The term “digital humanities” can refer to research and instruction that is about information technology or that uses IT. By applying technologies in new ways, the tools and methodologies of digital humanities open new avenues of inquiry and scholarly production. Digital humanities applies computational capabilities to humanistic questions, offering new pathways for scholars to conduct research and to create and publish scholarship. Digital humanities provides promising new channels for learners and will continue to influence the ways in which we think about and evolve technology toward better and more humanistic ends.
As defined by Johanna Drucker and colleagues at UCLA, the digital humanities is “work at the intersection of digital technology and humanities disciplines.” An EDUCAUSE/CNI working group framed the digital humanities as “the application and/or development of digital tools and resources to enable researchers to address questions and perform new types of analyses in the humanities disciplines,” and the NEH Office of Digital Humanities says digital humanities “explore how to harness new technology for thumanities research as well as those that study digital culture from a humanistic perspective.” Beyond blending the digital with the humanities, there is an intentionality about combining the two that defines it.
digital humanities can include
creating digital texts or data sets;
cleaning, organizing, and tagging those data sets;
applying computer-based methodologies to analyze them;
and making claims and creating visualizations that explain new findings from those analyses.
Scholars might reflect on
how the digital form of the data is organized,
how analysis is conducted/reproduced, and
how claims visualized in digital form may embody assumptions or biases.
Digital humanities can enrich pedagogy as well, such as when a student uses visualized data to study voter patterns or conducts data-driven analyses of works of literature.
Digital humanities usually involves work by teams in collaborative spaces or centers. Team members might include
researchers and faculty from multiple disciplines,
graduate students,
librarians,
instructional technologists,
data scientists and preservation experts,
technologists with expertise in critical computing and computing methods, and undergraduates
some disciplinary associations, including the Modern Language Association and the American HistoricalAssociation, have developed guidelines for evaluating digital proj- ects, many institutions have yet to define how work in digital humanities fits into considerations for tenure and promotion
Because large projects are often developed with external funding that is not readily replaced by institutional funds when the grant ends sustainability is a concern. Doing digital humanities well requires access to expertise in methodologies and tools such as GIS, mod- eling, programming, and data visualization that can be expensive for a single institution to obtain
Resistance to learning new tech- nologies can be another roadblock, as can the propensity of many humanists to resist working in teams. While some institutions have recognized the need for institutional infrastructure (computation and storage, equipment, software, and expertise), many have not yet incorporated such support into ongoing budgets.
Opportunities for undergraduate involvement in research, provid ing students with workplace skills such as data management, visualization, coding, and modeling. Digital humanities provides new insights into policy-making in areas such as social media, demo- graphics, and new means of engaging with popular culture and understanding past cultures. Evolution in this area will continue to build connections between the humanities and other disci- plines, cross-pollinating research and education in areas like med- icine and environmental studies. Insights about digital humanities itself will drive innovation in pedagogy and expand our conceptualization of classrooms and labs
metadata: counts of papers by yer, researcher, institution, province, region and country. scientific fields subfields
metadata in one-credit course as a topic:
publisher – suppliers =- Elsevier processes – Scopus Data
h-index: The h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the publications of a scientist or scholar. The index is based on the set of the scientist’s most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications.
The era of e-science demands new skill sets and competencies of researchers to ensure their work is accessible, discoverable and reusable. Librarians are naturally positioned to assist in this education as part of their liaison and information literacy services.
Research data literacy and the library
Christian Lauersen, University of Copenhagen; Sarah Wright, Cornell University; Anita de Waard, Elsevier
Data Literacy: access, assess, manipulate, summarize and present data
Statistical Literacy: think critically about basic stats in everyday media
Information Literacy: think critically about concepts; read, interpret, evaluate information
data information literacy: the ability to use, understand and manage data. the skills needed through the whole data life cycle.
Shield, Milo. “Information literacy, statistical literacy and data literacy.” I ASSIST Quarterly 28. 2/3 (2004): 6-11.
