Bi-monthly web chat agenda & notes

NEXT CHAT:  June 15 @ 11:30 a.m.Eastern Daylight Time

URL: to be supplied

Proposed chat topics:

Digital humanities and digital archives potential for strategic collaboration (initial thread below)

• Matt Kirschenbaum: "Julia Flanders has asked me to write a short thought piece for the journal Digital Humanities Quarterly <http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/> discussing how the DH and digital archives communities (if that's the right word) can work together. I'd like to get everyone's input. What strikes you as the areas where DH can intervene? Steering users to born-digital collections? Policy and advocacy? Tool development? Cyberinfrastructure? Theorizing born-digital materials? Lending expert tech knowledge, particularly in the area of vintage hardware? Etc."
• Brad Westbrook: "...there are two general areas where my UCSD colleagues and I could benefit from collaboration with and input from content creators, be they digital humanists or representatives of some other scholarly domain.  One area is SIP production.  We are becoming more and more convinced that if we at UCSD are going to expedite the import of digital content into a well-managed collection, we will need the assistance of content creators.  In broad, vague terms, that assistance probably amounts to content creators actively participating in the creation of SIPs in any number of ways.  Certainly establishing good data management practices, that included in themselves the event of transferring the content to a centralized repository, would contribute to better ingest processes.  Some of the national work going on with data management plans may be pertinent here... A second area in which we at UCSD will need help is identifying the ways in which downstream researchers will make use of this information.  What kinds of tools will be necessary to support their research?  What kinds of access will we need to support?  As noted by Seth or Mark last month, there is probably a set of base line access / user tools that the repository can provide to all users and another set of domain specific tools that experts will have to invent... At UCSD, we are starting a two-year project to build cyberinfrastructure (the whole tamale, policy to disks) by bringing five research data sets under curation.  We are in the process of selecting those data sets and know now that one will be a couple of TB of astronomical simulation data (images, tabular, and project correspondence) and that other data sets are likely to come from the humanities (visual arts particularly) as well as natural sciences.  We are anticipating this pilot work will reveal methods for streamlining ingest, as well as increase our understanding the various ways these materials will get used and by whom.  But we could certainly be enriched by hearing the adventures of others in these matters.  
• Courtney Mumma : "We talked a bit about tiered strategies for the processing treatment of digital acquisitions at the symposium. I think that digital humanities researchers can help archivists assess whether the value of an acquisition is dependent upon it's presentation as close as possible to its original form (emulation, Rushdie), merits only bit-level treatment, should be mined/parsed for valuable records and then migrated to preservation formats, some combination of bit-preservation, migration and emulation events within a given collection arising from varied recordkeeping systems, or some other tier that I'm missing entirely. Digital humanities scholars could help archivists strategize about these sorts of assessments so that we can determine our ability to properly preserve and manage an acquisition and then, if we can, assign it the proper level(s) of treatment."

Input on outcomes and topics for the AIMS half-day workshop at SAA in August (initial thread below)

• Gretchen Gueguen (U Va): "While we have a general idea of the structure and overall goals of the workshop (talk about issues related to managing born-digital archives), we are still working out the specifics of the day. The AIMS Digital Archivists are very interested in suggestions about the kinds of outcomes and topics you would look for in a workshop like this – anything from topics of discussion or presentation, to activities, to specific goals and objectives."
• Gabby Redwine (U Tx - Austin): "I think examples of donor agreements and policy/procedural documents related to the transfer of materials from creator to archives would be useful, as would suggestions about how to incorporate "donor interactions" (for lack of a better term) into one's workflow without causing it to implode. I've been thinking about the latter lately because I recently realized how labor-intensive it could be to help a creator decide what content/formats to send to the archives. Part of the time commitment would be interacting or corresponding with a creator, but then also a certain amount of research would be necessary to give advice about a particular format, for example, or to determine whether the institution wants to take on a large number of items in a format or grouping (e.g., a Flickr account) that it hasn't worked with before. At this point, I could make time to do one of those things-revise the donor agreement, come up with a policy and procedure, interact with the creator, etc.-but certainly not all of them. So -- a useful exercise for a workshop might be to practice breaking up a large goal into smaller, more manageable steps. Pretty basic, I know, but also (I think) one of the hardest things to do and so vital to maintaining momentum."