Editing Versions

G. Thomas Tanselle’s Descriptive Bibliography — a monumental compilation of essays devoted to bibliographical theory and practice as they have evolved as a discipline since the 1960s — not only attests to Tanselle’s vibrant career but is also an occasion to reflect on bibliography as a “way of thinking” about book history, material culture, the editing of fluid texts, and digital scholarship. In our profession, the field of descriptive bibliography has endured decades of begrudging tolerance as “merely” custodial rather than critical; and yet bibliography — in so far as it records change — is the fundamental grounding for any historicist and materialist project. Melville’s so-called “L-word” in Typee — once it is tracked from manuscript to first edition to revised edition — records an “oscillating revision” in Melville’s thinking and writing that exemplifies the dance between accident and intentionality in the creative process. Tanselle’s essays on the practical workings of bibliography also suggest the field’s ability to extend its scope beyond idealized notions of the authorial work and to embrace non-authorized reprints, periodical placement, illustration, and non-literary documents, as well as adaptive revision in film and translation. Descriptive bibliography is essential for our deeper engagement with how and why versions evolve. Advancements in digital strategies related to database and display will facilitate the future acceptance of descriptive bibliography among literary scholars and critics seeking to test the interpretive potentials of biography, material history and culture, and the fluid text.

Is Digital Scholarship Meaningful?: A Campus Study Tracking Multidisciplinary Perceptions

Increased computational and multimodal approaches to research over the past decades have enabled scholars and learners to forge creative avenues of inquiry, adopt new methodological approaches, and interrogate information in innovative ways. As such, academic libraries have begun to offer a suite of services to support these digitally inflected and data-intense research strategies. These supports, dubbed digital scholarship services in the library profession, break traditional disciplinary boundaries and highlight the methodological significance of research inquiry. Externally, however, these practices appear as domain-specific niches, e.g., digital history or digital humanities in humanities disciplines, e-science and e-research in STEM, and e-social science or computational social science in social science disciplines. The authors conducted a study examining the meaningfulness of the term digital scholarship within the local context at University of Colorado Boulder by investigating how the interpretation of digital scholarship varies according to graduate students, faculty, and other researchers. Nearly half of the definitions (46 percent) mentioned research process or methods as part of digital scholarship. Faculty and staff declined or were unable to define digital scholarship more often than graduate students or post-doctoral researchers. Therefore, digital scholarship as a term is not meaningful to all researchers. We recommend that librarians inflect their practices with the understanding that researchers and library users’ perceptions of digital scholarship vary greatly across contexts.

Exploring National Library of Scotland datasets with Jupyter Notebooks

The National Library of Scotland’s Digital Scholarship Service has been releasing collections as data on its data-delivery platform, the Data Foundry, since September 2019. Following the COVID-19 lockdown, this service experienced significantly higher traffic, as library users increasingly made use of online resources. To ensure that as many users as possible were able to explore the datasets on the Data Foundry, the Library invested in a Digital Research Intern post, with a remit to provide introductory analysis of the Data Foundry collections using Jupyter Notebooks. This article provides a case study of this project, explaining the Library’s work to date around its new Digital Scholarship Service and releasing datasets on the Data Foundry; the reasoning behind the decision to begin to provide Jupyter Notebooks; the Notebooks themselves and what types of analysis they contain, as well as the challenges faced in creating them; and the publication and impact of the Notebooks.

Building Virtual Community through Digital Scholarship Meetups

With the launch of a newly created Digital Scholarship Program at our University Library, digital scholarship meetup events were designed and held with the intent to connect with campus stakeholders and begin to build community. This case-study paper describes the context around the development of the Digital Scholarship Program within our library and across our research institution’s community, and outlines the iterative process of identifying our core values and goals for a community-building meetup series. We discuss both the initial implementation of the series, highlighting successful strategies and the challenges we faced building community in a virtual format, as well as ways the series was modified over the course of several academic terms in response to community feedback. Our overview of the meetups includes a description of our planning, collaboration, and meeting facilitation techniques. We conclude with lessons learned and next steps to further reflect on and grow this broad-reaching virtual community of practice.

Tabulating HOLC Area Description Sheet Data

In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) oversaw a massive federal program that graded thousands of urban neighborhoods. The precise aims of this infamous program are still disputed, but the grading criteria were almost certainly devised to convey the level of risk each area posed to property investors. The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond has graciously digitized the maps and field notes produced by the HOLC and have made them freely available to the public. While these “redlining” maps have received considerable academic and media attention, the field notes used to assign risk grades—available for most cities in their “area description sheets”—remain virtually unusable for most multi-city analyses. Addressing this problem, I convert three of the most consequential variables from the description sheets for 129 cities into an accessible and analyzable tabular format. These include the average building age, Black population percentage, and “foreign-born” population percentage. In addition, I organize the description sheets into three semi-compatible tables, assisting future researchers incorporate other HOLC field note variables into their projects.

Developing student capacity to produce digital scholarship in the humanities

Despite the increased use of technology in higher education classrooms, we need a better understanding of pedagogical strategies that improve student ability to produce quality scholarly digital content in the humanities. This research was designed to examine student learning through scholarly digital storytelling, a technology-enhanced assessment. The researcher collected data during and after an interdisciplinary, graduate scholarly digital storytelling course, including student work, student reflections, and individual interviews, to examine experiences at key points throughout the learning process. The results indicate that this pedagogical approach, when carefully scaffolded alongside formative feedback and ongoing student support, can increase student capacity—including digital agency, problem-solving skills, and digital knowledge production skills—to produce scholarly digital work in the humanities. Students can also learn to understand the interplay between disciplinary learning and digital skills and the ways in which both are essential for scholarly communication within and beyond the classroom.