DSS Postdoctoral Fellow Michaela Kelly Reflects on International Conference Adventures

Posted on April 25, 2017 by Charlotte Nunes

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

Posted on April 3, 2017 by Charlotte Nunes

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.

GIS Librarian John Clark Offers Spring “Beware of Maps” Workshops

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Charlotte Nunes

Historic map of the British Empire

This spring, Data Visualization & GIS Librarian John Clark will offer two workshop opportunities for students and faculty to learn about critical cartography. Reading a map is trickier than you might expect. While maps casually present themselves as a visualization of reality, the truth is, all maps are imperfect models of natural and cultural features on the surface of the Earth. Reading a map involves understanding how a map maker has chosen to represent these features and, perhaps more importantly, what s(he) has left out. Join for a guided tour through a variety of different historical and contemporary maps as John explains some common principals used by cartographers. Participants will then have an opportunity to make a map using Social Explorer, an online mapping tool available to the Lafayette community through Skillman Library.

This event is being offered twice, Wednesday, February 1st and Friday, February 3rd, from 12:15pm to 1:00pm. Please RSVP to John Clark at clarkjh@lafayette.edu and indicate if you would like to attend the Wednesday or Friday event. Lunch provided.

DH Summer Scholars Impress at Bucknell Digital Humanities Conference

Posted on November 7, 2016 by Charlotte Nunes

Guest-blogger Will Gordon ’17, one of the Skillman Library 2016 Digital Humanities Summer Scholars, reports on a successful presentation at the Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference.

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

Last Friday, I piled into a van with four of my friends and fellow digital humanities scholars to drive to Bucknell University to present our undergraduate research and learn more about digital humanities. Research and Instruction Librarian Sarah Morris, who is also the leader of the Digital Humanities Summer Scholar Program at Lafayette College, drove us to the Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference (#BUDSC16). Tawfiq Alhamedi ‘17, Caroline Nawrocki ‘18, Mila Temnyalova ‘18, Johnny Gossick ‘18, and I were all part of the summer program, in which we each designed, researched, and realized our projects.

Now it was time to present our projects to a crowd of undergraduates, graduate students and academics through a panel session and electronic posters. Dinner and the keynote speech from Assistant Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University Tressie McMillan Cottom filled the first night. We learned about incorporating the digital humanities into a sociology graduate program, and saw ways to pursue these interests after graduating from Lafayette.

It was our turn to present the next day. Tawfiq, Caroline, Mila, and Sarah partnered up with members of Gettysburg College for a panel session on how to design a successful undergraduate digital humanities research program. Other attendees at the conference tweeted and commented on how impressed they were with Gettysburg’s and Lafayette’s programs.

DH Summer Scholar Mila Temnyalova presents

Afterward, Saturday’s keynote speaker, UCLA professor Safiya Noble, spoke about biases in search engine algorithms at lunch and their effects on the way people perceive race and gender. Her talk illustrated the power of algorithms and information bias in society, and proved the importance of doing good digital scholarship.

As the day came to an end, Tawfiq, Caroline, Johnny and I took part in an electronic poster session while academics and other attendees drank wine, ate hors d’oeuvre, and wandered the room to listen to our presentations and others.

After packing up our things and going to a panel session Sunday morning, we began the journey back to Lafayette. Although, at times, scholarship can be a strange endeavor, we were excited about the opportunity to present our undergraduate research projects, and the positive feedback we received.

DSS Attends Hydra Connect 2016 as New Hydra Project Partner

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Charlotte Nunes

Skillman 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!

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

Posted on September 29, 2016 by Charlotte Nunes

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.

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.

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 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

Posted on September 23, 2016 by Charlotte Nunes

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.

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.

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).

DHLaf students present their work at Bucknell Digital Initiatives Conference

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Emily McGinn

Jethro Israel, Ian Morse, Ben Draves, Vincent DeMarco and Feevan Megersa at the Bucknell Digital Scholarship Conference.

This weekend five Lafayette students presented their work at Bucknell University’s Digital Scholarship Conference, “Collaborating Digitally: Engaging Students in Public Scholarship.” The main focus of the conference was on building new ways to connect Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship with the student experience and on developing new frameworks for including students as meaningful collaborators on digital projects. While many of the presenters focused on students as researchers or contributors to larger projects, our students presented work of their own design.

Feevan Megersa discusses her project on Ethiopian Folktales on a panel presentation.

Feevan Megersa ’17, Ian Morse ’17, and Jethro Israel ’16 presented their work on a panel “Models of Student Engagement in DH” alongside of the Library’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities Emily McGinn. Feevan presented her project “Got Folktales?” an interactive project that maps the themes and morals of a collection of Ethiopian folktales, and Ian presented work from his Solution Based Press Freedom Project. Both projects were developed as part of the Digital Humanities Summer Scholars program. The internship was sponsored by Skillman Library and supported with funding from the Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Grant for Digital Initiatives.

