Your multidisciplinary team needs a librarian

A history of Aboriginal Sydney won a Research and Investigation Award from the National Heritage Trust last week. It is a proud achievement for a multidisciplinary team, including a librarian. In Library and Information Week, the Chief Investigator, Professor Peter Read, wishes to share his opinion why librarians are needed in a historical research team.

The University of Sydney project 'A history of Aboriginal Sydney' started off as a planned book, but soon turned into historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au. Suzana Sukovic, a librarian and researcher, gently steered the team of oral historian, photographer, film-maker and historical researcher towards an on-line presentation which would produce not three or four parallel results but one co-ordinated one. She joined the team as well, in 2010.

Librarians well versed in digital humanities, I realise now, offer not only new ways of creative thinking, but epistemological insights into how to present historical knowledge and understanding to solve new problems. Issues of design, attractiveness, maneuverability and access are just part of what I understand to be a great deal more than an easy way of putting everything together. We're all proud of what we produced. I'm preaching to the converted here, but any future historical project of mine, will certainly have a librarian in the team.

Admittedly, the librarian in question is also a LARK, but the message is an important one. Academic historians may be more inclined to take it on board when it is coming from their colleague. 

Peter Read is an Adjunct Professor in the Australian Centre for Aboriginal History, ANU.  He has worked in  Aboriginal History for most of his career, especially in NSW and the Northern Territory, and amongst the Stolen Generations.

LARK meetup: report of a sort

By Suzana Sukovic

 

The LARK meetup was five days ago but we haven’t told you how it went yet. ‘Lovely, as always’, is a short answer, but here is a long one (to quote our good blog friend ALIA Sydney).

It is the first week of the term and it’s just busy, busy, busy...Another meeting, even if lovely and friendly, seems a bit too much, but we’ve made a commitment. Alycia and I buy cheeses and wine, put a smile on our dial and greet our first guests. Our well-known and unknown guests come from near and afar with sure or tentative smiles, ready for the evening. We exchange information, we chat, we nibble and it’s time for a ‘real’ start although we are already on a roll. It’s a small gathering and, because we always have new people, we all say something about our research interests... I grow a bit taller in my chair. Some statements about interests, even research topics, have definitely become much more defined few meetings down the track. 

We talk about examples of research approaches in practice. Mary Anne Kennan tells us about surveys in a large international study and a follow-up using some qualitative methods. Alycia Bailey talks about the ethnography in a school library and lots of fine-grained data gathering – a very different approach from the previous one. I talk about action research and how data helped me see the first phase of my project as a bit more than flat-lying-on-its-back attempt. 

We then split into groups and things are seriously warming up. One group is all over gaming, another is serious about researching the value of ‘fluff’ and the third talks about social change (that’s serious but, in the end, I only know they talked about surveys – keyword injustice). I am the party breaker and clock-watcher (the eternal shame is mine) so we come back and say, ‘So what?’ and ‘What’s next?’ Suggestions that we can meet separately in groups or online don’t fly. Some people just love saying to their families and co-workers, ‘Sorry, guys, I’ve got to go’. My research tells me that there is real value in doing your work and chatting in corners for a few hours. Mary Anne mentions the ‘shut up and write’ approach, Mary Coe suggests reading circles...Now we know what we want – to work as much as we can alone and come back together, for longer, much longer.

By the time we take pictures, some people have gone. Our group is small as it is without a few missing people. But, research has never been a mass exercise. For a handful of LARKs, it’s inspiring to know there are others who are equally glad they I’ve made the effort. That’s what research is about. Fly above the daily grind for something in what you believe.

iTell rewards

Call for applications for ALIA research awards is now open. This post is a reflection from a previous Award recipient.

