Friday, October 19, 2018

Digital Humanities Librarian Search at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Digital Humanities Librarian
Assistant or Associate Professor, University Library
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


Position Available:
Position available immediately. This is a 100%, twelve-month, tenure-system appointment.

The University of Illinois is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action employer. Minorities, women, veterans and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply. For more information, visit http://go.illinois.edu/EEO. To learn more about the University’s commitment to diversity, please visit http://www.inclusiveillinois.illinois.edu.

Position Summary:
The University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is seeking a creative, innovative, collaborative, and intellectually curious individual to lead digital humanities services in the Library. The successful candidate will contribute to engaged, inclusive digital scholarship across campus. We encourage applicants who are committed to the principle that a diverse community enhances our institution and who will help the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign achieve new levels of excellence by fostering and sustaining our diverse and inclusive academic environment.

Reporting to the Head of Scholarly Communication and Publishing, the Digital Humanities Librarian leads outreach and services for research and instruction in the humanities and arts that employs digital technologies and data. Working with colleagues in the library’s Scholarly Commons, Research Data Service, and Scholarly Communication and Publishing units, Library Information Technology, Media Commons, special collections curators and archivists, and subject liaisons, the Digital Humanities Librarian is part of a team of functional and subject experts that works with researchers on digital scholarship broadly.

The Digital Humanities Librarian typically serves as the initial point of referral for humanities and affiliated researchers as they begin digital research and teaching projects, referring to and collaborating with these other experts as necessary. Building on a history of increasing library support for digital humanities on campus, the librarian plays a key role in furthering digital humanities library services, collaborating with others to fulfil needs identified in the library’s recent Digital Humanities Needs Assessment Report and providing ongoing assessment for new and existing activities. This role includes working to further the development of the library’s Scholarly Commons as a hub for digital humanities collaboration and discussion. The librarian also collaborates with other areas of campus that provide complementary services for digital research (including the NCSA Culture and Society Initiative, an emerging design center network, and others) to provide referrals and maximize impact.

Duties and Responsibilities:

  • Provide both reference services and in-depth research consultations for faculty and students on digital humanities-related research, in collaboration with colleagues;
  • Design and deliver instruction to classes, research groups, and other audiences to further information literacy and digital literacy outcomes;
  • Acquire and manage humanities research data (e.g., text and media corpora from commercial publishers) in consultation with others;
  • Work with librarians, library IT, and researchers to evaluate digital scholarship tools and select and implement the most appropriate tools to meet specific needs;
  • Serve as the primary point of consultation for researchers with questions about text and data mining tools and approaches;
  • Work with colleagues on digital humanities-related publishing activities and scholarly communications outreach related to digital humanities research;
  • Collaborate with colleagues in the Scholarly Commons and other units on outreach activities related to digital scholarship, and on fostering the Scholarly Commons as a collaborative space for digital humanities work;
  • Assess evolving campus needs and represent the Library in campus initiatives and activities involving digital humanities related research and data science, including serving as a liaison to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and other relevant initiatives;
  • Facilitate professional development opportunities for library faculty and staff, including subject specialists, in digital humanities areas relevant to their interests and responsibilities;
  • Contribute to the national and international reputation of the University Library through professional research, service, and collaboration with national colleagues, organizations, and consortia.

Qualifications:

Required:
ALA-accredited MS-LIS or equivalent, or a PhD in the humanities or humanistic social sciences (completed by start date) with two years of relevant experience with digital projects;
Understanding of traditional and emerging digital approaches to research and publication in humanities work, and of how new digital approaches can reshape research and teaching in the humanities;
Experience with research software or programming languages used within some area of digital humanities, such as text and data mining, network analysis, or multimodal publishing;
Experience teaching in workshop or classroom settings;
Excellent oral and written communications skills;
Demonstrated ability to work both independently and collaboratively with a diverse community, and manage multiple tasks effectively in a team environment;
Evidence of the ability to do research, publication, and service consonant with University standards for tenure and promotion.

Preferred:
Experience teaching technology and digital literacy concepts;
Experience authoring or collaborating on digital humanities projects in research or instruction;
Coursework or experience using a programming language, especially one commonly used in digital humanities projects such as Python or R;
Demonstrated understanding of metadata standards and data curation practices relevant to digital humanities work;
Familiarity with copyright and licensing issues related to digital projects.

Monday, October 08, 2018

Digital Humanities: Implications for Librarians, Libraries, and Librarianship in Journal of College & Undergraduate Libraries #DH

Although it's been out for almost a year now, I'm excited to have read the DH-themed issue in College & Undergraduate Libraries.  Volume 24's Digital Humanities: Implications for Librarians, Libraries, and Librarianship is a special issue that reflects some of the current challenges that occupy librarians who are engaging the academic community in the digital humanities.  Some of the authors are familiar names and that's not surprising as many are at the top of their fields in DH.

In College & Undergraduate Libraries, this special issue has thirty articles on various topics that have been organized around six main themes: theoretical and critical issues, transforming traditional collections, models of collaboration, planning and project management, the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, and embedded librarian instruction.   I enjoyed all of these pieces and it is a reflection of the work that is emerging at the intersection of academic libraries and digital scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.   It's good timing as Megan Meredity-Lobay and my DH-themed issue in Digital Library Perspectives is coming out soon, too.  Stay tuned for more on that.  In the meantime, take a look at the following articles!

