Digital Libraries and the Challenges of Digital Humanities

Citation

Paul, J. (2007), "Digital Libraries and the Challenges of Digital Humanities", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 41 No. 2, pp. 191-193. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330710743006

Dr Jeffrey A. Rydberg‐Cox, a University of Missouri, Kansas City academic, frames the challenge of digital humanities to digital libraries with unconventional style. The discourse begins with four case studies and detailed descriptions of the “Valley of Shadow” project, “Museum for the History of Science in Florence”, “Voyager Mozart CD‐ROM” and the “Perseus Digital Library”. He observes that these projects were accessible via the Internet and were not supported or hosted by traditional libraries. Moreover the impetus for the projects came from scholars with research interests who perceived digital libraries as extensions of traditional research and publication activities. Rydberg‐Cox argues that this posed a challenge to libraries as institutions.

His exposition on the definition of the digital library is insightful as he draws convergences and divergences in approaches between the librarian and the computational humanist. He argues that the traditional definition of digital libraries offered by the Digital Library Federation (DLF) and the working definitions offered by Ian Witten and David Bainbridge disqualify most of the work in humanities computing. The DLF definition insists the digital libraries must have a “consistent content model with consistent principles of selection, demarcations between collections…and librarians exercising principles of librarianship…with defined user community to be served … ” while most digital library projects use proprietary software and sometimes have an undefined user base. He posits that librarians and computational humanists face two common challenges. The first is that of long‐term preservation and the second is the deployment of digital tools that allow content to be understood in new ways. Computational humanities projects deal with similar issues the librarians had encountered in the pre‐digital era, which includes providing access to source materials, creating scholarship from source content, and preservation of source materials, tools and scholarship for future generations.

The title confines itself to work in the humanities that focus on written texts. Rydberg‐Cox first underlines the common challenges faced by digital librarians and digital humanists in providing access to scholarship. He describes existing standards and computational methods involved in the creation of machine‐readable transcriptions of literary, historical and cultural texts. Digital humanists go beyond visual representation of texts to “scholarly tagging” to further humanistic inquiry. Several mark‐up standards including Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) compliant XML (eXtensible Mark‐up Language) using the practical example of the Sidereus Nuncius project is then discussed. He concludes that XML has inherent advantages for scholarly analysis, long‐term preservation and portability.

Digital tools have the potential to transform content and help readers understand primary texts and works of scholarship very differently from traditional media. In the creation of text corpora for example, computational humanists have created tools such as syntactic parsers, part of speech taggers, sense disambiguation tools and parallel corpora alignment tools to serve the research needs of linguists. Parsers automatically generate hypertexts enabling users to understand and contextualise difficult aspects of language usage. Automatic extraction of keywords is another example. Rydberg‐Cox illustrates the power of these tools with real examples from the Perseus Digital Library. Keywords are important in identifying similar documents in the collection, capture thematic repetition, locate important concepts and in exploring secondary literature. The creative means of deploying information retrieval technologies to literary materials enhances knowledge creation. Query expansion, visualisation and multilingual searching enable scholars to explore semantic relationships and “hypernyms”. He laments that these tools, which can radically transform the way scholars work, have not found its way to digital libraries designed by librarians.

Rydberg‐Cox then looks into the future and explores the possibility of constructing a dynamic digital system that enables broad audiences to undertake content analysis. He surveys quantitative studies of literature texts and how it helps to enable scholars resolve questions surrounding authorship and date of texts. Pattern recognition and analytics help broader audiences to appreciate literary text more holistically. Similarly quantitative studies of vocabulary in a school environment would enable teachers to understand how students approach concepts and use them. The presence of large electronic corpora and digital tools eases basic lexicographic research like word collocations and developing citation databases. Rydberg‐Cox reckons the digital libraries are rapidly giving way to the creation of institutional repositories. The latter promises support to scholars working with digital texts and offer a systematic approach towards long‐term preservation of documents. Digital librarians will become more concerned with open standards, versioning and collaborative writing in the future. He highlights the open source DSpace and Fedora software as examples where tools for literary and linguistic analysis could be incorporated to draw textual data, analyse them and display to end users.

Rydberg‐Cox has used several techniques to make this title thoroughly readable, through interesting examples of digital library projects. Though the book is full of technical details, these are creatively weaved into the central debate and always clearly explained. Rydberg‐Cox's Digital Libraries is a must‐read for academic librarians and a must‐have for digital librarians or any digital library project group. The treatment of digital libraries in this book is sadly limited to textual content in an academic setting. The public environment on the contrary is all‐inclusive comprising of audio, visual, video and gaming contexts with a wider range of concerns ‐ both social and scholarly. Rydberg‐Cox could have more clearly explicated convergences between the scholarly and the public environment to better justify why digital librarians need to embrace the tools of the scholarly community. Additionally while the book establishes the dilemma of defining digital libraries clearly, the idea of “digital humanity” begs a definition. Rydberg‐Cox therefore superficially imposes the concerns of the scholarly community and generalises its applicability to the public environment. Nonetheless, the book challenges librarians to approach digital libraries from the perspective of analysis rather than access, content transformation rather than content presentation.