Scholars' Lab » Announcements

Collaborative mentoring at UT & UVa: co-developing an updated TEIDisplay for Omeka

tclement — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:43:04 +0000

In partial answer to Bethany‘s charge in her recent ProfHacker piece “it starts on day one,” I’m very excited to introduce a cross-institutional effort between the Scholars’ Lab and the School of Information at UT-Austin to mentor two UT graduate students in the iSchool as they work to develop a DH tool for the DH community. The project will have two corresponding parts based on the background and interest of the students. Zane Schwarzlose, whose background includes extensive experience in developing with PhP and JavaScript will work to enhance TEIDisplay, an Omeka plugin originally written by Ethan Gruber at the Scholars’ Lab, that allows users to upload and display searchable TEI texts within the Omeka environment. Carin Yavorcik, an emerging archivist, will create TEI templates as well as user documentation so that the new tool will be useful not only to the many cultural institutions that Omeka serves but also to instructors who are looking for an environment within which they can teach the integral ways in which a TEI text can function as a cross-platform representation of text.

The collaboration makes sense on many levels, but here are two that surface readily:

These are complex technologies that function in a complex social and cultural system. We can meet the development needs because we represent institutions with different institutional missions, different (though like-minded) communities, with different resources.
Our students, who will seek jobs in which they work collaboratively in different institutional missions, from the perspective of different (though like-minded) communities, with different resources, must be prepared to meet these challenges within a network of a the wider DH community.

If we believe in a basic DH tenet that making is a theoretically framed activity that helps deepen our understanding of our cultural artifacts and our modes of knowledge production, we must instill, as Bethany so aptly articulates, ”a can-do, maker’s ethos” in students who will feel “empowered to build and re-build the systems in which they and future students will operate.” To further this cause, we must also instill a second basic DH tenet in our community of scholars, makers, and teachers: we must pool our resources, both technical and academic, and develop our technologies (such as the TEI and Omeka) and mentor our students, together.

Both Carin and Zane will blog regularly in this space as the project develops. Onward ho, ya’ll.

seeking a Senior Research Specialist for SCI

Bethany Nowviskie — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:19:34 +0000

I’m pleased to share a formal job posting for an 18-month research-and-writing position with the Scholarly Communication Institute. The posting is limited to current employees of the Unversity of Virginia for four business days, after which it will open more broadly.* It’s a short-term position, but an excellent opportunity to work with SCI leadership and representatives of the following groups: the Scholars’ Lab Praxis Program, CHCI, centerNet, PressForward, the Modern Language Association, the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, the ACLS, CLIR, and more. The timeframe for our decision is very short, so interested applicants should not delay!

*UPDATE: The position is now open to all qualified candidates.
Please note new URL below!

Senior Research Specialist, SCI

The Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library seeks a senior research specialist for a full-time, 18-month position with the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI). The ideal candidate will have: excellent research, writing, and organizational skills; familiarity with humanities scholarship at the graduate level; and an interest in experimental approaches to digital authoring and publication or the education of emerging scholars and knowledge workers. Some travel is required, and there is a possibility of a work-from-home arrangement for a professional and thoroughly reliable candidate.

Reporting to UVa Library’s director of digital research and scholarship, the SCI research specialist will:

help design, execute, and analyze a broad-based, anonymous survey of humanities professionals (together with the perceptions of their employers) to examine graduate-level preparation for so-called “alternative academic” careers (20%);

attend and provide research support for three meetings and regular conference calls on new-model publishing and authoring environments, in order to take notes and help compile proceedings and recommendations (15%);

attend and provide research support for two to three meetings centering on the reform of methodological training in the humanities, involving major humanities consortia, professional associations, and funders, to take notes and help compile proceedings and recommendations (15%);

assist in research and organizational tasks related to the development and day-to-day operations of the Praxis Program at the University of Virginia Library, including the hosting of a gathering to foster inter-institutional collaboration on similar initiatives (20%);

and perform other research and writing tasks as needed by SCI principals (10%).

The SCI research specialist will join a vibrant and dedicated community of faculty and staff at the Scholars’ Lab, and as such will be eligible for the self-directed “20% time” that all team members are granted to pursue professional development and their own (often collaborative) R&D projects. This is a grant-funded position with a salary of approximately $50k per annum and full benefits as a member of the managerial and professional staff of the University of Virginia. The position begins no later than March 1st, 2012 and extends no later than August 31st, 2013.

Experience and Education: Master’s degree or higher in fields related to humanities scholarship or information science. Demonstrated ability as a writer and researcher. Project management experience or experience with survey design and analysis desirable.

Please APPLY ONLINE.

Mapping the Catalogue of Ships

Bethany Nowviskie — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:02:40 +0000

I’m very pleased to share a guest post by UVa Classics professor Jenny Strauss Clay, describing a new project we’ve undertaken at the Scholars’ Lab. We’re excited not only at the opportunity to use GIS techniques to test Professor Clay’s theories about the relation of ancient geography to mnemonic devices and poetic form, but also at the possibility that this process might assist in the identification of lost archaeological sites. — Bethany Nowviskie

Book Two of the Iliad notoriously contains a list of nearly 190 place names and includes the 29 contingents and that make up the Greek expedition to Troy. Before launching into an over 250-line catalogue of the leaders of the Greek forces and the number of their ships, Homer appeals to the Muses to aid him in this tour-de-force of memory. Without their help, he says:

I could not recount their numbers nor name them,
Not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths,
And an unbreakable voice and a brazen chest within,
If the Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing
Zeus, would remind me how many came under Ilium.

