Wednesday Noon Digital Scholarship Series

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    Text Mining “Re-” in Victorian Poetry
    (2023-11-11) Mazel, Adam
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    Applying Digital Scholarship to Book History Inventory Research
    (2023-10-11) Wingate, Alexandra
    Inventories are one of the most useful types of documents available to book historians. They are essentially lists of person or organization’s goods, but these seemingly simple lists contain a wealth of data and information. For a private individual, an inventory of their household goods can point towards their wealth and status in society while an inventory of their books allows us to analyze their book ownership habits and potential reading. For members of the book trade, inventories of their businesses can tell us about the size and characteristics of their business, the typical tasks they performed, as well as what types of books they produced or sold. Aggregations of these book inventories help us understand the production, sale, ownership and reading of books in a given geographic and temporal space as a whole. However, the data found in inventories of early modern private libraries, booksellers, and printers are usually published by book historians as simple transcriptions of the documents (sometimes with metadata identifying the book described in each entry) in print or in online journals as PDFs. Whether in print or in PDF, this static presentation of inventory data makes it difficult for book historians to browse, search, aggregate, compare, and build upon each other’s data. As part of my doctoral work investigating bookselling and private libraries in early modern Navarre, Spain, I am using TEI-XML and the open-source database builder Heurist to address these issues of dissemination, interoperability, and sustainability for book inventory data and to improve my overall process for conducting historical research. In this presentation, I will outline my current workflow for moving from historical documents in the archives to a final dataset. I will discuss my use of TEI inside and outside of the archive and the development of my Heurist database, Libros en Navarra | Books in Navarre (LN|BN), which stores data for private library and bookseller inventories documenting what books were present in Navarre during the 16th and 17thcenturies. I seek to show how these methods of digital scholarship provide a base which facilitates not only my research but hopefully the research of other book historians who in the future may wish to incorporate and transform my data in their own work.
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    Empowering Privacy-Centered Practices for Diverse Communities
    (2023-09-27) Gumusel, Ece
    As the digital landscape continues to shape how we interact and engage with information, the LGBTQ+ community faces unique challenges in maintaining their online identities securely and privately. This presentation explores empirical findings from a user study that evaluates the usability and effectiveness of privacy and security tools among LGBTQ+ individuals who are part of the library and information science profession. The study shows unique insights into the barriers influencing their adoption of such tools, the criteria they consider when deciding to disclose personal identifiable information and their overall satisfaction with the tools currently available. By leveraging the study’s findings, the significance of implementing robust privacy and security measures in libraries will be emphasized. Furthermore, we will collaboratively develop practical recommendations to empower libraries in better supporting and embracing the LGBTQ+ community. Through meaningful discussions and knowledge exchange, this presentation aims to raise awareness about the critical importance of privacy and security tools within diverse communities, inspiring a privacy-centered mindset and approach among libraries and professionals.
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    The Cosmopolitans: The Institute of International Education from Liberal Internationalism to Neoliberal Globalization (1919–2003)
    (2023-04-26) Spaeth, Elizabeth
    The Institute of International Education (IIE) administers the most prestigious awards for international education such as the Fulbright. As an intermediary between states, private philanthropies, corporations, and universities, the IIE has smoothed global crises and facilitated U.S. diplomatic policies related to international education for the past century. In my dissertation, “The Cosmopolitans: The Institute of International Education from Liberal Internationalism to Neoliberal Globalization (1919–2003),” I ask how parastatal organizations like the IIE became central to twentieth century liberalism. I argue that Americans came to rely on international students as proxies to end global conflicts, fortify the United States’ geopolitical standing, advance capitalist economic development in the Global South, and keep U.S. colleges financially afloat.The Institute of International Education has dominated the fields of international education and person-to-person diplomacy from 1919 to the present as an intermediary between states and private organizations. It has bolstered international student programs with private grants and administered flagship federal programs such as the Fulbright. This combination of private administration and capital with federal legislation and the brand of the U.S. government has characterized the shift from massive public spending and liberal internationalism in the postwar era to the neoliberalism of the late-twentieth century.
