 Okay, good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly online event where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. We normally do these sessions every Wednesday morning live at 10 a.m. Central Time. This week we are doing a special session on Tuesday because tomorrow is the 4th of July and we, as with many librarians, might even be watching us, are closed for the day tomorrow. So we're here on Tuesday at 10 a.m. doing this. All of our sessions are recorded, however, so if you are unable to join us live on Wednesdays or Tuesday, you can always watch our recordings later and see all of our four-something years' worth of recordings that we have out there. So this, and we have commission staff that do presentations and we bring in guest speakers sometimes as we have today. Today we've brought from just down the street, from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. I got it written down. Karen Delziel and Liz Loring. We actually have a camera person behind me. There you go. And they are going to tell us what the heck is digital communities and why the libraries care and what it has to do with us. And here we'll just move the microphone over to you guys. So take it away guys. Digital Humanities is a popular new buzzword in the library world, but it's been around for a while in academia mostly. In this presentation, Elizabeth and I will explain the digital humanities, what it is, give a few examples of how it's done, and end with a few places that you can look for further resources if you're interested in getting involved. So I will let Elizabeth Loring introduce herself. Hi. My name is Liz Loring. I'm a research assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska. And in the center I manage two digital projects, the Walt Whitman Archive, which is an electronic scholarly edition of Walt Whitman's Works, and Civil War Washington, a digital place-based study of the nation's capital during the Civil War. Now I want to start today with a definition of digital humanities. And I think it's important to say that even among people who identify as digital humanists, probably even between Karen and me, there's not really an agreed upon definition of the term, or whether you say, what is digital humanities, or what are the digital humanities? And that distinction sort of between a field or ways of studying the humanities is an important ambiguity, I suppose. So as a result, the field or the methods of study often get defined indirectly. So we might say this project is digital humanities, and the qualities of the project are A, B, and C. So digital humanities has something to do with A, B, and C. But such a method of definition gets unwieldy fast. So for our presentation today, I will be somewhat brave and offer my own working definition to which we might add or define. And I define digital humanities as, or DH, or DH, and we'll probably use the DH term throughout our talk today. So whenever we say DH, we mean digital humanities. But it is an interdisciplinary field of study that employs electronic and or computational processes for the preservation, documentation, exploration, and interpretation of cultural artifacts. So to clarify a little further, today we probably most often equate digital humanities projects with the World Wide Web. But digital humanities projects can, and indeed many do, take place off or outside of the web. A web presence may be only a small component or used for publication of scholarship that actually takes place outside the web. So although the digitization of materials is often an important component of digital humanities projects, digitization alone is not necessarily what we would call digital humanities. That digitization of materials is not the end of digital humanities, but is a means to end. Certainly much of the work that digital humanists do could not happen without the digitization of primary documents, including books, newspapers, correspondence, and a range of manuscript items as well as three-dimensional objects. But digital humanities also requires a level or layer of critical inquiry and interpretation, and this inquiry or interpretation can take on a number of forms. So for something to be digital humanities, there has to be a layer of human intervention and interpretation. Even in data mining, another buzzword, for example, computers are not providing answers, but rather they offer additional points of access for human interpretation. To help with these somewhat abstract ideas into perspective, I'd like to talk about them briefly in regard to two digital projects on which I work, the Walt Whitman Archive in Civil War Washington. Much of our work on the Whitman Archive, which is at whitmanarchive.org, is the editing of Whitman's manuscripts, including poetry manuscripts, prose manuscripts, and notebooks. In editing these manuscript materials, we acquire high resolution, lossless images of the original documents, which we use for archival purposes and for creating derivatives for web presentation. We transcribe and encode the manuscripts in the text encoding initiative implementation of XML, and we generate HTML versions of the XML for online display using XSLT style sheets. On the one hand, this sounds like fairly straightforward, even conventional by current standards digitization work. Interpretation, however, is embedded at nearly every stage. In the case of Whitman, it can be very difficult to tell a prose manuscript from a poetry manuscript. When we make a choice about what genre a manuscript is, our decision gets encoded and is an interpretational layer. In addition, using TEI requires us to say what we believe about a chunk of text in the structure and function of the manuscript. Is some text a poetic line? Is it a paragraph or not quite a paragraph and instead something different? If we were interested only in searching