Papers Panel 1. Digital Humanities Plus

Abstract

“Digital Humanities and the History of Science: Retrofitting Old Collections for New Purpose”: History of science collections offer unique possibilities for data visualization, data mining, and social involvement. This paper will discuss an Oregon State University Libraries project involving the records of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists (ECAS), a group founded by Einstein in 1946 to educate the public on the dangers of nuclear war and the peaceful uses of atomic science. This project creates an integrated tool that combines the digital humanities capabilities of multiple discovery platforms, enabling crowdsourced transcription, visual exploration of the digitized correspondence, and manipulation of collection metadata to reveal geographic concentrations, demographic patterns, donation trends, and more. These facets allow fresh insight into microhistorical questions about the successes and failures of the ECAS, but also enable exploration of larger questions about how Americans grappled with the new atomic reality.; “New Tools to Document Old Thefts: Mapping the Offenbach Archival Depot”: It is not widely known that along with cultural treasures books were also plundered by the Nazis during WWII; entire libraries were confiscated and housed in the Offenbach Archival Depot. In 1946, the MFAA , or Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives division dispatched one of the “Monuments Men”, Colonel Pomrenze, to sort through the stores of looted books stored at Offenbach. Using the Offenbach scrapbooks, scrapbooks containing thousands of book plates and stamps Mitch Fraas and Melanie Meyers have created digital maps of the libraries and regions looted. they will discuss their work in bringing this chapter of print history to light, touching on the history of “The Monuments Men”, the plight of libraries in the aftermath of WWII, and how using geo-mapping allows us to present a new, visually engaging take on 60 year old thefts.; “Studying the Book Arts in the 21st Century: Using Linked Data to Enhance Knowledge and Context”: Appreciation of a given visual or narrative artwork is strengthened by knowledge of its creator’s themes, subjects, and techniques, their working relationships, access to resources, and social, geographic, and educational background. For works within the handmade book genres, this contextual information is available in and/or can often be inferred from library catalog databases, but is typically dispersed among data elements and records. This paper will present the findings of a recent project to harvest metadata concerning the University of Miami Libraries Artists’ Book Collection, expose relationships between creators, works, and spaces, and semi- automatically enhance the library’s data with information from WorldCat Identities, VIAF, and other Web resources. This same workflow could be replicated to reveal or connect knowledge about any book genre, and the paper will discuss the benefits of twenty-first-century data sharing techniques for the study of bibliography and the book arts.