As a longtime academic librarian, I have been present for a great deal of the transition from print to digital, and as a humanities person, it has been both thrilling and frustrating to participate in this shift. From card catalogues to online searching to discovery layers that provide access to materials, and from microfiche indexes to punch cards to instantly-downloadable resources, I have been on the front lines and behind the scenes, trying to anticipate users’ content needs and provide technical support. The advent of full-text resources opened a gold mine of opportunities for humanists, as we moved from print concordances to being able to search a CD-ROM poetry database for how many times the word “rose” appears in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Spreadsheets and data visualization programs, along with software that can scrape websites, create timelines or maps, and clean and store data, have further revolutionized how librarians and humanists work.
While I had the privilege of decades of on-the-ground work that tracked the transition from print to online, today’s library science students and budding humanities scholars do not have that foundation. It takes time, research, and multi-disciplinary work to fully understand what Marcia Bates described so well as the “invisible substrate” of the information profession (Bates, 1043). Librarians work across disciplines in their daily work of reference and research consultations, collection development, and outreach. Bates’ work further provides a solid structure for understanding digital humanities (DH) librarianship and, specifically, how DH librarians analyze the processes within and across disciplinary domains, and work with researchers to create and organize new knowledge. I have seen many new librarians thrown into jobs that involve working with digital humanities researchers in multiple modes, from research assistance, to collections, to technical expertise. New-ish librarians often have to play catch-up to see the intersections between those functions and recognize all the moving parts.
As part of my personal career shift from librarian to faculty member responsible for training librarians, I have focused on the applied curriculum that students need to function in today’s information settings. That includes creating the Digital Humanities Librarianship class at the University of Washington’s Information School, which I built to help students understand the intersections between traditional disciplinary reference and liaison work, collection development, and the use of existing and emerging technologies to create new knowledge and understanding in the humanities.
The question of the role of the librarian in DH work is one that runs throughout the course, as can be seen in the formal course outcomes:
examine the structure of knowledge and information needs in the humanities.
explore varied resources that provide reference, data, and bibliographic support for work in the humanities.
connect DH concepts to ongoing projects and scholarship in a wide range of forums, both geographic and disciplinary.
engage with equity and inclusion concepts including feminized labour and the lack of diversity in the DH field.
identify and evaluate the technical resources needed to support DH scholarship.
articulate different models of library support for changing paradigms of research in the humanities.
DH librarians wear a number of hats, ranging from identifying, acquiring, or digitizing content to advising about technology, to being asked to clean data, to being full-on credited collaborators with disciplinary researchers. Thus, the training for DH librarianship has to cover a range of content and skill areas, from understanding multiple research methodologies across humanities disciplines to being familiar with the many technologies used in DH, to managing expectations and creating boundaries.
As part of the DH Librarianship course, the students dive into humanities disciplinary resources, and they also explore different open-source DH tools. We hear from people across the DH field, ranging from noted scholars like Roopika Risam to project managers to digital scholarship librarians, so they can learn about the field from a variety of perspectives. We look at a lot of DH projects—good, bad, and in between—and we explore what makes up data across the disciplines. We read broadly from scholarly articles in DH and the disciplines to blog posts and (until recently) Twitter threads; see Appendix A for a selected reading list.
Assignments
Students work on multiple assignments during the quarter. They work in teams to explore tools ranging from TimelineJS, StoryMaps, and AntConc to Voyant, Omeka, Manifold, and OpenRefine, among others. Tools are examined for functionality, accessibility, and difficulty to master. We use a text each quarter to make up a basic data set that is used in testing these tools; this year the script for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse provided our reasonably-sized and approachable file. Students also dive into the disciplinary literature, exploring both print and digital resources across the humanities, from religion and philosophy to music, art, and literature. Here, they have a chance to dive into rabbit holes of content and think about how it can be used from a DH perspective.
The final project that students work on is a Digital Humanities Consultation. In this assignment, the goal is for students to put themselves in the role of a DH librarian, meaning they imagine that they are consulting with faculty, researchers, and students, rather than building their own DH projects from the ground up. As is the case with many of us in academia, we often don’t ask for help when we should—we try to work our way through problems, whether those be content and data-focused, or technology-based—and so by the time we do ask for assistance, we may be knee-deep or more into our project. And this is where the DH librarian comes in: they often meet with stakeholders who have started a project and then gotten stuck, and the DH librarian is called in to advise on technology, on disciplinary resources, or clean-up activities. To mimic this very real-life situation, and to highlight issues of maintenance and sustainability in DH, I ask the students to search for abandoned DH projects which are in need of assistance, and to insert themselves as the DH librarian, as if they were working with the original project creators. The students are not asked to make contact with the project authors, though nearly every quarter I teach this someone does reach out, much to the surprise and delight of the original researcher—they are always glad to know that someone is looking at their work.
