Educator + Infonista + Historian

*This week I've edited and republished several previous posts as part of my LBSC 751 Final. Previously I wrote about DH being a public service and the difficulty that humanities scholars have created for themselves by only viewing other scholars as their primary audience. This week’s readings for LBSC 751 follow right along that thread by examining humanities publication in this digital age. I heartily agree with Shawn Graham, Guy Massie, and Nadine Feuerherm’s chapter “ The HeritageCrowd Project: A case study in crowdsourcing public history ” in Writing history in the digital age: A born-digital, open-review volume , when they stated that “the need to reach out to the public has never been greater.” In these times of limited resources, humanities scholars need to stop talking to each other about how significant and relevant they are as interpreters of cultural heritage and prove it to the public through their actions! As Leslie Madsen-Brooks (2012) points out in “ ‘I neve...

*This week I've edited and republished several previous posts as part of my LBSC 751 Final. I decided to earn an MLS because I want to work on Digital Humanities projects. As a high school humanities teacher I frequently searched the web for primary sources to make history and literature more engaging for my students. I knew there should be tons of resources online but I just couldn’t find them! I decided to go to back to school to learn the technology skills necessary to increase the number and findability of quality primary sources on the web. Basic digital collections are useful for instruction but DH projects are more suited to educational ends. I left teaching to find a place for myself merging educational technology and digital collections in order to better the teaching of others. I enjoyed Trevor Mu&ntildeoz's blog post about DH and was excited to hear what he would have to say in class. Listening to students ask questions and the answers Mu&ntildeoz provide...

QUESTION 2. Faculty, English I'm teaching an English honors seminar this spring, and I'm hoping to include a component of primary research. There was widespread discussion in the Victorian popular periodical press of matters related to the concerns of this course -- physiological psychology, mesmerism, evolution, phrenology, vivisection, and so on. But I'm unsure what the best ways of helping students enter into the research might be, and what kind of access is available to original texts (presumably, principally online or in microforms). ANSWER So my first response to this request would be to ask for the catalog description and the syllabus if available so I could get a better grasp of the exact content and original format desired (only popular publications or scientific publications from the period as well? ), along the same lines of Alana’s request . In addition to Alana's description of databases sources available, I just wanted to point out that one of Research Por...

A couple weeks ago I came across a webpage that demonstrated how to install and use a CPAN module which would allow programmer to write Perl code in Latin ! I geeked out a little bit. I was/am amazed and amused that someone would want to write Perl in Latin. I can only read and write in Latin with the help of a dictionary. I am finally beginning to read Perl. The idea of combining the two blew my mind. My INFM 743 has taught me read through simple Perl code so that I'm now able to follow the code well enough to hypothesize about the outcome. Coding is no longer a mess of letters and symbols but it's starting to make sense. Yay! Though how literate I actually am will be shown by today's midterm. For now I need to practice my Perl basics, but someday I just might be able to practice Perl and Latin all at the same time. And wouldn't that be cool? Fine, it would be geeky, but I think geeky is cool! ;) Have a great day and keep smiling! :)

Melissa Terras’ blog post “The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it?” provides graphic evidence that when academics actively tweet and blog about their research that research is more likely to be downloaded. SO? Article downloads are important for tenure. Articles in institutional repositories are accessible to a wider audience than articles only available in subscription databases. Twitter and Blogs can be effectively used to increase awareness of articles that have been published and provide links to those articles. Applications! Keep blogging! Blog posts that are intended for more than a personal audience should be tweeted (maybe I should use my twitter account for more than cyber stalking DHers, huh?). Consider adding a page to the blog dedicated to past publications and current research (in my case only the latter applies). Have a great day and keep smiling! :)

The last two weeks were a flurry of group projects, presentations, and Super Storm Sandy. Amongst them were the subject area presentations in LBSC 751. The groups presented about reference resources available for Art History, Folklore (my group), English, History, Film Studies, Psychology, and Theater. Art History gave an interesting presentation which focused primarily on how their discipline has been incredibly slow to embrace digital research and scholarship. While they are late adopters, this means that the digital tools available to Art Historians are state of the art. Samples of digital resources available to Art Historians included: The Medici Archive Project , seriously so cool! ARTstor Google Art Project Oxford Art Online Folklore was actually an early adapter to digital resources and scholarship. Some of the first educational websites were dedicated to folklore content (Library of Congress’s American Memory Project). However this means that many of their web resource...