Monthly Archives: April 2017

DSS Postdoctoral Fellow Michaela Kelly Reflects on International Conference Adventures

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A view of the interior of Robarts Library, University of Toronto

NCC (the North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources) hosted a conference with the University of Toronto Libraries called Doing Digital Scholarship in Japanese Studies: Innovations and Challenges in mid-March. I was asked to give two short talks – one focusing on creating digital collections with students and partners, and one about using digital projects as a teaching tool in undergraduate learning.

Conference speakers included university librarians, faculty and CLIR postdoctoral fellows, describing their differing approaches to digital scholarship. Tokyo Metropolitan University professor Hidenori Watanave gave the keynote presentation, demonstrating a number of creative and interactive archive building projects he has been developing. Watanave’s projects group videos, photographs and data associated with people who experienced some of Japan’s most devastating disasters – the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the battle of Okinawa in 1945, and the 2011 Eastern Japan Great Disasters. Visitors to Watanave’s archives can navigate maps to access the movement of people over time, watch video recordings of their stories or interact with other archival resources. Watanave is developing phone apps that use artificial reality (AR) to provide the same experience for visitors to these cities in real-time. Other digital scholarship sessions featured innovative map projects, local history work and a comprehensive scholarly image organization system.

The hand of the archivist and one photograph of many in the archive in Japan.

I also visited Japan, where I negotiated the building of a digital archive. The project aims to digitize tens of thousands of objects, photos and documents collected over a 70-year period. The collection features evidence of the pervasive military culture in Japan in the 1930s, but also preserves documentation on local history and governance, folklore, religion and festivals, family life and economic change. The digitization project will commence July 2017.

Last, I attended the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) conference held in Albuquerque. Concurrent with the CNI conference, I attended the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) mid-year conference, which included targeted sessions for fellows on grant writing, project updates, career mentoring, and the creation of small group projects. Time spent reconnecting with others in the cohort fostered collaboration on various aspects of our postdoctoral projects.

My thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, NCC and CLIR for providing generous support for these learning opportunities.

Skillman Hosts Environmental Data Rescue Event

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The Data Refuge logo.

On Sunday, April 2 from 1-8 p.m., Skillman hosted a Data Rescue in association with Data Refuge and the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI).  The goal of the event was to contribute to a national effort to back up vulnerable data critical for research in the environmental sciences, including areas related to climate change and renewable energy development.  With Sunday’s event, Lafayette joined colleges across the country in a national effort to protect vulnerable climate date.  Recent and upcoming Data Rescues include events at Yale, UC-Davis, Harvard, and Haverford, among many other campuses.

The Lafayette College Data Rescue was an immense success, drawing 70 registered participants including students, faculty members, staff members, librarians, and Easton community members.  Lead coordinators of the event, Dr. Carolyn Buckley (Psychology) and Dr. Caleb Gallemore (International Affairs), explain the importance of the Data Rescue movement:

Data Rescue participants hard at work sorting environmental data to be backed up by the Internet Archive.

“Since 2008, EDGI, with the help of the Internet Archive (IA) and wayback machine, has been harvesting federal data at the end of every presidential term. This has become increasingly difficult with each election, as many data sets are too large for their automated web-crawler, or they include video or interactive data access that must be harvested manually. The amount of data to be harvested has increased from roughly 25 TB in 2012 to over 200 TB in 2016. For this reason, DataRefuge and others have been organizing Data Rescue events where concerned citizens assist in harvesting our most vulnerable data. This includes the contents of government web pages, as well as the scientific data that are only accessible through links on those pages.”

Student, librarian, and faculty “guides” at the Data Rescue wore yellow hats and brought a fantastic degree of fun, energy, and enthusiasm to the event. A huge thank you to student collaborators from the Lafayette Association for Computing Machinery, the Lafayette Society of Environmental Engineers and Scientists, and the Lafayette Environmental Awareness and Protection.  Special thanks also to the Provost’s Office, International Affairs, Psychology, and the team at Skillman Library.