Tag Archives: Digital Publishing

What Are the Digital Humanities?

Posted on by
Reply

Introduction

As new technology has revolutionized the ways all fields gather information, scholars have integrated the use of digital software to enhance traditional models of research. While digital software may seem only relevant in scientific research, digital projects play a crucial role in disciplines not traditionally associated with computer science. One of the biggest digital initiatives actually takes place in fields such as English, History, Philosophy, and more in what is known as the digital humanities. The digital humanities are an innovative way to incorporate digital data and computer science within the confines of humanities-based research. Although some aspects of the digital humanities are exclusive to specific fields, most digital humanities projects are interdisciplinary in nature. Below are three general impacts that projects within the digital humanities have enhanced the approaches to humanities research for scholars in these fields.

Digital Access to Resources

Digital access is a way of taking items necessary for humanities research and creating a system where users can easily access these resources. This work involves digitizing physical items and formatting them to store them on a database that permits access to its contents. Since some of these databases may hold thousands or millions of items, digital humanists also work to find ways so that users may locate these specific items quickly and easily. Thus, digital access requires both the digitization of physical items and their storage on a database as well as creating a path for scholars to find them for research purposes.

Providing Tools to Enhance Interpretation of Data and Sources

The digital humanities can also change how we can interpret sources and other items used in the digital humanities. Data Visualization software, for example, helps simplify large, complex datasets and presents this data in ways more visually appealing. Likewise, text mining software uncovers trends through analyzing text that potentially saves hours or even days for digital humanists had they analyzed the text through analog methods. Finally, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software allows for users working on humanities projects to create special types of maps that can both assist in visualizing and analyzing data. These software programs and more have dramatically transformed the ways digital humanists interpret and visualize their research.

Digital Publishing

The digital humanities have opened new opportunities for scholars to publish their work. In some cases, digital publishing is simply digitizing an article or item in print to expand the reach of a given publication to readers who may not have direct access to the physical version. Other times, some digital publishing initiatives publish research that is only accessible in a digital format. One benefit to digital publishing is that it opens more opportunities for scholars to publish their research and expands the audience for their research than just publishing in print. As a result, the digital humanities provide scholars more opportunities to publish their research while also expanding the reach of their publications.

How Can I Learn More About the Digital Humanities?

There are many ways to get involved both at the University of Illinois as well as around the globe. Here is just a list of a few examples that can help you get started on your own digital humanities project:

  • HathiTrust is a partnership through the Big Ten Academic Alliance that holds over 17 million items in its collection.
  • Internet Archive is a public, multimedia database that allows for open access to a wide range of materials.
  • The Scholarly Commons page on the digital humanities offers many of the tools used for data visualization, text mining, GIS software, and other resources that enhance analysis within a humanities project. There are also a couple of upcoming Savvy Researcher workshops that will go over how to use software used in the digital humanities
  • Sourcelab is an initiative through the History Department that works to publish and preserve digital history projects. Many other humanities fields have equivalents to Sourcelab that serves the specific needs of a given discipline.

Big Ten Academic Alliance Open Access Developments

Posted on by
Reply

Last month, the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) made a series of announcements regarding its support of Open Access (OA) initiatives across its member libraries. Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use those articles fully in the digital environment. Put plainly, Open Access ensures that anyone, anywhere, can access and use information. By supporting these developments in OA, the BTAA aims to make information more accessible to the university community, to benefit scholars by eliminating paywalls to research, and to help researchers to publish their own work.

Big ten academic alliance logo

On July 19, the BTAA announced the finalization of a three-year collective agreement with the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), a charitable organization dedicated to publishing open access scholarship with no author-facing article processing charges. OLH publishes academic journals from across the humanities disciplines, as well as hosting its own multidisciplinary journal. This move was made possible thanks to the OLH Open Consortial Offer, an initiative that offers consortia, societies, networks and scholarly projects the opportunity to join the Open Library of Humanities Library Partnership Subsidy system as a bloc, enabling each institution to benefit from a discount. Through this agreement, the BTAA hopes to expand scholarly publishing opportunities available to its member libraries, including the University of Illinois.

Following the finalization of the OLH agreement, the BTAA announced on July 21 the finalization of a three-year collective action agreement with MIT Press that provides Direct to Open (D2O) access for all fifteen BTAA member libraries. Developed over two years with the support of the Arcadia Fund, D2O gives institutions the opportunity to harness collective action to support access to knowledge. As participating libraries, the Big Ten members will help open access to all new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections from 2022. As a BTAA member, the University of Illinois will support the shifting publication of new MIT Press titles to open access. The agreement also gives the University of Illinois community access to MIT Press eBook backfiles that were not previously published open access.

By entering into these agreements, the BTAA aims to promote open access publishing across its member libraries. On how these initiatives will impact the University of Illinois scholarly community, Head of Scholarly Communication & Publishing Librarian Dan Tracy said:

“The Library’s support of OLH and MIT Press is a crucial investment in open access publishing infrastructure. The expansion of open access publishing is a great opportunity to increase the reach and impact of faculty research, but common models of funding open access through article processing charges makes it challenging for authors in the humanities and social sciences particularly to publish open access. The work of OLH to publish open access journals, and MIT Press to publish open access books, without any author fees while also providing high quality, peer reviewed scholarly publishing opportunities provides greater equity across disciplines.”