Carlson, J., Fosmire, M., Miller, C. C., & Nelson, M. S. (2011). Determining data information literacy needs: A study of students and research faculty. Portal: Libraries & the Academy, 11(2), 629-657.
embedded librarianship,
Courses developed: NTRESS 6600 research data management seminar. six sessions, one-credit mini course
NEW ROLESFOR LIbRARIANS: DATAMANAgEMENTAND CURATION
the capacity to manage and curate research data has not kept pace with the ability to produce them (Hey & Hey, 2006). In recognition of this gap, the NSF and other funding agencies are now mandating that every grant proposal must include a DMP (NSF, 2010). These mandates highlight the benefits of producing well-described data that can be shared, understood, and reused by oth-ers, but they generally offer little in the way of guidance or instruction on how to address the inherent issues and challenges researchers face in complying. Even with increasing expecta-tions from funding agencies and research com-munities, such as the announcement by the White House for all federal funding agencies to better share research data (Holdren, 2013), the lack of data curation services tailored for the “small sciences,” the single investigators or small labs that typically comprise science prac-tice at universities, has been identified as a bar-rier in making research data more widely avail-able (Cragin, Palmer, Carlson, & Witt, 2010).Academic libraries, which support the re-search and teaching activities of their home institutions, are recognizing the need to de-velop services and resources in support of the evolving demands of the information age. The curation of research data is an area that librar-ians are well suited to address, and a num-ber of academic libraries are taking action to build capacity in this area (Soehner, Steeves, & Ward, 2010)
REIMAgININg AN ExISTINg ROLEOF LIbRARIANS: TEAChINg INFORMATION LITERACY SkILLS
By combining the use-based standards of information literacy with skill development across the whole data life cycle, we sought to support the practices of science by develop-ing a DIL curriculum and providing training for higher education students and research-ers. We increased ca-pacity and enabled comparative work by involving several insti-tutions in developing instruction in DIL. Finally, we grounded the instruction in the real-world needs as articu-lated by active researchers and their students from a variety of fields
Chapter 1 The development of the 12 DIL competencies is explained, and a brief compari-son is performed between DIL and information literacy, as defined by the 2000 ACRL standards.
chapter 2 thinking and approaches toward engaging researchers and students with the 12 competencies, a re-view of the literature on a variety of educational approaches to teaching data management and curation to students, and an articulation of our key assumptions in forming the DIL project.
chapter 4 because these lon-gitudinal data cannot be reproduced, acquiring the skills necessary to work with databases and to handle data entry was described as essential. Interventions took place in a classroom set-ting through a spring 2013 semester one-credit course entitled Managing Data to Facilitate Your Research taught by this DIL team.
chapter 5 embedded librar-ian approach of working with the teaching as-sistants (TAs) to develop tools and resources to teach undergraduate students data management skills as a part of their EPICS experience.
Lack of organization and documentation presents a bar-rier to (a) successfully transferring code to new students who will continue its development, (b) delivering code and other project outputs to the community client, and (c) the center ad-ministration’s ability to understand and evalu-ate the impact on student learning.
skill sessions to deliver instruction to team lead-ers, crafted a rubric for measuring the quality of documenting code and other data, served as critics in student design reviews, and attended student lab sessions to observe and consult on student work
chapter 6 Although the faculty researcher had created formal policies on data management practices for his lab, this case study demonstrated that students’ adherence to these guidelines was limited at best. Similar patterns arose in discus-sions concerning the quality of metadata. This case study addressed a situation in which stu-dents are at least somewhat aware of the need to manage their data;
chapter 7 University of Minnesota team to design and implement a hybrid course to teach DIL com-petencies to graduate students in civil engi-neering.
stu-dents’ abilities to understand and track issues affecting the quality of the data, the transfer of data from their custody to the custody of the lab upon graduation, and the steps neces-sary to maintain the value and utility of the data over time.