Suzana Sukovic

 

Photograph 'iTell reflection' by Hannah Berekoven

A study trip to Europe was one of my highlights last year thanks to the ALIA Research Award. I received it for the project entitled iTell: digital storytelling@National Year of Reading. The project started at the beginning of the National Year of Reading when I decided to investigate issues of writing and reading in a digital era while giving students at the school where I work an opportunity to try something new. This is how iTell was born. Transliteracy and digital storytelling were at the core of the project, and as project developed, I felt I missed a connection with relevant communities of practice. I applied for the ALIA Research Award proposing to travel to the United Kingdom to meet with a few key people in areas of interest and attend DS8: Digital Storytelling Festival, hosted by the University of Glamorgan’s George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, in June 2013 in Cardiff. I was delighted when my proposal was accepted in spring 2012 and the grant covered some project expenses and a study trip, which would take me to a main DS event in the world. 

Between my grant application and the trip, iTell was going through some major developments. Library staff were trained in digital storytelling and we provided a few rounds of workshops to students at our school. I was interested in experimenting with boundaries between reading and writing, so in iTell students worked with existing stories to develop their own unique perspective based on their reading. Although some students decided to work with their original writing, most based their digital stories on books. During the workshops, I gathered data about their engagement with learning, development of transliteracy skills and any impact on students’ learning. By the time my study trip started, iTell was presented at several conferences and professional gatherings. After some ups and downs, it was a well established project, which generated interesting data. At that time, I was curious how experiences with the project fit with developments elsewhere.

My study trip started in June 2013 with a whole day seminar at the British Library and an opportunity to catch up with colleagues I met in the past. Later I traveled to Bath to meet with some members of the original PART Group (Production and Research in Transliteracy), which initiated the concept of transliteracy as we discuss in the LIS field today. Professor Sue Thomas, the creator and leader of the Group, was very generous with her time and traveled to Bath to meet with Prof Kate Pullinger, Australian Dr Donna Hancox and me. We spent a few hours talking about transliteracy, multimedia and research interests. To this day, I cherish the opportunity to learn about the development of transliteracy from its originators. 

DS8 conference dinner

DS8 in Cardiff was the final destination of my study trip where I found a very diverse crowd of media producers – from community and health workers to political activists and academics – coming from Japan, Egypt, Norway and, mainly, from the UK. I was a bit of an unsual presence there as the only person from Australia and LIS sector. My paper iTell: digital stories for creative readers was presented in the panel session Digital Storytelling inEducation. After a day of thought provoking presentations, there was a conference dinner with a difference. I thought I knew what conference dinners were about, but here we were in a room with a bar, listening to impromptu storytelling, some even in musical forms. I left lovely people of Cardiff, bilingual signs and chilly Welsh winds with some heart-warming memories.

Months later in Sydney I am still feeling benefits of my study trip. Unlike academics who tend to travel to international conferences, this experience was a privilege for a profession-based researcher. Not only that I learnt interesting things, but experiences I had are a constant reference point and a confidence-builder in my work. At times when I am unsure how to tackle questions of my branching involvement with transliteracy, I rely on Susan Thomas’s voice in my mind telling me that there aren’t any ready answers. When I wonder about a reflective space digital storytelling opens for our students, I remember numerous examples of how digital stories are used for healing with prisoners and victims of trauma. A sense that my approach to digital storytelling through reading has a potential for further exploration is now based on confirmations from a digital storytelling community. A freshening effect of chilly summer rains in foreign lands, far away from a daily grind, shouldn’t be underestimated either.

A new round of proposals for ALIA research awards is now open. I would strongly encourage all of you interested in research to send a proposal and see where it will take you.

Come to the next LARK meeting on 1 May if you wish to talk with experienced researchers and get some advice from members of the ALIA Research Committee!

'Librarians as Researchers' in Perth

By Gaby Haddow

 

The ALIAWest Committee organised an event at the State Library WA this week titled Librarians as researchers. It was advertised as:

Learn how you can take that great idea or interesting project you are currently working on and share it with the world. The session will work through how you can convert an idea you have into a conference paper or journal article. Starting with preparing the abstract, then translating the abstract into a paper or presentation. Hear from others who have gone through the process and perhaps event attempt to prepare a short abstract during the session and receive feedback from others.