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    A Philosophical Journey on the Map: Constructing a Geospatial Bio-bibliography of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna)
    (2023-03-08) Shahidi, Pouyan
    Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) (980-1037 CE), the renowned physician-philosopher and polymath, lived a life of nonstop writing and constant traveling. Organizing his scholarly works was a task initiated by his disciples, continued by medieval biobibliographers, and grappled with by modern historians of philosophy and science. In my doctoral project I am interested in two of his many fields of scholarship as well as the interaction between the two—namely celestial natural philosophy (celestial physics), and mathematical astronomy. Like my fellow medieval and modern historians of Ibn Sīnā’s corpora, I found his wanderlust and prolificacy a complicating factor in tracing his authorship in time and space. In this talk, I show how I resolved this complication by visualizing Ibn Sīnā life journey on a multilayered map, and how, using the vector data that I produced in the process, I ran a geospatial analysis to detect the time and place where he was most active in writing on the two abovementioned fields of knowledge. I will outline the workflow behind my digital humanity project including data collection, thinking about taxonomy for data organization, choice of platform, building a geodatabase with multiple layers, data visualization and analysis using a number of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms.
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    Digitizing Bronzeville: A Digital Project Examining Housing and Urban Community
    (2023-02-22) Stokes, Brandon
    This project will examine the digital component to my dissertation concerning two housing developments in Chicago’s Bronzeville community. The privately developed Lake Meadows and the public developed Clarence Darrow Homes went on divergent paths and through data visualization we can see how and why these housing complexes varied in their development. The humanities offer a way to tell the story of housing development but a the digital world offers a way to tell this story to a wider audience. Data visualization offers researchers a way of changing how we use data and how data can tell a story will bridging the gap between the digital world and the humanities.
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    From Plants to Glaciers: Mapping and Photographing Russian Imperial Borderlands
    (2023-02-08) Saburova, Tatiana
    This digital project is a part of my larger research project on exploration and photography in the Russian empire’s borderlands in Siberia and Central Asia (Mapping and Photographing Asiatic Russia: Imperial Landscapes of Exploration) and it will serve as an analytical instrument to bring data from different disciplines to visualize research results and make this project available to scholars and general public. This project aims to develop a digital map with data, using georeferencing, to link texts, historic maps, and photographs to examine scientific exploration and colonization of the Semirechie region in Central Asia in the early 20th century. This project will locate and visualize expeditions led by Prof. Vasilii Sapozhnikov (1862-1924), a botanist and glaciologist, and give a new possibility for complex interdisciplinary analysis of his findings and representations of the region. When this project is completed, it can be used for further analysis of the environmental transformation of landscape if it is linked with other data, including scientific records and aerial photography. This project can be also used as a prototype for analysis and visualization of other expeditions, like Sapozhnikov’s expeditions to the Altai mountains. This research project links history of science and exploration, history of the Russian empire and its borderlands in Asia, visual studies, environmental studies, and spatial history, examining writings, photographs, and maps produced as a result of the expeditions in Jeti-su [Semirechie] in the late 19th-early 20th century. It aims to identify a role of scientific exploration in imperial colonization of the region and how explorations in geography, geology, glaciology, and botany represented the region as a territory and a natural resource to be incorporated into the empire. I will present this work-in-progress discussing steps taken, reflecting on the learning curves and research experience creating a database to collect and organize data I need for making ArcGIS web map, learning ArcGIS Pro for mapping the expeditions to Semirechie and Altai and using ArcGIS StoryMaps applications to visualize and present my research.