Sunday, August 12, 2018

Open Access, APC's, and the Pop-Up Restaurant

Recently, a Canadian economics professor ventured into the dark world of predatory publishing and got punished by his university and is now banned and suspended without pay. What's an academic to do when all he's doing is exposing the "deceptive scholarship" of fellow academics (that happens to be from his own university) seeking to advance their careers whose articles have been published for a fee in suspicious and fraudulent journals?

Predatory journals claim to be refereed but in reality, they publish articles in exchange for the payment of fees by authors.  Even Jeffrey Beall, the librarian who first coined the term and highlighted the negative aspects of predatory journals with his now eponymous Beall's List taken down due to pressure from his own university.

To be clear, scholarly publishing is a high stakes business, with tenure and promotion, skyrocketing journal subscriptions, and shrinking college budgets solidly inter-woven. The solution (and problem) proposed by librarians and academics (and publishing companies albeit begrudgingly) is to "open" up research outputs distributed online for free of cost or other barriers now popularly known as open access in order to counter the inequitable and unsustainable practice of charging institutions for ever-increasing subscription prices on scholarship that should be for the public good.   Open access is important; but we must face the problems of its outgrowth.

The unintended consequence is that that other than self-archiving them in institutional repositories, open access journals often require article processing charges paid by authors or research sponsors -- the "Gold OA path".  This has a prevalent byproduct: the predatory publisher that takes advantage of the desperate researcher whose job prospects depend on how many articles get accepted and published in journals.  As more journals have jumped on board to go open access, even wealthy publishers have gotten into the game by offering open access.  By clinging their hopes in this broken scholarly ecosystem, the situation reminds me of the "pop-up" dinner phenomenon.  This happened at the turn of the century when dining out became so exorbitantly expensive that consumers wanted to find an alternative, more sustainable ecology of gourmet.    

Pop-up restaurants have been popular since the 2000's and such diners typically make use of social media to communicate to its audiences.   No doubt the hospitality business is lucrative as such pop-up restaurants has become effective methods for young professionals to gain exposure, seeking investors, and experimenting with new culinary concepts.  It has gotten so successful that Restaurant Day takes place worldwide with even traditional restaurants participating.  The problem is that there is high turnover, with the most successful pop-up operations burning brightly, then quietly and quickly disappearing to make room for something new.   Does this sound familiar?   

This is not to say that the pop-up is a failure, nor is it a perfect analogy of scholarly publishing, but there is a similarity with how much disruption is happening in a traditional business with a mad scramble by entrepreneurs (and both traditional and predatory publishers are certainly that) to take advantage of those hungry to eat and get published.   Though some academics ignore OA altogether as tenure requires publication in a "global brand" of an exclusive journal or press and go where the money is, those who choose to publish in OA tend to do so out of altruism or academic disciplines who aren't tied to a prestigious publication.    To be sure the big luxury brands will not disappear anytime soon, and there will always be those who prefer to the Michelin-star experience over the home-cooked potluck.  

So let's return to the economist Derek Pyne's current ethical dilemma of his research: reveal the complicity of institutions and be punished or stay silent and conform to the dubious cycle.  Of course, he chose the former, and though we don't know the full context of the case, what we do know now is that one researcher's findings has provoked enough impact for it to be designated as dangerous.


Sunday, May 13, 2018

The Learning Gardens at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

During my sabbatical, Patrick Lo, Dickson Chiu, and I were fortunate to interview Louise Jones, the University Librarian of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) for an upcoming book project.  The Chinese University of Hong Kong Library is one of the leading research libraries in East Asia, and has a significant Special Collections ranging from Shang dynasty oracle bones to modern Chinese literary archives.  With ongoing digitization initiatives, the Library makes available over 5 million digital images/objects and making content openly accessible to the local and global research community.

While CUHK Library comprises seven libraries, I had the most fun with the tour of the Learning Garden, which is an inspirational space that has won awards.  The Learning Garden is combined effort of librarians, architects, and the university community.   As far back as 2014, when the Learning Garden first opened, it introduced 3D Printing and 3D Scanning services with the idea of bringing design concepts to life.  In inspiring students to explore new interests in design and helping them to bring their creations and design concepts to life, the library provides two desktop level of 3D printers, including the Structure Sensor and Next Engine 3D scanners.

Clearly, with the trend in academic libraries is the shifting relationship between space and collections, physical collections increasingly across academia are being moved to storage or lesser used facilities, freeing up of space for collaborative learning and study spaces.   With specific spaces opened for 24 hours a day during term time, how does the Learning Garden provides flexible seating and facilities to support teaching and learning activities.  In addition to face-to-face teaching, collaborative learning through discussion among peers to generate ideas is increasingly important; in addition, with the needs of group projects for coursework, a 24-hour library space is necessary for the needs of students, particularly those who live on campus.   On average, the Learning Garden has up to 300 patrons just after the library closes at 10.00pm.