Once they’ve identified a suitable project, the students work through a number of points: Based on Miriam Posner’s “How Did They Make That?” tutorial, they evaluate what platforms and tools were used, and using their growing reference interview skills, they attempt to determine “Why did they make that?” and “Who did they make this for?” After that assessment, they propose what a DH librarian could provide the author/researcher to make their project more complete, relevant, and accessible. In doing this, they explore what context and content is available that could be added to the extant website. They also envision what technology or tools would be useful and evaluate the website for usability.
Their deliverable is an in-depth proposal for how they would assist the researcher; it could take the form of a prototype of a rebuilt website, a timeline, map, information visualization using extant and new content, an accessibility assessment, a bibliography of content to consider adding, or whatever is appropriate for that specific project. As part of the proposal, some students focus on growing their familiarity with technology to provide an example of what they would show a researcher. I use a social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion lens in all my courses, and for this project the students are required to locate DH projects to work on that highlight some aspect of marginalized or underrepresented voices: creating a map of locations in Charles Dickens’ London or cataloguing different sea creatures in Moby Dick do not fit the bill. See Appendix B for the full assignment prompt, and Appendix C for the scoring rubric.
What the students come up with is impressive, year after year. Below are just a few examples and screen shots from the winter 2023 iteration of the course.; The students have all provided permission to use these anonymized images, and URLs are provided for the original much-in-need-of-help projects.
There are always a number of websites that the students work with which were created in the 1990s and are in need of technology and often content updates. For example, the website Black People’s Hair (Figure 1) is mostly dead links, especially in the exhibit section. The student focused their efforts on discovering content that the original author could link to if they updated their website—they found a number of exhibits and websites that would be great additions, including a website that was available in March of 2023 but is no longer extant of this writing, called The Black Hair Syllabus (thus providing yet another example of maintenance and sustainability issues in DH). They also created a prototype website on Omeka (Figure 2) which provided a more appealing showcase for the African comb exhibit than on the original website.
Figure 2: Screenshot of student-created revised exhibit using content from the website Black People’s Hair and showing “Traditional African Comb” item.
Figure 3: Screenshot of original website landing page for “The Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature”: A Revised History of Homosexuality & Mormonism, 1840-1980” website, http://www.connellodonovan.com/lgbtmormons.html, accessed 1 March 2024.
This student created a prototype revised website in Omeka (Figure 4), and also demonstrated how an embedded timeline would highlight specific events and organizations that had been buried on the original website (Figure 5).
Figure 4: Screenshot of student-created revised Omeka prototype for “The Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature”: A Revised History of Homosexuality & Mormonism, 1840-1980” website, showing Introduction section).
Figure 5: Screenshot of student-created revised prototype demonstrating a timeline feature for events and organizations specified on the “The Abominable and Detestable Crime Against Nature”: A Revised History of Homosexuality & Mormonism, 1840-1980 website.
Some students located websites that may not originally have started out as DH projects but could easily morph into them. In the example below, the student found The Blue, the Gray, and the Chinese: American Civil War Participants of Chinese Descent blog, which focused on American Civil War descendants of Chinese descent (Figure 6). The blog has a lot of resources, but they are inconsistently tagged, and there are no features such as timelines or maps.
Figure 6: Screenshot of original landing page for The Blue, the Gray, and the Chinese: American Civil War Participants of Chinese Descent blog, http://bluegraychinese.blogspot.com/, accessed 1 March 2024.
Figure 6: Screenshot of original landing page for The Blue, the Gray, and the Chinese: American Civil War Participants of Chinese Descent blog, http://bluegraychinese.blogspot.com/, accessed 1 March 2024.
This student hypothesized that those features would engage a wider audience and allow multiple access points into the material. They ended up prototyping a StoryMaps website (Figure 7), with which they were not satisfied. They then built out a spreadsheet of metadata to create a more visual way to explore the data from the blog and attempted to use it in CollectionBuilder, but they were unable to make it work.
Figure 7: Student-created ArcGIS StoryMaps prototype using content from The Blue, the Gray, and the Chinese blog.
This is one of many—and I expect this—cases where the ultimate recommendation did not make it into prototype form because of time or technology limitations. University of Washington is on the quarter system, which means we have a mere 10 weeks to cover a lot of ground. As this student said,
“I wish I was able to get it to properly work as a mock up, and the inability to do so bothers me from a reference librarian standpoint…this also was a lesson learned about not going down those rabbit holes and trying to do everything myself—remembering that completing the project singlehandedly is not my job.” (“Student Reflection 1”).