The Catalogue of Ships that follows this invocation can be mapped as an itinerary, or more precisely, three itineraries that traverse most of Greece. The theoretical basis for the project I am undertaking with the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library is already complete. In my recent book, Homer’s Trojan Theater (Cambridge University Press, 2011), I argue that Homer was able to recite the Catalogue by creating a mental journey that used the mnemonic techniques involving loci or places, well known from ancient rhetorical writers. By envisioning a series of places, Homer could mentally walk – or sail – through Greece and produce a detailed catalogue. Our project will reproduce that journey by showing that the itinerary described follows the natural contours of Greek geography and the patterns of early Greek urban organization.

Mapping the Catalogue of Ships involves several steps. “Least-cost path” GIS analysis by the Scholars Lab is revealing the terrain that must naturally be followed when taking a walking tour of the Greek mainland. We are creating an interactive map that follows that path. The Barrington Atlas of the Ancient World (2002) as well as the recent Historischer Atlas der antiken Welt (2007), The Homer Encyclopedia (2011) and the Pleiades Project, a collaborative database for ancient sites, have pinpointed locations for which we have evidence. We will attempt to link the sites mentioned in Homer with archaeological material and useful bibliographies. Finally, we hope to do in situ investigations by actually traversing the plotted itinerary at ground level to survey the terrain, and create extensive panoramic photography. Our main goal is to demonstrate that the arrangement of the Catalogue, far from a random list of place names, corresponds to the natural geography of Greece. In cases where the position of a site is unknown or disputed, we hope that our analysis will provide plausible geographical and literary evidence to help identify its location.

Collaborators in this project include Ben Jasnow and Courtney Evans, two of my graduate students who worked with me on the Trojan Theater project and who are assisting with GIS analysis, under the guidance of Chris Gist and Kelly Johnston of the Scholars’ Lab. Wayne Graham and other members of the Scholars’ Lab R&D division are creating a presentational framework for our maps and text, and Jeremy Boggs is our lead designer.

Jenny Strauss Clay
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Classics

The Mappy Goodness that is GIS Day in the Scholars’ Lab

Kelly Johnston — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:46:16 +0000

Every November on the Wednesday of Geography Awareness Week the world celebrates GIS Day. On that day in Charlottesville the geospatial community gathers in the Scholars’ Lab for mappy goodness.

And cake.

In 2010 we threw open the Scholars’ Lab doors for folks to present geospatial lightning talks. We were impressed by the breadth of GIS work ongoing across our community.

And lots of people came to hear these mappy stories.

And for cake.

Face it, you love maps. We invite you to join our band of Virginia Mapheads as we celebrate World GIS day 2011 with a lightning-fast show of the world’s coolest geowork in the Scholars’ Lab on Wednesday, November 16 at 1:30pm.

Sadly, I know many of you don’t have the pleasure of working all day every day with maps and geodata, so treat yourself to a once-a-year map fix. You know you deserve it! And bring a friend.

Again, we have a compelling lightning talk lineup for 2011.

Your reward? Two slices of our soon to be legendary 2011 GIS Day geocake to be revealed on GIS day!

2011 GIS Day Update

Over 70 folks enjoyed our 2011 GIS Day celebration in the Scholars’ Lab.

Speakers ranged from wily GIS veterans to those who’d recently started using geospatial tools. Check the speaker list above to see the wide range of topics.

The Charlottesville CBS station sent their GIS Day team to cover the event interviewing Eric Johnson, Scholars’ Lab Head of Outreach and Consulting.

And we feasted on the already legendary Virginia-shaped geocake decorated with flags marking unusual place names. All this was followed by delicious hot mulled cider.

Thanks to everyone who played a part in making GIS Day 2011 a mappy success!

Fall 2011 Workshop Series

ronda — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 17:35:50 +0000

We’d like to invite you to our workshop series this fall.

Chris Gist and Kelly Johnston have created eight GIS workshops designed to take attendees from learning to create their first map using ArcGIS10 to mapping the world with Open Street Map. The series starts Tuesday, October 11, and will run weekly through November 29.

Download the complete schedule of GIS workshops (PDF) here.

Nancy Kechner and Kathy Gerber of UVa ITS and the Scholars’ Lab are offering six workshops introducing statistical software packages and data visualization. The series started on September 28, and runs through Wednesday, November 9.

Download the complete schedule of software workshops (PDF) here.

All Scholars’ Lab workshops are free, open to all, have no prerequisites, and no registration is required. We hope you’ll join us!

Fedora Connector – New and Improved

dm4fn — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:16:31 +0000

This week we’re pleased to announce that we’ve finished up the first pass on a major redesign of our Fedora Connector plugin for Omeka. Fedora Connector makes it possible to connect an Omeka site to a Fedora Commons repository. After entering basic information about the location of the Fedora repository, you can create linkages between “datastreams” in Fedora and the native Omeka items on your site. Once those associations are configured, you can import all of the metadata from Fedora into Omeka with a single click.

You can grab the code on GitHub.