Whitman's corpus, we would not need to identify each of these constituent parts, their structure and their function. But we on the Whitman archive often agonize over details such as these because we believe that that tells us something about the manuscript as a whole, and it allows for additional interpretation of the text in consideration of other texts of the same type. When we edit Whitman's manuscripts, we are interpreting them and our interpretations are encoded in the metadata. On the screen now is a snippet of some TEI code, I believe, for one of the Civil War notebooks that we now make available on the Whitman archive. You will see that we have indicated what structural units we identify, text to be, what has been deleted and added, and other structural and editorial components. Another project that I work on is Studies Washington D.C. during the Civil War. This is Civil War Washington at CivilWarD.org. We're creating a website that brings together digitized text and images, a geographic information system, and a relational database. The texts, locations, and relationships we're interested in as a project have so far dealt with issues relating to medical history and race, slavery, and emancipation. We've created a database that allows us to record information about people, places, events, organizations, and documents, as well as about relationships among these entities. Importantly, we have not identified one or the other of these categories as more important than another. All are on the same level in the database hierarchy, and we can create relationships between all of them. People may be related to other people as well as to events, organizations, documents, and places. This structure of the database is an argument and an interpretation of what we regard as important about the war and the experience of the war. Documents such as photographs, newspapers, and maps are important not only because they represent a person or a place. Other database representations of the Civil War may be organized only around events, and other items matter only then in relation to these events. But this focus limits the people, places, organizations, and documents a project might include, which is a model of the war that we did not want to replicate for our project. For Civil War Washington, then, we consider part of our digital humanities work to be thinking about databases as models of the world, what we believe about the world, and what we regard as important for the study of Civil War D.C. My goal in giving these two quick examples from the Whitman Archive in Civil War Washington is to illustrate our working definition and to give a context for other parts of our talk today. I've actually jumped ahead a bit since what I want to talk about next is the history of the field, but as I'm giving the history of digital humanities, these examples from the Whitman Archive in Civil War Washington will give you a sense of where this history leads. From a single scholar who saw the potential of computers to help in his interpretation of a major religious figure to major interinstitutional federally supported collaborations. Part two, the history of digital humanities. Digital humanities may sound like a new field, but its history stretches back nearly 60 years. Father Roberto Boussa, a Jesuit priest and scholar of Thomas Aquinas, is regarded as the founder of the field we now call digital humanities. Father Boussa on the screen now. Beginning in the late 1940s, Boussa began to use computers to study the meaning of words used by Aquinas, such as how the meaning or interpretation of the same word might vary depending on the other words with which it appeared, so words in context. Boussa, working with IBM, created a concordance of all 11 million words in the Aquinas corpus and located the words in context. This project stretched computational processes of the time and stretched technology, and it made an argument about how and where Boussa understood the meanings of Aquinas' words to reside and how he might best study them. Following Aquinas, much early work in digital humanities, and again the term was not then in use, focused on the creation of concordances. The dollars then turned to author attribution studies, and through the mid 1980s, concordances and similar projects were the main thrust of humanities computing as it was then called. In this stage, the work of early digital humanists was hampered by technology. Before the era of personal computers, humanists rarely had access to the computational power that they needed. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as computers found their way into work and home offices, humanists could suddenly do more. Importantly, they could communicate more. In addition to the mainstays of creating concordances and performing attribution studies, digital humanities was affected by the emergence of hypertext. The centrality of hypertext to DH increased with the coming of the World Wide Web. The Text Encoding Initiative, whose website you'll see on the screen now, was established in the late 1980s, and TEI gave rise to, among other areas of study, the electronic scholarly addition, of which the Whitman Archive is an example. In this period as well, collaboration emerged as a central component of digital scholarship and digital humanities. These collaborations were often inter-institutional and interdisciplinary in nature, involving two or more scholars to whole teams of scholars from single institutions or institutions throughout the United States and throughout the world. Today, then, digital humanities projects include electronic scholarly additions, text and data mining, author attribution studies, historical geographic information systems, and geospatial analyses of literary texts, and the creation of tools and platforms for the presentation and interpretation