Tag Archives: Digital Scholarship

Area Studies, Global Studies, Open Access, Read Hot and Digitized

Read, Hot and Digitized: The Open Siddur Project: A Gateway to Open-Source Judaism

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Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s 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.

A siddur (pl. Siddurim) is a Jewish prayer book containing the order of daily, Shabbat (the Sabbath), and holiday services. The word siddur means ‘arrangement,’ or ‘putting things in order’ in Hebrew, and the siddur provides a structured liturgy that includes prayers, blessings, and scriptural verses. These books are used in both synagogues and private homes and vary among different Jewish communities and denominations. They are often available both in Hebrew and in translation to the language of the local community where they are being used.

The Open Siddur Project is a “volunteer-driven, non-profit, non-commercial, non-denominational, non-prescriptive, gratis (without cost) and libré (without restriction) Open Access archive of contemplative praxes, liturgical readings, and Jewish prayer literature (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure) composed in every era, region, and language Jews have ever prayed.”[1] It provides a platform for sharing open-source resources, tools, and content for individuals and communities crafting their own prayerbook with content that pertains to their own life cycle.

Aharon Varady, a community planner and Jewish educator who founded the project in 2002 and directs it to this day, is a key figure in open-source Judaism, an initiative that uses open-source principles to create and share Jewish cultural and liturgical works. He believes that “the commodification of prayer texts, historical or contemporary, is anathema to Jewish spiritual practice.” Asserting that “the underlying unformatted text of a liturgical reading or prayer … must remain accessible for redistribution and adaptive reuse,” the project’s values are aligned with the definition of open content and open data maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation, the definition of open-source maintained by the Open Source Initiative, and the four values of libre/free culture.[2]

Image 1: view of main categories and upcoming festivals, feast & fasts

The Open Siddur Project’s main page includes six sections, through which various prayers and related content could be discovered. The Project’s activity ‘heatmap’ displays a calendrical grid of resources published by the project over the course of each year since inauguration, alongside a display of recent contributors. The next section includes recently added prayers and related content (e.g., “Thanksgiving to the Almighty for the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty the Empress Victoria, by Joseph Ezekiel Rajpurkar at Gates of Mercy Synagogue, Bombay (20 June 1897)). Additional sections on the main page present selected sub-categories and calendars.

The database itself is organized around four main categories: Prayers & Praxes; Liturgical Readings, Sources, and Cantillation; Compiled Prayer Books; and Miscellanea — each of which has its own sub-categories. For example, under Prayers & Praxes, one can find prayers for after “Earthquakes & Tsunamis,” or prayers “composed for, or relevant to, conflicts over sovereignty and dispossession.” Additional sub-categories include “Commemorative Festivals & Fasts” (e.g., Hannukah), as well as “civil days on civil calendars;” e.g., Transgender Day of Remembrance (November 20th), Human Rights Day (December 10th), and even one prayer for May the Fourth, “marking the success of the Rebel Alliance in defeating the Galactic Empire.”

Image 2: The Jewish Prayer of the Dead, adapted for commemorating victims of lethal hate-crimes against Transgender people. This version was originally written for Queer Jews at Brandeis’s Transgender Day of Remembrance Services on 20 November 2024.

Additional points of discovery and access are available by clicking on the top right search button. There are indices of languages & scripts, and authors & contributors, as well as categories index and various how-to guides. 

The whole project is backed up and downloadable on GitHub. Unsurprisingly for an open access project, the default license under which all content is shared online is the Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International license. A such, content could be shared through email and a few social media platforms.

The Open Siddur Project is used by students studying private and communal Jewish prayer in its literary and historical context, educators preparing curricular resources, authors of new prayers and liturgies, translators of prayers new and old, transcribers of digital text from printed and handwritten works, and ultimately, living practitioners actively producing new prayerbooks for their communities.

Let us end this post with a Prayer for Librarians!

Siddurim and Jewish liturgy in UTL collections:

Katz, Ariana. 2024. For Times Such as These : A Radical’s Guide to the Jewish Year / Rabbi Ariana Katz & Rabbi Jessica Rosenberg. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press. E-Book.

Langer, Ruth. 2015. Jewish Liturgy : A Guide to Research / Ruth Langer. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. E-Book.