We’ve completely redesigned the front-end administrative interfaces and made a lot of plumbing upgrades to the code that communicates with Fedora. One of the challenges with this type of “glue” software – code that crosses back and forth between different systems and data standards – is that it’s always something of a losing game to try to cover all possible use cases. For example, Fedora Connector needs to query the XML in a Fedora datastream for a particular set of nodes that can be used to populate the native Dublin Core fields for Omeka items. That’s pretty straightforward if the datastream is already encoded in Dublin Core – but if it’s not, the plugin needs a “conversion table” of sorts so that it knows that node X in Dublin Core corresponds to node Y in whatever schema the target datastream is marked up in.

Trying to code out all possible combinations of metadata standards would devolve into a big game of programming whack-a-mole. Some permutations are obvious. For example, the new version of Fedora Connector ships with code to convert from the commonly used MODS metadata format. But the edge cases aren’t so obvious, and beyond a certain point it becomes a fool’s errand to try to guess to hard about software will be used in the wild.

Luckily, this is just the sort of situation where open source really shines! Eric and Wayne concocted a highly clever system that essentially creates a “sub-plugin” ecosystem inside of the Fedora Connector plugin that makes it possible to modularly snap in new chunks of code to handle specific metadata formats. This way, if you need the plugin to communicate with an unsupported metadata standard on your Fedora server, you can just write out the XPath queries that map onto the Dublin Core fields, and, with a minimal amount of easy-on-the-eyes boilerplate, plug the new importer into Fedora Connector.

Here’s how it works. New importers just inherit from an abstract class called FedoraConnector_AbstractImporter, which handles all of the utility tasks of fetching content from Fedora and writing new values to the Omeka database. All you have to do is define two functions. The first, called canImport(), essentially just announces to the sub-plugin system that datastreams of metadata type X (whatever standard your code is supporting) can now be imported. And the second, called getQueries(), takes the name of Dublin Core value and returns the queries needed to find the corresponding value(s) in the datastream content.

First, though, we need to tell PHP where to find the abstract class:

require_once FEDORA_CONNECTOR_PLUGIN_DIR . '/libraries/FedoraConnector/AbstractImporter.php';

Next, declare your new class and tell it to inherit from the abstract base class:

require_once FEDORA_CONNECTOR_PLUGIN_DIR . '/libraries/FedoraConnector/AbstractImporter.php';

class NameOfFormat_Importer extends FedoraConnector_AbstractImporter
{

}

Make sure to name your class with the format [NameOfFormat]_Importer so that Fedora Connector can see it. Now, add the declarations for the two functions:

require_once FEDORA_CONNECTOR_PLUGIN_DIR . '/libraries/FedoraConnector/AbstractImporter.php';

class NameOfFormat_Importer extends FedoraConnector_AbstractImporter
{

	public function canImport($datastream)
	{

	}

	public function getQueries($name)
	{

	}

}

In canImport(), you just need to return a true or false value depending on whether or not the passed in datastream matches the format that your importer is designed to handle. This can be done by just checking for equality and returning the result of the evaluation:

require_once FEDORA_CONNECTOR_PLUGIN_DIR . '/libraries/FedoraConnector/AbstractImporter.php';

class NameOfFormat_Importer extends FedoraConnector_AbstractImporter
{

	public function canImport($datastream)
	{
		return ($datastream->metadata_stream == ‘NameOfFormat’);
	}

	public function getQueries($name)
	{

	}

}

Now, all that’s left is to process the Dublin Core $name variable getting passed into the getQueries() function and return an array of XPath queries that will pluck the corresponding nodes out of a document marked up in the format that you need to accommodate. Just run a switch-case on the $name and run through all the Dublin Core values:

require_once FEDORA_CONNECTOR_PLUGIN_DIR . '/libraries/FedoraConnector/AbstractImporter.php';

class NameOfFormat_Importer extends FedoraConnector_AbstractImporter
{

	public function canImport($datastream)
	{
		return ($datastream->metadata_stream == ‘NameOfFormat’);
	}

	public function getQueries($name)
	{

		switch ($name) {

			case 'Title':

				$queries = array(
				'//*[local-name()="mods"]/*[local-name()="titleInfo"]'
					. '/*[local-name()="title"]'
				);

			break;

			case 'Creator':

				$queries = array(
				'//*[local-name()="mods"]'
					. '/*[local-name()="name"][*[local-name()="role"] = "creator"]'
				);

			break;

			[...handle all DC values...]

		}

		return $queries;

	}

}

Stick the file in the FedoraConnector/Importers directory and you’re good to go! We’ve also implemented a nifty method of adding custom “renderers” to the plugin – code that controls the display of various data formats on the public-facing Omeka site. Check out the README.md file on GitHub for details, and watch for more development on the plugin in the near future.

Omeka Development with Vagrant

err8n — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 20:09:12 +0000

For the latest information about this system, please see the README file. It contains this information, plus I’ll keep it up-to-date.

One of the biggest annoyances in a developer’s life is managing the software required to work on several different projects. Usually, this doesn’t just mean having different systems or programming languages, but having different versions of them as well. It isn’t a chop-your-limb-off problem, but more a death-by-1000-paper-cuts.

One solution is virtual machines. They promise so much: A separate machine that can get as trashy as needed, without actually messing up the sacred laptop or desktop. Unfortunately, they can also be difficult or time-consuming to set up properly, and when a developer has to do that maybe once a week or more for new projects, it adds up quickly.