of humanistic artifacts, to name just a few. Other projects are interested in the way the digital alters our experience of the world for better and worse, and they study the digital from both real world and theoretical perspectives. Recognizing the growth and importance of digital humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities established the Office of Digital Humanities in 2008, and that's the website that's on your screens now. Following a several years long initiative to cultivate DH, the Office of Digital Humanities was created. Institutions are hiring digital humanities at a brisk pace in both academic departments and in libraries, and this pace is brisk, I suppose, relative to the larger job market. And many imagine a not too distant future when the humanities are the digital humanities, and libraries are playing a crucial role in that work, whether as formal partners or as consultants on an ad hoc basis. So I'm now going to turn the presentation over to Karen, who will talk about how this digital humanities work actually gets done. Thank you. My name is Karen Delzell. I work in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities as a digital resources designer. So I do some programming and some web design and a lot of putting websites together and fixing broken websites. I'm going to begin my part of the talk with, I'm going to talk about where to start with doing DH. Up first is conferences because this is often where you make the connections that lead to digital humanities projects. They're all about collaboration with a lot of different people usually. So I'll talk about ALA annual first. I didn't go to this year's ALA annual, but I looked at the schedule and I was really sad I didn't go. I counted nine sessions that actually mentioned digital humanities specifically and there may have been more sessions that use a slightly different term. And I think there was a pre-conference too. So digital humanities is increasingly becoming a buzzword in the library community and it's getting easier to find other librarians interested in talking about digital humanities. And actually just last night I saw in the library with the lead pipe, I think that blog is called has a nice article on digital humanities that's a pretty good resource too. So of course the conversation shouldn't end with librarians. So that's what leads me to that camp. Thanks for advancing this for me. So that camps are informational, their informal conferences where a bunch of like-minded people get together and they talk about whatever they want really. That camp stands for the Humanities and Technology Camp. So it incorporates topics as wide ranging as how to make your own wearable technology to digital humanities, libraries and public engagement. And that last session was one I actually attended at that camp Iowa City which was held a few months ago. That camps are springing up all over and is one example and I'm coming back camp and this is the screen that's up right now is that camp libraries and digital humanities. And that'll be this November in Denver. So I'm hoping to go to that one. I think it'll be pretty exciting. So other conferences, the American Historical Association, the Modern Languages Association, and the American Literature Association. They've all included digital humanities sessions at their last conferences. Some of them have very big digital humanities programs. And as the digital humanities gather more popularity you will likely see more of these types of things and kind of the subject conferences for different academic subjects. And also online, even if you can't go to any conferences, digital humanists are by and large very active on the internet and on Twitter specifically. There's a Twitter list that I have up here that's digital humanities that's maintained by Dan Cohen. And I'll talk about a few other places to find digital humanists online. And so if you find them, you just start to talk to them and you join in the conversation and you find people that have like-minded interests. The point of joining conversations at conferences and online isn't just to learn about digital humanities and how it works and what kinds of projects exist and who is doing it, although those things are nice. But to connect with people interested in collaborating on projects. If you go into these spaces prepared to talk about what you are interested in, whether it's local history or preservation of board games, and you find people to get excited with. So next I'm going to talk about digital humanities models, a few different ways in which digital humanities gets done. So first I'm going to talk about individuals. Individuals do a lot of digital humanities work. A lot of projects actually started as individual projects and then they move on to center or bigger projects or multi-institutional projects. Because somebody has an interest in something and they scratch that itch, they are often working at a university but not always. And sometimes they have no formal anything training. They don't have programming experience or anything and they create their own projects and they teach themselves the necessary skills. And this is where libraries come into play because libraries can help support these individual scholars. Sometimes these individuals might get small starter grants to help their research either through an institution, sometimes cities, sometimes states. Especially if it's got a local history slant you can sometimes get this kind of local support. But sometimes they just put in their own time and they buy their own web space and they just do their own project again because it's what they're interested in. So it can also include people outside academia and there are people, librarians. These are the people, librarians at universities without a formal support system might be called on to assist and even in public libraries. So just a few examples here. Jean Bauer, this is her project, DeVila. