Today we meet Erika Coronado, who joined the Libraries in Februrary 2022 and spends her days landing content for our users and finding ways to stretch our budgets while doing so.
What made you decide to work in a library?
Erika Coronado: As someone who is an avid reader, I enjoy being surrounded by books. I love that working in libraries gives me access to thousands of books and many other valuable resources. I feel I work in paradise.
What’s your title, and what do you do for UTL?
EC: I am an Electronic Resources Coordinator and form part of the Content Management team. I am responsible for reviewing and negotiating the licenses of our e-resources, setting up library trials, collecting and maintaining usage statistics of e-resources, and assisting with some of the troubleshooting. I also help maintain the integrity of data within Alma.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work?
EC: I take great satisfaction in helping others and knowing that I can make a positive impact.
What are you most proud of in your job?
EC: The proudest moment for me is each time I realize I can save our library funds – either by negotiating quotes and getting a much lower cost, catching orders that can be canceled, or preventing purchases from happening either because we already own or have access to the resource.
What has been your best experience at the Libraries?
EC: The many good relationships I have developed during the time I have work for the Libraries. I work with such amazing and talented colleagues who are always willing to lend a hand. I am also grateful to work with a team that values and fosters learning, new ideas, and promotes growth.
What’s something most people don’t know about you?
EC: I spend a great deal of my time assembling jigsaw puzzles. I love all kinds, but especially the ones that challenge me!
Dogs or cats?
EC: I don’t have any pets, but I prefer dogs. I sometimes pet sit two dogs – a cute chubby Chihuahua (who is missing an eye) and a very friendly, energetic mutt.
Favorite book, movie or album?
EC: This is hard to answer, as I don’t have favorites. My favorite book genres are psychological thrillers, mystery, and crime novels. I love Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. I also love books that keep me up at night. I am currently reading books by the author Alex North. I find his novels spooky and engrossing – his books are hard to put down.
Cook at home, or go out for dinner? What and/or where?
EC: I have bad eating habits as I tend to eat out most of the time. I usually prefer to explore food trucks over to restaurants, and since I like all kinds of cuisine, there are lots to choose from. One of my favorite places is Beirut Restaurant, a food truck that serves delicious Lebanese dishes.
Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.
Segregation By Design is a compelling personal project by Adam Paul Susaneck, an architect based in New York City. Through spatial analysis, demographic data, historical photos, and extensive research, Susaneck effectively illustrates “how the American city was methodically hollowed out based on race.” It offers an insightful perspective on an important issue that has shaped the country’s history and continues to impact its present. The project’s goal is threefold: to create a print “Atlas of Urban Renewal,” to create digital materials for local groups opposing ongoing freeway expansion, and to raise awareness through social media.
Screenshot of the Chicago, Illinois page on Segregation By Design.
The website offers a preview of what the print atlas will look like. 180 municipalities that received federal funding from the 1956 Federal Highway Act have been analyzed, and so far, there are 14 cities profiled. Each city has multiple sections, such as “Freeways & Urban Renewal,” “Redlining,” and “Transit.” Focus is given to specific highways, neighborhoods, environmental impacts, or buildings.
For example, the “Chicago: Dan Ryan Expressway (I-90)” section includes an animated swipe map juxtaposing aerial photos from 1938 and 1984 illustrating the “path of destruction” and displacement when the I-90 highway was built in the 1960s. It explains that over 81,000 people, many of whom were BIPOC or recent immigrants, were displaced.
Video still from Chicago: Dan Ryan Expressway by Segregation By Design.
Likewise, the “Chicago: Bronzeville” section profiles a neighborhood decimated by “urban renewal.” Before and after photos of buildings are combined with Susaneck’s transposed line drawings of buildings over present-day photos, masterfully visualizing and mapping redlining of the area.
Redlining is a discriminatory practice that systematically denies services such as mortgages, insurance loans, and other financial services to specific area residents based on race or ethnicity.
Redlining map of Chicago with selected comments from the redlinign notes from Segregation By Design.
Yet another section, “Chicago: Pekin Theater,” focuses on the first black-owned theater in the United States, which was appropriated by the city through eminent domain, a process that left large swaths of the neighborhood cleared for “urban renewal.” The lot has been vacant since 1940.