Those of us with DH experience know that we learn a lot from our failures—in fact that’s usually where some of our biggest successes start—and I’m glad to see that this student was able to transform their challenge into the realization that they’d most likely be working as part of a team were this a real-life undertaking.
Another student worked with a project that is definitely DH but is on a platform that is no longer as functional as desired. The Eugenic Rubicon, a history of sterilization in California from the 1920s to the 1950s was built in Scalar, which many of us will remember as a go-to platform for several years; However, most of the images no longer load, either in the text or the embedded timeline. Scalar also failed some basic accessibility tests. A platform such as PressBooks or Manifold would make this project far more useable. What this student ended up creating was a list of content resources across the fields of Women’s and Gender Studies, African American Studies, and American Studies, to bolster the existing materials.
Several students investigated websites and projects that, to put it candidly, could do better in their approach to diversity and inclusion. For example, one student focused on The Traditional Animal Foods of Indigenous Peoples of Northern North America website. While the website was created in 2017, there are no citations for resources written after 1998. There is also a lot of self-citing by one of the authors, and there is no indication that any contributions to this page were made by Indigenous peoples. Several other concerning statements were also on the website, including one about environmental changes affecting traditional food use being a subject that is not reliably documented. That statement was easily disproved by a little research on the part of the student, who reached out to request further information from the website’s authors; That request went unanswered. Given these fundamental questions about the project, what’s a student posing as a DH librarian to do? In this case, the student went all-in on finding Indigenous-based resources that the website creators should consult so they can better understand the documentation of causes and consequences of change in traditional food systems.
Reflective work
The assignment also asks students to write a reflection. Some of the questions they pondered include how well they think their added content or different technology improved the project. Others include what support or training they would have liked to have had to work on this project as a DH librarian, and how they would have bridged the gaps between themselves as a librarian and the scholar/researcher, to help them define their role.
This is where I am always delighted to see how much students have learned about themselves in addition to everything else this course tries to accomplish. For example, a student whose project focused on a website that archives images of women’s personal effects from 18th and 19th-century Iran (Persia) ran into multiple stumbling blocks. Throughout the project, the student did a lot of digging into content, only to be challenged by barriers including language and disciplinary knowledge. In this statement, they show the realization that flexibility is key when working with DH projects:
“My final, most frustrating limitation was myself. I felt I wasted a lot of time being stubborn about carrying out my plan as I originally envisioned it instead of letting myself change my mind as soon as it did not make practical sense. I wish I had kept more of an open mind about what I could accomplish with this project instead of trying to limit myself to what I already knew.” (“Student Reflection 2”)
Another student tackled the Black Gotham Archive, a website about the history of Black New Yorkers during the 19th century. This student searched for complementary archives and DH projects that would intersect with the Black Gotham Archive and created a StoryMaps plus some family tree visualizations to add depth to the existing content. In their reflection, they noted what we all know to be an issue in DH: “I came across a good amount of DH projects that were no longer being maintained and were filled with dead links. This was frustrating because sometimes the subject matter was exactly what I needed.” (“Student Reflection 3”)
This student also summarized issues with technology, noting they did not, and would not, have the time needed, to realize their vision:
“Starting out, I thought it would be easy to find some sort of family tree tool that had features to make it interactive…I have a lot of programming experience so I did find options that I knew could create exactly what I needed, but the amount of time spent coding would be unfeasible for the researcher, the library staff, or me.” (“Student Reflection 3”)
Conclusion
While the learning outcomes of this assignment are in general measurable and build upon the weekly work we did as a group, my not-so-subtle but also non-quantifiable hoped-for outcome is to see that the students are curious, that they’re making connections, and that they are pushing at their comfort levels in order to learn. Starting to understand the universe of what they do not know, and how to remedy those gaps, as well as what strengths they do bring to the profession, shows that some profound learning has happened. This class is always a joy for me to teach because by and large students do achieve so much more than they thought they could, and also because I learn so much from them along the way. To me, that is what librarianship and DH are all about. Being able to exhibit flexibility, practise skills that can get them into and out of rabbit holes, and understand how DH librarians interact on multiple levels with their users are all useful takeaways that I have seen these students put to use in their work as new professionals.
Jay, Alex. The Blue, the Gray, and the Chinese: American Civil War Participants of Chinese Descent. https://bluegraychinese.blogspot.com/. Accessed 1 Mar. 2024.
Kuhnlein, Harriet V., and Murray M. Humphries. Traditional Animal Foods of Indigenous Peoples of North America. McGill University. 2017, https://traditionalanimalfoods.org/.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