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. It's an open source relational database schema visualization and annotation tool. Jean has a PhD in history. She started the project while she was a ninth graduate fellow and she did the programming and design on the project and she is now a digital humanities librarian at Brown University. And there might be individuals outside the university system who do DH projects to scratch a personal itch. So this is Ben Brumfield. He's a computer programmer who has started this project to aid in transcription and annotation of his family diaries. And he's built a platform so other people are now using the same platform. And when Ben started this project, he was not in the digital humanities, but he worked on his own and developed a network of people to consult with. And so it's really interesting to watch people from within academia and public history and all these people kind of get together and talk about how best to do these projects. So you might even include people who are doing work that they probably wouldn't define in DH. Maybe some people in DH might not even define it as such. But I think it fits many of the properties that we were talking about. These are a new kind of public humanities, gone digital. As barriers to much digital work are constantly lowered, we will see more and more of this type of work. Public librarians may be called on to help a community member start a site and librarians can help raise awareness of how to grow and link these sites. So just as one small example, and there's a whole bunch of these out there, but I like this one because it's based in Nebraska. Alma's diary lived in Guide Rock, Nebraska. And this is her granddaughter. I don't actually know her name. She remains anonymous, but her granddaughter is publishing short entries from her grandmother's diary. She adds commentary. She adds some tagging systems. And she does it on several different social networking sites. And so this, I think, is on the very low end of what DH is. But because she is doing that tagging and she's kind of organizing it, I think it kind of fits in that definition. And I think more and more people are going to kind of start doing this. And as they do, we'll be able to pull out of it kind of a vast local history. Like people are doing it. They don't even know that's what they're doing. Yeah, as a name. Yeah. And I think, especially in public libraries, if people come in to get help with this kind of thing, if we can kind of fit it in that framework, then we can go, oh, we have resources that can help with this kind of thing. Because if you think about it as digital humanities, you can get say, let's ask a digital humanist how they would handle this. OK, so one other section I wanted to talk about was digital humanities in the classroom. There are many digital humanists have brought their digital research methods into the classroom. I'm going to go over three examples of this, but there are more and more every day. So first, I'm going to talk about Brian Croxel's undergraduate survey assignment, The American Century. It featured an interactive timeline and an interactive map of American literature following the Civil War. The students created an assignment in HTML and they use spreadsheets. This is actually all pulled from an online Google doc. And it allows them to see their work in a more visual way than just writing another paper. And it gives them experience in writing HTML and working with databases. And these are skills that they'll probably need once they get outside of the classroom. Casey Nash's project on our, I'm going to read this. On our way for the sunny south land of Chivalry was created for a summer research seminar in digital history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. And this will be incorporated into her master's thesis. This project features many visualizations. She has an interactive map and timeline like Brian Croxel's student project. And she has a concept map shown here where you can kind of see how different concepts mapped out through time. Prism is a graduate practicum project of the Praxis program out of the Scholars Lab, which I'll talk about a little bit later too. The Scholars Lab is a digital humanity center at the University of Nebraska, Virginia. And six graduate students created a software project to collaboratively analyze text. And in the process, they learned about every aspect of creating a digital humanity software project, including writing all the coding, doing the HTML and the design and the promotion. So it's probably worth mentioning that all of these student projects that I picked, I just handpicked a few, involve the creation of visualizations. And that's one way digital humanities is looking at data in a new way. And I think especially for students, they do so much paper writing. It's really nice to kind of get in there and do other things with literary text or historical archives and visualize them in a different way. On a larger scale, digital humanity centers. They're usually hosted at universities. I think there might be a few outside of universities, maybe, but they're generally located inside a university. They're a formalized way to support projects. These centers are usually staffed with programmers, designers, metadata experts, mapping experts, librarians, and anyone else who can help support an ongoing list of projects. Below are three examples of digital humanity centers to give an idea of the diversity of activities. And I will give away to find more centers. So CDRH, this is where I work and where Lizbeth works. I'm a designer and she's a project manager. And what's your new title? Well, I have several titles. She does everything. I love working with Liz because