Established in 1905, the Pekin Theater was the first Black-owned musical theater in the country from Segregation By Design.
The project’s second goal is to create digital materials for local groups opposing ongoing freeway expansion. Susaneck states, “As state governments continue to mindlessly widen freeways, community groups in cities across the country have formed in opposition. This project aims to support these groups by creating easily digestible graphics to spread awareness.” One such project is Stop TxDOT I-45 in Houston, Texas. Their mission is “to challenge the status quo of transportation policy and to fight for all people in Houston to be able to participate in the decisions that affect health, safety, and mobility in their communities.” Similarly, the “Houston: Flooding” section of Segregation By Design discusses the environmental impact of highways and urban sprawl and how nonwhite residents are disproportionately affected by natural disasters.
Houston, Texas, proposed I-45 expansion from Segregation By Design.
Susaneck is accomplishing his third project objective of raising awareness through social media. In fact, Segregation By Design first caught my eye with an Instagram post that highlighted a striking map of Atlanta followed by bird’s-eye images of highway construction clearance from 1956 to 1990. The caption is lengthy for Instagram but is engaging. Susaneck describes the images in it: “The first image shows the freeway right of way overlaid on the 1936 HOLC redlining map and a 1960 aerial photo. The subsequent images show the destruction wrought by freeway construction.” Susaneck then explains who was affected by the highway construction, gives the names of neighborhoods decimated, and expounds on the history of redlining. Instagram lends itself to the graphic nature of his work, the dynamic swipe maps (often used to illustrate before and after destructive events), then-and-now comparisons, and augmented photos highlighting the significance of buildings as well as homes and communities that have been demolished.
A 1960 aerial photo with a 1936 redlining map and freeway right of way overlayed, Segregation By Design.
For readers not on Instagram who still want updates, you can sign up to receive new entries via email, including high-resolution images and maps. Supporters can contribute to this largely self-funded project through the subscription-based platform Patreon.
Segregation By Design uses engaging infographics and directness to help explain the complicated policies contributing to systemic racism in our country. It’s invaluable in making these issues more manageable and understandable. I look forward to adding the Atlas of Urban Renewal print version to the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) Map Collection.
Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.
One day when I was familiarizing myself with the history of Japanese Canadians, I encountered this lovely, small online exhibition. It is built on 36 PDF files of digitized letters selected from the Joan Gillis fonds, housed at the University of British Columbia Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections. The exhibition, beautifully titled “I know we will meet again,” tells a dark and brutal episode in Japanese Canadian history from 1942 to 1948.
The letters were written by young Japanese Canadians to Joan Gillis (1928–2019, more info on Gillis), a white teenage girl they shared elementary and middle school years with before being forcefully removed from their homes in British Columbia to various locations in interior Canada during WWII. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government seized fishing boats and confiscated cameras and shortwave radios owned by Japanese Canadians. In January 1942, the Canadian federal government passed an order to remove Japanese Canadians from coastal British Columbia. By March 1942, about 22,000 Japanese Canadians were dispersed to areas east of the Rocky Mountains and were not granted freedom until 1949. During their forced removal, the Canadian government also seized, confiscated, and sold Japanese Canadian properties left in BC, including lands, houses, farms, etc.
The letters detail the harsh childhood and teenage years that Gillis’ Japanese Canadian friends had to endure. All the letters in this exhibition have been scanned, transcribed, annotated, and geo-coded, thereby making it easy to explore the letters’ content by author, theme, location, and time.
For example, when we choose to browse by subject, we are directed to a beautiful and effective visualization of the subjects discussed.
Figure 1. Color-coded subject visualization
As a person with mild color vision deficiency, I have to commend the curators’ apparent thoughtfulness in making the spectrum easier to see. Click on the little colored circles, then the associated subject will be highlighted in each letter.
Likewise, one can open up a transcript and see every sentence’s annotated subject on the right.
Figure 2. Annotated letter transcript.
Maps help users grasp the extent of the dispersal of the letter writers as each letter is encoded with coordinates. One can zoom in and out to see the physical distance between the letter writers. One suggestion I would have is to mark Gillis’ location as well, just to give viewers a sharper sense of how far they have been dispersed.