Over 25 practitioners came along – a great turnout for an after work event. The session included two presentations by practitioners with experience. The first was a very brief ‘3 tips about writing an abstract for a conference paper submission’, followed by a longer presentation about submitting an article to a journal. A colleague and I then raced through some of the main issues to consider when writing and submitting a conference paper abstract – using the ‘just published’ instructions for submissions to the Online Conference in 2015.

My own tips for running a session like this:

1.       Don’t try to fit too much in – with 90 minutes, the event this week couldn’t possibly cover everything it promised in any depth

2.       Allow lots of time for questions

3.       Include some time for hands-on work or one-to-one discussions with attendees

LARK meetup: kickstart a research project

Do you want to start a research project? Do you want to connect with other people with similar research interests? Yes? Come to the LARK Meetup! 

You will have a chance to meet the LARK Committee and discuss research ideas with people with similar interests. Dr Mary Anne Kennan, Senior Lecturer in the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University will be there to help with advice and facilitation. 


When? Thursday, 1 May from 6 to 8 pm
Where? St.Vincent’s College, Potts Point Light refreshments will be served
ALIA members: a gold coin donation, non-members $5
RSVP and map Eventbrite

Let’s not forget how to walk…

By Katherine Howard
 

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/7941866470_00846a8127_o.jpg

Some of you may have seen the media release and subsequent blog posts from Swets in December last year about Natural Language Processing and academic literature search. 

Natural Language Processing – or NLP – is not a new field of study, but according to Swets it has seen renewed attention since Yahoo acquired the NLP technology company, SkyPhrase, in early December last year.  NLP draws on concepts and research from multiple fields, such as linguistics (including computer-mediated communication, or CMC), human-computer interaction (HCI), artificial intelligence (AI); and those more closely related to LIS such as information retrieval (IR) and knowledge representation (KR).

Broadly, NLP is about developing a computer language that is capable of understanding natural human languages such as English, with all of its idiosyncrasies: synonyms, homonyms, homographs for example that are largely incomprehensible to a computer.  However, advances have been and continue to be made, with perhaps the best-known current application of NLP being spelling and grammar check.

The blog posts relate the advantages of NLP to academic researchers in particular, whose role it is to “stay[…] abreast of recent developments” (Part 1, para. 1) in their field.  The case is made that while a researcher may be able to tell very quickly which search results are relevant, the sheer amount of information available makes it possible that other useful extant material may not be located by that researcher.  NLP seeks to understand the content/topic that the researcher is interested in by using “indicator phrases” to contextualise the surrounding words and sentences in order to return more highly relevant results. Or in ‘librarian speak,’ a higher precision to recall ratio, where the computer itself will be able to determine if the duck you want to carve is for dinner or a hobby.

This contextualisation is known as ‘semantic search’, and the second blog post briefly discusses this and the (until now) hypothetical semantic web.  The importance of metadata as an aid to this semantic discoverability is highlighted, and it is explained how NLP processing principles can be used to “automatically extract textual metadata and classify resources into established taxonomies” (Part 2, para. 5).

The premise underpinning this technological development is the realisation that
“Familiar keyword search as in Google […] is not always the ideal mechanism when looking for scholarly material […]. Pure keyword search may well miss crucial subtleties of context in academic literature, fail to return results rich in semantically similar keywords, or be incapable of tailoring results depending on whether the user is looking for discussion of methods, support for a hypothesis, background reading and literature review or a myriad of other specific uses for the material” (Part 1, para. 10).

As information professionals, we have known this for a while now. We have highly developed search skills that enable us to find the right information at the right time - but what do non-information professionals do? How do people obtain the skills to not only find information, but to evaluate it for its relevancy, accuracy and validity? The necessity for these skills in today’s information-rich environment I believe moves far beyond the academic researchers that are the subject of these two blog posts.  Anyone who seeks information electronically – whether via the World Wide Web or via subscription databases – should have these skills. This doesn’t mean I’m arguing for Grandma to have a skill-set equal to that of a qualified librarian – these skills can be learnt (and used) to varying degrees of expertise.  I believe we, as a profession, need to advocate for these skills to be viewed as essential in today’s world as both reading and writing.

