Category Archives: Digital Scholarship Services

New Digital Humanities Projects at Lafayette

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The Mellon Digital Humanities Steering Committee has issued a new call for digital humanities proposals in conjunction with Skillman Library and DSS. The proposal offers funding for those looking to incorporate digital scholarship in the classroom, as well as those looking to invest time in learning digital humanities methodologies and tools. For more information about this program visit the Mellon DH Steering Committee’s site or view the full call.

This call follows last year’s Summer Fellowship Program, the results of which are now under development with DSS including Anthropology Professor Andrea Smith’s “Mapping and Memories: Easton’s Lebanese Neighborhood,” and Engineering Studies Professor Benjamin Cohen’s “Pure Food Project.” Both of these projects serve as innovative examples of how digital tools can help in the discovery of new kinds of research questions.

Pure Food Project

Professor Cohen’s project uses a geographic information system (GIS) to examine and map food adulteration in the context of rapidly expanding food supply-chains, enabled by growing railroad and steamship networks in the late 19th century. The project’s mapping component focuses on two aspects of the growing spatial separation of consumers from their food supplies. The first charts the growth of the production of specific adulterants, for example cottonseed oil, which was mixed with olive oil and lard as a low cost substitute. Such production locations are displayed alongside concurrent maps of related themes, such as the continental growth of cotton production in the United States, and expanding global trade patterns. The second, still in development, will provide a geographic visualization of published information about food adulteration. This genre of literature ranged from sensational journalism to professional treatises informed by the growing scientific knowledge of chemistry and nutrition. The aim of this GIS application is to map both the publication of a selection of books on this subject, as well as to map the locations of adulteration incidents as reported from within these texts.

Prototype GIS mapping application for Benjamin Cohen’s Pure Food project.

The maps for this project were created in partnership with John Clark, DSS’ Data Visualization & GIS Librarian. Working with Professor Cohen and his EXCEL Student Matt Plishka ’15, Clark has transformed the data tables collected from historical sources into geospatial datasets, which can be ingested into our digital repository and displayed online in an interactive mapping interface.

This project marks a new digital landscape for DSS and showcases a new mapping platform that will eventually be made available to other Lafayette researchers as well. “Both Benjamin’s and Andrea’s projects extend the current repository to include geospatial information,” explains Eric Luhrs, director of DSS. “Now that this infrastructure is in place, we’ll be able to create similar mapped environments for future projects.”

Mapping and Memories: Easton’s Lebanese Neighborhood

In addition to utilizing this mapped environment, Andrea’s project also includes an element of crowdsourcing. Begun in 2007 as field work with her students, the project examines the demolition of Easton’s “Syrian Town” a once a thriving multi-ethnic community destroyed when over 800 homes were torn down under the auspices of urban renewal in the 1960s. Though the wounds of this destruction are still felt by many of the former residents, now in their 70s and 80s, there is no archive, no public display that marks its existence.

Smith has been working with her students to preserve the memory of this unique space through an oral history project that collects the residents’ photographs and stories. With help from Paul Miller, Digital Production Manager for DSS, Smith and her students held “Scan-a-thons” with local residents. The team scanned and collected hundreds of photos and memorabilia for residents helping them preserve their family memories and helping to build a digital collection.

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Prototype map-based crowdsourcing application for Andrea Smith’s Lebanese Town project.

With funding from the Mellon grant, she is able to share her findings even more broadly. The new application developed by DSS uses a base map made from Easton Area Public Library insurance maps dated 1919, when the Lebanese neighborhood still existed, to geo-reference the images and stories Smith has collected.  Smith and her team will then pin stories and images to the map virtually recreating the neighborhood and its culture. The next step of the project will include the functionality for residents to upload and share their own stories and photos adding to Andrea’s existing collection.

The Mellon Digital Humanities Steering Committee is now accepting applications for this year’s program. If you would like to submit a proposal please submit your application here.

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu, or call (610) 330-5796.

“Collaborating Digitally:” Alena Principato ’15, DSS’ Eric Luhrs, and Professor Chris Phillips present the Easton Library Company Project at Bucknell

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Eric Luhrs, Chris Phillips, and Alena Principato at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference

EXCEL student Alena Principato ’15 presented her work on the Easton Library Company Project alongside project creators Professor Chris Phillips of the English department and Eric Luhrs, Director of Skillman Library’s Digital Scholarship Services team, at the first annual Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference this week.

The conference “Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Faculty Research,” was sponsored by Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. It brought together a wide range of digital scholars focused on expanding digital projects into the classroom and into the research profiles of both graduate and undergraduate students.