Enter Vagrant. This makes defining, setting up, maintaining, and using a VM easy.

Using Vagrant, I’ve been working to get an out-of-the-box Omeka VM working for development. I haven’t quite succeeded, but it’s getting there. This involves a base box (not available yet) and a Chef Solo cookbook with instructions for setting up the VM.

Here’s how to use it to create a VM environment to develop a theme, plugin, or site with Omeka. These instructions work on a Mac, but they assume only that you have access to a Terminal/console window, a text editor, and a web browser, so with the right changes, it should work on any system.

Note: Some of the resources (like the base box) aren’t publicly available right now. We’re working on that. Watch this space for more information.

Get Vagrant and VirtualBox

Vagrant’s written in Ruby, so assuming you have Ruby and RubyGems installed, just do this:

gem install vagrant

Getting VirtualBox is more complicated. Check the VirtualBox website for how to install it.

Setting up the Working Directory

Once the software is installed, you’ll need to set up a working directory and initialize it for Vagrant. You’ll also need to download the Chef cookbooks that you’ll use.

mkdir omeka-project cd omeka-project git clone https://github.com/opscode/cookbooks.git git clone git://github.com/scholarslab/cookbooks.git slab-cookbooks vagrant init omeka-project PATH-TO/base-centos32.box

The last command created a file called “Vagrantfile”. (It also pointed to a file that won’t exist on your system. We’re working on a URL for hosting the base box. When it’s available, use that URL in place of PATH-TO.) Go ahead and open it up in your favorite text editor. Vagrantfile is just Ruby, nothing scary there. We need to add a few lines. At the bottom of the file, just before the “end,” insert these:

config.vm.provision :chef_solo do |chef| chef.cookbooks_path = ["cookbooks", "slab-cookbooks"] chef.add_recipe "omeka" end config.vm.forward_port('mysql', 3306, 3333) config.vm.forward_port('apache2', 80, 8080)

The first four lines tell Vagrant to set up the system using Chef Solo, and they tell Chef to use the cookbooks we downloaded from GitHub and to use the “omeka” recipe. The last two lines tell Vagrant to set up port forwarding so we can access the web server and database from the host machine, without needing to log onto the VM.

Set up Omeka

Now we’re ready to set up Omeka. By default, the system assumes that your Omeka code is in a subdirectory of your working directory and that it is named “omeka.” (This — and many other things — are configurable, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.)

These commands will download the latest version of Omeka (as of the time I’m writing this) and change permissions on the archive directory so the web server can write to it.

curl -O http://omeka.org/files/omeka-1.3.2.zip unzip omeka-1.3.2.zip mv omeka-1.3.2 omeka chmod -R a+rwx omeka/archive/

There used to be something here about setting up your “db.ini” file. The Omeka Chef recipe now takes care of that for you.

Start the VM

Everything’s in place. Now it’s time to start the VM. From the console, just enter this command:

vagrant up

A lot of lines will scroll by. Many minutes will pass. Apache, PHP, and MySQL will be installed. When you get your prompt back, you should be ready to go.

You probably missed it, but these lines were near the beginning of all that output:

[default] -- mysql: 3306 => 3333 (adapter 1) [default] -- apache2: 80 => 8080 (adapter 1) [default] -- ssh: 22 => 2222 (adapter 1)

These tell how you can communicate with your newly minted VM. Since it’s using port forwarding, you can pretend like you’re talking to your host box, but using the ports listed above:

mysql -uomeka -pomeka --protocol=TCP --port=3333 omeka open http://localhost:8080/ vagrant ssh

Finishing the Omeka Installation

Now you need to finish setting up Omeka. Just point your browser to the Omeka instance (http://localhost:8080)
running on the VM and fill in the installation information like you normally would. Nothing special here.

Developing

The Omeka code running the site is on your host machine, in the omeka/ directory that you created above. You can put the plugins and themes that you want to use into there, and you can edit them as you like.

Closing Down

When you’re done for the day and you want your resources back, you can just suspend the VM by calling this:

vagrant suspend

When you’re done with the project and you want to destroy the VM, the database, and everything on it, give this command:

vagrant destroy

Next Steps, or What Can I Do Since It’s Vaporware?

For you, if you’re interested in this, you may want to become familiar with Vagrant by looking at their instructions for Getting Started.

For me, I wrote this today in the spirit of releasing early and often, and there’s lots for me to do. Here’s a little of what I’m planning initially:

Make the base box publicly available;

Write a README for the cookbook and Chef metadata for the Omeka Recipe;

More recipes for more systems;

Add phpunit, phpmd, and other PHP systems to help improve code quality; and

Add a Rakefile with tasks for running phpunit, dumping the database, and other things.

Hopefully this will make all of our lives easier. Stay tuned.

grad student jobs in Scholars’ Lab R&D

Bethany Nowviskie — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 19:52:40 +0000

Are you a maker? A builder? A tinkerer at heart?

The Scholars’ Lab in Alderman Library seeks energetic and imaginative UVa graduate students from all disciplines looking to hone their digital skills. Interested in cutting-edge technologies for the digital humanities and interpretive or humanistic social sciences? Want hands-on experience in project management and the design of innovative, beautiful, and useful tools for scholarship and cultural heritage? We encourage you to apply for this apprenticeship opportunity with our Research and Development team!

