How digital networks and services bring the issues of archives out of the realm of institutions and into the lives of everyday users

Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. Electronic files, search engines, video sites, and media player libraries make the concepts of “archival” and “retrieval” practically synonymous with the experience of interconnected computing. Archives today are the center of much attention but few agendas. Can archives inform the redistribution of power and resources when the concept of the public library as an institution makes knowledge and culture accessible to all members of society regardless of social or economic status? This book sets out to show that archives need our active support and continuing engagement. 

This volume offers three distinct perspectives on the present status of archives that are at once in disagreement and solidarity with each other, from contributors whose backgrounds cut across the theory–practice divide. Is the increasing digital storage of knowledge pushing us toward a turning point in its democratization? Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle? Is there a downside to the present-day impulse toward total preservation? 

Critical Making in the Age of AI invites students, teachers, learners, and digital humanists to explore making as scholarship. Inspired by the craft traditions of textile arts, this book combines a survey of forms of alternative scholarly communication—such as comics, GIFs, maps, games, and generative AI—and a pattern book, where patterns serve as starting points that makers can reimagine and remix. Firmly grounded in the humanities and utilizing free tools and platforms (including Twine, Voyant, and Tracery) wherever possible, this engaging and accessible guide to digital methods introduces and puts into practice concepts that are essential to preparing students to navigate a changing landscape of media and information without investing in proprietary software, dedicated lab space, or expensive creative tools.

The book’s eight patterns are especially appropriate for those just beginning to explore digital scholarly methods, and one goal of Critical Making in the Age of AI is to provide structure for work that is both meaningful and achievable with limited resources and time. By centering critical making through a design-justice and feminist lens, the coauthors model how inclusive and expansive approaches to making in research and teaching are vital to shaping the humanities of the future.

How have university scholars across a variety of disciplines navigated the co-creative and collaborative relationships involving community partners? How has the addition of digital components changed the way information can be communicated to the intended audience? Through digital projects, traditional academic silos have given way to community-based partnerships which open research, storytelling, and curation to wide array of contributors from civic engagement professionals, librarians, archivists, technology personnel, local citizens, and academics. The collaborative process may push your comfort zone and make you grapple with your roll of storytelling but as the authors of the last chapter say, “You can’t make ketchup without smashing a few tomatoes.”

Digital projects can empower communities through collaboration and create new primary sources, collapse barriers, and spark new dialogue. Digital Community Engagement “lifts the hood” and presents nine examples of digital collaborations from constructing a public response to police violence, to creating digital stories of homelessness, to young activists united around local people in the Deep South to build a grassroots movement for social change.

Wingo, Heppler and Schadewald bring together cutting-edge campus-community partnerships with a focus on digital projects. The case studies, authored by academics and their community partners, explore models for digital community engagement that leverage new media through reciprocal partnerships. The contributions to this volume stand at the crossroads of digital humanities, public history, and community

A new generation of video standards promises lossless storage of digital objects for future generations. Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic document the development and adoption of JPEG 2000, FFV1, MXF, and Matroska while investigating the social and material aspects of their design and the forces driving their journeys from niche to ubiquity.

Drawing on interviews with archivists and developers, Jones and Jancovic reveal the archive as a dynamic space where deeply entrenched social practices produce disagreements but also resourceful collaborations. They contrast the unprecedented rise of archivist-driven standardization and controversies around non-standard technology with the historical dominance of the film and broadcast industries. Throughout, the authors clarify the role of tech companies, software developers, film pirates, hackers, and other players with poorly understood roles in the process.

A timely look at the state of audiovisual preservation, The Future of Memory provides a history of recent innovations alongside a snapshot of a field in the midst of profound technological change.

Exploring technology, ethics, and culture to unlock digital scholarship’s future

Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing navigates the ever-shifting terrain of digital academia, examining practical and ethical considerations as technology continues to evolve. In this indispensable collection, digital humanities practitioners and scholars work with a wide range of archival materials to confront key challenges surrounding the adaptation and sustainability of digital editorial projects as well as their societal impact.

Broaching essential questions at the nexus of technology and culture, Futures of Digital Scholarly Editing is organized around three principal frameworks: access, sustainability, and interoperability; ethics and community involvement; and the evolution of textual scholarship. From addressing outdated technical infrastructures to fostering new collaborations, this volume serves as a beacon guiding scholars and institutions through the complexities of digital editing in an era of profound technological and societal transformation.

