Keynote Address

“Joycestick – Engaging Ulysses In a Virtual Reality Game”

Joycestick is Ulysses adapted as an immersive, 3D virtual reality (VR) computer game – a “gamification,” in contemporary parlance. Users don a VR eyepiece and headphones and, with gaming devices, navigate and explore various scenes from the book.  Joycestick is Nugent’s most recent excursion into digital humanities. In past years, he and his students have produced an e-book guide based on Joyce’s Dubliners, a multi-media tour depicting Dublin in 1922 also inspired by Ulysses, and an interactive digital guide to accompany a McMullen Museum of Art exhibition on Ireland’s Arts and Crafts movement.

Joycestick represents new ground, not just for Nugent and this group of students, but arguably for the teaching of literature. The possibilities and challenges of this approach – dubbed “gamefiction” by the Joycestick group – spark the kind of discussions that lie at the heart of liberal arts education, says Nugent, who has seen his vocation as a Joyce scholar metamorphose in a relatively brief period.

Joseph Nugent is Professor of the Practice in Boston College’s English Department. Professor Nugent’s interests lie at the confluence of Irish Studies, Joyce Studies, and the Digital Humanities. His Digital Humanities courses explore ways in which GIS and off-the-shelf digital text analysis tools can enhance students’ experience of space, actual and literary. He is currently managing an Advanced Topic Seminar exploring VR and immersive technologies. Professor Nugent's technological projects exploit Joyce's texts as windows onto the social and cultural life of fin-de-siecle Dublin. This classroom-laboratory approach has generated products such as the iPhone app, JoyceWays, the e-book Digital Dubliners, and the Dubliners Bookshelf. His digital guide and his 3D immersion experience appeared in Making it Irish, at the McMullen Museum in 2016 and in Boston College Ireland.

return to the main conference page

Luncheon Keynote

"Digital Commonwealth Repository System Update: Year in Review and Future Directions"

An overview of features and collections added to the Digital Commonwealth system over the past year will be provided, and a roadmap for additional features and future system updates will be discussed. In addition, this session will cover usage statistics and user behavior patterns for the Digital Commonwealth collections site, as well as exploring site traffic sources and popular content.

Eben English is a Web Services Developer at the Boston Public Library. Prior to this position, he worked in a number of academic libraries in Chicago, focusing on digital collection development and library website design. He holds an MLIS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

...................

Breakout Sessions

"Harbor Way: Using Media to Travel Through Time"

In May 2016, development and construction firm Skanska made an unexpected discovery: a shipwreck buried deep under South Boston. They convened an archaeological team at the site to conduct excavations and compile a report on the find. The ship was not able to be preserved intact but digital preservation of the area’s history is now underway. Harbor Way will be a public space and media experience located next to 121 Seaport Boulevard, where the shipwreck was found. The experience explores the story of South Boston and its transformation over time, making extensive use of local history resources, particularly via Digital Commonwealth and Leventhal Map Center at Boston Public Library. Harbor Way transports visitors through time to experience key moments in the history of the Seaport era via an on-site portal and a downloadable phone app, including augmented reality and historical maps and images.

Liz Neill is an associate producer, researcher, and archaeologist with an MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from Bard Graduate Center. She can often be found wrangling content for museum exhibits, researching historic Boston, or excavating in the field.

....................

"Sharing with All: Accessibility and Historical Resources"

This session will begin with a brief overview of useful concepts for talking about accessibility and ways to think about improving access. We'll then discuss different aspects of how to make your resources more accessible or problems people may experience in using your resources. The focus will be on how to think through different concerns and issues but links and resources on how to improve technical aspects will be shared as well. 

Jennifer Arnott has been Research Librarian at Perkins School for the Blind since May 2015. She answers reference requests from a wide range of people (4th graders to current practitioners to academic researchers) about historical and current practice topics related to blindness, visual impairment, and deafblindness. Her previous jobs (including as an Information Technology Librarian and a high school librarian) have given her a strong interested in improving access to technology and helping people use it better. 

....................

"Design for Context: Cataloging, Web Design, and Linked Data for Exposing National Educational Television (NET) Content"

This talk will provide an overview of the work that WGBH and the Library of Congress put into creating a way for public to access the nation's earliest public television content on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting Website. Discussed will be the approaches, challenges, and outcomes of the team's work on collaborative cataloging, web design, and linked data, to fit the NET collection into the larger framework of the AAPB, DPLA, and digital libraries in general.

Sadie Roosa is a Project Manager/Metadata Specialist for WGBH and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. In this capacity, she manages a team of developers to maintain and enhance the AAPB's website and she builds policies and workflows used to improve access to the AAPB's rich and historic content. She is also the Vice-President of Digital Commonwealth.

....................

"Copyright Programming for Public and Academic Libraries: Educating to Support Creators and Enhance Access"

This program will present strategies and ideas for copyright education for audiences beyond the typical academic library. We will discuss the benefits of copyright education in different contexts, and provide successful models of similar programming. We'll discuss what's "wrong" with the "scared straight" model of copyright education, and how to avoid those pitfalls. Finally, we'll talk about how copyright education in the library can help increase access for the public.

Laura Quilter is the copyright and information policy librarian/attorney at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She works with the UMass Amherst community on copyright and related matters, equipping faculty, students, and staff with the understanding they need to navigate copyright, fair use, open access, publishing, and related issues. Laura maintains a teaching appointment at Simmons College School of Library & Information Science and the UMass Legal Studies Dept., and has previously taught at UC Berkeley School of Law with the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. She holds an MSLIS degree (1993, U. of Kentucky) and a JD (2003, UC Berkeley School of Law). Laura is a frequent speaker, who has taught and lectured to a wide variety of audiences. Her research interests are the intersection of copyright with intellectual freedom and access to knowledge, and more generally the public interest within technology and information law.