Scholars’ Lab R&D is engaged in a number of projects leveraging textual encoding techniques, advanced search services, geo-temporal visualization, relational database systems, and modern Web development frameworks. The intent of these assistantship positions is to allow you to work as part of a team, learning design, coding, and project management skills that will be invaluable to your own research and make you highly marketable within the broad field of the digital humanities.

Students will have the opportunity to partner on Scholars’ Lab collaborations with UVa faculty and to help test Omeka plug-ins and craft geo-temporal scholarly arguments using Neatline, a tool we’re building with funding from the Library of Congress and in partnership with the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. We’ll also be undertaking a brand-new project with our R&D assistants in Fall 2011: “Crowdsourcing Interpretation.”

These are 10-hour-per-week positions with the opportunity to work longer hours in the summers and between semesters. We hope to hire several grad students, who may also be interested in becoming Scholars’ Lab Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities.

UVa graduate students may apply through CavLink. Search for “Scholars’ Lab Research & Development Assistant.”

Welcoming Eric Johnson!

Bethany Nowviskie — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:18:42 +0000

We’re proud to announce that Eric Johnson will join the faculty of UVa Library’s Digital Research and Scholarship department this July as Head of Outreach & Consulting. In his new role, Eric will direct day-to-day public services in the Library’s vibrant Scholars’ Lab and help to coordinate our intellectual programming as well as our transformative program for Graduate Fellows in the Digital Humanities, now entering its fifth year.

Eric comes to us from The Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello) where he currently serves as New Media Specialist, guiding Monticello’s connection to its user community and the development of organizational media policies and services. While at the Foundation, Eric participated in a number of digital initiatives, including the Jefferson Encyclopedia and the Thomas Jefferson Libraries project, and coordinated more traditional library services for users such as reference and research assistance for Foundation staff and visiting fellows. He holds degrees in history from the College of William & Mary and George Mason University, as well as an MS in Library and Information Science from FSU, and has two decades of experience in public service in the library and cultural heritage sector. Eric’s recent and forthcoming publications showcase his thoughtful approach to user engagement in digital scholarship, and his deep commitment to libraries as places of community and hospitality for scholars, students, staff, and the general public.

We look forward to welcoming Eric and his wife, Sheryl, to the Scholars’ Lab family this summer!

Welcoming David McClure!

Wayne Graham — Mon, 02 May 2011 15:42:01 +0000

We’re delighted to welcome our new Web Applications Specialist, David McClure, to the Scholars’ Lab R&D team.

David graduated from Yale University with a degree in Humanities in 2009, and has been working as an independent web developer in San Francisco, New York, and Madison, Wisconsin for the last few years. David is the creator of Public Poetics, an elegant PHP interface for collaborative, web-based commentary on poetry. He characterizes this project as a design experiment in addressing “a problem of content ‘over-accumulation’ that tends to plague many existing systems of textual annotation and commenting.” Not only does David have a strong aesthetic sense and background in web application development, he also has experience in computer graphics, having worked with graphics libraries while developing software for the Cognitive Science department at Yale.

David is also an avid outdoorsman. His essay “Mountain Magic on the Pyrenean High Route” was published in Backpacking Light online.

David McClure will start with us in late May, and we’re excited to bring him on as a collaborator!

Announcement: BagItPHP Library

err8n — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:16:01 +0000

The Scholars’ Lab is pleased to announce the initial release of a PHP library implementing BagIt 0.96. BagIt is a specification from the Library of Congress for bundling and transmitting multiple files along with their meta-data. You can check out the project page at http://github.com/scholarslab/BagItPHP/.

Our work on BagItPHP stems from the open source “Omeka + Neatline” project, a collaboration of the Scholars’ Lab with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. “Omeka + Neatline” is supported by the Library of Congress.

Downloads

You can download the library either as a ZIP or tarball, or you can clone the repo with git:

git clone git://github.com/scholarslab/BagItPHP

Use: Creating Bags

To create a bag, simply instantiate a new BagIt object with the name of a directory that doesn’t exist, add files to it, and package it into a tarball with the name of the bag:

require_once 'lib/bagit.php'; $bag = new BagIt('./new-directory'); $bag->addFile('./exhibit/index.html', 'index.html'); $bag->addFile('./exhibit/imgs/1.png', 'imgs/1.png'); $bag->addFile('./exhibit/imgs/2.png', 'imgs/2.png'); $bag->package('./new-directory'); // The bag package will be created named ./new-directory.tgz.

Use: Reading Bags

To read a bag, simply open an existing back, validate it (optional), fetch remote resources, and iterate over the files, copying them or processing them in some other way.

require_once 'lib/bagit.php'; $bag = new BagIt('./existing-bag.zip'); $bag->validate(); if (count($bag->getBagErrors()) == 0) { $bag->fetch->download(); foreach ($bag->getBagContents() as $filename) { copy($filename, 'final/destination/' . basename($filename)); } }

For more information about the methods that are available, please see the documentation.

Let Us Hear from You

If you’re using this library or have any feedback on it, we’d love to hear from you! We are relying on the GitHub issues tracker for code feedback, so you can file bugs or other issues there. If you have a more general question, feel free to post here.

project launch: “Spatial Humanities!”