Salmon, Howard, and Benjamin Sharff. 2008. Comic Book Siddur : For Shabbat Morning Services / Howard Salmon, Artist & Interpreter ; Benjamin Sharff, Editor. Tucson, AZ: Howard Salmon.

[Siddur] Rabbinical Council of America. 2018. Sidur ʻAvodat Ha-Lev / Rabbi Basil Herring, Editor-in-Chief. New York, N.Y. : Rabbinical Council of America.

Siddur (Reform, Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism). 2020. Tefilat ha-Adam [Prayer of Humankind] : An Israeli Reform Siddur. Jerusalem : Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism.

Non-UT resources:

Open-Source Judaism (with Aharon Varady, founding director of The Open Siddur Project) [podcast, including full-text transcript] – The Light Lab, episode 60 (72 min.).

[1] https://opensiddur.org/

[2] The four values are: the freedom to use the work, the freedom to study the work and apply knowledge acquired from it, the freedom to make and redistribute copies of the information or expression, and the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works. See https://freedomdefined.org/Definition.

Acquisitions/Foreign Travel, Area Studies, Collections, Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, Global Studies, Humanities & Liberal Arts, Uncategorized

Down and Out in Lisbon and London: Antiquarian Books and Digital Humanities in Europe

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Thanks to the generous support of the Center for European Studies and the UT Libraries, I was recently able to travel to London, England and Lisbon, Portugal.  On my trip, I had the chance to attend a scholarly conference, acquire unique materials to add to UTL’s collections, network with academics, vendors, and librarians, and purchase books for the UT Libraries’ collections.

A street in London lined with bookstores containing antiquarian and rare books.
A street in London lined with bookstores containing antiquarian and rare books.

My time in London was an invaluable opportunity to build stronger connections with an international cohort of colleagues. For example, I met with one of the UT Libraries’ vendors who I work with to procure rare materials on early twentieth century European politics. The vendor I met with, Carl Slienger, frequently supplies us with items not held by any other North American libraries, making the materials he sources very important for our distinctive holdings of pamphlets and other propagandistic literature, as well as antiquarian books that enhance our holdings of rare and unique European occult and spiritualist materials. I also met with a colleague at the British Library to discuss coding workflows and best practices for working with digital materials. Meeting with my colleague at the British Library was likewise very beneficial, as much of my work involving digital methodologies is focused on programming in Python and other languages, and I am currently supervising a project focused on using Python to automate digital archival workflows.

Ian standing outside of the British Library.
Ian outside of the British Library.

In Lisbon, I attended and presented at the The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) Digital Humanities 2025 conference.  My poster presentation focused on software packages I have written  in the Rust programming language to support multilingual computational approaches to linguistics and digital humanities. My poster highlighted three software packages: a package for performing lemmatization, a key natural language processing task, on text; a package for assessing the readability of a text containing a variety of algorithms to choose from; and a package to perform stylometric analysis on text. They were all built with multilingual support in mind, and as such are specifically designed to move outside of an Anglocentric paradigm often found in technologies for natural language processing and textual analysis, creating new opportunities for multilingual and non-English textual analysis and digital humanities. Beyond my own presentation, I was able to  attend talks on other digital research methodologies throughout the conference. Being able to attend talks by colleagues from all around the globe was both invigorating and rewarding, and an invaluable way to stay on top of the current research being done in the digital humanities. I also took the opportunity to acquire a small amount of zines while in Lisbon, adding to our collection of unique materials that we would not be able to purchase without undergoing a foreign acquisitions trip.

The poster session area at the DH 2025 conference in Lisbon.
The poster session area at the DH 2025 conference in Lisbon.

This trip allowed me the opportunity to represent UT Austin internationally to a diverse group of colleagues, and I’m grateful that I was able to serve the Libraries in such a capacity. I look forward to building on our distinctive holdings and further expanding UT’s collections while continuing to work on using digital methodologies to enhance accessibility for research and open source software.

Benson Latin American Collection, Exhibits, Global Studies, Uncategorized

An Adventure in El Paso, Texas

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One of my favorite parts of being a librarian is the opportunity to participate in community engagement projects. So when the opportunity to work with Albert A. Palacios on a traveling exhibit as one of my rotations, I immediately said yes. The exhibit was a collaboration with the University of Texas at El Paso’s C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, which was especially exciting as a UTEP alumnus. This is part of a long standing partnership made possible by a U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center grant. Our exhibit brought together holdings from the Benson Latin American Collection, the C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections, and the Municipal Archive of Saltillo in a joint physical and digital exhibit about the Mexican Revolution.

