Digital Humanities + Libraries Series

Bergis Jules
University and Political Papers Archivist, University of California, Riverside Library

The public's use of social media platforms to document events of historical significance, to engage in political conversations, or to share and explore cultural experiences, continues to be widespread and this presents new opportunities for archivists interested in working with social media to build collections. But practices developed for more manageable traditional archival materials, don't always apply well in the era of social media, creating significant ethical dilemmas for archivists. The Documenting the Now project is interested in addressing these issues by helping to build tools and develop practices in community with archivists interested in the ethical collection, access,and preservation of social media content.

Bergis Jules is the University and Political Papers Archivist at the University of California, Riverside library, where he manages university archives, political papers, African American collections, and community archives projects. He is one of the principal investigators on a 2015 funded project for social media archiving from the Andrew Mellon Foundation titled, Documenting the Now: Supporting Scholarly Use and Preservation of Social Media Content

Collections as Data is an effort by librarians, archivists, and museums professionals to strategize best practices for developing, describing, providing access to, and encouraging reuse of collections that support computationally-driven research and teaching. Thomas Padilla, Principal Investigator for the IMLS-funded Collections as Data Initiative, will talk about the aims and interests of those engaged in these efforts and the kinds of research and communities that cultural heritage collections rendered as data can support.

Thomas Padilla is Visiting Digital Research Services Librarian at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He publishes, presents, and teaches widely on digital scholarship, digital collections, Humanities data, data curation, and data information literacy. He is Principal Investigator of the Institute of Museum and Library Services supported, Collections as Data.

Thomas Padilla
Visiting Digital Research Services Librarian, University of Nevada Las Vegas

Thomas is a member of the Association for Computers and the Humanities Executive Council (2017-2021), the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities Executive Council, the WhatEVery1Says Advisory Board, the Integrating digital humanities into the web of scholarship with SHARE Advisory Board, and the ARL Fellowship for Digital and Inclusive Excellence Advisory Group. Thomas serves as an Editor for dh + lib Data Praxis. Thomas is a regular instructor at the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching Institute (HILT).

Jennifer Wolfe
Digital Initiatives Manager, Newberry Library

Matthew Krc
Digital Initiatives Librarian, Newberry Library

Like many smaller cultural heritage institutions, the Newberry -- a Chicago-based independent research library specializing in the humanities -- is rich in collections but relatively poor in digital infrastructure. Lacking in-house web design or development staff, librarians have struggled to keep up with demand for digital scholarship support. Adopting a toolkit of free and open-source software (FOSS) programs has helped turn things around, enabling a mostly pain-free process for creating professional-looking sites with specialized functionality. Learn about the Newberry's resources showcasing digital collections, crowdsourcing, digital pedagogy, and open data, how you can participate in these initiatives, and how you can use FOSS tools in your own digital scholarship projects.

Jen Wolfe worked as a librarian at Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture and the University of Iowa Libraries before becoming the Newberry's Digital Initiatives Manager. She was awarded the Center for Research Libraries Primary Source Award for Access in 2013, and co-authored "DIY History: Redesigning a Platform for a Transcription Crowdsourcing Initiative" in Outreach: Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections (Rowman & Littlefield: 2014).

Matt Krc is the Digital Initiatives Librarian in the Department of Digital Initiatives and Services at the Newberry, a Chicago-based independent research library specializing in the humanities. Matt's areas of expertise include digital collection building, cultural heritage crowdsourcing, and metadata workflows; he holds a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Digital Art History Program at the Getty Research Institute sponsors and advises collaborative art-historical research and publication projects that facilitate access to and analysis of digitized objects, particularly those in the Institute's collections. Emily Pugh, who oversees the program, will provide an overview of the DAH at the GRI, detailing the kinds of projects the program undertakes and the skills represented in the DAH team. In doing so, she will highlight two DAH projects in particular: Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles archive, and PhotoTech, which focuses on digitizing a significant portion of the GRI’s Photo Archive.

Emily Pugh
Digital Humanities Specialist, Getty Research Institute

Emily Pugh is the Digital Humanities Specialist at the Getty Research Institute, where she oversees the GRI’s Digital Art History Program. Prior to her time at the GRI, Emily served as the first Robert H. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate, with special responsibilities for digital humanities projects, at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. She is a specialist in digital art history but also in architectural history, having received her PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2008.

Erin Glass
Digital Scholarship Librarian, UCSD

The digital humanities offer libraries an exciting opportunity to foster participatory knowledge production and critical digital citizenship on campus. Emerging, easy-to-use, and often free digital tools enable students, scholars, and librarians to transform private research and learning into interactive, collaborative, and public facing research projects that utilize or contribute to library collections. Simultaneously, the facilitation of these projects grants libraries the opportunity to train participants in critically assessing the ethical, political, and intellectual implications of digital tools that shape both our research and everyday lives.

In this talk, I will describe several digital humanities projects at UC San Diego that align with these directives such as KNIT (a digital commons for institutions of higher education in San Diego), the Race and Oral History Project (a student-driven, digitally-accessible archive about race in San Diego), and the Digital Humanities Research Group. I will offer suggestions for how these projects and their underlying principles might be repurposed at other institutions and hope to end with a discussion about the ongoing challenges and opportunities of cultivating digital humanities practices within a library context.

Erin Rose Glass is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at the UC San Diego Library, where she helps academics critically understand, apply, and shape digital technologies used in knowledge production. Her recently-completed dissertation, Software of the Oppressed: Reprogramming the Invisible Discipline, examines the politics and history of digital technology at the often overlooked site of academic and student writing. As an advocate for community driven software, she directs KNIT, a digital commons for UC San Diego, the San Diego Community College District, and San Diego State University that facilitates publicly-engaged, participatory, and collaborative research and teaching. She is also co-founder of Social Paper, a non-proprietary platform for socializing student writing and feedback funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Kate Zwaard
Director of Digital Strategy, Library of Congress

Kate Zwaard will discuss creating a sustainable and inclusive innovation culture in cultural memory organizations, recent experiments in LC Labs, and user-centered design for engaging all users.

Kate Zwaard is the Director of Digital Strategy at the Library of Congress. In that role, she is working to empower the nation’s oldest cultural institution to leverage technology to reach as many people as powerfully as possible.

A dynamic leader dedicated to using evidence and empathy to enable change, Kate brings passion and innovation to her work at the Library. In 2017, she spearheaded the launch of LC Labs, a small team charged with incubating innovative projects and serving as an inviting human interface to the Library’s digital services. Kate joined the Library in 2012 as an engineering manager, leading the team building the Library’s digital repository and serving as a technical advisor to curatorial groups who deal with Library digital collections.