One of the most exciting and potentially transformative aspects of digital humanities is an inflection from dealing with scarcity to dealing with abundance. Traditionally, humanities libraries have been defined by their emphasis on rare materials or special collections. What are the implications of having an abundant humanities library? As a greater amount of these materials becomes available in digital format, there is growing evidence that humanists might adopt data-driven research or teaching methods that are typically common in the sciences. The multi-institutional “Digging into Data” request for proposals represents an example of this new frontier. The Roman de la Rose Digital Library led by the Johns Hopkins University represents a useful case study in this realm. Choudhury will discuss the implications of the Rose Digital Library for digital librarians and scholars and offer ideas about how humanists might consider developing and leveraging cyberinfrastructure across domains.
An Abundant Humanities Library
October 13, 2009
MITH Conference Room
Speaker Bios
Sayeed Choudhury is the Associate Dean for Library Digital Programs and Hodson Director of the Digital Research and Curation Center at the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of Operations for the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) based at Johns Hopkins. He is also a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins, a Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Senior Presidential Fellow with the Council on Library and Information Resources.