Since these announcements, the BTAA has continued to support open access initiatives among its member libraries. Most recently, the BTAA and the University of Michigan Press signed a three-year agreement on August 5 that provides multi-year support for the University of Michigan Press’ new open access model Fund to Mission. Based on principles of equity, justice, inclusion, and accessibility, Fund to Mission aims to transition upwards of 75% of the press’ monograph publications into open access resources by the end of 2023. This initiative demonstrates a move toward a more open, sustainable infrastructure for the humanities and social sciences, and is one of several programs that university presses are developing to expand the reach of their specialist publications. As part of this agreement, select BTAA members, University of Illinois included, will have greater access to significant portions of the University of Michigan’s backlist content.

The full release and more information about recent BTAA announcements can be found on the BTAA website. To learn more about Open Access efforts at the University of Illinois, visit our OA Guide.

It Takes a Campus – Episode Two with Harriett Green

Posted on by
Reply

Image has the text supporting digital scholarship, it takes a campus with icons of microphone and broadcast symbol

 

 

Resources mentioned:

SPEC Kit No. 357

University of Illinois Library Copyright Guide

 

For the transcript, click on “Continue reading” below.

Continue reading →

Introducing the Illinois Open Publishing Network: Digital Publishing from the University of Illinois Library

Posted on by
Reply

The face of scholarly publishing is changing and libraries are taking on the role of publisher for many scholarly publications, including those that don’t fit the mold of traditional presses. Initiatives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are working to address strides in digital publishing, increasing momentum for open access research, and the need for sustainable publishing models. This year alone, The Illinois Open Publishing Network (IOPN) has released five new open-access multi-modal scholarly publications. IOPN represents a network of publications and publishing initiatives hosted at the University Library, working towards high-quality open-access scholarship in digital media. IOPN assists authors with a host of publishing services—copyright, peer review, and even providing assistance in learning the publishing tools themselves and strategizing their publications in what for many is a new mode of writing.

Continue reading →

Meet Dan Tracy, Information Sciences and Digital Humanities Librarian

Posted on by
Reply

This latest installment of our series of interviews with Scholarly Commons experts and affiliates features Dan Tracy, Information Sciences and Digital Humanities Librarian.

What is your background and work experience?

I originally come from a humanities background and completed a PhD in literature specializing in 20th century American literature, followed by teaching as a lecturer for two years. I had worked a lot with librarians during that time with my research and teaching. When you’re a PhD student in English, you teach a lot of rhetoric, and I also taught some literature classes. As a rhetoric instructor I worked closely with the Undergraduate Library’s instruction services, which exposed me to the work librarians do with instruction.

Then I did a Master’s in Library and Information Science here, knowing that I was interested in being an academic librarian, probably something in the area of being a subject librarian in the humanities. And then I began this job about five years ago. So I’ve been here about five years now in this role. And just began doing Digital Humanities over the summer. I had previously done some liaison work related to digital humanities, especially related to digital publishing, and I had been doing some research related to user experience and digital publishing as related to DH publishing tools.

What led you to this field?

A number of things. One was having known quite a number of people who went into librarianship who really liked it and talked about their work. Another was my experience working with librarians in terms of their instruction capacity. I was interested in working in an academic environment and I was interested in academic librarianship and teaching. And also, especially as things evolved, after I went back for the degree in library and information science, I also found a lot of other things to be interested in as well, including things like digital humanities and data issues.

What is your research agenda?

My research looks at user experience in digital publishing. Primarily in the context of both ebook formats and newer experimental forms of publication such as web and multi-modal publishing with tools like Scalar, especially from the reader side, but also from the creator side of these platforms.

Do you have any favorite work-related duties?

As I mentioned before, instruction was an initial draw to librarianship. I like anytime I can teach and work with students, or faculty for that matter, and help them learn new things. That would probably be a top thing. And I think increasingly the chances I get to work with digital collections issues as well. I think there’s a lot of exciting work to do there in terms of delivering our digital collections to scholars to complete both traditional and new forms of research projects.

What are some of your favorite underutilized resources that you would recommend to researchers?

I think there’s a lot. I think researchers are already aware of digital primary sources in general, but I do think there’s a lot more for people to explore in terms of collections we’ve digitized and things we can do with those through our digital library, and through other digital library platforms, like DPLA (Digital Public Library of America).

I think that a lot of our digital image collections are especially underutilized. I think people are more aware that we have digitized text sources, but not aware of our digitized primary sources that are images that have value of research objects, including analyzed computational analysis. We also have more and more access to the text data behind our various vendor platforms, which is a resource various researchers on campus increasingly need but don’t always know is available.

If you could recommend one book to beginning researchers in your field, what would you recommend?

If you’re just getting started, I think a good place to look is at the Debates in the Digital Humanities books, which are collections of essays that touch on a variety of critical issues in digital humanities research and teaching. This is a good place to start if you want to get a taste of the ongoing debates and issues. There are open access copies of them available online, so they are easy to get to.

Dan Tracy can be reached at dtracy@illinois.edu.