A Fight for Democracy exhibit at UTEP
Intertwined Destinies: El Paso and Northern Mexico exhibit at UTEP.

Albert and I traveled to El Paso in May 2025 to finally see the fruits of our labor. When we got to the library’s third floor, Claudia Rivers (Director of the C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections) was hard at work putting the finishing touches on her exhibit. The U.S.-Mexico border played a big role in the Mexican Revolution, which means that UTEP has a lot of special objects in their archives. One of these objects is a commemorative cigar from when Porfirio Díaz and William Howard Taft met at the border in 1909. It was an incredible experience to see these first hand, and to have people from the community view these as well.

Items included in the exhibit.

The next day was dedicated to digital scholarship workshops to local scholars. We had participants from all over the El Paso-Juárez region, and an archivist even drove three hours from Alpine to attend! Elisabet Takehana, Director of UTEP’s Center of the Digital Humanities, taught stylometry using the stylo package in R. Sergio Morales, LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Graduate Research Assistant and Latin American Studies Master’s student, taught ArcGIS’s Online and StoryMap tools for presenting spatial research using the official photographs from Mexico’s 1910 independence centennial celebration. And finally, I taught how to use Voyant Tools and UDPipe for text analysis using telegrams between Francisco Villa and Lázaro de la Garza. By the end of the day, participants had gotten hands-on experience with all of these different digital humanities tools and processes.

Sergio Morales teaching ArcGIS Online and StoryMaps tools.
Ana A. Rico teaching text analysis.

After the workshops, we headed upstairs to the third floor once again for the exhibit opening. The exhibit curated by Claudia Rivers was incredible – showcasing a silk print of Porfirio Díaz, a camera from the early 1900s, and portraits of Francisco I. Madero and his wife which were taken by an El Paso photographer. Though our exhibit didn’t get there on time for the opening (Albert and I learned how to roll with the punches) we were able to direct people to the digital version of the exhibit. All in all, it was a day full of learning and celebration, as well as making connections to scholars in the area.

People viewing exhibits during the opening reception.

Finally, on the third day, our exhibit arrived and we put it up for students, faculty, and the public to enjoy! It was a joy to share the Benson Latin American Collection with a wider audience. The exhibit, A Fight for Democracy: The First Years of the Mexican Revolution, will be displayed at UTEP for the summer and then travel to the El Paso Border Heritage Center in the fall. A second copy will circulate through the Austin Public Library later this year.

Albert A. Palacios and Ana A. Rico in front of their exhibit.

Acknowledgements
This initiative would not have been possible without the support of the following individuals and sponsorships:

C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, The University of Texas at El Paso
● Claudia Rivers, Head
● Susannah Holliday, Assistant Head
● Gina Stevenson, Photo and Processing Archivist

Center of the Digital Humanities, The University of Texas at El Paso
● Elisabet Takehana, Director

Municipal Archive of Saltillo
● Olivia Strozzi, Director
● Iván Vartan Muñoz Cotera, Head of Outreach

LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections
● Melissa Guy, Director, Benson Latin American Collection
● Ryan Lynch, Head of Special Collections
● Jennifer Mailloux, Graphic Designer (special thanks)
● Adela Pineda Franco, LLILAS Director & Lozano Long Endowed Professor
● Theresa Polk, Head of Digital Initiatives
● Ramya Iyer, Grants and Contracts Specialist
● Susanna Sharpe, Communications Coordinator (special thanks)
● Cindy Garza, Accountant
● Leah Long, Administrative Manager

Sponsors
● U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center Title VI Grant
● LLILAS Benson Collaborative Funds

Area Studies, Features, Global Studies, Libraries, Read Hot and Digitized

Read, Hot and Digitized: A Digital Survey of the Scottish Witch Trials

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The witch trials of Europe in the early modern period, from about 1400 to 1775, resulted in the prosecution, often violent, of over 100,000 people. Studying this history and understanding its causes—which were multifaceted, and incorporated elements of religious persecution of alleged heresy, superstition, and religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants—is an important way we can understand the motivations of past atrocities and learn from them to avoid similar violence and intolerance in the future. The Witches: Survey of Scottish Witchcraft project at the University of Edinburgh is one project that makes this history more broadly accessible and understandable both to scholars and the general public.