Jethro discussed his history with the McDonogh Project, a digital project that tells the story of Washington Watts McDonogh and David Kinney McDonogh, two emancipated slaves who were educated at Lafayette in the 1830s. Jethro described his trajectory as he moved from a student working on a class project, to an EXCEL scholar creating and managing the data behind the digital exhibit, to developing his own research interests in relation to the larger project.

Vincent DeMarco and Ben Draves during the poster session

Vincent DeMarco ’18 and Ben Draves ’17 were a part of their own separate panel where they presented their project Tempo of the Times, a data analysis project also developed in the Summer Scholars program that examines key features of popular music including polarity, “hotness” and danceability against economic data over time. They were also asked to present their work during the poster session during which they were able to do live demos of their interactive graphs and predictive models that anticipate future trends in music.

Ian Morse (center) answering questions at the NextGen Plenary session

Ian Morse was also given a second opportunity to present his work at the conference. He was selected as part of the NextGen Plenary session in which a panel of five early career scholars presented their work to the entire body of conference goers. Ian presented his project that used large scale text analysis to investigate press freedom violations surrounding Turkey’s Gezi Park protests. His work dovetailed perfectly with keynote speaker Micki Kaufman’s methods on text analysis on Henry Kissinger’s correspondence.

Lafayette College was well represented with one of the largest contingents of students, all of whom had produced exceptional work that set the standard for undergraduate research in the digital humanities. They showed a professionalism and dedication to their work that stands as a testament to the culture of research and intellectual curiosity at Lafayette. During the course of the conference, all of our students became valuable resources for their peers as well as to faculty and administrators hoping to replicate their same success at other institutions.

To continue to build a community of practitioners and collaborators here at Lafayette, we will be holding a general interest session Wednesday December 2 in the tech lounge (Pardee 28) from 3-5. Our students will be available to talk more about their projects and are hoping to find students interested in starting their own digital projects and collaborating with them in the future. Drop in anytime between three and five.

For more information contact Sarah Morris, Research and Instruction Librarian at morrisse@lafayette.edu.

DSS contributes to developer community at HydraConnect 2015

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Emily McGinn

Lafayette’s Digital Scholarship Services is once again in the forefront of library repository development. At this year’s HydraConnect Conference, DSS developer James Griffin shared his work with the burgeoning community of Hydra developers.

Hydra is an Open Source software that, together with the repository system Fedora, forms the basis of many institutional repositories and is the foundation for preservation and discovery for many digital archives. Griffin is part of a working group looking to expand the uses of Hydra to include the preservation and display of GIS data within library repository systems. While this kind of work is largely invisible to the casual user, it can make a lasting impact on future development.

DSS Developer James Griffin presenting on Geospatial Data in Hydra

In designing the architecture of this new functionality, Griffin finds himself in excellent company working with a handful of other like-minded developers from Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Alberta, who form the GIS Data Modeling Working Group. The conference provided the occasion for the group to present their initial data models. In these initial stages, the group has begun to break down the complex data components of GIS files into a structure compatible with the repository’s internal organization and consistent with existing data models for other types of information.

The group participated in a poster session and also sponsored an “unconference” session, a free form discussion whose topics are determined by the conference goers. In addition, Griffin presented a lightning talk on their data model. “Our presentations have generated a lot of interest in how we have addressed our use cases using linked open data in the Resource Description Framework,” explains Griffin. “While few are working on GIS related projects our project gives weight to the idea that Hydra is flexible and versatile. It’s more than just a repository solution.” This work, now cutting edge, will help to guide future development in Hydra and expand its potential applications in digital library infrastructure.

Through Griffin’s work, Lafayette is an increasingly important player in this arena and the working group will present their latest developments next month at the Digital Library Federation conference in Vancouver, and at the Geo4LibCamp at Stanford University in January.

Putting the Teacher-Scholar Ideal into Practice: A Liberal Arts College Model for Digital Humanities

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Emily McGinn

Neil Fraistat, Alison Byerly and Paul Barclay

On October 1, President Byerly joined Professor Neil Fraistat, Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and Professor Paul Barclay (History, Asian Studies) for a public conversation about Digital Humanities, and more specifically, how DH fits into the liberal arts. The event was sponsored by Skillman Library and the Digital Humanities Steering Committee and is part of an ongoing initiative to enrich digital scholarship on campus.

With the benefit of a $700,000, four-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Steering Committee has launched a number of new initiatives on campus, including the DH Summer Scholars internship and DH in the Classroom program. These initiatives are in addition to their continued support of large-scale faculty research projects. The broad spectrum of these programs reveals the Committee’s goals of creating a holistic approach to Digital Scholarship that fosters collaboration across disciplines through project-based learning. In addition, these programs work to build a reciprocal relationship between teaching and research in which digital methods open new research questions while transforming the nature of engagement with humanistic objects of study for both students and faculty.

Alison Byerly and Neil Fraistat

Professor Fraistat joined us to discuss the future of these initiatives as we work to strengthen digital engagement with research and the curriculum. The event prompted an energizing conversation that elucidated the shared goals of the college, the steering committee, and the field of Digital Humanities.

We have included here the full transcript of Professor Barclay’s opening remarks and we look forward to continuing this conversation with the Lafayette community.

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