Figure 3. An overview of the letters’ locations.
Figure 4. A zoomed-in and city-level view of the letters’ original locations.
The curators have enhanced the exhibition through suggested themes which include essays that reference snippets from the letters. These essays give historical contexts in which the letters were produced. For example, in the essay on “Communications,” the curators discuss how the correspondence between Gillis and her friends was censored by the Canadian authorities. Under “Labour,” one will find more information about sugar beets farming that many letter writers’ families “volunteered” to engage in, although the letters make clear this “volunteering” was the only option other than labor camps and the splitting up of families.
Last but not least, I love the notes under “About the Collection.” The Land Acknowledgement is specific and lists all Indigenous lands that are mentioned in the collection. There is also a deep reflection of publicizing materials that were meant to be private and intimate. In particular, how the wartime censorship adds another layer of complexity to the nature of this correspondence. The curators’ own personal reflections communicated their own positionality towards the project and personal growth in a profound and touching way.
The project is built with open-source tools. The content management tool, CollectionBuilder is a set of static web templates for online collections created and maintained by librarians at the University of Idaho. The transcriptions are prepared with Oral History as Data, also a static web tool based on Github Pages and Jekyll to analyze and visualize transcripts, also by the same group at the University of Idaho.
I love the collection not only in the sense it teaches me about a dark episode in history effectively but also demonstrates how such a project can help each of us grow by reflecting on our own positions in relation to the history documented in the project.
Yi Shan is East Asian Studies Librarian at the University of Texas Libraries.
Kiana Fekette came to the Libraries a couple of years ago and was recently named Head of Digitization. Learn a bit about this North Carolina transplant.
What’s your background, and how did you come to work at the Libraries?
It’s a very long, somewhat complicated story of how I got to UT Libraries! Academically, I have BA in Archaeology with a double major in History and an MA in Anthropology with a focus in archaeology. More broadly, I went to university knowing that I absolutely loved history and books but wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do until I happened into a student position within my university’s special collections library as a conservation lab assistant. I knew then I wanted to pursue book and paper conservation but several major life events got in the way and I found myself working for Internet Archive after getting my undergraduate degree. Several years and one master’s degree later, we moved to Austin to be closer to my husband’s family. I wanted to work in something to do with cultural heritage but didn’t have any one specific goal in mind which is how I ended up looking for different library and archive positions.
What’s your title, and talk a little bit about what you do?
As of very recently (May 24th) I am the Head of Digitization within the Digital Stewardship and Preservation unit. Prior to this, I was the Digital Reformatting Coordinator and I started in 2021. As I am still transitioning into my new role, the majority of my responsibilities have stayed the same. I coordinate and execute the digitization of collections materials which include audio-visual and book/paper items. Our unit works closely with library staff members and patrons to make our collections materials more widely accessible by offering them in a digital format.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work?
Knowing that so many people – both library staff and patrons – rely on the variety of resources produced by digitization. We’re not just taking high quality scans of items to keep on some random, inaccessible hard drive; our goal is to help others with the pursuit of knowledge and to ensure that these items are available for use across time and space.
What are you most proud of in your job?
Despite the small size of our unit, I am proud of the fact that we’re able to produce such a large quantity of archival-quality material for the library.
What has been your best experience at the Libraries?
Any time the libraries staff is able to get together as a group is always such a fun time to meet new people and catch up with old friends. It’s always refreshing and reassuring to be in a space where you can truly feel the support for one another.
What’s something most people don’t know about you?
I’ve moved around a lot – first as a military kid, then as a nomadic adult. I’ve lived in Oklahoma, all over central North Carolina, Washington state, Hawai’i, Massachusetts, Ireland, and now Texas. My family is originally from central Pennsylvania (if you can pronounce Schuylkill and Yuengling, or have ever been to Knoebels, please come and find me – I’m sure we have lots to talk about!).
Dogs or cats?
Both! (I have two cats and a dog at home)
Favorite book, movie or album?