she keeps everything together. So we have a metadata encoding specialist, which is great because she gets all of the XML in great format. We have programmers. We have, me, I'm a designer, several librarians that really help get everything. And the librarians are great because they know where to get all the stuff that we need for all the projects. And we have other faculty from modern languages, from history, from English, and everybody works together to create these projects. We support projects that originate within the university, as well as massive projects that utilize talent from across several universities like the Whitman Archive. The CDRH is physically located in a library, so it's at UNL's Love Library. And it's a joint initiative with the College of Art and Science along with the library. We work primarily with text digitizing, displaying, analyzing and coding, usually with TEI, and visualizing them. Other activities include mapping, language preservation, and metadata research. Notable projects include the Walt Women Archive, the Cathar Archive, the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Civil War Washington, and the William F. Cody Archive is a newer one of ours. CDRH also has a hand in pedagogy, playing a major role in the creation of a graduate certificate in the digital humanities, and serving as a place for graduate and undergraduate students to learn the ins and outs of digital humanities. So a little bit different, the Center for History and New Media is located in Fairfax, Virginia at George Mason University, and it has a slightly different focus. This is a digital history center rather than a digital humanities center. And while they have projects that digitize and analyze text and images, such as Gulag, Many Days, Many Lives, their main focus is on tools. The CH&M's most popular tools are OMEKA, a platform for publishing collections and exhibitions, and Zotero, a citation management system. I think it would be hard to be in the library world without hearing of at least one of these projects. And so they use OMEKA as a platform for building many of their other projects, such as the September 11th digital archive. And administratively, CH&M is not affiliated with the library and depends heavily on grants for continued funding. So one final example, and again I'm just cherry picking three examples of a whole bunch. The Scholar's Lab is located in the University of Virginia libraries, and it has a deep focus in pedagogy, especially at the graduate level. The recently launched Praxis program, which I talked about before, is a pilot effort to realign graduate methodological training with the demands of the humanities in the digital age. They do this by choosing several grad students and working with them to build a digital humanities project, which was prism in this first year that they went through. The initiative comes after years of formally hosting, mentoring, and assisting graduate students with their own projects. In addition, the Scholar's Lab is heavily involved in mapping projects. The Scholar's Lab, like the CDRH, is physically located in a library and involves many librarians. And it has also been instrumental in developing BlackLay, a free and open source Ruby on Rails based discovery interface, also known as a next generation catalog. On a smaller scale than centers, a small group or lab might have just a few individuals, and this may encompass any group that is formed to research digital humanities like operations, but maybe doesn't have the formal support that a center does, so it could be temporary, it could just be an experiment to see how it goes. Sometimes labs are later folded into existing departments, but they are meant to experiment with new possibilities. And just one example of this, the New York Public Library Labs, they had a group called the Digital Experience Group that implemented several projects during 2007 to 2009, and this became New York Public Library Labs. The group partners with outside organizations such as Flickering Creates projects that are outside what the New York Public Library had provided, such as the New York Public Library Map Rectifier Project. And next I'm going to talk about massive collaborations. So a lot of what we do in the center is work on projects that are actually with us and another center or with other scholars at another university. The Whitman Archive is a good example of this. The first thing I'm going to talk about is digging into data. This was an office for digital humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities. They decided that they wanted to provide a grant for this. And it's a grant to help figure out what to do with all the data that librarian scholars and digital humanists have created. And this grant must be applied for as an international collaboration. So it has to be between countries. And so you get this massive network of people working on these things. The next one is the Whitman Archive. And since Liz knows a bit more about this than Mammon, I'll let her talk about how the collaboration works. I've already said a bit about the Whitman Archive, but on the collaborative end, it's, I think, useful to know just how big of a project the Whitman Archive is. It's co-directed by Kenneth M. Price and Ed Folsom. Ken Price is at the University of Nebraska. Ed Folsom is at the University of Iowa. The project originated in 1995 and was inter-institutional at the very beginning. Currently, we have five different, I guess, six different universities actively contributing to the Whitman Archive with faculty and undergraduate and graduate students all contributing to the project. I think between the different institutions, there are more than 20 graduate students currently contributing to the project. And it's become a training ground in some ways for the next generation of literary