The site itself contains an excellent introduction to the history of witch trials in Scotland. It states:

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Scotland went through a series of changes to the state and church which fuelled the Scottish witch hunt. As a result of the Reformation, when Scotland broke away from the Catholic Church and moved towards Protestantism, the church went through an upheaval of religious belief and became much more interested in what ordinary people did and believed. 

This concern led to great concern from Church and state about people’s religious beliefs and practices, deviations from behavior expected by the Church and society (such as not attending Church on a Sunday), and witchcraft. More than 4,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, and confessions were often evinced using torture. Of people accused of being witches it is estimated that around 2,500, or roughly two-thirds, were executed, with the majority of those executed (about 85%) being women.

The main map on the site’s landing page, showing locations where witches in the database lived.
The main map on the site’s landing page, showing locations where witches in the database lived.

The site’s most striking feature is a map showing accused witches’ residences and details about their case and personal lives, including their occupations. This provides an intuitive and visually appealing way to explore the dataset, and allows for free exploration of the data without digging into the spreadsheets and metadata underlying the map. Users can also search the complete dataset used to make the map, exploring the same by searching for an accused’s name. In addition to these exploratory tools, the site also features a very helpful introduction that explains many details of the dataset and provides further background information, as well as a number of additional visualizations. Particularly affecting is the Story of Isobel Young visualization, which chronicles the life and death of one woman who was accused of witchcraft and executed.

The Story of Isobel Young visualization, showing a map of places where Isobel lived and background information on the Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563.
The Story of Isobel Young visualization.

The site also provides a host of references that provide scholarly background on the history of witch trials in Scotland. There are also a number of resources, including a GitHub repository for the project’s website and the CSV files used to make the map. It also provides lists of accused witches, trials, people involved, and memorials and sites of interest within Scotland that users may wish to visit.

The Witches: Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site offers a robust but inviting introduction to this period of European history. I encourage you to explore the site for yourself and find out what it has to offer.

Related resources at the UT Libraries:

Witch Hunts in Europe and America: An Encyclopedia

Demonology and Witch-hunting in Early Modern Europe

Witch Hunts: A history of the Witch Persecutions in Europe and North America

Events, Scholars Lab

Scholars Lab Series Launches with Talk on Data Storytelling and Visualization

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The Scholars Lab Speaker Series at the University of Texas Libraries welcomed renowned data visualization expert Dr. Alberto Cairo on February 10 for a thought-provoking discussion on the intersection of visualization, art, and insight. Cairo, the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami, engaged an audience of students, faculty, and researchers in a conversation about how data storytelling can enhance both comprehension and communication.

During his talk, “Visualization: An Art of Insight,” Cairo explored the aesthetic and analytical dimensions of data visualization, emphasizing that effective visuals go beyond aesthetics to provide clarity, context, and meaning. He shared examples from journalism, scientific research, and public policy to illustrate how well-crafted visual representations can inform, persuade, and even challenge assumptions.

Cairo discussed how data visualization is not merely about following set rules but rather a reasoning process that carefully considers content, audience, and purpose. He emphasized that designing a visualization is an intentional, iterative dialogue, requiring deliberate choices about how information is encoded—using length, area, angle, or color—to effectively represent data.

Cairo illustrated how data visualization can reveal trends, exceptions, and broad patterns, pointing to, and underscored the challenge of balancing showing vs. explaining data, using the cone of uncertainty in hurricane forecasts as an example of how misinterpretation can arise without adequate context and annotation.

Finally, he urged designers to move beyond software defaults, encouraging thoughtful refinement in visual composition, from color choices to line breaks, to create clear and effective graphics. His insights reinforced the idea that data visualization is both an analytical tool and a form of storytelling, shaping how people understand and engage with information.

The event, held in Perry-Castañeda Library’s Scholars Lab, was the first installment of the new Scholars Lab Speaker Series, launched to highlight emerging trends in digital scholarship. Audience members had the opportunity to engage with Cairo in a Q&A session that followed the talk.

