Hi! Jim McGrath here. Northeastern’s community of digital scholars has had quite the busy few weeks, so we’d like to highlight some recent events, discussions, and research.
-Jen LaBarbera, Northeastern’s National Digital Stewardship Resident (who hosted last week’s fantastic roundtable discussion of digital preservation and digital humanities work), provided an update on her work over at The Signal, The Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation blog. Jen has been an invaluable component of the preservation work tied to Our Marathon and Northeastern’s Latino collections. We will be sorry to see her go when her residency ends!
-Yesterday, Northeastern was privileged to host an ACRL New England event: “Open Humanities and Digital Scholarship: Access, Innovation, and Support.” Speakers included Martin Paul Eve (whose most recent book, Open Access and The Humanities: Contexts, Controversies, and The Future is available for download for free as an open access edition here), Dan Cohen (who updated attendees on recent work done by The Digital Public Library of America), Peggy Glahn (who discussed the recent crowdfunding efforts of Reveal Digital), Paul Fyfe (who championed the value of “transformative use” over “fair use” when considering open access opportunities and questions of copyright), and Amanda Rust (who highlighted Wikipedia’s use by librarians, instructors, and fandoms, as well as promoted New England Wikimedians).
Hillary Corbett has graciously Storified a collection of tweets that made use of the event’s hashtag (#odhs15). The conversations also extended into Northeastern’s Digital Humanities Open Office Hours series: Paul Fyfe was kind enough to take us on a tour through a dizzying array (sometimes literally) of cultural heritage visualizations, including Victoria’s Lost Pavilion, the Virtual Paul’s Cross Project, and “What Jane Saw.” We had a great turnout for Paul’s discussion (our best yet this semester!), and we hope you can join us at our remaining meetings this spring: our next meeting in on Tuesday!
–Viral Texts has finally gone mainstream with its very own Twitter account! Follow along to learn about the amazing discoveries Ryan Cordell, Abby Mullen, and the rest of the Viral Texts team turn up in their work. In related news, Ryan will be discussing Northeastern’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks and digital curricula at Duke next Wednesday.