How does the Learning Garden differ from the Research Commons in the University Library though?  Both the Learning Garden and Research Commons are open spaces for students, undergraduate graduate students.  While the same number of group study rooms are also available for bookings at Research Commons on the first floor of the University Library complex, the services arranged by the Research Commons librarian are specifically focused for graduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers; such services include research consultation services, research café events, thesis writing skills, authoring workshop, and citation management.  However, the services for Postgraduates are not restricted to the Research Commons area; for example, the Research Cafe (presentations by Ph.D. candidates) are held in a small open space on the ground floor of the library. Activities conducted in open spaces aim to cultivate a learning ambiance and scholarly exchange and dialogue between students and scholars.

What's interesting about the Learning Garden is the emphasis of short-term flexibility with such things as movable furniture and temporary wall partitions.  The Learning Garden is an open plan design, uniquely with no temporary wall partitions; thus, its events are conducted in an entirely open setting. As its name conveys as a "garden," patrons can find their own favourite spot for individual study, for chatting, for relaxation in the refreshment zone, having group discussions or joining a talk in the Open Forum. Except for the bubble group study room, all of these activities co-exist in the Learning Garden in a harmonious, collaborative manner. The Learning Path is designed as two 50 meters long desks and S-shape curve creates natural bays for groups to study together or individual. For flexibility, the designer architect selected more light-weighted and robust furniture for students to freely move and group various tables together to fit their purpose of learning.  Smart whiteboards are movable as well.

The library is an important selling point for the university, and the Learning Garden has fast become the major attraction to University guests, students and visiting scholars.  As a building, it has won several awards.  The large whiteboard are full of students’ comments, drawing, traces of idea exchange and even poems, the students have indeed made the place their home and welcoming in their own way.  Here's the past UL Colin Storey's recap of how it all started in 2012.  


Friday, March 16, 2018

Data Analysis Using Gephi, a Digital Humanities Case Study

Chinese Canadian Stories – Uncommon Histories from a Common Past was a collaborative project that I was a part of during an earlier part of my career as a librarian, and one I'm re-visiting again in the context of digital humanities.   Interestingly, when we began, we had no idea of the term DH.  I was more involved in the community engagement aspect of the project (which is also an important ingredient in DH projects).  Between 2006-2008, a team of student researchers at UBC working with Prof. Peter Ward and Prof. Henry Yu who spent two years painstakingly recording the data for every one of the over 97,000 Chinese in the Chinese Head Tax Register.  For each of the Chinese who entered Canada, the data included names, age, height, villages and counties of origin and through a digital database, the project enabled us a powerful research tool for understanding who these migrants were, where they left, and where they were going in Canada.  The irony is that the practice of restricting immigration actually left researchers a rich data collection of those early Canadian migrants.

While the project collaborated with the local Chinese Canadian community to preserve their culture and history through outreach and actively collecting materials for its web portal, an unintended yet innovative result was the emergence of digital tools and techniques normally used in the sciences enabled us to examine the records of the migrants. Through the project, the researchers published a few peer-reviewed research papers documenting their use of Gephi, a visualization network analysis tool, which plotted locations in Saskatchewan based on longitude, latitude, and a tool called Ego Network, which it allows us to select any node in the network and filter the network to only see its connections.



In Gephi, to have a high betweenness centrality score would mean that you are integral in connecting elements within the network. In the Saskatchewan network produced by Gephi, three major destinations emerge: Saskatoon, Regina, and Moose Jaw. Swift Current, while a major destination, does not have as many links to highly-connected places as Saskatoon, Regina, and Moose Jaw (which predictably are very connected to each other). Some of the major families in this network also start to emerge: there was a strong Ma clan association that had through chain migration spread across Saskatchewan.  Combined with oral histories and analog research, this method of DH inquiry is a supremely powerful way to enhance discover and to visually tell the story of our findings. 


The Ma family appears to be much more important in the Regina network than in the Moose Jaw network. In order to produce these networks using Gephi, the researchers combed through all the immigrants that listed Saskatchewan as their destination but had to deduce the Romanized form of their surnames. There are quite a few Romanizations that have multiple possible Chinese surnames associated with Ma.  For instance, in anayzing the Regina network, it becomes clear that the Luo and Liu who are from Yuemingcun in Sen Ning are probably the same family--either Luo or Liu, not both.   My colleagues at Asian Library, including the now retired Eleanor Yuen, have pioneered the way for future research by mapping the villages and towns recorded in the Register of Chinese Immigration to Canada from 1885 to 1949 in their original Chinese character names. 
The project was furthered with the great help at the Spatial History Project, Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis [CESTA] at Stanford University.

Using the variables of family name, village origin, and destination in Saskatchewan, Stanford researcher Stephanie Chan used Gephi to produce network patterns for four Chinese family lineages that visualize the weighted correspondence of family name and village origin in creating family chains and connection between destinations. Of course, this preliminary visualization is limited to only describing the Ma family in Saskatchewan.   There's still much data to be analyzed.   The work has just begun. 
Historical Chinese Language Materials in British Columbia (HCLMBC) was a collaboration between UBC and SFU to digitize historical records and images related to Chinese settlement and life in British Columbia.