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    Tool Design as Digital Humanities Research
    (2023-02-01) Craig, Kalani
    Many researchers in a wide variety of disciplines outside of computer science are developing software tools as part of their research agenda. The current academic-publishing climate often then requires researchers to publish separate articles on their software tools, treating the tools as byproducts rather than primary research outputs. This presentation introduces Design Based History Research (DBHR) as a methodological bridge between the practices of digital-history tool design, the use of digital methods to create historical argumentation, and social-science-inspired methodological innovation. Design Based Research (DBR) is an approach to studying learning theory that asks researchers to integrate a theory into a design, implement the design, and then study the design as a way of modifying both the theory and the design that aims to reify it. DBHR is an adaptation of the DBR approach that seeks to center software tools as a primary research product by offering a template for research that is rooted in the concurrent and intertwined development of historical theory, digital-history tools, and collaborative historical methods.
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    Updates from HathiTrust Research Center: (Some of) What We’re Working On
    (2023-01-18) Dubnicek, Ryan
    This talk will discuss the context, methods and early results of a few of the projects underway at the HathiTrust Research Center, including: using machine learning to detect and classify English-language fiction and Black Fantastic literature, exploratory computational study of Native American-authored literature, and updates on the production of new datasets to further cultural analytics research. The HathiTrust Research Center is the research branch of the HathiTrust, with the mission of facilitating research use of the 17.6 million-item HathiTrust Digital Library. HTRC is co-hosted by PTI and the iSchool at University of Illinois. This presentation is co-sponsored by the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) Seminar Series.
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    Collaborative editing for organizational change: Rewriting the IU Libraries Diversity Strategic Plan together
    (2022-11-16) Hardesty, Julie
    The IUB Libraries Diversity Strategic Plan was originally written and published in Fall 2016 and has served the last few years as a way to gather and report metrics about the library organization, staff, the collections we provide, and the communities we serve in relation to diversity. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Dreasjon Reed in 2020 brought into sharp focus for library staff that what we were doing as an organization was not nearly enough to address systemic racism. As a result, the Libraries Diversity Committee began a collaborative process to understand organization-wide what it means to focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and accessibility and how our Libraries Diversity Strategic Plan could move us towards being a more diverse, equitable, inclusive, justice-oriented, and accessible organization and group of people. The focus of this talk will be to share how we organized this work, communicated with each other, and collaboratively worked on a new Diversity Strategic Plan together. This effort is coming from all of us in the Libraries and while it does require persistence, the methods shared here might be helpful to organizations working on improving transparency and encouraging participation.
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    Save Our Site: Web archiving at the IU Libraries University Archives
    (2022-11-02) Mellon, Mary
    In this presentation, we will discuss how web archiving fits into the University Archives mission and collection development policy; the usefulness of the Indiana University Web Sites and Social Media collections for researchers and IU employees, and current goals and challenges in capturing online content.
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    Scaffolding Digital Humanities Growth through Teaching & Research Pipelines
    (2022-04-06) Dalmau, Michelle; Craig, Kalani
    Digital Humanities (DH) centers come in all shapes and sizes, from one-person operations with minimal resources to larger teams with dedicated staff. Many centers continue to wrestle with questions of relevance and sustainability, two aspirations that are often at odds. Centers that register in the middle range—enough resources to make ripples but not enough to scale—are well-positioned to explore a pipeline model that offers scaffolded, staged pathways that build sustainable, permeable competencies in DH research and pedagogy. These pipelines also support cross-institutional partnerships, which strengthen a shared knowledge base and extend communities of practice beyond campus boundaries. The Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities (IDAH) at Indiana University Bloomington developed programs and approaches that follow a pipeline model with an emphasis on capacity-building via curriculum, skill acquisition, and increased support for graduate students. This presentation will provide an overview of the IDAH pipeline model and illustrate a working example of this model following the “journey making” methodology. *A version of this presentation was given as part of the 2020 Annual Meeting for the Association for Information Science and Technology.