Together the three presented on the panel “Old Records, New Questions, New Collaborations” where Alena was able to share her story as a contributor to the ELC, a project that includes digitizing and transcribing the lending records of the Easton Library Company from 1811-1862. These ledgers contain unique insights into the reading practices of 19th century readers as well as into the local Easton community of the era. From the students’ transcriptions, the DSS team has taken this data and transformed it into a relational database. Once complete, this project will allow users to investigate and visualize this data on their own and discover new relationships between readers, lenders, and the community.

Alena has been active with the project under Professor Phillips’ guidance since her arrival at Lafayette as a freshman. Now three years later, she is an expert on transcribing the records and has trained several other EXCEL students and worked directly with DSS to streamline the transcription process.

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Sample ledger facsimile, relational data table, and network graph visualization.

The panel also included the team’s colleagues Professor of Public History Kyle Roberts and undergrad Evan Thompson ’15 from Loyola University in Chicago. Their work on the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project explores the history of Loyola’s original library  collection and parallels that of the ELC. Their presentation provided an additional model for integrating faculty scholarship into the undergraduate experience.

To foster student faculty collaborations like this one and to encourage the inclusion of digital methodologies into student research, the Digital Humanities Steering Committee has opened a call for proposals that includes funding for EXCEL students like Alena and for integrating DH methods in the classroom. For more information visit the steering committee’s website at sites.lafayette.edu/dhlaf.

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu, or call (610) 330-5796.

 

John Clark and GIS at the Social Science History Association Conference

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sshaJohn Clark, Data Visualization & GIS Librarian with Skillman Library’s Digital Scholarship Services department participated in the 39th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association in Toronto this week. Over the course of four days John participated in and chaired a number of sessions featuring cutting edge research projects in digital and spatial history.

The Association brings together a broad interdisciplinary group of historians and social scientists organized in a variety of thematic research networks. The Historical Geography network, for which he serves as a co-chair, features many of the earliest adopters in the use of Geographical Information Systems in historical research and for many years has been one of the principal venues for the presentation of innovative work creating new spatial histories and historical geographies through GIS research methods.

The presentations at this year’s conference reflected continued growth in these methodologies that now reach beyond desktop GIS tools to include the development of web-based virtual research environments (VRE) much like those under development at Skillman Library’s Digital Scholarship Services repository.

While at the conference John chaired two sessions. The first focused on progress made at the Collaborative in Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA) at the University of Pittsburgh’s World History Center where researchers are creating a world-historical data archive covering the past four centuries along with a data integration tool, Col*Fusion, aimed at harmonizing and normalizing datasets from a wide variety of knowledge domains.

The second, a roundtable titled Historical Atlases, Yesterday and Today featured a lively discussion of the genre while focusing on two recent publications; the Historical Atlas of Maine (University of Maine Press, 2015) and the digital republication (University of Richmond Digital Scholars Lab, 2013) of the classic Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States (Carnegie Institution and American Geographical Society, 1932) featuring animations and other web-GIS functions applied to the original content.

The sessions will be of interest to both digital humanities scholars and social science researchers at Lafayette. To learn more about the latest in new research methods and projects using GIS contact John at clarkjh@lafayette.edu.

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu, or call (610) 330-5796.

DSS represents Lafayette at Digital Library Federation Conference

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DLFrev1BL_notag_200Eric Luhrs, Head of the Library’s Digital Scholarship Services, delivered a presentation at this year’s Digital Library Federation conference in Atlanta this week. The DLF is the premiere venue for digital scholarship in libraries. The yearly conference brings together librarians, scholars, and digital experts to discuss the role of the library and librarians in the evolving landscape of digital scholarship and preservation. Luhrs presented on the panel “Catastrophic Success: The Challenges and Opportunities of Supporting Digital Scholarship at Liberal Arts Colleges” alongside of his colleagues Kelcy Shepherd (Amherst College), Laurie Allen (Haverford College), Gina Siesing (Bryn Mawr College) and
Jennifer Vinopal (New York University).

This panel, which emerged from a Liberal Arts College working group organized by Lafayette at last year’s DLF conference, has written a Manifesto on Digital Scholarship at Liberal Arts Colleges that articulates the members’ commitment to developing a strong foundation for digital methods and research no matter the size of the school or perceived limitations.

Luhrs highlighted the strengths of the DSS team in building customized research environments and the flexibility they have in their autonomy, while calling attention to the limitations of resources and time endemic to digital scholarship at small liberal arts colleges when compared to the collaboratories, scholars’  labs, and digital centers at high profile research universities.