Sources for more reading:

Yu, Henry, and Stephanie Chan. " The Cantonese Pacific: Migration Networks and Mobility Across Space and Time." Trans-Pacific Mobilities: The Chinese and Canada (2017): 25. [Link]

Hermansen, S. and H. Yu. “The Irony of Discrimination: Mapping Historical Migration Using Chinese Head Tax Data.” In Historical GIS Research in Canada, J. Bonnel and M. Fortin (Eds.), University of Calgary Press, 2014. [Link]

 Murphy, Nathan. "Review of a Digital History Tool: Gephi–Networking through History."

Calma, Angelito, and Martin Davies. 2017. Geographies of influence: A citation network analysis of higher education 1972–2014. Scientometrics 110 (3): 1579-99. [Link]

More Networks in the Humanities or Did books have DNA? [Link]
Stanford Gephi Workshop materials. [Link]

Monday, January 08, 2018

DH Projects in East Asian Studies


The ‘Digital Humanities’ is still a young and highly contested area.  Furthermore, as Tom Mullaney has argued, within Digital Humanities is an “Asia deficit”which is no small part the outcome of more entrenched divides within the platforms and digital tools that form the foundation of DH itself.   This divide between East and West runs very deep, and is not primarily a question of scholarly interest or orientation.  I was pleasantly impressed at the progress made in DH learning more about these projects.

A couple of projects that I had come across recently came from a presentation by Michael Hunter of Yale University.  He introduced the The Life of the Buddha (LOTB) project which addresses this challenge by presenting and analyzing for the first time monumental Tibetan murals depicting the Buddha’s life, their related literature, and their architectural and historical settings. LOTB also offers scholarly and learning communities the first tool to research and engage image, text, architecture, and history as an integrated and meaning-rich whole. The project’s impact for the humanities and the study of Buddhism are thus twofold: the largest study to date on visual and textual Buddha narratives in Tibet, and a new digital tool for synthetic teaching and research of Buddhist images and texts in context.  These murals date from the first decades of the 17th century and are among only a handful of fully preserved narrative paintings in Central Tibet. They are also among the few murals in Tibet explicitly linked to an extant collection of narrative, poetic, ritual, and technical painting literature about the Buddha. Practically nothing has been written about the Jonang murals, and no complete visual documentation has ever been attempted.

The Ten Thousand Rooms Project (廣廈千萬間項目) is a project led by Michael Hunter, and is a collaborative workspace (but not a database) for pre-modern textual studies.  Building on the Mirador Viewer developed by Stanford University, the platform allows users to upload images of manuscript, print, inscriptional, and other sources and then organize projects around their transcription, translation, and/or annotation. Both as a workspace for crowd-sourcing core textual research and as a publishing venue for scholarly contributions that are less well suited to conventional book formats, the Ten Thousand Rooms Project is really one of the early DH projects at Yale that establishes an international online community committed to making the East Asian textual heritage more accessible to a wider audience. All users are free to view projects on the site, and registered users can create their own projects and also to others as well. 

In all, the future of DH in Asian Studies is coming along now, certainly at a pace that suggest much is happening, either at conferences, digital podcasts, and the network of scholars and practitioners coming together in a vibrant community of practice in an area of scholarship that's long overlooked.

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Horizon Report 2017 - Will Be Missed. Rest in Peace NMC



Happy holidays and New Year to you all.   While I look forward to 2018, I'm sad that the New Media Consortium, after so many years of great work, has ended. Best known for producing its “Horizon Reports” on the future of technology at K-12 schools, universities, and museums, I remember every year about this time anxiously anticipating the release of the latest technology trends that the report releases.  Unfortunately, alas, the NMC has abruptly shut down this month after officials discovered the organization was out of money. It's an embarrassing end to an illustrious organization. How "because of apparent errors and omissions by its former Controller and Chief Financial Officer, the organization finds itself insolvent" is beyond me.  I'm too surprised to be even angry at this point, though I think we should be upset at this development. Not even time for us to say good-bye, or a proper sendoff.

Started in 1994, the NMC has served hundreds of college and university organizations, organizing conferences and events, and published reports in its goal of encouraging exploration and use of new media and technologies for learning and creative expression, particularly in 2002 when it began publishing its must-read Horizon Reports.  With that said, I hope these technology trends for academic libraries will not be the last time that we'll see the report coming out with findings.

1. Big Data Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

2. Digital Scholarship Technologies Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less

3. Library Services Platforms Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

4. Online Identity Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Two to Three Years

5. Artificial Intelligence Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

6. The Internet of Things Time-to-Adoption Horizon: Four to Five Years

Though it's filed Chapter 7 bankruptcy, it's still too early to say that the NMC is completely gone since the NMC’s assets may still be sold as part of the bankruptcy process and another entity (maybe another nonprofit?) may yet go forward with the annual summer conference. Who know's, it's still too early to say. Maybe that will be our goal moving into 2018 - to wish the NMC back into existence.