The event also marked the commencement of International Love Data Week 2025, celebrating the significance of data in modern research and decision-making. For more information on upcoming events and resources, visit the UT Libraries’ official website.

Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, Scholars Lab

Transforming Text: A Year of the Scan Tech Studio

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The Scan Tech Studio (STS), located in the new PCL Scholars Lab, is a self-service facility designed to empower scholars and researchers in digitization, image processing, and text analysis projects. Equipped with advanced scanning equipment and software, the STS allows the UT community to independently digitize materials, apply optical character recognition (OCR) and handwritten text recognition (HTR), and engage in digital text analysis. From helping patrons scan historical documents to applying machine-readable techniques to modern texts, the STS has had an exciting first year guiding users in elevating their research.

The team behind this effort is the Scan Tech Studio Working Group, composed of seven librarians and digitization experts dedicated to helping scholars maximize the studio’s resources. We’re also grateful for the support of UT Libraries IT and the Scholars Lab Graduate Research Assistants, who keep everything running smoothly behind the scenes. The working group develops workshops, creates research guides, and promotes the use of digital scholarship tools related to OCR, HTR, and text analysis. Additionally, we offer guidance on copyright considerations and assist users in navigating the complexities of text recognition and analysis. Over the past year, the STS Working Group has been instrumental in fostering a dynamic learning environment within the Scholars Lab and building campus-wide connections to unlock the studio’s potential.

The working group has been dedicated to developing services that meet the evolving needs of the campus community. So far, our primary focus has been providing consultations and instruction related to digitization, OCR/HTR, and text analysis. With the diverse expertise of our team, we’ve been able to offer tailored, one-on-one consultations and small group sessions that help users think through the various stages of their digital projects, from planning to execution. Scheduling time with STS experts is simple through our user-friendly request form, ensuring patrons have easy access to specialized support.

Overall, we received 18 reservation requests, which meant that users had a consultation with one of the STS Working Group members, needed the space for digitization, and/or used our digital tool to OCR their materials. Many of these requests came from graduate students, specifically from the Department of History and the School of Information.

In addition to consultations, we’ve developed instructional tools such as a comprehensive research guide on research data management and the use of the studio’s equipment and software. The STS has also become a valuable teaching space, regularly hosting classes that integrate the studio’s technology into their curriculum, allowing students hands-on experience with advanced digitization tools and methods.

Reflecting on the past year, the STS has hosted several workshops inside and outside the studio to showcase its tools and demonstrate the possibilities to the campus community. For example, STS team members led workshops at this past summer’s Digital Scholarship Pedagogy Institute, focusing on digitization, OCR, and text analysis. Additionally, we contributed to the Digital Humanities Workshop Series, providing training in these specialized areas. 

It’s also worth noting that the working group dedicates time to internal development by hosting workshops for ourselves, allowing us to learn from one another and build up our collective skillset. As the saying goes, the best way to learn is to teach—and we’ve embraced this approach to better serve our users!

Due to the Scan Tech Studio being a new service, we wanted to partner with existing programs and reach out to various centers. We invited and provided an overview of our services to different centers around campus, such as JapanLab and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. This gave us great insight into the needs around campus regarding digitization and OCR.

Additionally, we provided training in using specialized OCR tools such as Abbyy FineReader, a paid program under Adobe that is exclusively available at STS. It works exceptionally well for accurately OCRing text and training. We had about 36 uses in just our first year in the space.

As we continue to see the success of our space, we are planning to expand our services and tools. We aim to create additional resources covering various OCR tools and processes. We also plan to continue to collaborate with the Digital Humanities Workshop series to present different OCR and text analysis tools. Additionally, we intend to develop workshops tailored to researchers, including pre-research and post-research workshops. These workshops will help researchers understand what they need to do when conducting their research to ensure a successful OCR experience and facilitate the beginning of text analysis upon their return. We look forward to seeing how the groundwork we laid during the first year will impact our service in the upcoming year.

As you can see, we have a lot of promising plans to build off the Scan Tech Studio’s successful first year. We look forward to continuing to grow the space as a new hub for digitization and text analysis on campus. Scan you feel the excitement? 

