Brett Bobley
NEH CIO
Director, Office of Digital Humanities
We fund innovation in the
digital humanities
Stuff to Talk About
• Open Data in the Humanities
• Academic Libraries and Data Management
• Libraries as Partners in the Digital
Humanities
• Electronic Monographs in the Humanities
"There is no clear idea in the humanities of what
sustainable data, interoperable data, reusable
data should actually look like.“
-- Will Noel, University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ director of the
Special Collections Center
White House Open Science Champions of Change, Eric Kansa and Will Noel
Papyrology?
The Study of Ancient Writing on Papyrus
CC:BY. © Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen
Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens.
Epigraphy?
The Study of Ancient Inscriptions
on Stone, Metal, Ceramics
Letter of Valerian and Gallienus, AD 257.
CC:BY Published by Reynolds in Roueché, Aphrodisias in Late
Antiquity no. 1
Epigraphy: EpiDoc Project
Roger Bagnall, Tom Elliott, NYU; Josh Sosin, Hugh Cayless, Duke; Gabriel Bodard, KCL
CA.BERK.UC.HMA.L.8-3420
Papyrology: Papyri.info Project
Roger Bagnall, Tom Elliott, NYU; Josh Sosin, Hugh Cayless, Duke
CC:BY. © Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens.
Archaeology
The study of human activity in the past,
through the recovery and analysis of the
material culture and environmental data
that they have left behind.
Archaeology: Open Context Project
Sarah Whitcher Kansa, Eric Kansa, Alexandria Archive Institute
Archaeology: Open Context Project
Sarah Whitcher Kansa, Eric Kansa, Alexandria Archive Institute
Journal article
cites their
dataset located
in Open Context.
Archaeology: Open Context Project
Sarah Whitcher Kansa, Eric Kansa, Alexandria Archive Institute
Professor Ben Arbuckle led effort to build major
zooarchaeology dataset. Now other scholars (e.g.
Canan Cakilar, Arek Marciniak) using same data for
completely different studies.
Geography
Linking open data via geo mapping.
Ancient Mapping: Pleiades Project
Roger Bagnall, Tom Elliott, NYU; Richard Talbert, Ross Twele, UNC
Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems
Currently 40 Partners
Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems
Currently 40 Partners
What research data is there
around Byzantium? The Pelagios
linked data system automatically
provides relevant links to papyri
databases, epigraphic inscriptions,
modern books, ancient texts,
archeological dig data, and others
that all reference this exact
geographical site.
Let's Talk About…
Mummies
Anthropology: IMPACT Mummy Project
Randall Thompson, Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute
Andrew Nelson, University of Western Ontario
Museum scanning
an ancient
mummy specimen.
IMPACT has made
arrangements with
49 institutions, to
date, to share their
radiographic
mummy data.
Anthropology: IMPACT Mummy Project
Randall Thompson, Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute
Anthropology: IMPACT Mummy Project
Andrew Wade, McMaster University
“Evisceration
and
excerebration in
the Egyptian
mummification
tradition”
Philosophy
Stanford University
University of Tennessee at Martin
Philosophy
Colin Allen, Indiana University
Data Mining — Natural language
processing (NLP) techniques
generate statistical hypothesis
about the relationships among
philosophically-salient topics.
Expert Feedback — These
hypotheses are evaluated by
domain experts through online
interfaces.
Machine Reasoning — Our
machine reasoning program uses
feedback and statistical measures
to populate the ontology.
Philosophy
Colin Allen, Indiana University
This view of articles
on Alan Turing shows
heavier emphasis in
the SEP on formal
computational theory
versus more generic
discussions of
Turing's contributions
to discussions of the
nature of intelligence.
Let's Loop back to Art
History…
Art History, History
Will Noel, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
CC. Walters Art Museum Ms. W.86, Book of Hours, 13th Century
"There is no clear idea in the humanities of what
sustainable data, interoperable data, reusable
data should actually look like.“
-- Will Noel, Art Historian, University of Pennsylvania
Stuff to Talk About
• Open Data in the Humanities
• Academic Libraries and Data
Management
• Libraries as Partners in the Digital
Humanities
• Electronic Monographs in the Humanities
Data Management Plans
From a typical ODH grant guideline:
All proposals will be required to include both a
sustainability plan that discusses long-term support for
the project and a data management plan that discusses
how research data will be preserved.
Small Workshop Example DMP
Example from the University of Maryland
Types of Data
The proposed project is a workshop with an accompanying
demonstration “sandbox” of potential technologies to be
evaluated for a larger project on Afro-Caribbean labor,
migration, and the Panama Canal.
The following types of data will be produced: 1) a white
paper outlining opportunities for further work; 2) a digital
bibliography of sources related to Afro-Carribean labor;
3) a website for the workshop; [etc.]