Thursday, October 12, 2017

An academic press reimagining the scholarly publication process



I've been following the work of Tom Mullaney, historian at Stanford University for a while now. Stanford University Press, with the help of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is exploring new publishing channels for digital scholarship. From development, to peer review, to marketing, Stanford's digital publishing initiative supports its scholars in conveying their ideas using emerging media and digital tools.  By advancing this new publishing process the purpose is to establish the same level of academic credibility on digital projects as print books typically receive, this hopefully supports the efforts of scholars in the humanities and social sciences that have for so long have worked so hard on digital scholarship that was outside the traditional road to tenure and promotion without reaping the rewards.  This recognition is an important development in the academic and scholarly publishing world.

Mullaney’s project, The Chinese Deathscape, integrates interactive maps with accompanying scholarly analysis, examining the spatial relocation of graves in China over time.  His work, scheduled to be published in spring 2018, is one of six digital-only projects Stanford University plans to release in 2018 and 2019.  The press, in a partnership with Stanford University Libraries, has also been exploring how to copyright the interactive works and ensure that they are archived and accessible in the face of a constantly changing publishing landscape.  This is an exciting development in the field of digital scholarship, and the humanities.  As the initiative proposes:
The nascent fields of digital humanities and computational social sciences have ballooned in recent years. Emergent technologies and scholars’ increasing fluency with these technologies are providing academics with new ways to visualize, analyze, and interpret data. Yet, there are no formal channels for publication or consistent peer review standards for digital projects. Our initiative, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, allows us to advance a publishing process that helps authors develop their concept (in both content and form) and reach their market effectively to confer the same level of academic credibility on digital projects as print books receive.
At my institution, I'm following similar developments with the collaboration between the UBC Press and the University of Washington Press developing a digital publishing platform in Indigenous studies thanks to a three-year grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  Together, UBC Press and the University of Washington Press will develop a digital platform for Indigenous multimedia books. Based on Scalar, an authoring and publishing platform, it will offer a suite of tools for linking data and analyses to digital content from around the world and for interacting in culturally sensitive ways with heritage materials.  It's even hired a Digital Publishing Coordinator and Digital Developmental Editor to build the infrastructure.  It's exciting times ahead at UBC and Stanford.

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

A new book, "World's Leading National, Public, Monastery and Royal Library Directors"



This is our book on practicing library professionals, but the very first joint interview book project dedicated to documenting on a global scale, the senior leadership and managerial skills, strategic planning as well as professional developments – of the skills and aptitudes that an "effective, total leader" needs in the world of librarianship today.  Each individual library director appearing in this book is highly experienced and greatly respected for their integrity, endeavors and contributions in his or her own right. Their participation in this interview book project, sharing with our readers, their valuable professional practices, unparalleled experiences and unique perspectives, creates such valuable professional learning opportunities for practicing library professionals who continue to communicate with each other on a cross-national, as well as on a cross-cultural level.

As renowned management scholar Henry Mintzberg of McGill University theorizes, “managing is about influencing action. Managing is about helping organizations and units to get things done, which means action. Sometimes, managers manage actions directly. They fight fires. They manage projects. They negotiate contracts.”

So as the individuals profiled in this book will tell us, their roles are manifold and complicated, involving a range of tasks and abilities that require experience, dedication, and creativity that not only keep the library’s operations afloat but thrive under their guidance. We are fortunate that these busy leaders of knowledge are able to generously share with us their time and knowledge in the making of this book. It was simply a pleasure to learn through their experiences and expertise by “picking” their brains about how these library managers not only shape the missions of their respective libraries, but also how they are shaped by their own experiences into become current leadership positions.  The people we interview in this book include the following:

National and state libraries

1 David S. Mao, Acting Librarian, Library of Congress
2 Dr. Johanna Rachinger, Director General, Austrian National Library
3 Caroline Brazier, Chief Librarian, British Library
4 Ana Santos Aramburo, Director, National Library of Spain
5 Marie-Christine Doffey, Director, Swiss National Library
6 Andris Vilks, Director of the National Library of Latvia
7 Prof. Dr. Renaldas Gudauskas, Director General, Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania
8 Alberto Manguel, Director, National Library of Argentina
9 Jelena Djurovic, Director, National Library of Montenegro
10 Dr. Claudia Lux, Librarian, Project Director of the Qatar National Library
11 Oren Weinberg, Director, National Library of Israel
12 Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director, The Library of Alexandria (Egypt)

Public and city libraries

13 Pam Sandlian Smith, Director, Anythink Libraries, Adams County (Colorado)
14 Christopher Platt, Chief Branch Library Officer, New York Public Library
15 John F. Szabo, City Librarian, Los Angeles Public Library
16 David Leonard, President, Boston Public Library
17 Felton Thomas, Jr., Director of Cleveland Public Library
18 Mary Anne Hodel, Director/CEO, Orange County Library System
19 Misty Jones, Director, San Diego Public Library
20 Marcellus Turner, City Librarian, The Seattle Public Library System
21 Kate P. Horan, MLS, Library Director, McAllen Public Library (Texas)
22 Dr. Hannelore Vogt, Director, Cologne Public Library
23 Christine Brunner, Director, Stuttgart City Library
24 Sandra Singh, Chief Librarian, Vancouver Public Library
25 Shih-chang Horng, Director, Taipei Public Library
26 Father Maximilian Schiefermüller O.S.B., General Director, Admont Abbey Library
27 Dr. Cornel Dora, Director, Abbey Library of Saint Gall
28 Oliver Urquhart Irvine, The Librarian & Assistant Keeper, The Queen’s Archives

