Humanities Data Curation: Building the Foundation of the Humanities Collaboratory

Harriett Green

English and Digital Humanities Librarian

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

ACRL Research Program, “Data Curation as a Form of Collaborative Research,” June 24, 2012

Is there Data in the humanities?

Humanities research traditionally centers around analog materials: books, images, manuscripts

Digital humanities = data

What is the digital humanities?

“The application of algorithmically facilitated search, retrieval, and critical processes that, originating in humanities-based work, have been demonstrated to have application far beyond. Associated with critical theory, this area is typified by interpretative studies that assist in our intellectual and aesthetic understanding of humanistic works.”

A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (2004)

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Digital Humanities Research

Digital Humanities Projects Data

XML and XSLT files for TEI and marked up text GIS mapping Iterative Visualizations Image files Software versions and tool prototypes Mueller, “Exploration and Curation,” Project

Bamboo Newsletter, spring 2012

Humanities Data Curation: Where Does it Fit?

Studies in humanities data curation My experiences in humanities data curation Looking ahead

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DH: curator scholar

“Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching landscape. It recasts the scholar as curator and the curator as scholar, and, in so doing, sets out both to reinvigorate scholarly practice by means of an expanded set of possibilities and demands, and to renew the scholarly mission of museums, libraries, and archives.”

—Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (2009)

Humanities Data Curation: Studies

ACLS, Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2006)

Summer Humanities Data Curation Summit, 2011 Muñoz and Renear, “Issues in Humanities Data

Curation” discussion paper http://cirssweb.lis.illinois.edu/paloalto/whitepaper/premeeting/

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Collaboratories

“A center without walls, in which researchers can perform their research without regard to physical location-interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, and accessing information in digital libraries.”

—W.A. Wulf, “The Collaboratory Opportunity,” Science (1993)

Tyler and Skinner, New Roles for New Times: Digital Curation for Preservation (2011)

https://monk.library.illinois.edu A web-based text mining application hosted at the

University of Illinois Library Contains a closed corpus of curated texts marked up in TEI

and POS tagging Texts selected from public collections (Documenting the

American South) and proprietary (EEBO) Users can analyze a subset of texts with tools based on

SEASR and Meandre

Challenges of Data Curation with MONK

Human resources Cyberinfrastructure Documentation and maintenance history Set goals for long-term viability?

Partner Institutions: Australian National University Indiana University Northwestern University Tufts University University of California, Berkeley University of Chicago University of Illinois, Urbana-

Champaign University of Maryland University of Oxford University of Wisconsin, Madison

Mission: “How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?”

http://www.projectbamboo.org

Hathi Trust Research Center http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc

Google Digital Humanities Awards Recipient Interviews Report (linked from HTRC website):

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/29936

Technical Objectives: HTRC will provide a persistent and sustainable structure to

enable original and cutting edge research Provision secure computational and data environment for

scholars to perform research using HathiTrust Digital Library

Looking Ahead

DH Curation Guide: http://guide.dhcuration.org

White paper on findings from Humanities Data Curation Summit:

http://cirssweb.lis.illinois.edu/paloalto/whitepaper/

Thank you!

Harriett Green

English and Digital Humanities Librarian

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

green19@illinois.edu

Twitter: @greenharr