Small Workshop Example DMP
•
•
•
•
Data and Metadata Formats
Data Storage and Security
Access, Dissemination, and Preservation
Role of the University of Maryland Library
Data Repository Example DMP
Example from Alexandria Archive Institute
NATURE OF THE DATA PRODUCED All query results
from Open Context are expressed as:
• JSON: The Javascript Object Notation format makes it
easier for third parties to develop applications using
Open Context’s querying services.
• Atom Syndication Format: Atom is a widely used
standard ideal for sharing lists of resources. Open
Context expresses all query results as paged Atom
feeds, using the feed-paging and archiving link relations.
Data Repository Example DMP
•
•
•
•
Metadata and Standards
Linked Data Entities
Versioning and Citation
Role of the California Digital Library
Stuff to Talk About
• Open Data in the Humanities
• Academic Libraries and Data Management
• Libraries as Partners in the Digital
Humanities
• Electronic Monographs in the Humanities
Libraries as DH Partners
• Exploring the Billions and Billions of
Words in the HathiTrust Corpus with
Bookworm: HathiTrust + Bookworm
Project
HathiTrust Digital Library, University of
Illinois, Rice University, Northeastern
University.
Libraries as DH Partners
• Folger Shakespeare Library's "Early
Modern Digital Agendas: Advanced Topics
Institute"
Folger Shakespeare Library
Libraries as DH Partners
• "Are We Speaking in Code?" (Voicing the
Craft & Tacit Understandings of Digital
Humanities Software Development)
The Scholars Lab at the University of
Virginia Library.
Libraries as DH Partners
• Scribe: Turning Text into Structured
Information through the Power of the
Crowd
New York Public Library in Partnership with
Zooniverse
Libraries as DH Partners
• Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
Everybody!
Humanities Commons/CORE Projects
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Modern Language Association
Rebecca Kennison, Columbia University Libraries' Center for Digital Research and Scholarship
• Humanities researchers increasingly wish to share their
scholarly output both within and outside their disciplines.
• In the past, scholarly societies served this role by
connecting their members at conferences and the like.
• How can societies (with small budgets) address the
needs of their members in a digital age where “open” is
becoming the norm?
Humanities Commons/Humanities CORE Projects
Modern Language Association
Columbia University Libraries' Center for Digital Research and Scholarship
• “Humanities CORE” is a shared, library-quality
repository for open access papers, articles, data, and
books. (Think arXiv for the humanities.)
• “Humanities Commons” is a shared networking space
that can be skinned & deployed by any scholarly society.
It will facilitate exchange of dialog, papers, and other
materials within & between disciplines.
Stuff to Talk About
• Open Data in the Humanities
• Academic Libraries and Data Management
• Libraries as Partners in the Digital
Humanities
• Electronic Monographs in the
Humanities
Georgetown University Symposium*
*These slides are from a talk I did at the Future of First Books, held at Georgetown
University. My thanks to them! They have a video on their website.
Let’s take a deliberately naïve, outsider’s
perspective on the “first book problem.”
Sometimes this perspective can shine an
interesting light on a problem.
What do most people think of when they
hear the term “first book?”
William
Faulkner’s First
Book
“…as sales of monographs decline,
reducing opportunities for scholars to
publish, a vital component of earning
tenure. How will new faculty members
now receive the credentialing they need
to earn tenure and move forward with
their careers?”
-- From the website of the Georgetown
symposium.
Let’s parse that….
“…as sales of monographs decline,
reducing opportunities for scholars to
publish, a vital component of earning
tenure. How will new faculty members now
receive the credentialing they need to earn
tenure and move forward with their
careers?”
-- From the website of today’s symposium.
So, that means…??
if sales decline then
not (humanities scholars = tenured)
What would William Faulkner’s editor think?
Could universities credential their employees
in some other way?
The economics of a first book
(the professor, the headhunter)
Sales numbers
Why a “First Book”?
(Why not skip to the second?)
We don’t write humanities monographs for riches. We
may do so in an attempt to earn academic fame. But
the career kickback for me was rapid promotion. In
the humanities, the monograph’s the thing.
-- Melissa Terras, in the Guardian, 30 September
2014.
Even with the changing publishing environment, some
things stay the same: the importance of the physical
single author monograph, and the importance of
academic patronage.
-- Melissa Terras, in the Guardian, 30 September 2014.
Will I publish another monograph without an
associated Open Access version? No….
-- Melissa Terras, in the Guardian, 30 September 2014
Why a “First Book”?
(Why not skip to the second?)
National Monograph Strategy
Ben Showers, Jisc
While the monograph remains a critical part of the
scholarly dialogue, especially within the humanities and
social sciences, sales are falling and as a result
researchers find it increasingly difficult to publish their
book-length research.
-- Jisc Report
Background
The Ideas
Next steps
Background
The Ideas
Next steps
Background
The Ideas
Next steps
The way forward for the United States?
Some Ideas Being Discussed:
• AAU-ARL Prospectus for an Institutionally Funded
First-Book Subvention
• New Mellon Foundation program to explore models
for subventing first books
Thank you!
Contact:
E-Mail: bbobley@neh.gov
Twitter: @brettbobley
Web: www.neh.gov/odh/