The first in a series of three-day Digital Humanities Data Curation (DHDC) Institute workshops is currently underway at GSLIS. The workshop provides 20 researchers from around the country with a strong introductory grounding in data curation concepts, focusing on topics in the digital humanities.
Conducting research with digital materials poses new challenges for humanities scholars and information professionals. Humanities data in particular encompass a diverse range of data types that are often grouped into specialized aggregations, which are significant for understanding, using, and curating research data. Further, research methods within the humanities such as interpretive and critical annotation are themselves curatorial in nature, generating interconnected networks of data that represent and document the research process. Understanding how to manage and curate data over its entire lifetime of interest is an integral part of that process.
Trevor Muñoz (University of Maryland), Julia Flanders (Brown University), and Dorothea Salo (University of Wisconsin-Madison) are leading a series of presentations and practical exercises that provide participants with an overview of the current data curation landscape and introduce techniques for curating their own research data. Ted Underwood (University of Illinois) is presenting a case study based on his own research activities, and workshop participants are encouraged to share information about their own projects and initiatives dealing with humanities data, including data curation techniques and challenges that arise in their institutions or as part of their individual research.
During the workshop, participants have access to an online resource where they are sharing their knowledge about data curation for the humanities. This resource, which builds on material for the existing DH Curation Guide, is being updated during the event and is publicly accessible on the workshop wiki. DHDC conversations can be followed on Twitter using the #dhcuration hash tag.
The second workshop in the series is scheduled for October 16-18, 2013, in College Park, Maryland. Applications for participation are available on the Institute website. To receive information about future workshops and other DHDC events, please subscribe to the mailing list.
Digital Humanities Data Curation is a project of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), the Women Writers Project, and the GSLIS Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS). This workshop series is generously funded by an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.