Bethany Nowviskie — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:24:12 +0000

Over the past two years, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library has hosted an Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of “Spatial Humanities,” a community-driven resource for place-based digital scholarship:

http://spatial.scholarslab.org/

This site responds to needs identified in conversation with our 21 Institute faculty members and 56 participants (humanities scholars, software developers, and map & GIS librarians). It includes:

an evolving, crowdsourced catalog of research resources, projects, and organizations;

a set of framing essays on the spatial turn across the disciplines by Dr. Jo Guldi of the Harvard Society of Fellows;

GIS-related feeds from Q&A sites and other forms of social media;

and a peer-reviewed, occasional publication for step-by-step tutorials in spatial tools and methods.

Please help us keep this resource current by contributing to it! You can:

use Zotero to freely upload research citations, projects, and links to groups;

contribute your own tutorials and helpsheets in “Step By Step” format for peer review and formal publication;

adopt the #geoinst hashtag on Twitter and Delicious;

ask related questions and offer help on DH Answers or the GIS Stack Exchange;

and post your commentary on the essays we’ve shared.

Learn more about our NEH Institute:

http://spatial.scholarslab.org/about/

and about how you can contribute to the “Spatial Humanities” site:

http://spatial.scholarslab.org/contribute/

Many thanks to the NEH, the staff of the Scholars’ Lab, our Institute advisory board and faculty, and the scores of Institute participants and fellows who helped to define the project!

Scholars’ Lab becomes Laboratory for Digital Byzantine Sigillography

Bethany Nowviskie — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:55:01 +0000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Through the generosity of an anonymous donor, the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library is proud to announce a change in name and concentration. Effective April 1st, the SLab (which has hitherto supported work in GIS, qualitatitive and quantitative analysis, and interpretive and textual scholarship in the humanities and social sciences) will sharpen its focus and be known as the Laboratory for Digital Byzantine Sigillography.

“Among major research libraries,” said University Librarian Karin Wittenborg, “UVa has made the most longstanding investments in Digital BS. Digital BS has enriched the landscape of the humanities and social sciences immeasurably,” she continued. “It’s just in the air in the former Scholars’ Lab. You can almost smell it!”

Department director Bethany Nowviskie agrees. “At UVa Library, we look for “shovel-ready” projects in the digital humanities and social sciences. In terms of Digital BS, scholars here have been piling it higher and deeper for decades.”

The name change comes with a significant shift to teaching and training, collaborations with UVa faculty, and admissions criteria for the lab’s Graduate Fellowships in Digital Humanities. Current Graduate Fellow Alex Gil was reached for comment at his dusty carrel in the bowels of Alderman Library: “As a doctoral candidate in English, you might expect me to be concerned about this new focus on digital Byzantine sigillography. Far from it! My dissertation is just full of digital BS! I’m ecstatic, and now plan to take an extra four to five years to immerse myself in it.” Former fellow and ethnomusicologist Wendy Hsu will defend her dissertation in the Lab later this month, before taking up a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Occidental College. She looks forward to “spreading all this Virginia BS westward.”

Outreach & Training Specialist Ronda Grizzle was careful to specify that the Lab will retain its two internal units: Consultation Services and Research & Development. One representative of Consultation Services, Kelly Johnston, was mucking around in the field and unavailable for comment beyond the following text message, sent to Grizzle repeatedly: “Sphragistics FTW.” Meanwhile, Wayne Graham, head of BS R&D, looks forward to fresh projects: “We intend to give a whole new meaning to the word ‘vaporware.’” New R&D hires Eric Rochester (Senior Developer) and Jeremy Boggs (Design Architect) expressed excitement at the opportunity to “ride the wave of digital BS at UVa.”

Some may see UVa Library’s new, exclusive concentration on digital Byzantine sigillography as a corrective to the broadening into meaninglessness of the phrase “digital humanities.” Nowviskie disagrees: “We’re an open community of practice. Everyone is welcome under the big tent of Digital BS.”

Welcoming our 2011/12 Graduate Fellows

ronda — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:33:26 +0000

The Scholars’ Lab is pleased to welcome our 2011/12 cohort of Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities:

Gabriel Hankins from the Department of English, Randi Lewis from the Corcoran Department of History, and Edward Triplett from the McIntire Department of Art.

Gabriel’s fellowship project will explore global modernisms by “modeling the network of textual relationships between global modernist writers and the social and institutional networks of the League of Nations project.”

Randi will use GIS technology to create digital maps showing “the changing patterns of Salem trade and the global reach of Salem’s maritime economy” during the Early Republic.

Edward will create a database of geo-referenced fortress-monasteries and churches created or occupied by military orders in medieval Spain to begin the process of exploring “how the military orders created a fortified border between Christianity and Islam while displaying varying degrees of cultural permeability across this same border.”

Please plan to join us at the September 2011 Digital Therapy Luncheon where we’ll formally introduce our new Fellows, and they will present a short introduction to their projects.

Welcoming Jeremy Boggs!

Bethany Nowviskie — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 17:05:43 +0000

We’re thrilled to announce that Jeremy Boggs will be joining the Scholars’ Lab and the staff of UVa Library’s Digital Research & Scholarship department this June, in the role of Humanities Design Architect.