Book: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Movie: The Princess Bride or Pride and Prejudice (2005)
Album: I don’t necessarily have a favorite album but my favorite musician is Andrew Bird
Cook at home, or go out for dinner? What and/or where?
I enjoy cooking but I also get very bored with food very easily so I’m always willing to go out to get something I wouldn’t otherwise cook. One of our favorite spots is Turnstile on Burnet Road. They’re both a coffee shop and a full-service bar with great breakfast tacos and truly incredible burgers.
What’s the future hold?
I have no clue, and I’m perfectly okay with that! I’m finally settling down in one spot for the first time in quite a while.
Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.
Zines have long been a medium for weirdos, freaks, and outcasts on the margins, which means they’ve been a staple of queer expression. The Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) has been digitizing and preserving queer zines for twenty years!
First of all, what are zines? Zines are DIY publications, usually staple-bound and made with printer paper. They’re cheap and easy to produce, and most zine makers give them away for free or sell them at low prices to recoup costs. This allows them to bypass mainstream publishers, so zines are often a medium for marginalized and radical voices.
Zines developed out of Science Fiction fan culture in the 1930s. In the 1970s, the onset of photocopying technology coincided with the rise of punk music. Punk fans (who often overlapped with Sci-fi fans) latched onto zines as a way to write about their favorite bands, share stories, and build community. As such, zines have always been a venue for outsider expression and radical politics. In the 1990s, feminist and queer zine makers really took hold of the medium. Punk communities might have been made up of outcasts, but they weren’t immune to misogyny and homophobia. Women and LGBTQ punks experienced marginalization and discrimination within their scenes, and zines provided a much-needed space to voice these experiences and find other like-minded queers.
So a project like QZAP is pretty revolutionary! This searchable database is run by a collective based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it is and will remain free and open to use. QZAP’s goal is to create a “living history” so they continue to accept new submissions from contemporary queer zine makers. They hold a broad definition of “queer,” too, recognizing that identities and language change over time. Zine makers submit their physical zines to QZAP, and collective members, usually librarians, archivists, scholars, and graduate students, scan the zines and create the metadata. Like zines themselves, QZAP is a DIY enterprise!
QZAP’s homepage features a rotation of different zine covers. This featured zine is about the representation of Black Lesbians in the Lesbian Herstory Archives.
QZAP allows users to browse zines, which is one of my favorite ways to explore their collections. With so much interesting and obscure content, browsing QZAP’s collection is a fun, serendipitous experience. QZAP also has an Advanced Search option for users to find zines by author, place of publication, or year of publication. I’ve used QZAP when working with Women’s & Gender Studies classes so students can see a broad set of queer zines over time. While the website’s look and feel are pretty simple and the technology is a bit dated, students respond enthusiastically to the content. I think QZAP’s simple design and stable technology have made it a sustainable project, especially because it is run by a volunteer collective independent of a university or institution.
Here’s a screenshot of a digitized zine and its metadata record in QZAP. I like that the metadata is so prominent next to the digital object.
One of my favorite things about QZAP is that it uses a specialized metadata schema just for zines called xZINECOREx, based on the more common DublinCore schema. Cataloging and describing zines are challenging. They often don’t have a title page with publication information. Sometimes no author or creator is listed, or the author goes by a pseudonym. Maybe they have a publication date, but often they do not.
A sample record using the xZINECOREx metadata schema.
Given these complexities, libraries and archives handle describing zines in all sorts of ways. The xZINECOREx schema provides a standard that can be used across institutions and by independent projects like QZAP. QZAP contributes metadata from its collection to the Zine Union Catalog, which aims to be a single place to search for zines across multiple libraries, archives, and independent collections. Because zines are ephemeral, this catalog is a great resource for scholars interested in the history of zines.
A digital collection like QZAP is vital to preserving the history of these rare, hard-to-find publications, yet there remains great value in studying physical zines. The physical objects provide the reader with a unique, tactile experience. This is especially important for LGBTQ+ history, which is so often erased or hidden. Reading a personal, first-hand account from a queer punk in the 90s – from the actual paper zine that person made by hand – is visceral and powerful. It’s an experience hard to replicate in an online setting. If you find QZAP intriguing, I encourage you to stop by our Zine Collection on the 5th floor of the Fine Arts Library. Our collection has many queer zines, including many published in Texas, and dates back to the 1990s.
