Humanities + digital insights is HyperStudio's weekly mailing about news in digital humanities. Every week we provide you with summaries on innovative digital projects and current discussions in the field, with pointers to conferences and innovative digital tools, as well as information on new publications and digital library initiatives.
Best,
The HyperStudio Team
Focus: Recent Developments in Web Archives
Writing for Parameters, Michele C. Weigle explains the value of archiving web pages for scholarly research, while also laying out tools, best practices, and current challenges faced by preservation efforts. Some of these challenges present areas for future research, including archives of paywalled content, damaged archives, and visualizations of changes in web content over time.
Meanwhile, Sarah McTavish pens a guide for scholars on performing large-scale analyses of web archives, tackling some of the challenges presented by Weigle in the previous article. This blog post provides a brief walkthrough of several tools and techniques, complementary to her work on the Archives Unleashed Learning Guides.
Finally, Rhizome's Ilya Kreymer presents a new prototype for the Webrecorder project, which seeks to "record" web pages by displaying web archives in an emulated web browser while preserving any client-side code. The new prototype demonstrates the possibilities for preserving entire servers, as well as automation of the recording process.
Digital Humanities Digest
Software company Datavized, in collaboration with the Google News Initiative, has released a new tool called Morph for artistic data visualization, targeted at users "without code or design skills." Take a look at the free tool here.
What are the legal considerations when preserving or archiving software? The Association of Research Libraries has enlisted legal and technical experts to produce a code of best practices in fair use for software preservation. View the full document here.
The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has launched a new digital humanities project called ReSounding the Archives, which combines historical sheet music with performances and student research about each digitized piece. View the project website here.
In an article for the open-access Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, Tasmania's Kristyn E. Harman reflects on the design and deployment of a digital humanities project to create personalized family histories for Australian descendants of convicts.
The Bay Area Video Coalition has released version 1.0 of QCTools, an open source toolkit for assessing the quality of digitized materials in video preservation. Check out the official project documentation here.
The Guardian's Tom Gardner reports on a digital photo archive of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, weaving together a photo essay out of archival materials from the VintageAddis.com project and interviews with its creators.
The use of augmented reality (AR) in museums is becoming increasingly popular, as Wired's Arielle Pardes reports on recent museum projects and their industry partners. Meanwhile, the University of Southern California announces its plans to bring AR to the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles.
Conferences, Fellowships + Publications
Registration is now open for this year's DLF Forum (15 - 17 October) and Digital Preservation 2018 (17 - 18 October).
Registration is now open for the University of Maryland's Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black Conference (18 - 20 October, 2018).
Submissions are due September 28 for next year's Current Research in Digital History (CRDH) conference (9 March 2019), with special consideration given to papers on Black digital history.
Submissions are due October 31 for a special issue of Social Sciences on the theme of "Big Data and the Human and Social Sciences."
Submissions are due November 10 for the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) inaugural conference (23 - 26 July 2019).
Submissions are due December 31 for a special issue of Open Theology on "Digital Humanities in Biblical Studies and Theology."
Submissions are due December 31 for a special online edition of Big Data & Society focused on "Data Politics."