scholars, but also digital humanists with many of the students who've worked on the Whitman Archive, going on to digital humanities programs, to teach in digital humanities programs, and then to develop their own projects. I'm just going to talk about a few resources that you can look at, places to find other people or the kind of support that you might want or just to learn more about the digital humanities. So first I want to talk about CenterNet. CenterNet is an international network of digital humanities centers and is part of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. And you can see on the map there on the screen that the digital humanities centers are all over the world. So this is a good way to kind of find a center near you and see what they might be up to and see if maybe some collaboration is possible. Next I'll talk about the Office of Digital Humanities. That's, again, part of the National Endowment for the Humanities. And they offer many grants specifically for digital humanities. They have a very active blog. They post, whenever new grants are awarded, they post them so you can kind of see what kind of grants people are getting and what kind of projects people are getting funded. And then they also have digital humanities startup grants, which are smaller grants. I think they're 30,000 to 60,000 in that range. And so these are grants to kind of get a proof of concept up to maybe work on a smaller project that doesn't need quite the big grants that are also out there. Digital humanities questions and answers. This is a great site. It's modeled after a lot of the tech sites where you can ask programming questions. But I think it's a really nice place for people who are just starting to learn programming, just starting to put together their own projects. I find it a lot friendlier than some of the online tech. A lot of the online tech ones, people will be a little short with you and say, you should go just read this. And I find that on this site people are a lot more, they'll walk you through things a little bit more. And you can ask a question about just about anything. The humanist mailing list, this has been around since 1987. It looks like the earliest date on there is. You can sign up for the humanist mailing list if you want. You can also just read all the archives on this site. And it's very active. I would say it's one of the more active places. I think this in Twitter are probably your best bets for actually conversing with people. And it's a really good way to get a lot of job announcements are made on this list and a lot of new projects are announced. So it's a good way to kind of get a feel about what's going on in the digital humanities. I mentioned earlier the digital humanities Twitter list. And DH now is, this is a collaboratively edited digital humanities resource, kind of like a half magazine, half RSS feed. And it kind of has two components. There's a fire hose kind of that just brings in everything. And then they also have an edited so you can see it says editor's choice up there. So if you want, you can either get just the stuff that's kind of handpicked or you can look at everything that's being announced. And the editors, they take into consideration not only the kind of intrinsic value, but also how much people are talking about something. So we're going to give concluding remarks now and I'll let Liz go first. Do you have any concluding remarks? Okay. What excites me about digital humanities is I think that it's, I think academic libraries have seen a lot of it up till now, but I think it's going to become more prevalent in public libraries as public historians create more sites. It's already started. I've seen a lot of it. Alma's Diary is one example, but I've seen a lot of these kinds of people going through their own archives and trying to make sense of them and get them online. Public libraries can help by giving workshops on how best to create and showcase this work and what the best tools are and they can get help through any of these digital humanities resources. And I like digital humanities because of this shift. The public has never had greater access and chances for comprehension than now when these resources are online and everybody can get to them. Also, being online, these resources can grow and change over time and should always reflect the best and most accurate information we have. Finally, digital humanities allows us to explore topics in ways we have never been able to before through text analysis, visualizations, on-the-fly mapping of data, and I'm really excited to see what the future of digital humanities holds. Just, I guess, a few comments. Say first that in academic libraries, digital humanities is not just something for research-won institutions. Many smaller state universities and private colleges are hiring digital humanities, and libraries may likely be called upon to help these scholars with their projects to buy books and journal subscriptions in the field and to collaborate on project creation. And also, as a humanities scholar, my background is in English, but I'm also pursuing a master's degree in library science. I'm excited about what digital humanities means for my research and my colleagues' research and how we actually do our work. I'm also taken by the possibilities that digital humanities creates by conveying this information to the scholarly community and to the public in ways that we've not been able to do in the past. In my view, digital humanities creates more open, less insular, and more relevant academic institutions. Okay. Thank you, Karen and Liz. Does anybody have any questions or comments or anything you want to share? Type them into the questions section. We didn't get anything while you were talking. So feel free to type in your questions or comments, anything you have to share. I also want to let