Contributors: Stephanie P. Browner, The New School; Julia Flanders, Northeastern U; Ed Folsom, U of Iowa; Nicole Gray, U of Nebraska–Lincoln; Cassidy Holahan, U of Nevada, Las Vegas; Fotis Jannidis, U of Würzburg; Aylin Malcolm, U of Guelph; Sarah Lynn Patterson, U of Massachusetts Amherst; Elena Pierazzo, U of Tours; K.J. Rawson, Northeastern U; Whitney Trettien, U of Pennsylvania; John Unsworth, U of Virginia; Dirk Van Hulle, U of Oxford; Robert Warrior, U of Kansas; Marta L. Werner, Loyola U Chicago.

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This innovative collection examines how book history and digital humanities (DH) practices are integrated through approach, access, and assessment. Eight essays by rising and senior scholars practicing in multiple fields—including librarians, literature scholars, digital humanists, and historians—consider and reimagine the interconnected futures and horizons at the intersections of texts, technology, and culture and argue for a return to a more representative and human study of the humanities.
 
Integrating intermedial practices and assessments, the editors and contributors explore issues surrounding the access to and materiality of digitized materials, and the challenge of balancing preservation of traditional archival materials with access. They offer an assessment in our present moment of the early visions of book history and DH projects. In revisiting these projects, they ask us to shift our thinking on the promises and perils of archival and creative work in different media. Taken together, this volume reconsiders the historical intersections of book history and DH and charts a path for future scholarship across disciplinary boundaries.

With textbook readers and digital downloads proliferating, it is easy to imagine a time when printed books will vanish. Such forecasts miss the mark, argue Jeffrey Schnapp and Matthew Battles. Future bookshelves will not be wholly virtual, and libraries will thrive—although in a variety of new social, cultural, and architectural forms. Schnapp and Battles combine deep study of the library’s history with a record of institutional and technical innovation at metaLAB, a research group at the forefront of the digital humanities. They gather these currents in The Library Beyond the Book, exploring what libraries have been in the past to speculate on what they will become: hybrid places that intermingle books and ebooks, analog and digital formats, paper and pixels.

Libraries have always been mix-and-match spaces, and remix is their most plausible future scenario. Speculative and provocative, The Library Beyond the Book explains book culture for a world where the physical and the virtual blend with ever increasing intimacy.

A poetics for reading the everyday objects that populate a hard drive

Bespoke online archives like PennSound and Eclipse host an astounding array of “old media” artifacts, posing a handcrafted counterpoint to the immense databases aggregated by digital titans like Google and Facebook. In The Little Database, Daniel Scott Snelson argues for the significance of these comparatively “small” collections, exploring how digital archives dramatically transform the artifacts they host and how they might help us better understand our own private collections in turn.

Examining curated collections such as Textz, UbuWeb, and the Electronic Poetry Center, Snelson explores media-specific works by poets and artists, including William Carlos Williams, Tracie Morris, bill bissett, Nam June Paik, and Vicki Bennett. He develops creative tools and contingent methods for reading cultural data, whether found on the internet or in our own collections of TXT, JPG, MP3, and MOV artifacts, presenting case studies to show how these objects have come to find revised meaning in their digital contexts. Along the way, experimental poetic interludes give readers practical entry points into the creative practice of producing new meanings in any given little database.

Inventive and interdisciplinary, The Little Database grapples with the digitized afterlives of cultural objects, showing how the past is continually reconfigured to shape the present. It invites readers to find playful and personal means for unpacking their own data collections, in the process discovering idiosyncratic ways to explore and connect with digital archives.

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Libraries are not exempt from the financial costs of data breaches or leaks, no matter the size. Whether from a library worker unwittingly sharing a patron’s address with a perpetrator of domestic violence to leaving sensitive patron data unprotected, patrons can also pay a hefty price when libraries fail to manage patron data securely and ethically. In this guide, readers will learn concrete action steps for putting the ethical management of data into practice, following two common public and academic library cumulative case studies. The authors explore such key topics as

• succinct summaries of major U.S. laws and other regulations and standards governing patron data management;
• information security practices to protect patrons and libraries from common threats;
• how to navigate barriers in organizational culture when implementing data privacy measures;
• sources for publicly available, customizable privacy training material for library workers;
• the data life cycle from planning and collecting to disposal;
• how to conduct a data inventory;
• understanding the associated privacy risks of different types of library data;
• why the current popular model of library assessment can become a huge privacy invasion;
• addressing key topics while keeping your privacy policy clear and understandable to patrons; and
• data privacy and security provisions to look for in vendor contracts.