“But the semantic web is coming soon – we won’t have to think about how to structure a search statement, or to evaluate results for relevancy because it will all be done for us,” I hear you cry!  As wonderful and exciting as these developments are – and I am looking forward to seeing the opportunities that NLP may bring to our profession – I am not sure that we should rely so heavily on technology to “[…] determine whether some, all or none [of the search results] are relevant to the user’s search” (Part 2, para. 2).  It is another tool that can be utilised to enhance the service that we offer our users.

After all, most of us know how to drive a car, but that doesn’t mean we have forgotten how to walk.
You can read the full posts at:

S.M. Das (2013, December 3). Natural language processing (NLP) and academic literature search (Part 1) [blog post].
S.M. Das (2013, December 17). NLP in academic literature search (Part 2) [blog post].

This post first appeared in the Research Column, March issue of InCite.

Katherine Howard is a PhD Candidate at the Queensland University of Technology

DH Babel

Digital Humanities Australasia 2014: Expanding Horizons, the University of Western Australia, Perth, 18-21 March. 

By Suzana Sukovic

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BabelBar.jpg

A few days at the second biennial conference of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) have convinced me of two trends in digital humanities. 1. The DH Babel tower is falling. 2. Its rise is in the fall.

Scholarly textual studies and electronic editions have been pillars of digital humanities since its inception. As Jerome McGann famously said, ‘Textual studies is ground zero of everything we do. We read, we write, we think in a textual condition’. From that ground zero, the Babel tower of scholarly digital humanities has risen, built mainly by academic scholars.

But the signs of its crumbling walls are everywhere. In the last DHA conference, like in other recent DH events, delegates were not only academics, but also librarians, engineers, independent researchers, writers, teachers and business people. Among wide-ranging papers, some were ‘digital’, but not really ‘humanities’. Conference discussions often came back to the questions of ‘what is in, what is out’ of DH. In his keynote address and conversations after the sessions, Anthony Beavers questioned the opinion of some academics that philosophy using digital methods doesn’t belong to digital humanities. The relevance of social sciences conferences to DH and the lack of any significant connection between the two fields, were repeatedly pointed out in various discussions. It would be easy to assume that issues of connections and belonging are of special interest to some delegates or even DH in Australasia; that older and more established DH communities in the US and Europe don’t share these concerns. However, from the first steps of electronic text centres in Australia in the mid 1990s to the conference this week, we have seen an expansion of digital humanities in Australasia and internationally in the directions which often don’t lend themselves to existing signposts. ‘Expending horizons’ was chosen as the conference theme for a reason.

Detonation always comes from the ground zero. For the humanities, it is what ‘we’ (humanists and academics) do with the text. Many authors have written about the changing nature of textuality and the knowledge field in the digital environment. For the purpose of this post, let’s focus on signs at the conference that both ‘we’ and the text are changing.

‘Text’ is still strongly present, but ‘visualisation’ is looming in the background when it’s not taking the centrestage. In her keynote, Sarah Kenderdine talked about the inspiring work in the GLAM sector. Among many beautiful images, she showed us some dance annotations consisting, not of words, but of lines marking dancers’ movements. Games were repeatedly mentioned as a research output, topic and a reference in conversations. Large data sets are still a centre of attention (e.g., http://huni.net.au/).

As for ‘we’, academia is still producing some fascinating work, but a number of other players are capturing people’s attention. If Twitter (see #DHA2014 and storify), as a collective note-taking tool, is any indication, the audience responded enthusiastically to talks about the archive of Circus Oz and the archive of games from the 1980s (playitagainproject.org). Following Peter Read’s, Diana Hodge’s and my Birds of Feather session Digital Humanities afield, a passionate discussion ensued, which could be heard in the next room, I was told. Stories from and about non-academic groups raise challenging questions and provoke conflicting views of critical importance to knowledge professions.

DH Babel tower, defined by scholarly textual studies, is falling, but the loss of one language with few dialects is a new strength of DH. The fall of a central monlingual tower and a dispersal of people to many language groups becomes a metaphor of the new knowledge model, much better suited to digital cultures. 