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DSS team members James Griffin, Eric Luhrs, and Thom Goodnow at DLF.

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DSS poster

Luhrs along with James Griffin, Digital Library Developer, and Thom Goodnow, Integrated Technologies Librarian, showcased these possibilities in a poster presentation describing how this small team has been able to streamline DSS’ project development processes.  By migrating from a multiplicity of platforms onto Islandora and adopting methodologies and workflows inspired by agile software development practices, the team can now develop a greater variety of digital tools and virtual research environments than previously possible. Their dedication and hard work has allowed the team to expand services and support innovation in scholarly research and digital scholarship across campus.

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu, or call (610) 330-5796.

 

DSS Open Hack Night

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We’ll provide an unending flow of coffee and espresso, pizza, and snacks, you provide the brainpower.

DSS Open Hack Night flyer

Monday October 6th ∗ 7pm ∗ Skillman 004

Put your skills to the test and help us identify and correct issues of both function and aesthetics in our new website.

For every issue solved you and your team will earn points, win prizes, and the night’s top team will earn gift cards to Cosmic Cup.

Programming skills are not required. However, the event will primarily focus on finding and fixing problems with a Drupal 7 website that uses a Twitter Bootstrap-based theme. Experience with web design, usability testing, CSS, JavaScript or HTML is a plus.

Participants are asked to bring their own laptops, any operating system will do. We will either match you with a team, or feel free to bring your own team of three.

Event starts at 7 and runs as late as you can go.

See you there!

 

The Digital World of Art History

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Intern Alena Principato ’15 shares her experience at Princeton Art History conference

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Alena Principato excited to attend the Digital World of Art History conference at Princeton University.

With plans to earn a Masters degree in Library and Information Science and pursue a career in academic librarianship after graduating from Lafayette, I was able to use my internship with Lafayette’s Visual Resources librarian Kelly Smith to learn more about the field.

As part of my internship I had the opportunity to attend a one-day conference at Princeton University titled “The Digital World of Art History.” The conference, organized by the Index of Christian Art and Princeton’s Visual Resources Collection and Department of Art and Archaeology, centered on the theme of “Standards and Their Application.”

Armed with enthusiasm for my first professional conference, I filed into McCormick Hall and prepared to learn about cutting edge digital art history projects along with dozens of other attendees. The agenda for the day consisted of a line-up of twelve speakers, ranging from librarians and academics to digital developers, and included professionals from various cultural institutions.

Some highlights from the presentations:

Christine Kuan, a representative of Artsy (artsy.net), kicked off the day with her presentation on Artsy, Technology, and the Power of Public Access. The mission of Artsy is to make art accessible to everyone through an online platform for discovering, learning about, and collecting art that is free to the public. The site features more than 100,000 high-resolution images of artworks.

The Art Genome Project, similar in concept to Pandora’s Music Genome Project, assigns specific values to characteristics of art and architecture—the “genes” of the artwork—and uses search algorithms to create associations between related artists and artworks. This system allows for what Kuan calls a “radial” process of searching, allowing users to discover new artists based on their preferences.

Dustin Wees and Margaret Smithglass presented for the Built Works Registry (BWR), an ongoing project “to create and develop a freely available registry and data resource for architectural works and the built environment.” The project is a collaboration between the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, ARTstor, and the Getty Research Institute. The BWR imports data about works from multiple sources and seeks to standardize the title, date, and location of each work as well as assign it a unique ID number.

 Set to launch this October, the BWR plans to eventually give its data to Getty to turn it into one of their authoritative databases. Resources like the BWR are important for standardizing the cataloging of visual resources by providing a controlled vocabulary to maintain consistency in cataloging across multiple institutions. In my experience cataloging with Shared Shelf, I’ve been using controlled vocabularies to assign subject tags to digitized prints produced by the Experimental Printmaking Institute. (Read more about this in my previous blog post.)

 Following the afternoon presentations was a reception inside the art museum, which provided a beautiful atmosphere for networking mixed with art appreciation. Overall, the conference was a great learning experience that expanded my understanding of the possibilities for digital projects involving visual resources collections and fueled my excitement about the direction in which the field is heading.

DSS is actively seeking students from across campus and across disciplines to participate in our internship program. With us you’ll learn hands-on skills in digital scholarship, computer programming, application design, and data preservation. You’ll earn work experience while learning from a professional team on the cutting edge of digital research. E-mail us with your name, major, area of expertise, and reason for applying at digital@lafayette.edu.