Area Studies, Humanities & Liberal Arts, Illuminating Explorations, Music

Illuminating Explorations: Music and Childhood Culture

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Hannah Neuhauser, 2025 PhD in Musicology, Butler School of Music

“Illuminating Explorations” – This series of digital exhibits is designed to promote and celebrate UT Libraries collections in small-scale form. The exhibits will highlight unique materials to elevate awareness of a broad range of content. “Illuminating Explorations” will be created and released over time, with the intent of encouraging use of featured and related items, both digital and analog, in support of new inquiries, discoveries, enjoyment and further exploration.

Music is a portal and can unlock a door to a fantastical sonic landscape, brimmed with mystic, melodic magic. We turn a page and open ourselves to discovering an entirely different realm, full of magic and mystery. Dangers may lurk around each corner, giants may want to gobble us up for lunch, and at times, the path may be so utterly twisted that we almost lose ourselves. Suddenly, the darkness becomes light, and in silence, we find ourselves back in the safety of our childhood bedrooms. The lion’s roar – a radiator. The pitter pattering of tiny Wild Things – the rain outside. Yet within a small, singular space, we traveled to another world and returned on the other side changed. In Throw the Book Away (2013), Anne Doughty remarks that regardless of how much a child reads, it is the experience of self-reliance and youthful agency that will ensure a protagonist’s survival in an unknown labyrinth. They must hear the warnings, read the signs, and act on their own. 

Cover image of the score book Songs and a Sea Interlude by Oliver Knussen and Maurice Sendak, from the opera Where the Wild Things Are.

This exhibit recreates these aural portals. However, instead of reading a book, we invite you to immerse yourself in the experience of children’s music. The Music and Childhood Culture Spotlight Exhibit seeks to inform scholars of the rich history of children’s music by highlighting hidden gems from the UT Austin library collections. Did you know A.A. Milne commissioned his own songbook for Winnie the Pooh in 1929? Or that Carole King wrote a children’s television special called Really Rosie in 1975? It was a huge hit and we have the score, which you can check out to sing to your younger friends! Selections also range from audio recordings like Danny Kaye’s narration of Tubby the Tuba (1947) to Oliver Knussen’s operatic score of Where the Wild Things Are (1982) and a wealth of interdisciplinary scholarship from Mozart’s influence on childhood labor (Mueller) to the rise of Young People’s Records (Bonner). 

Cover image of the score book Really Rosie by Carole King

Music is a psychological tool to study emotional regulation “without rules or limitations, it is pure assimilation” and media can stimulate fantasy for children to pretend “as if” they are something else (Gotz et, all, 2005 p.13). Numerous scholars discuss the sentimentality and destruction of child development due to media dependency, but children will always make their own ideas of media to understand, transgress, rebel, and connect with their surroundings (Parry, 2013). Here, in this exhibit, we seek to highlight the positive attributes of musical media that allow children (and our inner child) to enact their own creative cultures through their imaginations and identify the “traces” of media that we value. 

Cover image of the book Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood by Adeline Mueller

I hope you enjoy these discoveries as much as I did. 

Works Cited 

  • Doughty, Amie A. Throw the Book Away: Reading versus Experience in Children’s Fantasy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2013. 
  • Gotz, Maya, Dafna Lemish, Hyesung Moon, and Amy Aidman. Media and the Make-Believe Worlds of Children. Routledge, 2005. 
  • Parry, Becky. Children, Film, and Literacy. London: Palgave Macmillan, 2013.
Digital Scholarship, Scholars Lab, Staff, Uncategorized

Data Analysis of Library Data

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Anusha Ravi, a Scholars Lab Graduate Research Assistant (GRA), is entering her second year in the School of Information Science, specializing in Data Science and Analytics. During the last academic year, she undertook a Digital Scholarship Project as part of her GRA position. Collaborating with the Collection Development team, she cleaned, analyzed, and visualized data they had collected over the past few years.

I am a passionate data analyst with a keen interest in leveraging data to drive meaningful insights and decisions. My recent work at Scholars Lab Graduate Research Assistant(GRA) has given me a valuable opportunity to apply my skills in a real-world setting, addressing practical challenges and contributing to the enhancement of our informational resources present at the library. My journey in data science is driven by a curiosity to explore data intricacies and a commitment to using technology for the greater good. As part of my responsibilities, I have to complete a digital scholarship project.

