This 30 minute session will work as an open forum to discuss general knowledge and experience surrounding digitization projects. The session will also be interested in exploring issues faced by digitization projects. As an undergraduate who is new to the digital humanities and currently working on a digitizing project, I am interested in learning more through opening a dialogue about methodologies, workflow, personal experiences, and issues you’ve come across when working with digitization projects.

Key Questions:

What is your own baseline level of copyright knowledge? How can the correct use and implantation of copyright law be achieved/ maintained?

What are some successful ways that you or your institution has undergone digitization efforts, what problems have you run into within various digitization projects?

Should the digitization of obsolete formats be made available to stream or should it be digitized to another tangible format, ensuring that they will always exist physically? Should it be both?

What does your institution prioritize, more efforts towards learning and curating new technology or focus on preserving the past? How does this selection process work in your institution? How are these decisions made?

A 50-minute presentation and discussion around the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as a tool for teaching and research. The DPLA provides a platform where over 30 million digital cultural heritage materials from institutions across the country can be found. DPLA aggregates metadata for these objects and has made this metadata freely available on their API for users to employ in their research or in the creation of applications that can take advantage of the materials for further use. Many of the objects found in DPLA are primary resources related to the history of the United States and relate to the human experience.

The DPLA has also utilized these resources to create curated resources, including exhibits combining resources from multiple contributing institutions that would not have been linked together otherwise and primary source sets that can be used in classrooms to help students think critically about history, literature, and how to analyze various source types.

During this session attendees will learn how to access and search the API as well as explore the curated content in DPLA and learn how to create their own resources for teaching from the materials found in DPLA. Attendees will also discuss how they would use this resource in their classrooms as well as how contributing institutions can improve the resources and metadata for use in Digital Humanities projects and research.

This 50-minute session will introduce newcomers to the basic principles of Linked Data. This session will serve as a report-back for Sarah Stanley’s recent trip to the Digital Resources and Methods Lab, where she took a Linked Data for the Humanities course. Sarah will discuss Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the concept of triples, which is the basis of linked data. Using this foundation, participants will learn about ontologies, which describes how different pieces of data can be linked together.

In order to further demonstrate the utility of linked data for humanists, Sarah will lead a participatory demonstration of SPARQL, which is the query language for RDF and Linked Data. Participants will work together to create SPARQL queries which will allow us to answer questions like: What works were authored by a given author and published by a given publishing house? What are all the works that were in published by a given publisher between two given dates?

This session will be designed so that audience members can participate even if they have not used query languages before. No technical experience is required to participate.