....................

"Conquering Datasets"

This presentation will address the basics of working with data sets. Topics covered will include finding data, interpreting codebooks, cleaning data, and loading data into an analytics program like Tableau. 

Monica Locker is the Assessment, Teaching, and Learning Librarian at College of the Holy Cross, where she is responsible for assessing the Libraries’ instruction programs, and works with the Office of Assessment and Research to survey students’ information literacy skills. She is also the liaison to the Economics/Accounting, English, Political Science, and Legal Studies departments. Monica was previously a Data Management Librarian at Voxgov, a company that aggregates and analyzes federal government documents. Monica graduated with an MLIS from Rutgers School of Communication and Information in January 2017, and holds a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill with a double major in English and Sociology. 

....................

"Concepts in Data Mining"

In this session, Prof. Ruiz will provide an overview of data mining - the process of examining patterns in large data sets and databases. She will discuss the key data mining concepts including the sources of data, the identification of patterns and relationships, standard analytical techniques, and how data mining is used in a wide variety of disciplines.

Carolina Ruiz's research interests are in data mining, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Together with her graduate and undergraduate students, colleagues in computer science and biology, and medical doctors, Ruiz investigates and develops data mining algorithms for genomics and clinical medicine. In addition to being a Computer Science faculty member, she is a founder and active member of the bioinformatics and computational biology program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She enjoys teaching courses and advising undergraduate and graduate research projects in data mining and machine learning. Carolina holds a B.S. in Computer Science, a B.S. in Mathematical Sciences and an M.S. in Computer Science from the Universidad de Los Andes, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.

....................

"Digital Tools to Showcase Collections"

Trying to figure out how to select the best web-based platform to showcase your digital collections? This session will cover the criteria for selecting the right platform and demonstrations of tools such as Omeka, Knight Lab, and History Pin.

Nichole Shea is the Statewide Metadata Coordinator at the Boston Public Library. Her work is part of the library’s Statewide Digitization program, which provides digitization services and repository space for cultural heritage institutions in the state of Massachusetts. In her position, Nichole works with institutions in the Statewide Digitization program to gather and prepare data for the Digital Commonwealth repository. She is also the lead member of the program’s Metadata Mob, which provides metadata assistance for partner institutions as needed.

Julia Howington, director of the Moakley Archive and Institute at Suffolk University, has worked in academic libraries and archives for more than fifteen years. At Suffolk, she oversees the university's archives and special collections unit which include the papers of Congressman Joe Moakley. Her areas of professional interest include primary source instruction, information literacy, and digital humanities. Howington currently serves on Digital Commonwealth’s Board of Directors and has co-presented a series of Digital Commonwealth workshops on digital exhibits and OMEKA. Howington received a Master’s in Library Science from Simmons College and a Bachelor's of Science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

....................

"Describing Photographs: Can we talk?"

Dr. Mahard, an outspoken proponent of the essential differences between cataloging text materials and cataloging images, will review the essentials for providing good, discoverable descriptions of photographs. Her presentation will feature numerous examples and encourage participants to draw their own conclusions about what constitutes good image description. Participants are welcome to bring examples for discussion.

Martha R. Mahard is currently managing the print and photograph inventory projects at the Boston Public Library. Before coming to the BPL, Dr. Mahard was a Professor of Practice at the Simmons School of Library and Information Science, where she taught courses in the management of photographic archives, art documentation, and preservation management. She also held a variety of positions in the Harvard University libraries, including the Harvard Theatre Collection, the Graduate School of Design Library, and the Fine Arts Library, where she was Curator of Historic Photographs. During her 35-year career at Harvard she was instrumental in the development and implementation of their online union catalog for visual materials. She holds a Doctor of Arts degree in Library Administration from Simmons and is the co-author of The Preservation Management Handbook: A 21^st-Century Guide for Libraries, Archives, and Museums (2014).

....................

"Good Morning, IRENE!"

This presentation offers an update on the IRENE audio reformatting technology at NEDCC. IRENE uses a non-contact, optical-scanning approach for digitally reformatting historical grooved audio formats such as lacquer discs and wax cylinders. Instead of using a stylus to playback the audio on these carriers for digitization, IRENE takes images of the grooves and uses software to translate the images into audio files. Audio can be retrieved from damaged, fragile, and broken carriers that are otherwise unplayable.

Launched in 2014, the IRENE audio preservation service at NEDCC is the culmination of a decade of research and development at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Library of Congress. The technology has continued to develop rapidly as each project presents unique challenges and discoveries. Topics of this presentation will include the latest changes to NEDCC’s IRENE system; an explanation of the technology behind IRENE; an explanation of the current pros/cons to an optical-scanning approach; and an update on future developments.

Bryce Roe is the Manager of Audio Preservation Services at Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), where she confers with collection-holding institutions and individuals to evaluate their audio collections and develop preservation proposals. Bryce earned her MLIS in Archives Management from Simmons College, and a BA in Music with a concentration in Ethnomusicology from Oberlin College.

return to the main conference page

................

Registration Rates

Member: 

Early Registration $110
Late/Onsite Registration $125

Non-Member

Early Registration $145
Late/Onsite Registration $160

................

Tweet about the conference

#DigiCom18