Author Archives: Charlotte Nunes

DSS Attends Hydra Connect 2016 as New Hydra Project Partner

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Screen Shot 2016-10-18 at 12.19.00 PMSkillman Library Digital Scholarship Services team members James Griffin, Digital Library Developer, and Adam Malantonio, UI/Web Developer, represented Lafayette College at the recent Hydra Connect meeting October 3-6 in Boston, MA.  Collaboratively hosted by the Boston Public Library, Northeastern University, WGBH, the Digital Public Library of America, and Tufts University, Hydra Connect brought together diverse stakeholders in Project Hydra.  Hydra is a multi-institutional collaborative community that develops open source software solutions for digital asset management in academic libraries and cultural heritage institutions.

The first small liberal arts college in Hydra, Lafayette College was designated a Hydra Partner in June 2016, thus joining the ranks of large research universities and museums that have hitherto constituted the Hydra community.  Nominated by Princeton University as a result of its innovative digital repository development work, DSS at Lafayette will bring a fresh liberal arts perspective to the national Hydra conversation about what values and priorities should inform developments in digital asset management.

As a Hydra Partner, DSS commits to make substantive development contributions to the Hydra community.  In addition to pioneering the use of Hydra in a liberal arts college library and representing Hydra to peer liberal arts institutions, DSS plans to migrate the MetaDB feature set into a Hydra application.  This will enable other Hydra institutions to use the DSS-developed MetaDB distributed metadata collection tool, the first and only web-based application to split digital collection building tasks among several people.  Originally developed by Eric Luhrs, MetaDB allows librarians to create new projects, define metadata requirements, and import high-resolution master TIF images into the system.  Then, faculty collaborators who are subject specialists, as well as students completing digital archiving tasks as part of their coursework or internships, can access the system remotely and enter descriptive data about each item.  This collaborative approach to digital collection building integrates library preservation, faculty expertise, and undergraduate learning.  In this way, MetaDB is paradigmatic of the liberal arts values DSS brings to Hydra digital repository development.

Thanks to James and Adam for representing DSS and Lafayette College at large at Hydra Connect 2016!

Digital Library Developer James Griffin Presents at Digital Scholarly Editions Conference in Graz, Austria

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Digital Library Developer James Griffin. Photo credit: Kylie Bailin

Digital Library Developer James Griffin. Photo credit: Kylie Bailin

Digital Library Developer James Griffin of Skillman Library Digital Scholarship Services recently presented at the Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces Conference hosted September 23-24 by the Centre for Information Modelling at Graz University in Austria.  At a panel on “user-oriented approaches,” James reported on his encoding and design work for the Swift Poems Project.  With faculty collaborators James Woolley, Frank Lee and Edna M. Smith Professor of English at Lafayette College, and Stephen Karian, faculty at the University of Missouri, James develops web service infrastructure supporting an ambitious digital humanities initiative to transcribe, collate, and encode a publicly accessible digital archive of the verse canon of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745).  Paul Miller, Visual Resources Curator jointly appointed in Digital Scholarship Services and Fine Arts, has also significantly contributed to the project with metadata and database expertise.  The Swift Poems Project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and will serve as a digital companion piece to the forthcoming print edition of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift.

In collaboration with Dr. Woolley, James Griffin is currently developing an API (application programming interface) to collate and automate the encoding of variant poem texts according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines.  Text encoding is a process of structured editorial mark-up that allows scholars to create machine-readable digital editions of texts. Digital editions can be searched, queried, and interpreted based on the information the encoding scholar has embedded in the text.  In addition to his efforts developing a responsive UI (user interface) for the Swift Poems Project, James’s work connecting the project to the TEI community raises the profile and enhances the utility of the project for literary scholars and digital humanities practitioners.

To learn more about what was covered at the Digital Scholarly Editions as Interfaces Conferences, check out the conference Twitter hashtag: #DSEasInterfaces.

