Brett Bobley NEH CIO Director, Office of Digital Humanities We fund innovation in the digital...

Brett BobleyNEH 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 ProjectRoger Bagnall, Tom Elliott, NYU; Josh Sosin, Hugh Cayless, Duke; Gabriel Bodard, KCL

CA.BERK.UC.HMA.L.8-3420

Papyrology: Papyri.info ProjectRoger Bagnall, Tom Elliott, NYU; Josh Sosin, Hugh Cayless, Duke

CC

:BY. ©

Heidelberger G

esamtverzeichnis der griechischen P

apyrusurkunden 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 ProjectSarah Whitcher Kansa, Eric Kansa, Alexandria Archive Institute

Journal article cites their dataset located in Open Context.

Archaeology: Open Context ProjectSarah 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.

Archaeology: Open Context ProjectSarah Whitcher Kansa, Eric Kansa, Alexandria Archive Institute

Geography

Linking open data via geo mapping.

Ancient Mapping: Pleiades ProjectRoger Bagnall, Tom Elliott, NYU; Richard Talbert, Ross Twele, UNC

Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open SystemsCurrently 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.

Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open SystemsCurrently 40 Partners

Let's Talk About… Mummies

Anthropology: IMPACT Mummy ProjectRandall Thompson, Saint Luke's Mid America Heart InstituteAndrew 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 ProjectRandall Thompson, Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute

Anthropology: IMPACT Mummy ProjectAndrew Wade, McMaster University

“Evisceration and excerebration in the Egyptian mummification tradition”

PhilosophyStanford UniversityUniversity of Tennessee at Martin

PhilosophyColin 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.

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.

PhilosophyColin Allen, Indiana University

Let's Loop back to Art History…

Art History, HistoryWill 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 MarylandTypes of DataThe 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 ProjectsKathleen Fitzpatrick, Modern Language AssociationRebecca 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 ProjectsModern Language AssociationColumbia 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 thennot (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 StrategyBen 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.govTwitter: @brettbobleyWeb: www.neh.gov/odh/