Want to learn more about zines? Check out these resources:
Now that Dell Medical has adequately settled in, related programs really need some extra support. Enter Lynn Bostwick, our new Liaison Librarian for Health Sciences.
What’s your background in libraries, and how did you decide on librarianship as a career?
I decided on librarianship as a career because I was inspired in part by my grandmother who worked at the law library at SMU in Dallas when I was growing up. I learned from her to never take the access to information for granted. I also worked for a time for a non-profit providing medical information and community resources to the public, and realized then that I enjoyed the work of helping people access the information they need, so librarianship was a good fit for me. My background is in academic libraries and is varied! It includes all different types of work from cataloging and metadata creation for digitized items to reference and circulation to collection development, instruction and providing research help.
What’s your title, and what do you do for the Libraries?
My title is Liaison Librarian for Health Sciences. I work with students and faculty in Nutrition, Nursing, Pharmacy and Public Health providing them with classes and research help.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work?
Knowing I’ll have the opportunity to help someone or learn something each day.
What are you most proud of in your job?
Providing a class to Nutrition students and seeing the results in their posters on display in the Union Ballroom.
What has been your best experience at the Libraries?
All the people I’ve met so far – super students, faculty and colleagues! What’s something most people don’t know about you?
I LOVE football!
Dogs or cats?
I like dogs but have always had cats. We currently have a seal-point Siamese that rules our house.
Favorite book, movie or album?
Tough question! Favorite album is Alkohol – Goran Bregovic. Years ago I got to see Bregovic perform with his band at Bass Concert Hall.
Cook at home, or go out for dinner? What and/or where?
Both, but lately we’ve been going out to eat at Nori, a plant-based restaurant on Guadalupe that is so good!
What’s the future hold?
Catching up on travel post-pandemic and seeing more of the world!
The UT Libraries is one of the largest global lenders in the world. How do those materials make it from here to there, there to here, then back again? Resource Delivery Librarian Kristin Walker knows. Let’s find out more about her work and her world.
What’s your title, and what do you do for the Libraries?
Kristin Walker: Head of Resource Delivery for Interlibrary Services. I manage the department that includes Interlibrary Loan, Get a Scan and Remote Delivery. We borrow and scan research materials for the UT Austin community. Our department fills in gaps within the UT Libraries’ collections and we are able to obtain almost everything for our users. We also ship books to graduate students and faculty that are in remote locations, provide scans for faculty to use in their course materials and we digitize UT Austin dissertations and theses.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work?
KW: I am motivated by knowing that so many UT Austin researchers depend on our department to supply them with the critical materials needed to complete their projects. It feels good to know that we can help them or make things easier in some small way.
What are you most proud of in your job?
KW: I am most proud when Interlibrary Services is mentioned as one of the most valuable services provided by the UT Libraries.
ILS seems to be a bit of a quiet giant. How important is your department?
KW: Interlibrary loan is considered a critical library service to supplement library collections. No library owns every book or journal, so libraries share their collections with each other. A lot of what we do is behind the scenes, but it is all very necessary to the UT Austin community. It may seem like a mysterious process from the outside, but we use a mix of automation, research and a high level of staff training to make our work seamless to our users.
What has been your best experience at the Libraries?
KW: The best part of working at the Libraries is the people you interact with on a daily basis. My department interacts in some way with almost every other department in the Libraries and this has given me a wholistic insight as to how all of the parts work together.
What’s something most people don’t know about you?
KW: I love K-Dramas (Korean TV shows) and I’m learning Korean on Duolingo.
Dogs or cats?
KW: Cats! I currently have two black cats.
Favorite book, movie or album?
KW: Favorite Book: The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer ISBN: 978-0684830797
Favorite Movie: Wings of Desire; Director Wim Wenders
Favorite Album: Aladdin Sane by David Bowie
Cook at home, or go out for dinner? What and/or where?
KW: I usually cook at home. I attempt a lot of Asian inspired recipes, but I also make simple soups and tray bakes.
What’s the future hold?