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    Tilting the Lens to Black Lives: Using Public Open Digital Scholarship to Develop Student Skills and Deepen Community Engagement
    (Indiana University Digital Collections Services, 2022-10-05) Tavernier, Willa; Homenda, Nicholas
    Librarians are working to counterbalance collections decisions and priorities that have historically marginalized the histories and experiences of people of color. Critical digital scholars have also highlighted the need to disrupt the replication of this marginalization in the digital sphere. Meanwhile concerns about diversity, cultural competence, and the marginalization of students of color in STEM and librarianship continue. Libraries can use critical digital collections in response. This presentation will focus on an open access digital resource built at Indiana University Bloomington Libraries - Land, Wealth, Liberation: The Making & Unmaking of Black Wealth in the United States - which has seen significant uptake from the campus and community and attracted diverse student workers. Librarians and students built this resource on a Libraries-hosted digital exhibition service based on Omeka S, which allowed for rapid, collaborative and distributed development, and integration of embedded audiovisual content and interactive timelines. The primary timeline spanning 1820-2020 offers an alternate construction of significant historical periods, tying them to events that directly affected black communities, such as the 1921 destruction of Greenwood, Tulsa, and the federal urban renewal policies initiated by the 1949 Housing Act. Librarians actively engaged students in developing their skills in scholarly communication, open access, and digital methods. The success of this project opens new doors for collaborative digital scholarship projects between the Libraries, the campus, and the community, and illustrates that digital collections focusing on the stories of historically marginalized groups can be an important means of addressing multiple concerns.
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    Negotiating Network Analysis: Balancing Historical Thinking and Data Science Learning in Digital Humanities with Net.Create
    (Indiana University Digital Collections Services, 2022-03-30) Craig, Kalani
    The ability to understand and analyze massive amounts of information cuts across disciplinary lines but is particularly salient in the disciplines of both history and data science. This talk will leverage activity theory to explore an activity system that supports students and researchers working with complex information by integrating a collaborative open-source network-analysis software tool called Net.Create. I’ll explore the ways in which Net.Create transforms the limitation of large class sizes in history classrooms into a resource for students’ collaborative knowledge building, how Net.Create provides a platform for students to draw on details in a historical text to collaboratively construct a larger network, and how collaborative data entry supports the historiographic practices of citation and revision for both students of history and professional historical researchers alike.
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    The Way We Work: Library Work Patterns in a Shared Office Space During a Pandemic
    (Indiana University Digital Collections Services, 2022-02-16) Hardesty, Juliet L.; Homenda, Nick
    As the pandemic continues, so has life and work. We know things are different than before, but in which ways? In-person versus remote work is one area of life and work where we have been experiencing changes in the Libraries. Most IU Libraries staff worked remotely from late March 2020 through May/June 2021. Since summer 2021 library staff are increasingly working in the office, but the rapidly changing nature of the pandemic may alter this further. The reasons for working in-person versus working remotely are not necessarily clear in messaging from administrative areas of the university and the interpretation of that messaging varies by unit or department. In one office area of Herman B Wells Library, we sent out weekly surveys through the Fall 2021 semester to ask how work was happening and see if we could track any patterns or see any clear changes in how we do our work now. Join us for this topical conversation impacting libraries and other academic units across campuses throughout the country.
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    Minimal Computing Approaches for Public Humanities Projects: A New Take on the History Harvest Model
    (Indiana University Digital Collections Services, 2022-02-09) Dalmau, Michelle; Szostalo, Maks
    By preserving artifacts held by communities who are often hidden or erased from the dominant historical narrative and contextualizing these artifacts with oral histories, the History Harvest model, set forth by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in 2010 as a form of public humanities engagement, amplifies voices that would otherwise not be heard. A public history endeavor at Indiana University Bloomington offers a case study in which we reconsider History Harvest fundamentals, from technology needs to workflows, with human labor at the center, following minimal computing approaches. Our adaptations of the original model, eleven years after UNL’s launch of the History Harvest, are guided by the same principles of engagement, replication, and autonomy for the community members, students, and scholars alike, all of whom contribute to the telling of stories. In consultation with minimal computing “thought pieces” and related literature, we are working towards an approachable model, both in computer and human terms, for History Harvests. Our presentation will explore the human and technological aspects of minimal computing in the context of History Harvests, with a focus on how to scaffold limited resources like funding, lightweight technology and workflows, and properly support and acknowledge the limitless contributions of the cross-section of people involved in History Harvests.