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Call for Papers: Digital Humanities – The Shifting Contexts

I'm so pleased to be working with Megan Meredith-Lobay, who is the Scientific Analyst, Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at UBC together on an exciting project.   We are co-editors of a special edition of Digital Library Perspectives, a journal that explores new understandings and definitions of what is a digital library.   In this issue, we focus on the emerging field of digital humanities, the evolution of the term, and the ways it's being presented and practised by scholars and researchers, particularly examining it outside of the traditional parameters of what one usually considers DH.  So yes, we're looking at shaking up the boundaries a bit, and experimenting with new ideas and processes while we're at it.  But we need your help -- if you have something in the works, please do consider submitting it to this special issue, which will be first LIS academic journal devoting an entire issue to DH.  

Call for Papers: Digital Humanities – The Shifting Contexts 

This special edition of Digital Library Perspectives focuses on the topic of Digital Humanities, with emphasis on the shifting framework of scholars and practitioners who do not necessarily identify themselves digital humanists but use Digital Humanities tools and practices in their work. The Guest Editors of this issue include Dr. Megan Meredith-Lobay (University of British Columbia) and Allan Cho (University of British Columbia).

The co-editors invite contributions on the following, as well as other related topics:
  • Role of LIS in supporting non-traditional DH areas of scholarship, i.e. New Media Studies, Musicology, Archaeology, non-textual DH
  • Emerging areas of research, teaching, learning in the digital scholarship in the social sciences and humanities
  • Beyond “What is DH?” - exploring “Why DH?”
  • Non-traditional DH practice and practitioners: inclusion and exclusion
  • DH in non-western contexts
  • The intersections between DH and digital social science
  • Digital Humanities as Data Science
Important Dates:
  • Papers due: 1 February 2018 
  • First round decisions made: February 2018 
  • Revised manuscripts due: March 2018 
  • Final decisions made: April 2018 
  • Planned publication: Volume 34 Issue 3 (August) 2018
Submission Instructions:
  • Papers should be no more than 6000 words
  • Submissions to Digital Library Perspectives are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts, the online submission and peer review system. Registration for an account needs to be created first: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/dlp.

Friday, June 16, 2017

#DHSI 2017 - The Evolution of the Digital Humanities (DH)

It's been a while since I've attended my last Digital Humanities Summer Institute.   The colloquium and workshops have evolved since I first attended in 2008.   Back then, the DHSI was about learning the new tools available to us (text encoding initiative, digitization, transcription, etc.)  There was only a handful of courses.   At the time, DH could easily have been mistaken for Web 2.0 (or social software!)   In less than a decade, I've witnessed the emergence and evolution of a cohort of scholars and practitioners who have come back each year and have coalesced into a community of practice, with the DHSI as a stage for informing and encouraging new members to join the fray.

Of course, what I witnessed at DHSI 2017 is a critical mass of scholars and libraries of the need for DH support in the form of facilities and funding.   As a way to become more inclusive, some have instead preferred broader designations as digital scholarship as an embracing term that encompasses DH.  Some have also used data science that collate various faculty to an interdisciplinary lens.  Whether it be political or fiscal, before an institution can embrace DH, it needs to have a paradigmatic shift in mindset in institutional culture from one in which lone scholars conducting DH pedagogy or research can be fully supported with pooled resources.  I've seen not only the new tools, but also the gradual emergence of DH pedagogy and new DH methodologies.

One of the key themes I've heard and seen from the DHSI is the models that institutions need in carrying out DH work.   Institutions vary widely on how far along they are in establishing an institutional framework for DH.  Some have an institutional DH mandate with accompanying staff, but no centre or lab facilities; while others, have the centre and requisite facilities, but not necessarily a mission to coordinate a comprehensive DH plan.    Timing is everything because during the DHSI, Educause and the Centre for Networked Information (CNI) released a working paper Building Capacity for Digital Humanities: A Framework for Institutional Planning.  In my opinion, the authors address some of the fundamental issues with DH planning in higher education that is by far the most cogently articulated on paper.   So where to begin?  Let's start off with the organizational models first, which I find most interesting:

Centralized Model - This model focuses on meeting faculty and student needs by housing most or all DH services in a centralized unit.  In one collaborative space, practitioners can "rub elbows" and share insights easily, and this model is usually set up by a school, or program such as the library to support DH work.

Hub-and-Spoke Model - In this model, expertise, personnel, knowledge, and services are embedded in academic departments, units libraries, and other service points around campus, but coordinated through a central node.

Mesh Network Model - No one unit is dominant in this model.  Rather, each unit that offers DH services pools knowledge to create a linked network of units, groups, and practitioners who contribute their expertise to the overall pool.

Consortial Model - As the most recent model to have emerged onto the DH scene, this model leverages resources and interests across institutions to better support DH initiatives within each institution.  Such partnerships tend to arise organically as DH practitioners look beyond their own organizations to share ideas and knowledge while collaborating on projects.


As I'm writing this, I'm excited about the final day (yes, day #5) of the DHSI.   I'm going to be reflecting more about the stages of progression along the spectrum in which institutions belong to in creating infrastructures that can support and carry out DH work.