KW: There is much more emphasis on digital collections, open access and accessibility as they apply to interlibrary loan and document delivery. Long term, I see copyright laws being revised and modernized to account for digital items.
Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.
As a librarian, I can’t help but love a good bibliography.
The first professional book I purchased after getting my first bibliographer job was Maureen Patterson’s South Asia Civilizations: a Bibliographic Synthesis. Over the course of many years, Patterson, the former Bibliographer of the South Asia Collection at the University of Chicago, enlisted the help of a small army of graduate students and library staff to identify and succinctly document citations of scholarly books and articles organized in the ways that academics think. Arranged by broad chronological and thematic categories, Patterson’s Bibliography was a life-saver for me while in graduate school. Whenever I ventured into unknown territory as a grad student, the Bibliography was the perfect launching pad, giving me recommendations to begin learning. Since then, as a librarian often called upon to help people in areas less familiar to me, I’ve turned to Patterson’s Bibliography over and over to learn, explore, and discover. My personal copy, now tattered and torn but always with lots of post-it notes and flags pointing me to particular areas, reveals just how helpful this work has been to me.
Author’s personal copy of South Asian Civilizations
And yet, as a print source, published only once in 1981, it is dated. Not just in terms of content—the way we think about South Asia has certainly changed since 1981!—but also in terms of its static functionality. Bibliographies are essentially curated lists of citations, that is, of metadata (“data about other data”). The intersection of online metadata and citations, namely in and through tools such as citation managers such as Endnote, Procite, RefWorks, and Zotero, is fertile digital humanities ground wherein we can learn about new subject areas.
For example, I recently learned of a new bibliography for the study of legal history, the Indian Princely States Online Legal History Archive, or IPSOLHA. IPSOLHA takes up the challenge of complex histories from the colonial period when there were “hundreds of semi-sovereign, semi-autonomous states across the South Asian subcontinent. Varying in size and authority, these states (sometimes referred to as native, feudatory, or zamindari states) were incubators for innovative legal, administrative, and political ideas and offered a unique counterbalance to the hegemony of British rule. Yet despite their unique history, studying these states is complicated by the scattered nature of their archival remains.” IPSOLHA’s intervention is to use the tools of the digital humanities “to build a database and collection of references to facilitate historical study of these states, with a special focus on their legal and administrative history.”
Example of entries re: Princely States from Patterson’s Bibliography
Main collection of IPSOLHA, with options for sorting, display and visualization
Like Patterson’s Bibliography, IPSOLHA is built upon student labor to investigate and document publications; but unlike Patterson, IPSOLHA has used the dynamic citation manager tool, Zotero, to gather relevant references from both online and analog resources which are then uploaded into a database. The database sorts and presents the references in static thematic categories, but also in ways that can be determined by the researcher, including by type, language, location and more. At the time of this writing, IPSOLHA is primarily a discovery tool (like Patterson), but in time, the hope is that the discovery will lead to digitization projects and more online full-text access for researchers.
Display from IPSOLHA of Gazetteers
IPSOLHA is a fabulous place for both beginner researchers to get started, but also for more advanced scholars of princely India to find hitherto unknown source materials. I encourage all to dive in and explore the possibilities.
Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.
While digital, machine-readable texts in Arabic are growing in their availability, certain genres of writing and scholarship in Arabic have become more readily accessible than others. Among those more obscure disciplines are Sufism, theology (Muslim and Christian), and philosophy. These tend to be theoretically complex, and even dogmatically challenging, disciplines that are not as well represented in North American Islamic Studies programs as literature or Qur’anic studies. The Nuṣūṣ corpus––a project led by Antonio Musto––seeks to fill in some of the desiderata by putting more texts from these essential disciplines up on the Internet for researchers to use.
A project that began with an almost exclusive focus on Sufism, Nuṣūṣ has expanded to include works from a variety of complex disciplines of Arabic-language scholarship produced by Muslims and Christians. The corpus currently contains 61 machine-readable texts, with plans to add more and to make the text files available for download. Differing from other, larger corpora of Islamicate[1] disciplines, Nuṣūṣ provides the bibliographic information for the modern editions from which these digitized texts are derived. This is not only a responsible move, but a useful one for researchers: modern editions of historic texts can differ greatly; comparing modern editors’ approaches to the text and their choices that affect meaning and understanding is therefore rich area of exploration in Arabic-language digital humanities. It is hoped that––as possible––Nuṣūṣ will start to add multiple editions of historic texts in order to facilitate this comparative work.