Postdoc Michaela Kelly Attends the European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists (EAJRS) Conference in Bucharest

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Michaela Kelly, the 2016-2017 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Skillman Library, was in Bucharest, Romania from September 14-17, 2016, to present the EAIC at the European Association of Japanese Resource Specialists (EAJRS). Drawing together librarians and scholars from Europe, Japan and North America, the EAJRS conference hosted 34 presentations and one resource provider workshop. The four day conference was held in the beautiful Carol I Central University Library at the University of Bucharest.

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The exterior of the Carol I Central University Library, Bucharest, Romania

Michaela’s presentation, ‘Building an archive of Japanese images at Lafayette College and creating international partnerships with others,’ offered an introduction to the physical collection held at Lafayette College Special Collections, and the digital East Asia Images Collection (EAIC), supported by Lafayette College Digital Scholarship Services (DSS), that corresponds to it.  Michaela discussed the digitization process, the metadata schema used for images, and the benefits of collaboration with the Kyoto University (CIAS and Dr. Toshihiko Kishi) postcard collection and others. Audience interest centered on the OCM metadata tags and image formats. Michaela received a comment by an audience member who regularly uses the East Asia Images Collection for scholarly projects and wanted to echo its importance to the rest of the audience.

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Presentations underway at the Carol I Central University Library at the University of Bucharest

Other topics covered at the conference included the international exchange of librarians between institutions, virtual archives used by scholars, and specific resource introductions: HathiTrust, the National Diet Library Digital Collections, JACAR, Rekihaku’s Metaresource, and a host of others. There was also a roundtable presentation led by Akio Yasue on the conservation and preservation of Japanese library materials in Europe.

One of the many beautiful kuchie prints

One of the many beautiful kuchie prints on display

The EAJRS and University of Bucharest hosts began the conference by spotlighting their University of Bucharest undergraduate Japanese singing group and offered the opportunity to visit a kuchie print exhibit, curated by Ioan Colta of the Romanian Complexul Muzeal Arad, and a showing of ukiyoe prints at the Romanian Academy Library. The 80+ conference participants also attended at dinner gathering at a traditional Romanian restaurant where regional dance and music was on display.

-Michaela Kelly

DH Summer Scholars Present to a Full House

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Under the leadership of Sarah Morris, Research and Instruction Librarian at the Skillman Library, the 2016 Lafayette College Digital Humanities Summer Scholars undertook independent research projects on such topics as Iranian statecraft, Soviet monument culture in Bulgaria, the misunderstood Moog synthesizer, and histories of Indian Ocean trade and migration.

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From left to right: Will Gordon, Johnny Gossick, Tawfiq Alhamedi, Caroline Nawrocki, and Mila Temnyalova.

On Wednesday, five Summer Scholars presented their projects to a packed audience in the Gendebien Room.  In order to pursue their interdisciplinary research questions, students in the program used a variety of tools, platforms, and methods.  In most cases, students combined digital approaches so as to take advantage of unique capabilities.  For instance, Tawfiq Alhamedi used Omeka’s Neatline plug-in along with ArcGIS to reproduce the orientation of medieval Indian Ocean cartography in his project’s interactive map.  Other projects incorporated Scalar, Cytoscape, and TimelineJS, among other tools and platforms.

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Mila Temnyalova presents her digital project “Soviet Mo(nu)ments in Bulgaria.”

Tawfiq reflects, “the Digital Humanities Summer Scholarship was a unique and valuable experience for me to explore new methodologies that truly brought my research to life. Working in a creative and supportive environment helped nourish my project from being an abstract idea to becoming a useful digital resource open to anyone interested in my topic.”  DH Summer Scholar Caroline Nawrocki agrees about the distinctive value of the program: “it was an incredibly unique learning experience. It was a constant process of developing knowledge on digital tools, my specific topic, and what it means to be a researcher without being concerned about a grade or with failure.”

Dr. Paul Barclay, who was in attendance at Wednesday’s event, also points out the value of the program in terms of its emphasis on experimentation in undergraduate research: “the program shows the value of letting students explore data, its visualization, and computational methods for humanities research in an independent research setting.”

Check out all of the DH Summer Scholar Projects at the project website!  To learn about Lafayette’s brand new Digital Humanities Club, please contact President Tawfiq Alhamedi (alhamedt@lafayette.edu) or Vice-President John Gossick (gossickj@lafayette.edu).