpage for their Seminars on Scholarly Text Encoding.

The deadline is approaching for applications to the introductory TEI customization workshop in the NEH-funded “Taking TEI Further” institutes. Please note that the dates for the “Publishing and Transforming TEI Data” seminar have been changed.

Taking TEI Further: TEI CustomizationBrown University, May 8-10, 2013Guest instructor: Trevor Muñoz, University of MarylandApplication deadline: February 15, 2013Taking TEI Further: Teaching with TEIBrown University, August 21-23, 2013Guest instructor: Jacqueline Wernimont, Scripps CollegeApplication deadline: June 1, 2013Taking TEI Further: Publishing and Transforming TEI DataBrown University, November 20-22, 2013 [note the date change!!]Guest instructor: David Birnbaum, University of PittsburghApplication deadline: August 15, 2013

**Travel funding is available of up to $500 per participant, up to $1000 for graduate student participants.**These seminars assume a basic familiarity with TEI, and provide an opportunity to explore specific topics in more detail, in a collaborative workshop setting.

These seminars are part of a series funded by the NEH and conducted by the Brown University Women Writers Project. They are aimed at people who are already involved in a text encoding project or are in the process of planning one, and are intended to provide a more in-depth look at specific challenges in using TEI data effectively. Each event will include a mix of presentations, discussion, case studies using participants’ projects, hands-on practice, and individual consultation.

The seminars will be strongly project-based: participants will share information about their projects with the group, discuss specific challenges and solutions, develop encoding specifications and documentation, and create sample materials (such as syllabi, docmentation, etc., as appropriate to the event). A basic knowledge of the TEI Guidelines and some prior experience with text encoding will be assumed.For more detailed information and to apply, please visithttp://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding/seminars/

CFP: JEMCS Special Issue on the Early Modern Digital

The following call for papers, posted on SHARP-L, may be of interest

to readers.  Contact Devoney Looser for additional information (contact information below).

Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies:  Special Issue on the Early Modern Digital (due 15 Jan 2013)

It is well understood that “the digital turn” has transformed the contemporary cultural, political and economic environment.  Less appreciated perhaps is its crucial importance and transformative potential for those of us who study the past.  Whether through newly—and differently—accessible data and methods (e.g. “distant reading”), new questions being asked of that new data, or recognizing how digital reading changes our access to the materiality of the past, the digital humanities engenders a particularized set of questions and concerns for those of us who study the early modern, broadly defined (mid-15th to mid-19th centuries).For this special issue of JEMCS, we seek essays that describe the challenges and debates arising from issues in the early modern digital, as well as work that shows through its methods, questions, and conclusions the kinds of scholarship that ought best be done—or perhaps can only be done— in its wake.  We look for contributions that go beyond describing the advantages and shortcomings of (or problems of inequity of access to) EEBO, ECCO, and the ESTC to contemplate how new forms of information produce new ways of thinking.We invite contributors to consider the broader implications and uses of existing and emerging early modern digital projects, including data mining, data visualization, corpus linguistics, GIS, and/or potential obsolescence, especially in comparison to insights possible through traditional archival research methods. Essays of 3000-8000 words are sought in .doc, .rtf, or.pdf format by January 15, 2013 tojemcsfsu@gmail.com<mailto:jemcsfsu@gmail.com>.  All manuscripts must include a 100-200 word abstract. JEMCS adheres to MLA format, and submissions should be prepared accordingly.In addition, we would welcome brief reports (500-1500 words) that describe digital projects in progress in early modern studies (defined here as spanning from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries), whether or not these projects have yet reached completion.  These reports, too, should be submitted in .doc, .rtf, or.pdf format, using MLA style, by 15 January 2013 to  to jemcsfsu@gmail.com.

Devoney Looser, Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair and Professor of English
Co-Editor, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
Tate Hall 114
Department of English
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
573-884-7791
FAX: 573-882-5785
looserd@missouri.edu
http://www.devoneylooser.com

Classification and Interpretation, and the Construction of Digital Resources

In “The Alchemy of Turning Fiction into Truth” (Journal of Scholarly Publishing, [July 2008]: 354-372), David Henge examines the LC classification system and its treatment of “historical” works. Noting that works catalogued under the LC classification system’s D-DX, E and F categories are generally assumed to be factually based, Henge demonstrates the error of this assumption. He opens by discussing four types of works devoted to studying the past—“history based on solid evidence and argument, history based on less acceptable forms of these, pseudo-history, and counterfactual history” (354)—but his key concern is with the cataloguing of the last kind of history. Counterfactual histories or “pretend histories”

immediately and unabashedly depart from accepted versions of the past in order to hypothesize about what the course of the past and present might have been., if only different events and outcomes had taken place. They never quite pretend that these alternative histories did occur, but they clearly often wish they had. (357-58)

Despite addressing themselves to a past that never occurred, these counterfactual works are more often than not given LC designations that place them among works of actual history. Such placement seems all the more odd if we consider that the LC system does have other categories that would better signal their status. For example, the HX806-HX811 call numbers represent Utopias, the Ideal State, and these categories often seem a far better fit for the titles Henge discusses (368). Although most of these works end up in history, a few have been correctly placed under the classification designations for fiction. That some do end up in fiction ironically boosts the factual nature of those fictional works that remain classified as history. Further clouding the status of these “pretend histories” is their frequent adoption of the trappings of authoritative scholarly work—the appearance of “maps, footnotes, numbers, and pictures with false captions” (362) as well as the imprint of a university press.

While Henge identifies general readers as the population at greatest risk for viewing titles bearing D-DX, E or F designations as credible and factually based, his study does address issues relevant to the creation of scholarly digital resources. Henge notes that although “guides to the LC classification scheme spend considerable time classifying history, they ignore the equally important task of defining it” (363). Similarly, building digital resources entails designing classification schemes, and it is important to make the logic of those systems transparent. Henge’s article usefully reminds us that classification is an exercise in interpretation and that users must understand the rationale and assumptions behind the interpretative processes employed in the various classificatory designations. Even a cursory look at the description of the TEI header on the Text Coding Initiative’s website makes the link between classification and interpretation abundantly clear.

From another, less technical perspective, the desired feedback sought by Julia Flanders and John Melson for “Exploring Reception History in Women Writers Online” represents the type of forethought necessary for anticipating users’ needs and assumptions effectively and for creating the type of supporting contextual documents that will help lay bare the thought processes involved in creating a digital resource. In the process of discussing visionary failures of the LC classification designers, Henge points out that its originators assigned the essentially the same amount of classification space to the history of Asia as they did to the history of gypsies and labels this case “the most egregious example in the D-DX (history properly speaking) classes of the failure to anticipate growth” (360). While this decision seems inexplicable, generally it can be very difficult to predict future needs and build a resource capable of growth. This difficulty is compounded by the potential of digital resources to create new perspectives and new areas of inquiries not yet imagined.

The cataloguing of “pretend histories” as actual history that Henge identifies underscores that even accepted authorities like the LC classification scheme are not infallible. A parallel to Henge’s critique, work by Jim May, Stephen Tabor and others on problems with the ESTC have already received attention on emob, and both cases suggest a healthy dose of skepticism is often warranted even when dealing with respected and well-established resources.