This pioneering monograph provocatively explodes current research paradigms for the modern and the medieval by showing that Twitter shares key similarities with medieval literary forms, texts, and narrative techniques. Analyzing tweets with medieval texts, and vice versa, Spencer-Hall initiates readers into an innovative methodology of interdisciplinary literary criticism, posing vital questions about the politics of medievalism today. Chapters include brand-new readings of The Owl and the Nightingale, the Chastelaine de Vergi, and Marie de France’s Laüstic, and arresting insights into troubadour style, Margery Kempe, and #MedievalTwitter. The book culminates in a medieval(ist) reading of Twitter’s premature demise, and Elon Musk’s medievalism. Throughout, points of contact and divergence are dissected, re-contextualizing the socio-cultural meaning of communication and texts across the temporal divide.

This book looks at the intersection between medieval studies and digital humanities, confronting how medievalists negotiate the “virtual divide” between the cultural artefacts that they study and the digital means by which they address those artefacts. The essays come from medievalists who have created digital resources or applied digital tools and methodologies in their scholarship. Text encoding and analysis, data modeling and provenance, and 3D design are all discussed as they apply to western European medieval literature, history, art history, and architecture.

Open Access has evolved into the most complex challenge of the scholarly publishing landscape and something libraries grapple with on a regular basis. But although librarians hold increasingly positive perceptions about OA, including its richness of unique content and immediacy of access, many lack the understanding, training, documentation, and knowledge of best practices that would allow them to engage with it confidently. This book helps to fill that gap, using a holistic approach that walks readers through the steps of integrating OA resources into library collections and supporting OA initiatives irrespective of budget, institution type, collection size, and staffing. Explaining definitions and models of OA, types of OA support, the tensions between free-to-read and libre OA, and other key topics, from this book readers will learn

• the origins and growth of OA, how to define it, and some of the ways in which librarians have made connections to OA;
• where OA diverges from the historic role of library collection development policies and ways to bring OA into alignment with an institution's collection development principles and practices;
• real-world examples of how libraries have supported or integrated OA into their collections, including strategies for selecting and activating OA titles and collections for inclusion, offering open educational resources (OER) to students, samples of collection management workflows, and ideas for aligning collections with institutional repositories or other Green OA initiatives;
• guidance on financially supporting OA content, initiatives, and platforms;
• how OA publishing does and does not harmonize with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; and
• tips for using ongoing assessment and evaluation to continuously support the library’s path to an open future.

This briefing discusses the history and role of preprints in the biological sciences within the evolving open science landscape. The focus is on the explosive growth of preprints as a publishing model and the associated challenges of maintaining technical infrastructure and establishing sustainable business models. A preprint is a scholarly manuscript posted by the author(s) to a repository or platform to facilitate open and broad sharing of early work without any limitations to access. Currently there are more than 60 preprint servers representing different subject and geographical domains, each one evolving at a different based on adoption patterns and disciplinary ethos. This briefing will offer invaluable help to those who wish to understand this rapidly evolving publishing model.

From statistical databases to story archives, from fan sites to the real-time reactions of Twitter-empowered athletes, the digital communication revolution has changed the way sports fans relate to their favorite teams. In this volume, contributors from Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States analyze the parallel transformation in the field of sport history, showing the ways powerful digital tools raise vital philosophical, epistemological, ontological, methodological, and ethical questions for scholars and students alike.

Chapters consider how the philosophical and theoretical understanding of the meaning of history influence a willingness to engage with digital history, and conceptualize the relationship between history making and the digital era. As the writers show, digital media's mostly untapped potential for studying the recent past via blogs, chat rooms, gambling sites, and the like forge a symbiosis between sports and the internet, and offer historians new vistas to explore and utilize.

Sport History in the Digital Era also shows how the best digital history goes beyond a static cache of curated documents. Instead, it becomes a truly public history that serves as a dynamic site of enquiry and discussion. In such places, scholars enter into a give-and-take with individuals while inviting the audience to grapple with, rather than passively absorb, the evidence being offered.

Timely and provocative, Sport History in the Digital Era affirms how the information revolution has transformed sport and sport history--and shows the road ahead.

Contributors include Douglas Booth, Mike Cronin, Martin Johnes, Matthew Klugman, Geoffery Z. Kohe, Tara Magdalinski, Fiona McLachlan, Bob Nicholson, Rebecca Olive, Gary Osmond, Murray G. Phillips, Stephen Robertson, Synthia Sydnor, Holly Thorpe, and Wayne Wilson.