Presentation 1
From the Laptop to the Archive: Managing Research Data in the Humanities
Researchers, librarians, cultural heritage managers, and the general public increasingly interact with digital materials. However, no technology infrastructure currently exists that addresses the diverse needs of these groups. Our project addresses these challenges which include: converting digitized and physical materials into a usable database with appropriate metadata, providing appropriate access to different research materials for different audiences (researchers, students, public), and lack of librarian input early in the process on how research archives are best organized and preserved.
We are using Bibliopedia, a web-based platform (bibliopedia.org) that supports the organization, visualization, search, and sharing of digital archives without the need for research expertise in metadata, data visualization, or databases. Bibliopedia transforms an often unstructured mass of files into networks that can be visualized to provide new insights into structure and context. It is also a platform for active research and a gateway to long-term preservation.
We are building on the existing implementation of Bibliopedia and significantly extend its functionality to meet the needs of two different digital humanities projects:
The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project (chineserailroadworkers.stanford.edu), a major international research collaboration that involves over a hundred scholars from the United States, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Canada, which needs to describe and share a large number of under-described artifacts; and
The Market Street Chinatown Archaeology Project (marketsteet.stanford.edu), a collaborative, community-based research and education program established to study a remarkable collection of artifacts from the first Chinese immigrant community that lived in San Jose, California. This project seeks to integrate its diverse collections to enable new research insights and to share materials for teaching.
In this panel, we will discuss Bibliopedia and our experiences using and adapting it for these projects, both of which continue to add to their wide arrays of digital and digitized historical materials.
Presenters: Claudia Engel (Stanford University), Mike Widner (Stanford University), Jason Heppler (Stanford University)
Presentation 2
Exploring Open Review in the Digital Scholarship Community with Web Annotation
Scientific publications have been recent leaders in exploring new forms of peer review: PLoS ONE and PubMed Commons are two well-known examples of a broader trend toward post-publication review. More recently, we have seen examples of new models of peer review in the humanities, including Kathleen Fitzpatrick's monograph Planned Obsolescence (published by NYU Press in 2011), which was openly peer reviewed at MediaCommons Press in fall 2009; the draft version remains available online for open discussion. In recent years, the digital humanities (DH) has established a significant presence on the web; digital humanists tweet and blog prolifically, and many of these scholars rely on aggregators such as dh + lib and DHNow to find out about new content. To this end, we will discuss the potential for leveraging the existing robustness of the digital scholarship and DH communities for these new models of peer review.
Michigan Publishing has a history in experimental forms of publishing, as well. In 2011, the U-M Press published the open access version of Hacking the Academy, edited by Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt; this edited volume "crowdsourced" its submissions in one week through a call for proposals online and on social media. Michigan Publishing has also recently implemented open peer review for an upcoming monograph using the Hypothes.is web annotation tool. The panel will discuss Michigan's exploration in this area and offer suggestions for future work.
The Hypothes.is project, funded by the Knight, Mellon, Sloan, Shuttleworth, and Helmsley foundations, is based on the Annotator project and W3C annotation standards currently under development. We will discuss the roadmap for Hypothes.is—what features have been implemented and which are yet to come, and how this and other tools might be used to drive forward the new models suggested by the panel.
Presenters: Jason Colman (University of Michigan), Alix Keener (University of Michigan)
Speakers
Director of Publishing Services, Michigan Publishing
CE
Academic Technology Specialist, Stanford University
Academic Technology Specialist, Stanford University
Historian of 20th c. America, using R as part of computational and spatial historical analysis and data visualization.
Digital Scholarship Librarian, University of Michigan
University of Michigan
Academic Technology Specialist, Stanford Libraries
Tuesday October 27, 2015 1:30pm - 2:30pm PDT
Salon A
Pinnacle Hotel