CfP now closed
Isabel Galina Russell and Glen Layne-Worthey, editors
We’re seeking proposals from the digital humanities, library, and archives communities for chapter contributions to a volume on Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities. This book is under contract for publication with Routledge in its Companions to the Digital Humanities series.
Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities will cover a wide range of issues encountered in the world’s libraries, archives, and special collections as they continue to expand their support of, and direct engagement in, DH research and teaching. We’re interested in DH-related questions both as they reflect the library and archival professions’ traditional values and practices, and as those values inform and enhance evolving DH work generally. We hope to reach beyond topics such as digitization and digital repositories (which have been extensively covered in the library literature) into newer areas of inquiry. In addition to topics related to the practice of librarianship, and to libraries and archives as DH-friendly institutions, we will address issues of importance to library and archives workers themselves: training and reskilling in digital humanities methods; labor issues; organization and infrastructure; and focused professional practices that reflect the increasingly important role of librarians and archivists as active research partners in large collaborative projects.
We are interested in receiving chapters from a wide range of countries and cultural contexts in order to reflect the diversity of the profession around the world.
Topics to be covered include:
Please send your chapter proposal (250-500 words) and a cover letter (250-500 words) describing your interest in contributing a chapter by 25 April 2022, to the editors, Isabel Galina Russell igalina@unam.mx and Glen Layne-Worthey gworthey@illinois.edu. Acceptance decisions will be made by the beginning of June, 2022. First drafts of accepted chapters (maximum 6,500 words) will be due 1 August 2022, and final chapters due at the end of October 2022.
General timeline for submissions and production:
* Initial chapter proposals due: 25 April 2022
* Notification of accepted proposals: 1 June 2022
Routledge offers several Open Access publishing options. The editors hope to publish as many chapters of the volume as possible in Open Access, and are committed to work with authors and libraries to accomplish this goal. [https://www.routledge.com/our-products/open-access-books/publishing-oa-books/chapters]
While we seek funding to support Open Access for the entire volume, we hope to count on the support of individual authors who may have access to institutional funding for their own chapters. Please be in touch with the editors to discuss
Digital Humanities work is often assumed to be supported principally in academic libraries and archives, and lots of good scholarship has focused on these particular systems. But there are many other important libraries and archives engaged deeply and visibly in DH, and they have particular characteristics that have not been examined as closely. This section is intended both to address this gap, and to integrate our understanding of the variety of libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage organizations in which important DH activities, collaborations and support occur: national archives, national libraries, and their counterparts at the regional, state, and local levels; public libraries; institutional, corporate, and special archives; and independent research libraries. Their collections contain important and valuable resources for teaching and research in DH. Additionally, these organizations tend to focus on providing access to the general public and they frequently work on DH inflected projects to do so. This section will look at:
Digital humanities work frequently focuses on digitized collections provided by libraries (including special collections libraries) and archives. In recent years there has been an increased interest in provisioning, accessing, and using these collections as data in order for them to be processed and used for research and teaching with computational methods. Increasingly, archives and libraries are beginning to think about how to prepare, present, and curate these collections as data so that they can be readily used for these purposes. Even more recently, scholars and curators alike have focused on representation, inclusivity, diversity, and historical exclusions in library and archival collections. Historical injustices and the legacies of colonialism, racism, and other exclusionary collecting practices can be hidden or even exacerbated upon digitization, especially when the resulting digital collections are presented as, or assumed to be, “comprehensive.” But DH theory and practice can also play essential roles in the “technologies of recovery” (including digital repatriation) that are essential not only for the social consciousness of DH itself, but also as a way to promote a more just society at large, as it contributes positively to a truer and more equitable understanding of our diverse human cultures and histories.
This section will focus on various themes such as:
The Digital Humanities, perhaps more than any other humanistic field, rely on a variety of infrastructures. (Even the myth of the “lone humanities scholar” generally relies on one crucial piece of infrastructure: the libraries and archives in which they do most of their work!) Technical, organizational, and funding infrastructures – and even less formal social infrastructures – have proven crucial to the success of both large- and small-scale DH work, and our archives and libraries have very often been the locus of many of those infrastructures, whether their role is characterized as “supporting” DH or “doing” it (if indeed those are distinct activities). This section will address some of the following questions:
Library- and archives-based publishing operations have expanded greatly in recent decades, focusing especially on innovative models for interactive and digital genres; on the difficult problems of long-term digital preservation; and on more open subscription and access models. Although somewhat further afield from libraries proper, some prominent university presses working in DH are administratively part of libraries. Even in cases where a library and a press are distinct organizationally, the library’s active participation in supporting DH scholarship and in creating research outputs often leaves them with major roles in the distribution and long-term maintenance of the resulting digital product. The library’s role in digital preservation and as provider of long-term access also puts it prominently in the role of publisher, as it makes public the digital artifacts produced in DH scholarship. As new forms of knowledge dissemination arise – for example, digital collections and data sets together with the tools and environments required to interact with them – it behooves us to reconsider the very definition and meaning of “publication.” Beyond this ontological question lies an economic one: as scholarly demand increases for these new forms of publication, we must consider who is best poised to meet that demand – libraries as Open Access publishers, or for-profit corporations – and what these choices mean for the future of our global field.
Because so much DH work touches upon legal issues of intellectual property (copyright, fair use / fair dealing, licensing, and so forth), scholars are under pressure to have at least some familiarity or facility with complex issues that are largely outside their domains of expertise, and librarians and archivists are among the colleagues most often called upon for advice on these matters, whether in their frequent role as data providers, promoters and teachers of information literacy – or more generally as simply the profession that perhaps more than most others (aside from the legal profession itself) deals with these “legal literacy” issues (such as copyright, licensing, privacy, ethics, policy, and risk analysis) regularly. Relatedly, extra-legal issues of ethics, privacy, and cultural appropriation are increasingly understood as crucial and essential when considering the digitization and presentation of indigenous sources, personal archival collections, and other sensitive materials. This section will touch upon the role of libraries and librarians in some of the following activities:
We welcome your questions and topic ideas! Please contact us: Isabel Galina Russell igalina@unam.mx Glen Layne-Worthey gworthey@illinois.edu