Professor Paul Barclay and the East Asia Image Collection on the World Stage

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Today History Professor Paul Barclay presents his paper “Playing the Race Card in Japanese Governed Taiwan – Anthropometric Photographs as ‘Shape-Shifting Jokers’” at the European Association of Japanese Studies’ International Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The paper stems from Barclay’s interest in the visual history of the Japanese empire with a particular focus on mass-produced ephemera. As the general editor of the East Asia Image Collection, developed in partnership with Eric Luhrs, Director of the Library’s Digital Scholarship program, Barclay has amassed a collection of over 5,000 digitized items including postcards, stereographic prints, photographs, and several other media types.

His presentation traces the material history of a single photograph. The image, taken by Japanese ethnologist-photographer Mori Ushinosuke, is an anthropometric portrait of a Taiwanese woman, Paazeh Naheh. Barclay argues that the heavy reproduction of Paazeh’s portrait and the shifting contexts of that image, from a lantern slide, to an ethnographic object of study, to a picture postcard, reveal more than the typical concerns of imperialist discourses and racist essentialism often associated with anthropometric materials. Instead, this image functions as a “shape-shifting joker,” refusing a stable symbolic function. Because the portrait appeared in a broad spectrum of venues and was utilized for a range of agendas, some of which ran counter to the imperial narratives about Taiwan and its people, it subverts the possibility for a monolithic interpretation

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Images of Paazeh Naheh in the EAIC

The conference brings together scholars in Japanese history and culture with the aim of fostering an international exchange of ideas. Barclay will present his work alongside colleagues from both Japan and the United States on the panel “Photography in Twentieth Century Japan: Imaging Self and Other.” The presentation is part of his larger project, a book-length study on the history of Japanese-Taiwan Indigenous Peoples relations from 1873 to 1945.

Barclay’s work illustrates the value of the East Asia Image Collection in opening new avenues of investigation for scholars worldwide. The faceted discovery interface allows users to create virtual image sets of items that meet specific criteria while the ability to identify precise relationships between seemingly disparate items aids in the recognition of patterns of production, imagery, and context, making the EAIC a powerful and innovative resource in the field.

To learn more about Professor Barclay’s work and the EAIC visit the collection at: http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections/eastasia.

Connect with this project on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/EastAsiaImageCollection

or follow the latest from Professor Barclay on his new EAIC blog: http://sites.lafayette.edu/eastasia/

For more information on starting a digital project with DSS or applying for an internship opportunity contact us at digital@lafayette.edu, or call (610) 330-5796.

The Art of Cataloging

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Alena Principato ’15 discusses her Visual Resources Internship with DSS cataloging images from the Experimental Printmaking Institute

This summer I completed an internship under the guidance of Kelly Smith, Lafayette College’s Visual Resources Librarian. I have been learning about visual resources management and assisting Kelly with the digitization of the Experimental Printmaking Institute’s body of work. Each print that is digitized must be photographed, edited, and uploaded to Shared Shelf, a cloud-based cataloging and content management system developed by ARTstor.

What is cataloging and how does it work?
According to Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and Their Images, “to catalog a work is to describe what it is, who made it, where it was made, how it was made, the materials of which it was made, and what it is about.” This information is also referred to as metadata (essentially, “data about data”), especially when it is entered in a digital format.

Recording such data may seem straightforward, and often is; the name of the artist, the measurements of a work, and the date of creation are simple enough to ascertain. However, selecting the subject of the work is more ambiguous. As Shared Shelf explains, the subject field contains “terms that identify, describe, and/or interpret what is depicted in and by a work.”

Consider what it means to “interpret”—when a person views an art object, they draw conclusions about what it means, often through the lens of their unique background and personal experiences. A detail in a painting that captivates one person may be completely overlooked by another.

The challenge for a cataloger of a visual work is to consider all of these potential viewpoints. The cataloger must be observant and sort out what information about a work is relevant to include, and what elements are trivial or unnecessary to describe. It’s helpful to think of subject terms as the keywords used to conduct an image search. Catalogers have to anticipate future users’ research needs—which could be on a general subject or specific topic—and account for both when they are describing a work.

While there is no one standard governing the selection of subject tags, catalogers may choose subject terms from lists of pre-set subject identifiers known as controlled vocabularies. For cataloging the Experimental Printmaking Institute’s works, we selected four resources for subject terms: Getty’s Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) and Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Iconclass, and Library of Congress Subject Headings. Each helps standardize the cataloging of visual resources by providing a controlled vocabulary to minimize variations in cataloging by different institutions.

