Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 380.
Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
Hosted by DH-Cologne
www.dhhumanist.org
Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
Date: 2024-01-09 11:14:25+00:00
From: Alan Liu <ayliu@english.ucsb.edu>
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.377: call for collaborators: infrastructure for histories
Dear Gerben,
"Histories of Digital Humanities" is a very important initiative. It would
be helpful to know what is preferred and acceptable as input materials for
ingest into your Nextcloud instance from the early digital and Internet era
(e.g., text, code, databases, or files in Gopher, HTML, image, video,
audio, and even VRML) and how those materials should be associated via
metadata or otherwise documented to represent their relationality--that
is, the integral wholeness of DH projects. A sample or mock-up (even just
hand-drawn) of your planned Omeka or end-point website would be useful to
envision what you intend as the user's view of the results.
I ask because my own early materials--for example, any representation of my
Voice of the Shuttle website dating from 1994 (in both its static HTML and
later database-to-HTML versions, plus ancillary materials) includes a chaos
of materials, https://liu.english.ucsb.edu/voice-of-the-shuttle-vos/. I
would not know what to submit, or how to relate the materials. Remediated
and migrated versions of original DH materials are also an issue. Early DH
is not unlike the ephemeral creative digital works of the Electronic
Literature Organization [ELO], for whose ELO's Born-Again Bits remediation
project I was a lead author back in 2005.
(https://www.eliterature.org/pad/bab.html).
Or, another comparison from the artist's domain: the problem of archiving
DH at its origin is conceptually akin to that of the digital "Archiving the Avant
Garde" project in the 2000s
(https://www.proquest.com/docview/2150720?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals).
That was an art archiving project that confronted such issues, for
instance, as how to archive an installation like Ed Ruscha's chocolate
works
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/arts/design/ed-ruscha-chocolate-room-moma.html).
The equivalent problem for archiving DH is: what should early DH folks send
to your "Histories of Digital Humanities" project--their finished
chocolate, their beans (not just text and HTML but, for instance, jpg's,
css, javascript), their underlying storage files (e.g., databases), or all?
This is not unlike the more general issue today of what to deposit in
so-called TRUST (Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability
and Technology) data repositories or similar institutional data
repositories). (On TRUST, see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0486-7.)
For example, projects in many fields, including the humanities, now upload
materials to Zenodo both both as a repository and, increasingly, as a primary
publication venue
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenodo) (https://zenodo.org/).
What should actually be deposited in such repositories, and in what development
states?
P.S. What are the intellectual property implications of ingesting materials
through Nextcloud (https://nextcloud.com/)? Even if your final output is
open, will there be a Nextcloud claim or ability to reuse transient states
of materials?
--Alan
On Mon, Jan 8, 2024 at 9:56 PM Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org> wrote:
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 377.
> Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
> Hosted by DH-Cologne
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
> Date: 2024-01-05 17:02:10+00:00
> From: Gerben Zaagsma <gerben.zaagsma@eui.eu>
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.369: name of the first ALLC/ACH
> conference; archiving
>
> Dear all,
>
> I am very happy to see the discussion that followed Alan Liu’s question and
> wanted to chime in with some news.
>
> In the past months myself and Julianne Nyhan have been setting up a project
> infrastructure for Histories of Digital Humanities which we aim to publish
> online before the Summer of 2024.
>
> This will consist of a project website, which should function as an
> information
> hub, a Zotero group library and an Omeka S instance which we plan use to
> present
> materials and function as an online archive. We also started to use an
> internal
> Nextcloud instance to gather materials, but for copyright reasons this
> cannot be
> opened up; the idea is that we use this internal cloud archive to feed into
> public Omeka sites (following copyright clearance). The overall idea is to
> start
> small and slowly build up resources and a community around them. The whole
> thing
> is currently hosted on Reclaim’s EU servers (which offers stellar support
> btw).
>
> Those of you who are interested in collaborating in this project, please
> do get
> in touch. The ultimate aim is to create a community of people interested
> in and
> working on all aspects of histories of digital humanities.
>
> To give a little bit of background, my own work and new book project is
> currently about the history of digital history, set within the broader
> context
> of how new technologies have shaped historical research practices and
> knowledge
> production since at least the late 19th century. A programmatic article I
> wrote
> on this is currently under review and I hope it will be out this year. At
> the
> C²DH in Luxembourg we are now digitising relevant materials, at the moment
> mostly those pertaining to the history and computing era from the 1980s to
> early
> 2000s (AHC proceedings, Halbgraue Reihe zur historischen Fachinformatik,
> some
> newsletters). I also plan a lot of archival research this year and started
> collecting web archives of the national branches of the AHC.
>
> As Manfred Thaller suggests, there is plenty of work to be done for the
> period
> 1980-2000, let alone earlier decades. And materials, at least for the
> discpline
> of history, come in many different languages (not just English, German,
> French
> but also Dutch, Russian, Polish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish to name a few
> ). I
> have over the past few years digitised many materials myself, and I am
> sure many
> others have too. Finding a way to integrate all this into an online
> resource
> would be a gret step toward filling a documentary void and creating
> building
> blocks for future DH histories.
>
> And a final note: those of you interested in the history if digital
> history keep
> an eye out on this conference: https://dhdhi.hypotheses.org/8726.
>
> With best regards,
> Gerben Zaagsma
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