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    Relational Data and Managing Research in Medieval Archives
    (Indiana University Digital Collections Services, 2022-03-02) Lunt, Kayla
    This presentation will introduce attendees to the use of a relational database, built using AirTable, that can provide a platform for managing projects that require analysis of a large number of primary sources. As a use-case, I’ll share my own relational database that contains entries for the 185 medieval manuscripts analyzed for my dissertation. I will explain how those of us working in the Humanities can use this platform to prepare for and process archival research, demonstrating how a relational database can even help reveal otherwise difficult-to-identify patterns in our research.
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    Creating a Fellowship Program Pilot: Helping Instructors Transform their Course Materials
    (Indiana University Digital Collections Services, 2021-11-10) Hare, Sarah; Hunt, Alexus
    As course reserves became unavailable and students were unable to share textbooks, the COVID-19 pandemic made the need for accessible, digital course materials more important than ever. IU Bloomington and IUPUI Libraries partnered to create a Course Material Fellowship Program (CMFP) in 2020. The goals of the Course Material Fellowship Program are to help all students afford college regardless of their economic status, to facilitate and inspire the development of alternatives to high-cost textbooks, and to centralize support for instructors working with affordable course material solutions. In order to compensate them for their time and ensure success, fellows are provided with a stipend, the expertise of librarians and instructional technologists, and the opportunity to learn alongside their peers. The pilot year of the Course Material Transformation Fellowship Program is estimated to impact over 5,000 students and save them over $185,000 across the two campuses. Fellows from the initial cohort utilized a variety of solutions, including existing Open Educational Resources, library resources, and their own content, to build new and more effective course materials which will be used throughout the 2021-2022 academic year. This session will provide an overview of the CMFP pilot, discuss the obstacles inherent creating and implementing the pilot program virtually, and showcase one or two example projects from the 2020 pilot cohort. Additional CMFP details can be found on the IU Libraries website. A previous brown bag on OER may also serve as useful background.
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    Content Warnings and Harmful Language Statements: Embedding empathy in the research process
    (Indiana University Digital Collections Services, 2021-10-27) McLaughlin, Brianna; Hardesty, Juliet L.
    There are no current archival standards for remediating harmful language/content in archival materials. For this reason, Digital Collections Services (DCS) prepared a harmful language statement and reporting system for the Libraries’ digital archival and special collections. Taking an active role in managing archival collections allows users to engage with the Libraries about potentially harmful language/content. In this statement, we connect users to collection policies and campus-wide efforts to mitigate white supremacy and similarly biased views. While a harmful language statement is an important step to provide context for archival materials, we also wanted to commit to an ongoing workflow inspiring discourse with the communities we serve and center those communities who have been marginalized and underserved by our library practices. We created a Qualtrics form linked from the DCS website as well as collection and item level description where applicable. Users can anonymously report offensive language or content. Our hope is that users feel empowered to contribute to and request change in our digital collections. DCS assigns the report ticket to the appropriate collection manager who determines how to address the reported issue. Data collected from the reporting forms can be used to address current description practices as well as inform future description. For example, reporting offensive content could result in adding a content warning where users would encounter the reported item. We hope that opening communication will strengthen collection description, supplement ongoing anti-racist description practices, and bolster a more conscientious relationship between users and collection managers.
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    IU Libraries Audio-Video Preservation Services
    (Indiana University Digital Collections Services, 2021-10-13) Casey, Michael; Mobley, Robert; Figurelli, Daniel; Dunn, Jon
    Audio-Video Preservation Services (AVPS) is a new department in the Library Technologies division of IU Libraries, offering services to IU units that hold archival audio and/or video recordings. It is staffed by veterans of the now-completed Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative and offers expert preservation-quality digitization of a number of audio and video formats. In addition, AVPS is able to assist with audio and video collection management issues such as prioritization, selecting vendors, developing grant proposals, and quality control, among others. This presentation will explore AVPS origins, current objectives, and technical capabilities, with presentations by Mike Casey, Rob Mobley, Dan Figurelli, and Jon Dunn.