My process for subject tagging the EPI works begins with identifying general terms and narrowing down from there. First I evaluate the work for major concepts and overall themes. Once those are established, I take a closer look at details in the image that seem important, such as an identifiable person, place, or event. Details do not necessarily have to be a focus of the work as a whole to merit being included–if a tag could be useful in helping someone locate an image of a particular subject, it may be worth including. However, it’s not a good idea to tag details that are truly a minor or irrelevant part of the image, since this could result in overemphasizing their importance.

An Example
Here’s how I approached cataloging “Taxes on Us Without Our Consent,” a screen print by Faith Ringgold.

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“Taxes On Us Without Our Consent,” from Declaration of Freedom and Independence by Faith Ringgold

Continue reading →

Building the Digital Humanities

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 Engineering student William Stathis interns with DSS

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James Griffin, Digital Library Developer, and Billy Stathis ’15.

The first time I heard the term “digital humanities” was at a lecture from one of the field’s foremost authorities, Dr. Willard McCarty. He portrayed the field as a mixing of the classical humanities with new analytical technologies – mainly computation. This marriage of the quantitative and the qualitative may, at first, seem somewhat paradoxical. However, by using new analytical techniques and a bit of imagination on the part of both programmers and researchers, one can gain new insights.

Personally, my discovery of this field was a great excitement. As a current student of Electrical and Computer Engineering, I find very few opportunities to do work in history, which has been an interest of mine for years. As fate would have it, the head of Digital Scholarship Services, Eric Luhrs, was at the same lecture. He was looking for a summer intern to work on Digital Humanities collaborations with members of the Lafayette faculty. The internship would allow me, in a practical way, to combine my technical background with my interest in the humanities.

My initial time at DSS was spent learning new programming skills. After about two weeks of reading books on PHP, Javascript, and the Drupal framework, I was prepared to tackle the first project assigned to me. I had only worked on a software development team once before, and it was in the context of a class. Being free to use the best resources for the job, and not just those approved by a professor, was a nice change. Many of the new skills I learned are readily extensible to industry. In particular, the work-flow model we used was prevalent in startups and other small web based companies. This knowledge combined with my work fixing broken sections of code and adding new functionality via server-side and client-side processing will be valuable experience as I progress into a career.

Of all the projects that DSS is currently working on, I was primarily a part of The Easton Library Company Project. The ELC database is a collaboration between English professor Christopher Phillips and the Library’s Digital Scholarship Services department.  Using a relational database of transcribed library loan records from the early 1800s, this project attempts to create an interactive model of the era’s social network. Organized in this way, the tools and records provide users with a means to analyze the reading trends, patron relationships, and other social aspects of life for those in and around Easton in the early 1800s.  While the website is not yet publicly available, additional information can be seen at: http://digital.lafayette.edu/collections/eastonlibrary.

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Billy Stathis at work on the ELC project

Overall, I found my time working at DSS educational. I gained some interesting knowledge of the digital humanities, which is also useful. Additionally, the website development experience I gained was invaluable for working with web and software companies. But my experience went beyond simple coding languages and coding practices. Most of all, I learned what a job in the software development world is actually like, and how to interact with a professional team of developers. I now feel that I have a much better idea of what development jobs hold in store and that will help guide me in my career search more than anything.

DSS is actively seeking students from across campus and across disciplines to participate in our internship program. With us you’ll learn hands-on skills in digital scholarship, computer programming, application design, and data preservation. You’ll earn work experience while learning from a professional team on the cutting edge of digital research. E-mail us with your name, major, area of expertise, and reason for applying at digital@lafayette.edu.

New Website for Digital Scholarship Services

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Hello all and welcome to the new DSS Blog!

Located in Skillman Library at Lafayette College, Digital Scholarship Services works with faculty members to understand the unique nature of their research. We build customized digital tools that allow new questions to be asked and we help analyze, visualize, and promote the results. We also provide expert digitization services and persistent access to digital scholarship in support of the research and instruction needs of the Lafayette College community. For more information about the services we provide, please visit http://digital.lafayette.edu/services.

We redesigned our website (http://digital.lafayette.edu) to feature faculty projects and provide information about the resources and services we provide. As part of this redesign we are also launching this blog. Information about upcoming events, project updates, posts from faculty partners, and featured content are just a few of the items you will see here.

Our new website and blog will expand our current collaborations and pave the way for new ones with the Lafayette community and beyond.  Use the contact form on the new website or send an email to digital@lafayette.edu if you have an idea for a digital project, no matter how big or small.