Monday, April 03, 2017

Locating Digital Humanities in India: the Emergence of DH in the Global South #digitalhumanities

Courtesy of Pad.ma project (http://pad.ma/)
In my research, I approached digital humanities from a cross-cultural perspective.  In my examination of the field of DH, I can't but help notice the immense scale of the project, the sheer difficulties of not only defining the parametres of what constitutes digital humanities among institution, but also the lofty challenges of defining it among countries.

In a very interesting research report by Puthiya Purayil Sneha, she concludes that locating DH in India as a futile project.   This is particular so, as conversations around the internet and digital technologies have been located within the domain of the developing information and communication technologies in India.   In the Global South, digital usually means rhetoric about the potential to address and even resolve social and economic problems - anything digital translates to “good” and “beneficial.

The ICT-fication, as Sneha put it, of education has been a major objective and challenge within the larger DH vision, specifically because of access, namely the quality of access and the lack of connectivity.  There is an emergence of independent, online archives, seen as a fallout of the hegemony of state-funded archives though, particularly early key projects such as Bichitra, Tagore’s works at Jadavpur University, and Pad.ma.

However, in terms of the logistics of technology, Indic scripts is a persistent problem for digital initiatives in India.  Though in Bengali work has been done to address this by a keyboard software called Avro which stores conjunct letters preserving their separate characteristics - general searching the “anglicized," funding for research and development, maintenance, and sustainability is difficult to obtain.

The research infrastructure has been primarily for the natural sciences - humanities often end up being inadequate, in terms of financial and intellectual investment.  For example, in the case of Bangalore, with so much infrastructure at its disposal, there has been minimal development in the humanities.   And other places like Kashmir, there is strict regulations of access to the Internet due to security concerns.  Consequently, the need to have an archive metadata tool that can work with different Indian languages at the moment is difficult, if not impossible.  So even with technology a concern, there are other key points in consideration:
  • Post-Colonial Considerations - The “incompleteness of the archives” is not well preserved by British administrators before independence.  Still a contentious among archivists and historians, the viability and usefulness of this incomplete history of India produces problems for academic research of the digital humanities in India.
  • Small Steps by the Academic Institutions - Indian Institute of Technology at Indore and Hyderabad have engaged in DH and cultural informatics - through modules in existing courses and seminars.  Small steps are being taken in this very early era of DH in India. 
  • Academic Cultural Resistance - Just as with Western scholars, there is resistance from humanities departments ranging from lack of expertise to concerns about too “technological”
Indian researcher Radhika Diwan is currently conducting research into the state of digital humanities in India, tracing the history and development of Indian DH and reviewing prominent DH projects and the analysis and data collected through the interviews with DH scholars.  So the future is bright, with prospects of more to come.

Monday, March 20, 2017

My Stroke of Insight - By Neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor


A dear friend and mentor of mine had suffered a tragic stroke recently.  A stroke is the last illness anyone would want: the debilitating consequences can take a lifetime to heal, a lifetime changes within a fraction of time.  I'm truly at a loss for the suffering that my friend faces.  As a librarian, I do what I do best in times of tragedy: I read and understand what I'm up against.   I am reading as much about stroke and strategies for recovery.   I'm fortunate to come across My Stoke of Insight, a brain scientist's personal journey through stroke, and her process of recovery as I know it's one of the important titles in the field.   I read the book and here are the important points about stroke patients and what we need to remember. If you find it useful, please share it with others, especially with caregivers who have friends and loved ones who suffered a stroke.   Here's how Bolte Taylor recalls in her journey to healing:

1. I desperately need people to treat me as though I would recover completely (Regardless if it would take 3 months, 2 years, or 20 years, or a lifetime, I need people to have faith in my continued ability to learn, heal, and grow)

2. Honour the healing power of sleep (Value sleep, as it physically heals cell; Brain is the ultimate authority on what it needs to heal itself)

3. I need people to love me, not for the person I had been, but for who I might now become (At the essence of my soul, I am the same spirit. But with brain wiring now different, I might have new interests, likes, and dislikes)

4. I need those around me to be encouraging. I need to know that I still have value. I need to have dreams to work toward. (Accept me as the person I am at the moment, permit me the freedom to evolve as a right hemisphere dominant personality)

5. I need people to celebrate the triumphs I make everyday because my success, no matter how small, inspire me (focus on my ability, not my disability)

6. I need people to come close and not be afraid of me (I desperately need their kindness; I need to be touched, stroke my arm, hold my hand, or gently wipe my face)

7. I need my visitors to bring me their positive energy
(I appreciate when people come in for just a few minutes, take my hands in theirs, and share softly and slowly how they are doing, what they are thinking, and how they believe in my ability to recover. It's difficult for me to cope with people who come in with high anxious energy. Extremely nervous, anxious, or angry people are counter-productive to my healing)

Sunday, March 05, 2017

One Belt, One Road, and Beyond - A Look at the Collections of Libraries, Archives, and Museums

I'm pleased that my research partners from across the Pacific Ocean, Dickson Chiu (University of Hong Kong) and Patrick Lo (University of Tsukuba) will be giving a talk at the University of Hong Kong Libraries.   Our book is a labour of love (perhaps more labour than love it seems at times).
The genesis of it come from a common theme that we hear too often about the challenges and trials of librarians who face continuously shrinking budgets, increased workloads, and the constant change in information technologies.  But as we gradually worked our way through these discussions, we realized that such themes go beyond just libraries, but includes cultural institutions as archives, museums, and to a certain extent, art galleries – what is now more commonly known as a whole as LAMs.