Jeremy comes to us from the wonderful Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, where he serves as Associate Director of Research and as development manager for Omeka, an open-source web publishing system for cultural heritage collections. Jeremy was also one of the originators of THATCamp, the popular technology and humanities “unconference.”

He is completing his doctoral dissertation at Mason, “The Designing Historian,” and the UVa community has benefited from Jeremy’s presence this year as a visiting scholar in the Scholars’ Lab.

In his new role, Jeremy will be advising faculty and grad students on design and user experience aspects of their digital projects in both the humanities and humanistic social sciences and contributing to ongoing work in Scholars’ Lab R&D, with special attention to “Neatline,” a set of tools we’re developing with funding from the Library of Congress and in collaboration with CHNM.

We look forward to welcoming Jeremy and his wife Jill to the Scholars’ Lab family this summer!

Unsworth to speak at UVa

Bethany Nowviskie — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 22:17:25 +0000

The UVa Digital Humanities Speaker Series presents:

John Unsworth on “Idiosyncrasy at Scale: Data Curation in the Humanities”

Friday, March 25
3:00pm (reception follows)
South Lawn Auditorium (NAU 101)

This talk is co-sponsored by IATH, SHANTI, and the Scholars’ Lab

Abstract:

Unsworth will argue that, in the past, the humanities have been characterized by data sets that are significantly smaller than those in the sciences, but also significantly more idiosyncratic. Now we face a situation where humanities data, at least in textual form, and soon enough in other forms, is large-scale. Can it still be idiosyncratic? What are the trade-offs between the requirements of curation and the needs of the users for whom that data is curated? What models or initiatives are out there that could help us grapple with idiosyncrasy at scale?

John Unsworth is dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. John was the founding director of IATH at UVa, and remains one of the most prominent figures in the field of digital humanities.

Welcoming Eric Rochester!

Bethany Nowviskie — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:04:41 +0000

The Scholars’ Lab is very pleased to welcome Dr. Eric Rochester as the new Senior Developer on our R&D team!

Eric is an accomplished computational linguist and digital humanities scholar and developer. His past work includes appointments with the Oxford University Press and Georgia’s Linguistic Atlas projects, as well as consultancies and programming positions at a number of technology firms. Eric’s doctorate is in English from the University of Georgia, where he concentrated on medieval literature and wrote a dissertation entitled Schwa: A Dictionary Pronunciation Database System. Schwa examines the production of lexicographical pronunciations, both from a technical and a theoretical perspective, and establishes a set of best practices, well-grounded in the history and present state of dictionary pronunciation. To test his research and theorizing, Eric implemented a lexicographical pronunciation system — and he’ll be bringing that brand of thoughtful, iterative scholarly software development to his new role in the SLab.

You can find more information about Eric at his website and follow @erochest on Twitter. He starts on Monday, and we’re thrilled that he and his wife Jackie and daughter Melina are joining the Scholars’ Lab family!

Are you our new Head of Outreach & Consulting?

Bethany Nowviskie — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:37:50 +0000

We’re excited to announce a fantastic job opportunity: a faculty-level position at the University of Virginia Library with responsibility for running public services in our growing and well-respected Scholars’ Lab.

Head of Outreach and Consulting

Are you an excellent and enthusiastic communicator with a strong background in technological approaches to humanities and social science scholarship? UVa Library seeks a Head of Outreach and Consulting to coordinate public services in our internationally-recognized Scholars’ Lab. The ideal candidate is detail-oriented, eager to work collaboratively, and able to represent — to internal and external audiences — UVa Library’s involvement in the digital humanities. This supervisory position is responsible for day-to-day operations in the Scholars’ Lab (overseeing staff dedicated to geospatial, data-driven, and text-based research consultation) and plays a key role in our program for Graduate Fellows in the Digital Humanities. This position reports to the Library’s Director of Digital Research & Scholarship.

The position is for a true “hybrid” or “alternative academic” — someone with a strong service ethic and sense of hospitality who can also collaborate as a true intellectual partner with faculty and graduate students, enabling next-generation DH in the Scholars’ Lab. The Head of Outreach and Consulting should also be able to take good advantage of the “20% time” that all Department of Digital Research & Scholarship faculty and staff are granted to pursue professional development and their own (often collaborative) R&D projects. This is a full-time, permanent general faculty position at UVa.

Primary Responsibilities:

Outreach and Scholars’ Lab Management: oversight of day-to-day operations and consulting services, coordination of intellectual programming (speaker series, workshops, etc.) and organization of Graduate Fellows program; Scholarly Projects Consultation: development of intake process, workplans, and MoUs for new scholarly collaborations, in consultation with Scholars’ Lab R&D; Education and Professional Development: pursuit of own scholarly R&D agenda related to the humanities or social sciences and publication of results and/or presentation at appropriate conferences.

Specialized Knowledge and Skills:

Working knowledge of digital humanities technologies and directions. Strong public service orientation and interest in guiding faculty projects from conceptualization to the formulation of workable project plans. Excellent communication skills, including the ability to present complex technical information to a generalist audience and a clear understanding of the perspectives and needs of the professoriate. Previous experience in public service in an academic library setting and experience in scholarly research, writing, and web development preferred.