But, where is the strength in dispersal? Humanities faculties are struggling for survival. Often mentioned reasons are the current economy and parents who want their children to study something which will put bread on their table. Both are certainly true, but in my experience of living with teenagers at work and home, it’s also students who want to put time, money and effort into something that will pay back material dividends. It’s the students who often have doubts that wide reading and philosophy will give them skills for life-long learning. At the same time, this generation would love to apply their interest in history and literature to something they also enjoy. For many of them, interest in WWII came from playing Call of Duty or watching films, not from learning history at school. They like the idea that they could write stories for a new breed of games and immersive environments if they study humanities, though they doubt it. Digital humanities knowledge has potential applications in learning, medicine, well-being and recreation. Humanities departments need to help students in developing their ability to participate in the digital knowledge economy and to convince others that a history or English graduate is an asset. This is not an argument for turning universities into vocational education institutions, but for thinking of different approaches to strengthen the appeal of the humanities. Having ‘digital’ in front of ‘humanities’ is definitely an advantage for the young generations, but the digital humanities could and should have clear applications outside classrooms and academic research. It is already happening in some cases, but they are too isolated to change a common perception.

A new audience with time, resources and will to explore own interests is within reach. Special interest groups and the aging population are likely to be interested in scholarly output for their own purposes. As historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au indicates, there are large groups in the community who need accessible, appropriately presented, historical records to study the past and construct their own view of a topic of interest. Providing a guided and orderly environment, which encourages investigation, requires collaboration between academics, information specialists and relevant groups in the community. It can’t be a purely academic pursuit.

Finally, multipurposed scholarly digital edition - the holy grail of digital humanities. Very few scholarly editions have achieved the dream of being used by scholars in own and other disciplines to investigate a variety of research questions, as well as by students and the community. The reason is that the dream is based on the arborial conception of knowledge while digital platforms are a fertile ground for rhizomes. 

Digital humanities may be enriched by allowing people in the community to take bits and pieces from academic outputs to build constructions of their own dreams. Furthermore, digital humanities should actively participate in building skills and tools for rhizomatic approaches. 

Last week Daniel Powell mentioned a Canadian DH van traveling to schools to show students how to use tools and work on their own projects. We need many DH vans and sheds. Who knows, they may build something interesting and new. My Facebook feed informs me regularly of school kids who broke new scientific grounds. This doesn’t happen in the humanities. Of course, there is a reason for a bit of arrogance in pointing out that wunderkinder don’t exist among writers and that PhD students in the humanities and social sciences are typically older than in sciences. Humanities insights usually require maturity, they are not normally built on few special breakthroughs and skills. However, with the growing importance of creative applications and digital skills, even that may change. We can’t assume, not even in the humanities, that grey heads always know better.

Digital humanities should pay close attention to the recruitment outside undergraduate courses. By working with schools, libraries and community groups to develop projects and skill base, humanists may develop people’s interest and raise skill levels. High school students with skills and appetite for digital humanities will once become more capable university students and contributors to the field.  

 
Once I wrote about divergent, parallel and convergent flows in relation to changing practices in the humanities. For illustration, I used a graph showing the evolution of glacial ice. I would like to use the graph again to illustrate that DH is entering the cycle of divergence and parallel flows. An articulated effort is required to build energy from the outward movement.

Reference
Wilson, Christopher John, and Zhang, Yu. “Comparison between Experiment and Computer Modeling of Plane-Strain Simple-Shear Ice Deformation.” Journal of Glaciology 40, no. 134 (1994): 46–55. cited in Suzana Sukovic. “Convergent flows: humanities scholars and their interactions with electronic texts.” Library Quarterly 78, no. 3 (2008): pp. 263–284

Suzana has lived on ground zero most of her life. With a BA(Hons) degree in literature and linguistics; MA in literary theory and criticism interrupted due to immigration; MA (Information) topped up with a study of electronic editions; PhD thesis on roles of electronic texts in the humanities; and many years of earning bread, butter and a few extras in libraries, she believes she can feel in her bones when Babel is shaking.