Collections as Data for Humanists

Books tend to be well defined as something with a start and a finish and often have a cover, serving as a nice physical boundary representing where they start and end, and generally researchers trained in the Humanities are comfortable with these objects. However, as the world of cultural material expands and we increasingly analyse born-digital and digitized material, we are often wading into a larger discussion around digital asset management and hosted content on the web.

In this presentation I will discuss some of the affordances of working with digital cultural heritage objects on platforms such as Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online, as well as digital repositories like Omeka and ContentDM. I will offer my perspectives what the challenges and opportunities are, and where I think literary-historical perspectives fit into this larger framework.

About the Speaker

Dr Heather Froehlich is the Digital Scholarship Specialist at the University of Arizona Libraries in Tucson, Arizona, where she supports digital activities including text and data mining. Heather earned her PhD and Masters of Research from the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK), where she studied language, variation, and change through the representations of social identity in Early Modern London plays. She is currently involved in the Mellon Foundation funded project Digital Borderlands in the Classroom, which trains University of Arizona faculty members in digital, archival, and open pedagogy methods relating to the US-Mexico border.