In a new post on his website, Thomas Padilla (University of Nevada Las Vegas) probes questions of how to “engage absence” within data, using his experience spearheading Collections as Data as a lens: Where the data exhibit significant informational paucity, indeterminate values, inordinate biasing, or limited scope it is common to cast them aside in pursuit ...

Sarah Whitwell (McMaster University) has authored a post for the Lewis & Ruth Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship’s blog, entitled “Resistance, Racialized Violence, and Database Design,” detailing her work defining “resistance” for a database schema: When inputting data on incidents of racialized violence, for example, I must decide how to code types of violence… It is ...

Paxtyn Merten (Northwestern University) has written an article in Storybench, a publication of the NU School of Journalism, discussing the work of Catherine D’Ignazio (Emerson College) on data literacy and feminism. In “What Can Data Visualization Learn from Feminism?,” Merten summarizes six points given by D’Ignazio to encourage “a feminist perspective on the design of ...

Emily Drabinski (Long Island University) has published “Ideologies of Boring Things: The Internet and Infrastructures of Race,” a review of Safiya Umoja Noble’s (University of Southern California) forthcoming Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Drabinski’s review draws attention to the ways infrastructures can be visible or invisible ...

Jennifer Howard (EdSurge) has written an article entitled “What Next-Gen Digital Humanities Looks Like,” detailing the recent NEH Office of Digital Humanities Project Directors’ Meeting in celebration of its ten years in existence. The program featured talks by ODH grant recipients, discussion of the broader history of humanities computing and contemporary DH, and a keynote ...

Rona Stein (OCLC) has published a post on the Hanging Together blog entitled “University Futures, Library Futures: a multi-dimensional model of US higher education institutions,” which reports on a collaborative project between OCLC and Ithaka S+R, supported by the Mellon Foundation. The project involved developing a model and a framework for use in “exploring emerging ...

From the special edition of #DLFcontribute, Kelly Doyle (West Virginia University Libraries) and Ashleigh D. Coren (University of Maryland, College Park) discuss how they leveraged Wikimedia Foundation’s #1lib1ref (1 librarian, 1 reference) campaign “to highlight how librarians use Wikipedia to fill in public knowledge gaps about local and marginalized knowledge.” We wanted to challenge our participants’ preconceived ...

AHA Today, the blog for the American Historical Association, has published a post by Amy E. Earhart and Maura Ives (both Texas A&M), “Race, Print, and Digital Humanities: Pedagogical Approaches.” The authors describe the teaching of a graduate and undergraduate course at Texas A&M that applied “the methods of book history—enumerative bibliography and scholarly editing—to the ...

Becca Quon (DLF) has published a write-up of her experience attending the Digital Blackness in the Archive symposium for the Digital Library Federation’s website. Quon summarizes the purpose of the symposium, “which brought together DocNow community members to ‘address issues at the intersection of archival practice and the existence of Black people on the web and social media.'” Quon also ...

In a post for the ACRLog entitled, “What We Know and What They Know: Scholarly Communication, Usability, and Un-Usability,” Dylan Burns (Utah State University) considers the usability of library collections in relation to the growing use of SciHub, #Icanhazpdf, and #Twitterlibraryloan. He points out that students at his institution use SciHub because, as they have reported ...

Jaime Mears (LoC) has posted an interview with Lorena Ramírez-López (the Memory Lab Network) on The Signal, the Library of Congress’ digital stewardship blog. Ramírez-López, the Project Manager for the Memory Lab Network, has been hosting weekly FAQ sessions for potential partners interested in applying to the newly formed network. Funded by an Institute of ...