DLF Forum 2015

Bring your lunch—this session will get started at 12:15.

Digital humanities practice and practitioners have long found a welcoming home in libraries, and DH has long loved its libraries. Library workers around the world have begun organizing around digital humanities, forming professional organizations to address shared issues and needs.

The international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) recently established a "Libraries and Digital Humanities" Special Interest Group (L&DH SIG), with founding conveners from France, Germany, Mexico, Norway, and the U.S., and a stated mission "to provide the connective tissue" between ADHO organizations and DH initiatives in library organizations.

Our problem is how best to organize ourselves: the many national and international organizations operating in both library and DH spaces share both a desire for interconnectedness and a tradition of individual identities (and of course a shared distaste for duplication of efforts). The combinatorics of this complex set of relations, made more so by our international mission, leads to a frightening proliferation of organizations and organizational ties.

The possible resolutions of this confusion are also legion: Should we seek to unite all these "Lib+DH" organizations into a whole ("One Ring to rule them all"), sending emissaries to like-minded professional organizations? Or should we allow diversity (and chaos) to reign, relying on informal networks to relay information and share expertise? While both options are unrealistic extremes, in fact each possible configuration leads to very practical questions: Should we share email lists, membership lists, publications, meetings, officers?

The ADHO L&DH SIG is of course seeking to establish a relationship with DLF, as well as with many other organizations around the globe. With DLF, as with these others, we have substantial overlap in both formal and informal membership.

We're seeking appropriate and effective organizational structures, governance models, and working metaphors for our shared libraries + digital humanities effort.

Bring your lunch—this session will get started at 12:15.

Service hubs in the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) network offer a unique statewide or regional opportunity for libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to pool together resources, whether staff, equipment, funding, or expertise, in order to contribute digital collections records to the DPLA. Currently, the DPLA has almost twenty such service hubs around the country, and its ultimate goal is to cover all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Along with the content hubs from single institutions, the service hubs form the backbone of DPLA's aggregated network of data providers.

The DPLA provides good documentation on how to become a service hub, as well as consultative support for potential service hub applicants. However, regional contexts differ widely -- and not just in terms of harvesting mechanisms and approaches to metadata standardization. As new service hubs form, they need to decide upon governance, policies, funding sources, staffing models, workflows, outreach strategies and other challenging decision points. They often introduce their libraries and archives community to DPLA's open sharing practices, and typically engage that community in establishing standards and best practices.

This working session proposes to bring together various DPLA service hub implementers and address, as a group, the kinds of challenges we faced, or are facing, in standing up our service hubs. What governance and funding models are emerging for service hubs across the network? How have local workflows and staffing been impacted, revised, and sustained for ongoing participation in the DPLA? What are some shareable lessons learned for the community? Besides fruitful discussion of the DPLA service hub experience, the goal is to arrive at an understanding, if not a drafted outline, of replicable hub models that could be further fleshed out, documented, and distributed to organizations or collaboratives wishing to create a service hub.

The DLF Project Managers Group provides a forum for sharing project management methodologies, best practices, latest trends and tools, alongside broader issues such as portfolio management and cross-organizational communication. The DLF Project Managers Group will host a lunch at this year’s forum with breakout group discussions. Come join in on the discussion and connect with other project managers.

Agenda:

 

• Round robin introductions (10 min)
• Break into discussion groups (30 min)
• Report out on group discussion (15 min)
• Discuss next steps & announcements (10 min)

 

Grab your lunch and join us.

Head down to the lower level (Cordova Level), and grab your lunch—this session, sponsored by Plotly, will get started at 12:15.

**10/26/15** Due to travel issues, the presenter will be attending virtually.

This talk will review the new wave of online tools available for research, data analysis, data visualization, collaboration, publication, and reproducibility. Particular attention will be paid to the importance of these tools for open science and open data.

Presenter: Matt Sundquist (Plotly)

Following up on the last year's "<a href="http://www.diglib.org/forums/2014forum/program/02z/">Using Confluence & JIRA for Project Management</a>," this session will be a Birds of a Feather discussion on continuing developments integrating Confluence and JIRA or other collaboration tools and workflow tracking solutions in digital initiatives and development. It will be an opportunity to meet with other members of the community, share experiences and demos. This BoF seeks to promote interaction among institutions using these tools, and build upon best practices.

Data analysis tools and techniques continue to evolve and become more common in humanities research. Methods range from word counts and term frequency visualization to more sophisticated processes such as topic modeling, named-entity recognition, and network analysis. Unfortunately, finding usable data can be challenging for researchers. Over the past two decades libraries have digitized, described, and provided online access to unique collections, yet these efforts don't always meet the needs of digital humanists and other computationally-inclined scholars. For example, interface development for text collections typically feature page turners rather than bulk download features and usually provide page images instead of plain text. Where bulk downloads are available, the data and metadata are often not formatted for common analytical techniques.

As a result, researchers who are not already skilled at manipulating data end up performing hours of tedious work to prepare data for analysis. And once that work is done, there isn't an easy way to share resulting data sets with other researchers. Additionally, for instructors who want to train students in digital methods, considerable data preparation can be a barrier to instruction. By providing simple methods of access to humanities data collections, libraries will be better positioned not only to support the research and pedagogical needs of both novice and advanced humanities data users but also to ensure continued use of library collections.

During this session participants will focus on gathering collection use cases, examples of approaches to collection repackaging and re-documentation, methods of dissemination (Github, Fedora, etc.), methods of evaluating re-use, and possibilities for collaborative Humanities data provision.

Presenters: Thomas Padilla (Michigan State University), Stewart Varner (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Laurie Allen (Haverford College), Patricia Hswe (Penn State University), Sarah Potvin (Texas A&M University), Elizabeth Russey Roke (Emory University), John Russell (University of Oregon)
Co-author: Zach Coble (New York University) 

The DLF Assessment Working Group will host an assessment-themed lunch, which will build on their presentation, Collaborative Efforts to Develop Best Practices in Assessment: A Progress Report, (Monday, October 26th, 1:30-2:30). The lunch will include facilitated discussions among attendees and coordinators of each working group, including citations, analytics, cost assessment, and user studies. Discussions will focus on determining the next steps for working groups, identifying areas for new working groups, and connecting new participants with preferred working groups.