The data points in this graph have been anonymized to safeguard confidentiality.

As my digital scholarship project, I worked with the Collection Development team on improving the process of handling suggested purchase requests. These requests are crucial as their analysis would help them understand and enhance the breadth and depth of the collections available in the library. My role involved exploring historical data to identify gaps and understand its structure thoroughly for future enhancements. Collaborating with the Collection Development team who are my stakeholders, I ensured their needs were clearly understood and actionable. This collaborative approach not only enriched my perspective but also aligned our efforts with the library’s strategic goals.

The data points in this graph have been anonymized to safeguard confidentiality.

Using Python, I undertook the task of cleaning and anonymizing the data. Fixing missing values and ensuring data confidentiality was challenging, yet automating these processes was a significant achievement. Python’s versatility and powerful libraries were instrumental in this endeavor. Looking ahead, I aim to deepen my expertise in Python to automate more complex data workflows and improve efficiency further. Learning to automate this process was a big challenge, but overcoming it was a significant achievement. I had to code with a future use case in mind, which proved to be very insightful and thereby allowed me to improve my skills.

For data visualization, I turned to Tableau, known for its user-friendly interface and powerful visualization capabilities. Creating interactive and simple charts made it easier to communicate complex data insights to non-technical stakeholders. This was confirmed on presenting this dashboard to the Collection Development team who praised the simple but effective dashboard.  Additionally, based on their feedback, I plan to create documentation on using Tableau to ensure easy navigation for future use of the team. 

The Scholars Lab provided invaluable support, offering resources and expert advice that enhanced my analysis. Presenting my findings at a poster session was a highlight, showcasing the success and the practical recommendations for better data organization and future collection improvements. This project taught me the importance of stakeholder collaboration, secure data practices, and the continuous quest for automation and efficiency in data processes. 

Digital Scholarship, Scholars Commons

Scholars Lab Newsletter – March 2024

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Digital Humanities Workshop

 Introduction to Recogito

When: 3/8/24, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Where: Zoom

Presenters: Miriam Santana and Willem Borkgren

Recogito is an open-source semantic annotation tool that allows you to tag key terms and reveal the relationships between key names, places, and events between multiple documents. Attendees will learn how to create an account, upload documents, and start working on tags and annotations. They will also learn the deeper capabilities of Recogito, such as mapping relationships, working collaboratively on a corpora of documents, and exporting data for use in other DH tools.

Zoom Registration

Introduction to Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

When: 3/22/24, 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm

Where: Hybrid – Zoom and Scholars Lab Data Lab, Perry-Castañeda Library

Presenters: Dale J. Correa, Mercedes Morris, & Natalya Stanke

This workshop introduces the basics of optical character recognition (OCR), which allows for full-text searching and other types of text manipulation of a digitized document. Attendees will learn how to use Google Docs to create a basic machine-readable text from an image file and be introduced to Tesseract for OCR through exercises in Google Colab.

This workshop is open to researchers interested in OCR for any language. It is strongly recommended that attendees:

1) prepare a digitized, highly legible sample image file for trying out the tools

2) have a Google account to do the exercises fully and save their work.

Register for Zoom or PCL Scholars Lab Data Lab

Open Education Week Virtual Panel

When: 3/8/24, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Where: Zoom

UT Austin’s OER Working Group invites you to celebrate Open Education Week (March 4-8) by joining our faculty/student panel for a virtual discussion on open education practices. Join us for a special Open Education Week discussion on applying open education practices in your teaching. Our student/faculty panel will discuss their experiences finding, adopting, and even creating open educational resources (OER) and other no-cost course materials.

In addition to this faculty perspective, our panel will also include a student voice. Our student panelist is currently collaborating on an original OER project, bringing valuable and unique insight into how open pedagogy can transform student learning experiences.

Zoom Registration

Digital Scholarship in Practice

When: 3/8/24, 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm

Where: Scholars Lab Data Lab, Perry-Castañeda Library

Want to get started with Digital Humanities in the classroom, but you don’t know where to start? This introductory workshop will provide advice and practical ideas to incorporate digital humanities methodologies at all levels of teaching — from syllabus design to assignments and classroom activities. Learn about platforms, strategies, and resources to fit your classroom, your teaching style, and your comfort level with technology. While the advice given will apply to a wide variety of classrooms, the workshop will highlight resources specific to Japanese and East Asian Studies.