Education: Masters Degree or PhD in humanities or social sciences.
Experience: 3 years experience with project management and/or hands-on development of digital projects related to digital humanities or cultural heritage.
Salary and Benefits: Salary commensurate with experience and competitive depending on qualifications. General faculty status. Excellent benefits, including 22 days of vacation; TIAA/CREF and other retirement plans along with generous funding for travel and professional development.

If this sounds like you…

we invite you to APPLY FOR THE JOB!

Consideration of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled.

Scholars’ Lab and CHNM Partner on “Omeka + Neatline”

admin — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 18:58:57 +0000

The Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library and the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University are pleased to announce a collaborative “Omeka + Neatline” initiative, supported by $665,248 in funding from the Library of Congress.

The Omeka + Neatline project’s goal is to enable scholars, students, and library and museum professionals to create geospatial and temporal visualizations of archival collections using a Neatline toolset within CHNM’s popular, open source Omeka exhibition platform. Neatline, a “contribution to interpretive humanities scholarship in the visual vernacular,” is a project of the UVa Library Scholars’ Lab, originally bolstered by a Start-Up Grant from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Omeka is an award-winning web-publishing platform for the display of cultural heritage and scholarly collections and exhibits, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

This two-year initiative will allow CHNM and the Scholars’ Lab to expand and regularize a partnership that developed informally between the two centers over the course of the past year. Collaboration has already resulted in improvements to the core functionality of Omeka by CHNM and has led the Scholars’ Lab to produce a number of prototype plugins making Omeka a more attractive and viable option for scholarly partnerships with larger libraries and cultural heritage institutions. These include: improved data import (including EAD, a common archival standard); Solr-powered searching and browsing; and Fedora-based repository services. Further development will improve existing plugins, add preservation workflows, and refine the Neatline toolset for integration and sophisticated editing and scholarly annotation of historical maps, GIS layers, and timelines. Enhancements to Omeka’s core APIs, improved documentation, regular “point” releases, and a new Exhibit Builder will strengthen Omeka’s already large and robust user and developer communities.

Omeka + Neatline is one of six contract awards made by the Library of Congress in a program that aims both to improve the Library’s own content management and content delivery infrastructure and to contribute to collaborative knowledge sharing among broader communities concerned with the sustainability and accessibility of digital content. In July of 2010, the Library of Congress targeted approximately $3,000,000 toward Broad Agency Announcements covering three areas of research interest related to these goals. Technical proposals were openly solicited from expert, multi-disciplinary communities in both academic and commercial settings in three areas: Ingest for Digital Content, Data Modeling of Legislative Information, and Open Source Software for Digital Content Delivery.

In addition to guiding software development work at the Scholars’ Lab and CHNM, project directors Tom Scheinfeldt and Bethany Nowviskie will use the Omeka + Neatline project as an opportunity to document and disseminate a model for open source, developer-level collaborations among library labs and digital humanities centers.

Are you our new Web Applications Specialist?

Wayne Graham — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 20:51:07 +0000

Are you an enthusiastic Web developer with an interest in the humanities or cultural heritage? UVa Library seeks a Web Applications Specialist to help develop software in our internationally-recognized Scholars’ Lab. The ideal candidate is detail-oriented, eager to work collaboratively, and stays involved with the latest Web and digital humanities technologies.

We’re seeking someone passionate about tackling technical problems in the digital humanities – preferably a person with both a technical and liberal arts background, prepared to build next-generation DH interfaces and tools. Our new Web Application Specialist will also be able to take advantage of the “20% time” that all Department of Digital Research & Scholarship faculty and staff are granted to pursue professional development and their own (often collaborative) R&D projects. This is a full-time, permanent position at UVa.

Web Applications Specialist

As a Web Applications Specialist reporting to the Head of R&D for the Scholars’ Lab, you will be responsible for building, testing, and debugging code, developing documentation, and assisting at troubleshooting. You should possess an attention to detail and a high level of accountability and responsibility. We’re looking for someone who enjoys technical challenges, likes to figure out how things work, and stays involved in the latest Web and digital humanities technologies. You will need to be able to fit in to a creative and collaborative environment. Want to join us as we create great scholarly interfaces?

2-3 years of experience developing web applications with tech skills demonstrated via one or more of the following:

your open source work

your github repository

your awesome blog

your code samples from side projects

or your production web site (handling real traffic)

knowlege of SQL, git, svn, HTML, CSS, Javascript

ability to work with technical and non-technical collaborators thanks to your great communications skills

experience with software development (maybe even including Agile methodologies)

Duties and Responsibilities:

Build, test, and debug code

Write test cases

Estimate coding projects

Provide consultation on collaborative projects

Develop documentation

Assist in the debugging and system troubleshooting for existing software written in a variety of languages and platform

Qualifications:

1+ years full-time experience with web development (Rails and PHP preferred)

2+ years experience of standards compliant HTML, CSS, and Javascript

Javascript skills (AJAX, JQuery or similar JS framework)

Experience with Test Driven Development (Shoulda, RSpec, PHPUnit)

Experience with relational database management systems (MySQL, Postgresql)

Familiarity with version control systems

Understanding of software life cycle

Strong foundation in OO programming and practices

Experience with Omeka a plus

If this sounds like you…

We encourage you to APPLY FOR THIS JOB. Salary is commensurate with experience, and expected to range between approximately $43,500 and $75,500 per annum. We’re looking to fill this position quickly, so please don’t delay!

Consideration of applications will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled.