A new series of workshops on data curation for humanities scholars, librarians, and archivists will take place next year as part of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Digital Humanities Data Curation Institutes project, directed by Trevor Muñoz (MS ’11), associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and assistant dean for digital humanities research, University of Maryland Libraries, will facilitate a multi-institutional collaboration between MITH and the University Libraries at the University of Maryland, the Women Writers Project (WWP) at Brown University, and the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to provide three workshops during 2013 and 2014.
Megan Senseney (MS ’08) of CIRSS will be the project director at GSLIS. CIRSS Director and Professor Carole Palmer will serve as a consultant and advisor, contributing her expertise in data curation and integrating project activities with related CIRSS initiatives.
The practice of cutting-edge humanities research increasingly involves acquisition, synthesis, and management of data in digital form. The theoretical knowledge and practical skills of information science, librarianship, and archival science represent a vital component of the skill set that will be required to succeed in the rapidly transforming landscape of the academy and the wider society.
Digital Humanities Data Curation institutes will provide opportunities for participants with all levels of expertise—from beginners to the most advanced—to receive guidance in understanding the role of data curation in enriching humanities research projects. By the conclusion of each institute, participants will be adept at formulating solutions for existing challenges and will be able to document their data curation strategies in the form of data curation plans and strategic risk assessments, key elements of innovative digital scholarship.
A core resource for the Institute will be the Digital Humanities Curation Guide developed at GSLIS. The Guide is an online educational resource that offers articles about data curation in the digital humanities, and is a product of the Data Curation Education Program for the Humanities (DCEP-H), funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and led by GSLIS Interim Dean and Professor Allen Renear. The Guide was officially launched during the Digital Humanities 2012 Conference held July 16-22, 2012, at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
The Guide allows instructors and participants to share scholarly knowledge about literature, tools, projects, and standards relevant to curating humanities data. It will serve as a forum for the knowledge developed at the Institutes to be shared across the three events and with the broader research community.
Julia Flanders (WWP) and Dorothea Salo (faculty associate in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison) will serve as co-instructors alongside Muñoz for the three institute events and will contribute resources to the Guide.
A call for applications to participate in the workshops will be announced in late Fall 2012 with the first Institute beginning in Spring 2013. For more information, please visit: mith.umd.edu/research/project/data-curation.
GSLIS is a leader in the field of data curation and has established a strong foundation of unique educational opportunities for students interested in the field. CIRSS is widely recognized as an innovative base of data curation research, with projects funded by the National Science Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and IMLS, among others.