Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 383.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org




        Date: 2024-01-10 17:17:44+00:00
        From: Zaagsma, Gerben <Gerben.Zaagsma@alumni.eui.eu>
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 37.380: histories of digital humanities: input materials?

Dear Alan,

Thank you for your reply, this is very helpful.

It is too early to get into the precise details of what we envisage as we are in
a very early set-up phase and want time to experiment with different
implementations; but at this point we are especially interested in
collecting/digitising pre-DH paper materials, not so much the web archiving of
early DH projects. In my own work, for instance, I am very much interested in
early developments taking place in the period 1940s-1980s and Julianne also
works on early developments especially through an oral history lens but
including also traditional archival work. Organisational web archives (such as
the AHC and its branches in the 1990s) are a different matter but how we’d go
about this is really still too early to tell.

All best wishes,
Gerben

Van: Humanist <humanist@dhhumanist.org>
Datum: woensdag, 10 januari 2024 om 08:15
Aan: Zaagsma, Gerben <Gerben.Zaagsma@alumni.eui.eu>
Onderwerp: [Humanist] 37.380: histories of digital humanities: input materials?

              Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 380.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
                      Hosted by DH-Cologne
                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




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