everyone know that during the session, and I think I caught them all, all of the websites and everything that Karen and Liz mentioned have been saved into the Library Commission's delicious account, as we normally do when we do these sessions. So when the recording is available and up, you will be able to have a link to all of them collected in one place. And I think I was able to find every single one of them and catch the measure. I can send you an email with all of them, too. Because there's a lot of things going through very quickly, lots of examples. And as you said, these aren't the only ones out there. Either this is just like a start or simply no places to go, ways to get started figuring it out. And that also that Michael, actually Michael Sowers, our technology innovation librarian here who's behind the camera at the moment, hiding, had shared that blog posts from in the Library of the Love Pipe, actually, they mentioned that. So that's on the list as well. So I'm not even sure how many, I was just cranking through them all. So any questions, comments, anything you want to share, or ask of Karen and Liz while they're here, trapped? And our emails are up there, too. So if you do have questions later on, or want to talk about anything, feel free to email us. Does anybody have any questions? Oh, wait, we have one thing. Jan Sears, who's from Kimball Public Library. We have a genealogy group active in the library with tons of obituaries and files and cataloged on note cards. How to transfer that to this project is a big question. I think it can be hard for public libraries that the first start, the first step of course is transcribing, and that can take a really long time. And I think getting it into that text format is definitely the first step. And the nice thing about things like that is you can usually get a lot of community support. As I say, community volunteers or students or somebody that, yeah. And you could just set up a blog, and just like each entry could be a separate obituary, and then you can tag them. And the nice thing about it is later you can pull, if you wanted to do something a bit more complex, text analysis later on, you can pull that out of the database. And then, so if you're getting that first step done, but that doesn't mean that you can't do more with it later on. We have a project at the, what is it called, in Beatrice, the Homesteading National Monuments. Oh, Homestead National Monuments, yeah. And a bunch of volunteers out there helped transcribe a lot of these original homesteading documents for us. And we find that it's pretty easy to get volunteers for these types of things, people like doing it. So if you have a few computers you can set up and people can come in and just type out what's on there. And genealogy is a huge topic. And like she says, it's a very group that's active in the library. And you just tap them and say, here's the new project. You guys always want to do something that will help get this information out and record it, really. Not just these note cards, as she says. I mean, that's fine, but those note cards eventually are going to fall apart, get lost. And making them searchable and getting it. You get it out. And I say a blog format, it doesn't have to be a blog, but it's a nice, easy administrative way to do it. And the nice thing about that is then it'll be searchable by the whole web. So if anybody is searching for a certain person, they'll hit on it just by searching in Google. The whole goal of all this is making it available to everyone. It was out there, not just people that could walk into your library and look at your note cards. Did you have a question? Michael has something. Maybe we offer blogging services here for public libraries and commission and WordPress that might be a way to go. I have a question, though, about that particular example or using that example for my question would be, how important would it be to get volunteers to transcribe it but then get volunteers to verify the transcription? I like a two-step process. Yeah, both things are important. I think getting it transcribed the first time is important. And then you can have that two-step process to say, okay, now you're going to come in. And sometimes people, I think, who are not very good at typing out the entries are actually very good at doing the proofreading. So you might ask people what they're more interested in because there are some people that are really slow typists, but they're good at catching those differences. In terms of the handwriting of the source material. Exactly. And I think, I'm actually going to move this toward Liz because I think Liz can speak towards handwriting. Whitman had kind of notoriously bad handwriting. I mean, we've seen the examples from Whitman or the manuscript example from Whitman in his hand. I thought it was probably a cleaner manuscript. There was one screenshot there that was just electric. Right. The other materials that we're working on now for Civil War Washington, the set that we're working on now seem to be, we're not entirely sure what they are, but they seem to be kind of court records related to slaves in the district who filed for their emancipation following the passage of the D.C. Emancipation Act in 1862. And those were written on the fly by someone with horrible handwriting who was trying to capture oral testimony. And those are, and we're working from digitized microfilm that wasn't great quality to begin with. So it's kind of every, everything that could be go wrong has gone wrong with that. And we've decided that Civil War Washington is in part an editorial project. And so for us, we do the initial transcription and encoding and then every record is getting two, if not three rounds of checking ultimately signed off by a director of the project. But that's because of how we've defined the project