One might ask, why focus on LAMs? We argue that the present convergence is actually a return to traditional unity. These three institutions share epistemological links dating from the “Museum” of Alexandria and continuing through the cabinets of curiosities gathered in early modern Europe. But over time, as these collections expanded, they became more specialized and their storage separated according to the form of information that emerged in around the nineteenth century, and as a result, these institutions professionalized and intellectual societies and educational programs materialized that further crystallized the formal separation.  We have come full circle.  For us to focus on only one but not the other would be to give an incomplete picture as to the continued merger of LAMs. Our book is thus based on a series of direct interviews with different practicing librarians, archivists, and museum curators across the world who specialize in East Asian collections.

In trying to examine the dynamically shifting role of the cultural institution in the context of managing information, cultural and knowledge exchanges, and collaboration on a global scale, we want this book to serve as a reference guide for students, scholars, researchers, and professionals who manage East Asian collections, and enable them to gain a glimpse of the vast amount of treasures available for their research and other scholarly activities. As LAMs began their histories mainly as collecting institutions with mandates to preserve and make accessible primary sources valuable for researchers, we want to show in this book how we are coming full circle again with the merger of practices and techniques of managing collections across cultural institutions.

When we sought a title for this book, we were careful to live up to the promise of “World’s Leading Librarians, Archivists and Curators.” Of course, it can be a subjective process in labeling who exactly are “leading,” but we strove to select those who are considered experts in their field, those who have published extensively in there area of literature, who have amassed many years of experience in management of their collections, and also those who have won awards or acclamation from their peers. We did not make our selections in haste; we also carefully selected interviewees based on a geographical spread that best represented various countries across the world to justify the global focus of our book. So that is why we went on a journey to interview experts from Berlin State Library, Bavarian State Library, the British Library, the British Museum, the National Library of France, the Vatican Library, the National Library of Denmark, the National Archives of Japan, the National Taiwan Library – just to name a few.

In the context of this book, East Asian collections not only refers to those housed and managed by library, archive, and museum (LAM) professionals who are ethnically of East Asian descent, but also their American as well as European colleagues, who have devoted their careers to safeguarding cultural heritage collections of immeasurable values. We conducted our research using a mixed-methods approach using semi-structure surveys through face-to-face meetings, Skype, and also by email depending on preferred mode of access by our interviewees. Upon completion of transcribing our interviews, we followed up with our interviewees for clarification and approval for publication of the text.  We're looking forward to finally having this monograph out and available.  Expect a June launch to come.  

Saturday, January 28, 2017

The Screwmaneutical Approach to Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship

Image courtesy Duke University
I've attended many Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI)'s over the years, and have come to realize that digital humanities is neither a field, a discipline, nor a methodology.  Humanities cannot be done with computers, nor is it computer science performed on topics of interest to the humanities.  There's much debate within academia about the merit of digital scholarship.  While some have called digital humanities as a "misappropriation," others have even referred to its as "Twitter as scholarship."

 DH is currently caught in an existentialist dilemma despite the resulting dynamic dialogue between emerging technology and humanistic inquiry.   Although DH comprises a scholarly humanities community of practice that is engaged in a wide variety of projects but that collectively values experimentation, collaboration, and making, it is a contentious label that signifies elitism and is characterized by a fetishization of technology and a lack of critical reflection. However it is defined, DH has had a significant impact on the academic landscape for more than a decade. Micah Vandegrift takes a page from Stephen Ramsay and calls for a "screwmaneutical approach," one which of re-imagines the place and role of the library is not simply as a place to get the right answers, or be directed to the correct resource, and that means browsability and playfulness.  As Vandegrift put its,
"the“serve ‘em and send ‘em along” model is no longer serving a patronage whose information needs include planning, building and executing projects that utilize the strengths of librarianship."
He recommends some excellent steps to take for those interested in diving into this area of DH.   I've added some of my own an in a more holistic approach.  I hope as a community of practice that this is useful:

1. Attend academic department events - scholars present their work at colloquia

2. Sign up to the department listservs and keep up with its social media

3. Connect with councils and committees - campus-wide initiatives

4. Get involved in online DH social networks - how about #digitalhumanities?

5.  Follow Digital Humanities Now

6. THATCamp - a Humanities and Technology Camp that is an open and relatively inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.  There are camps across North America
7.  Blogs - Lisa Spiro's blog is just one of many who delve into this topic

8.  Join ACRL's Digital Humanities Humanities Discussion Group - Perhaps the most involved academic library group.

9.  Digital Research Tools (DIRT) wiki 

10.  Follow the scholars - Is there a better way than using the web and keeping up with the latest researchers in the field of Digital Humanities by following some of the most involved scholars?