Digital Scholarship, Scholars Lab, Uncategorized

Scholars Lab Newsletter – February 2024

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Digital Humanities Workshop Series

Digitization, Digital Projects, and Copyright Issues

When: Feb. 2, 2024, 12 pm – 1 pm 

Where: Perry-Castañeda Library Scholars Lab Project Room 6 (2.218)

Join us in-person for a discussion about some of the common copyright issues that pop up when digitizing materials or creating digital projects. We’ll have some scenarios to talk through as a group, but feel free to also bring your questions and we’ll try to discuss some of those scenarios as well.

In-Person Registration

Interactive Writing in Twine

When: Feb. 9, 2024, 12 pm – 1 pm

Where: Zoom 

Twine is an open-source application used to write interactive narratives ranging from fictional adventures to practical decision trees. This workshop will introduce the basics of Twine story creation: creating your first passage of text, linking passages, incorporating HTML and variables, and publishing a Twine project. The session will include a variety of example Twines of different complexity and purpose, and by the end, participants will have their skeleton decision tree that they can expand into a larger text. 

Zoom Registration

Getting Started with Scalar

When: Feb. 23, 2024, 12 pm – 1 pm

Where: Zoom 

Scalar is a free, open-source publishing platform designed for long-form, born-digital, and media-rich digital scholarship. This workshop will give an overview of Scalar and discuss what differentiates it from other content management systems, before demonstrating how to build your Scalar site.

Zoom Registration

Data & Donuts Workshop Series

 Research Data Management Best Practices

When: Feb 16, 2024, 12 pm – 1:15 pm

Where: Perry-Castañeda Library Scholars Lab Data Lab (2.202) and Zoom

This workshop will go over helpful strategies and techniques for effective research data management in all stages of the research lifecycle, from the drafting of comprehensive data management plans to successful publication of research data. Join this session to learn how to overcome data management challenges and stay in compliance with research data management regulations.

Zoom Registration

The Institute for Historical Studies in the Department Workshop

“Mapping Trauma: A Workshop on Space and Memory”

When:  Feb 19, 2024, 12 pm – 1:30 pm 

Where:  Perry-Castañeda Library Scholars Lab Data Lab (2.202) and Zoom 

Anne Kelly Knowles has been a leading figure in the Digital and Spatial Humanities, particularly in the methodologies of Historical GIS, for more than twenty years. She has written or edited five books, including Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008); Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800-1868 (2013); and Geographies of the Holocaust (2014). Anne’s pioneering work with historical GIS has been recognized by many fellowships and awards, including the American Ingenuity Award for Historical Scholarship (Smithsonian magazine, 2012), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015), and three successive Digital Humanities Advancement grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2016-2022). She is a founding member of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative, an international group of historians and geographers who explore the spatial aspects of the Holocaust through digital scholarship. She is currently developing a public website to share data on over 2,200 Holocaust camps and ghettos and nearly 1,000 survivor testimonies to enable students and scholars to map the historical geographies of named and unnamed Holocaust places.

Levi Westerveld is a geographer and award-winning cartographer with broad experience in spatial data gathering, analysis and visualization. He has 8 years of work experience in GIS and mapping for environmental modeling, impact assessments, community engagement and communication. Levi has international project management experience overseeing multidisciplinary teams with delivery in the Arctic and Pacific, and thematic knowledge in land and marine environmental issues, including climate change, waste and biodiversity. He is the lead editor of the forthcoming Arctic Permafrost Atlas. He is currently employed as senior engineer in the section for digitalization and innovation at the Norwegian Coastal Authority.

For In-person Registration email: cmeador@austin.utexas.edu

Zoom Registration

Digital Scholarship in Practice

Computational Approaches in the Study of History: The Case of People’s Daily

When: Feb 21, 2024, 12 pm to 1 pm 

Where: Perry-Castañeda Library Learning Lab 3

In this talk, we will explore what computational approach and methods may look like in historical studies. Alongside the potential advantages, the talk will also discuss the limitations and pitfalls in computational historical analysis. We will focus on a case study of the People’s Daily 人民日报, a prominent national newspaper of the PRC, to demonstrate the outcomes and limitations of applying computational methods in historical research.