and its editorial goals. And so for other projects, I think that the degree of checking and how many people are going to look at it and what is good enough to go live, we hope that our transcriptions are 100% accurate. They never are. That's our goal, but depending on what the needs of the library are, you will probably be better off with a much leaner editorial pipeline. Yeah, and parts of it, you probably want the names really checked over. And that's probably more important for purposes of searching, whereas if the is spelled wrong somewhere, that's not as big a deal. Where would OCR software fall into that? Actually, that's the question that Jan just actually related to that just typed in. They only have three to five active members, unfortunately, in the challenge groups. That is huge, but a blog is a good idea. She says, and then she asked, can the obits be scanned and tagged? So doing it that way. You can get OCR software, and there's actually some free solutions online now that you can kind of play with. They kind of change. It seems like they come and go, and so you have to do a search for free OCR software. Your results may vary. The OCR software that we use is fairly expensive. I think it's like $600 to $1,000, I think, for the program, for a seat. And so it is very useful, but at the same time, it's pretty expensive. And the results, it only works if it's typewritten pretty clearly. It doesn't work for handwriting at all, of course, but so if there's a lot of this material, it might be useful, and maybe you could find someone in the community that would be willing to pay for it, or find a group of people that say, hey, we want to raise money to buy the software. Maybe the cards were typed originally. Yeah, then that might work. And in your experience, has free or open source OCR worth the time? Well, I found some of them that work pretty well, but there's generally a limit to the amount you can run through it. So you're limited to 20 documents, or at least the ones that I've tried. And ever note this free OCR, but it doesn't actually give you the text back in a useful format. So a lot of these are kind of iffy, and the software is still expensive enough that it's kind of hard to use. Yeah. Oh, and she wants to know if that software is on the ADA computers. Oh, I believe she's talking about the computers that we just gave to the libraries. No, it's not the same kind of thing that's on there. No, that's just reading, that's just text software to read it out loud to people with vision problems. It's not the same kind of software. No, you wouldn't be able to use that software for this purpose. It doesn't do the same thing. And the other, thanks for the idea, you might have some calls. Yeah, if you want to email, we can tell you what software we use. We switched when we went to Mac instead of PC, so we have different, because one of them isn't made for Mac. So we have some that we've used, and they work pretty well, but transcribing sometimes is almost as fast, depending on how good the software is going to do with the text. Hey, any other questions, comments for Karen and Liz? Anything you have to say behind the scenes, Karen? No. No, it doesn't look like anybody has desperately typed, nobody typed in anything in between with Jan was saying, so that's fine. So I guess I'll say, if nobody has anything urgent that they need to know right now, you have their contact information, of course feel free to call, email them with any questions you might have. Session has been recorded, so it will be available to you, and we'll let you guys know when it's up there and ready. The PowerPoint presentation will be along with it, so you'll have that to refer to, and as I said, all the links that were mentioned during the session will be there as well. So you have access to all that. So nothing has come in yet right now. Thank you very much, Karen. Liz, that was very interesting. I personally didn't know anything about digital human, I mean, you know, for it of course, because you do it all the time I hear about it. You know, I didn't know much about it myself either, but it sounds very interesting. It's a mixture of a lot of different fields. You can come at it as far as getting involved in it from various directions, technical, graphic design, just being interested, like Jan was saying, we're into genealogy, and you don't know it, but that's what you're doing. It's digital humanities. You just now have a name to attach to it. And I think sometimes that's a big help, because then you know what to search for to get help. We have more information on how can we do this better, what process could we use, what software, yeah. So a lot of these resources would be great for people. Okay, well thank you very much, you guys, and thank you everyone for attending this morning. We will be back on a regular Wednesday next week, as usual Wednesday at 10 a.m. So I hope you'll join us for next week's session, which is a day in the life of the Scholarship Student Conference Attendee. Here at the Library Commission we have an IMLS grant, 21st Century Librarian Grant, and we gave state stipends to scholarship students to attend conferences. And I'm not sure which conferences they've all attended, but we're going to have a group of scholarship students, about five or six people here, who are going to talk about what conferences they attended, how they did there, their first experiences attending these national conferences, things like ALA that was just happened that you were just mentioning in other conferences. So we'll have a group of students who have their experiences with us, so if you're interested in what happened at conference or how you can possibly get involved yourself, that will be a good one to attend. So thank you very much for attending, and we'll see you next week. Back on our Wednesdays. Thanks, bye-bye.