Nusus’s “Browse Corpus” page.
Nuṣūṣ’s aspirations lie in providing researchers with an adequate corpus from which to do computational text analysis. To that end, the team has created several different ways for researchers to access and engage with the texts. The “Browse Corpus” feature gives researchers an accurate sense of which specific items are included. If one is looking for a particular author or text, this would be the list to consult. This is also where crucial metadata (information about the item) is located, such as the origin of the digital images (Nuṣūṣ’s own OCR process or the OpenITI project repository), the internal corpus text ID, the date of the historic text’s alleged composition, the discipline, the genre of writing, the title, and the author. Author names link to biographies from the Encyclopaedia of Islam, and titles link to the WorldCat record for the modern edition used in the digitization of the text.
Performing a search for the exact term “عقل” in the Nuṣūṣ corpus.
Furthermore, the Nuṣūṣ team has provided a cross-corpus search tool. Researchers can build a search using the provided fields and Boolean operators (AND, OR), and can specify whether they are searching for an exact term. It is also possible to confine the search to specific titles, authors, or genres. This arrangement encourages researchers to pursue projects that might compare across a scholar’s oeuvre, across a genre of writing (Muslim theology, philosophy, Sufism, or Christian theology), or across a single text. Researchers could use this tool to construct searches across known networks of scholars, as well. As the corpus expands, the ability to conduct searches and collect the resulting data will become increasingly effective and useful.
Readers interested in text and corpora analysis should consult the UT Libraries’ Digital Humanities Tools and Resources guide for more information on methods to apply to corpora like Nuṣūṣ. For recommendations of other corpora that might be useful for your research, consult the Data Set list on the Text Analysis guide. Lastly, as the Nuṣūṣ corpus partners with and derives from the OpenITI repository, it is worth considering the OpenITI repository documentation at the KITAB project. Happy corpus hunting!
Dale J. Correa, PhD, MS/LIS is Middle Eastern Studies Librarian andHistory Coordinator for the UT Libraries.
[1] The term Islamicate was coined by Marshall G.S. Hodgson in volume 1 of his The Venture of Islam (p. 57).
Meet Discovery Services Librarian Alisha Quagliana, who operates behind the curtain to make sure users can get to stuff, wherever they are.
What’s your title, and what do you do for the Libraries?
Discovery Systems Librarian, I manage our discovery system (Primo) as well as other systems related things within Alma and dealing with electronic resource access and discovery. I also manage the ticket system for access issues.
What motivates you to wake up and go to work?
Coffee? Seriously, I like figuring things out so between resolving access related issues and figuring out ways to get our systems to work better for us I spend a lot of time on puzzles, which I love.
What are you most proud of in your job?
I’m really proud of the ticketing system and the various desks we have now. We were early in setting up a system like this, 2009, and now we’ve migrated it to JIRA so it’s a real ticketing system. It really helps me resolve issues and spot trends so much faster.
What has been your best experience at the Libraries?
I think our migration to Alma and Primo was a great working experience. I learned a lot about other areas of the library and got to work closely with folks I hadn’t before and we forged a great team.
What’s something most people don’t know about you?
Most people probably don’t know that I ride in a Mardi Gras krewe in New Orleans. It is a ton of fun!
Dogs or cats?
Both, but I only have a dog now.
Favorite book, movie or album?
I read so much I cannot possibly pick a favorite book. I’m actually listening to The Godfather right now, it’s been many years since I’ve read it, and the audio version is very compelling. I’m really enjoying it.
Cook at home, or go out for dinner? What and/or where?
Both. Spaghetti and meatballs is one of my go to dishes to make. And our go to restaurant is probably Odd Duck since we can walk to it.
What’s the future hold?
Immediate future for me is Mardi Gras! But long term I’m looking forward to getting some overdue clean-up projects completed and working on getting more of our cultural heritage materials into the discovery system.
