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Archive for June, 2009

NINES in DHQ 3:2 (Spring 2009)

Friday, June 19th, 2009

The latest issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly contains a special cluster of essays on the topic “Done,” edited by Matt Kirschenbaum. The three essays — by William Kretzschmar on the Altas Project, David Sewell on the UVA Press Rotunda Imprint, and Susan Brown et al. on the Orlando Project — all take up the questions as posted by Kirschenbaum: with regard to digital humanities projects, “How do we know when we’re done? What does it mean to “finish” a piece of digital work?”

David Sewell gives considerable attention to John Bryant’s Typee project, and mentions its aggregation into the NINES federation:

“We could generate RDF metadata files in the format used by the Collex tool created by Jerry McGann and his NINES team. In July 2007 we did this, so that the base view of each manuscript page exists as an indexed object in Collex, along with the editorial introduction and the publication home page.”

Kudos to DHQ and these authors for the very interesting set of thoughts on the challenges and rewards of uncompletability.

Posted by astauffer in collex, digital humanities, press | No Comments »

NINES and new forms of publication

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Executive Council member Dino Franco Felluga (Purdue University) will be presenting a paper on “NINES, RaVoN and the Place of the Libraries in Paperless Publication”  at the American Library Association (ALA) conference in Chicago this July. For those of you planning to attend, this will be part of the Association of College and Research Libraries panel.

Dino explains:

This talk argues that the digital revolution offers us a solution to the crisis in humanities scholarship but only if we embrace the radical changes this new medium entails. My major example of the new possibilities opened by the digital revolution will be the Mellon-funded (now University of Virginia funded) NINES initiative or Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship, though I will also discuss, by comparison, the more traditional editing project I’m involved with: RaVoN or Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, the expansion of Romanticism on the Net into the Victorian period. RaVoN is a good example of a skeuomorphic approach to new media, NINES of the radical possibilities and challenges faced by digital scholarship. I would posit that NINES illustrates for us that editing and scholarship need to take up the challenge of new media, that new scholars must therefore be trained differently than they have been to date, and that libraries have a chance to play a central role in the future of scholarly publishing.

**Update**  Read an exhibit based on Dino Felluga’s talk here.

Posted by Dana Wheeles in digital humanities, events, publishing | No Comments »

The NINES widget

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Widget on Poetess Archive

Until recently, sites peer reviewed and federated into NINES could be most quickly identified by visiting the NINES website itself. In an effort to make this process simpler, we’ve created a badge that also serves as a search widget, seen here on the home page of the Poetess Archive.

widget

From this box, users can open a search in NINES in a new browser window, and get results in the context of all the aggregated sites. We’re looking forward to distributing these to all peer-reviewed sites in NINES over the next few months.

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Posted by Dana Wheeles in collex, features, usability | No Comments »

The Final Phase of the NINES Redesign

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

New Home Page, June 2009

Visitors to NINES will soon be greeted by a new front page, the final step in a redesign phase that began in June of 2008. After the usability studies in July and November of last year, the site was rearranged, moving the Search, Tags, Exhibits and About pages into their own separate tabs in the interface. At that time, we also introduced two new features: the My 9s dashboard and this blog.

Since our redesign launch in December, the NINES development team has been working on the style of the site, with a focus on making the home page as effective and informative as possible. We’ll also be introducing another new feature: a NINES Forum, where visitors can keep up with ongoing conversations in nineteenth-century studies, digital humanities research and topics concerning NINES itself.

A note to those of you with exhibits in progress: have no fear! The changes made to the site this week should not affect your work at all. If you do experience any trouble due to the release, be sure to let us know at technologies at nines dot org.

Many thanks to the folks at Gibson Design Associates and Performant Software Solutions for all their help and hard work!

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Posted by Dana Wheeles in collex, digital humanities, redesign, usability | No Comments »

COST Action 32: Open Scholarly Communities on the Web

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Launched in April of 2006, the COST (Co-operation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) Action 32 is an initiative dedicated to creating a research infrastructure for humanities scholarship on the Web. Meant to foster international cooperation between projects and communities already pursuing digital humanities scholarship, this group facilitates collaborations among scholars and allows for healthy debates about the best practices for scholarly editing and publishing online. Its members represent some of the most innovative and impressive work emerging in Europe, including Discovery Project partner sites  HyperNietzsche (edited by Paolo d’Iorio and soon to be NietzscheSource), HyperWittgenstein (soon to be WittgensteinSource, edited by Alois Pichler), and SchopenhauerSource (presented by Matteo V. d’Alfonso) among many others.

Late in 2008 NINES was invited to join COST Action 32, first and foremost to continue the development of our textual collation tool, Juxta, as a web service adaptable to other online frameworks like Talia. Associate Director Laura Mandell (Miami University, Ohio), Developer Nick Laiacaona (Performant Software) and I traveled to Göteborg, Sweden last week to attend the most recent meeting of the group, and to share our own institutional goals with European scholars. Our presentation (and the ever unpredictable live demo) was well received, and I hope to see a number of new sites passing through the NINES peer review process in the near future.

More news about Juxta for the web and other transatlantic development projects will be posted in the coming weeks.

Posted by Dana Wheeles in collex, digital humanities, events, features, juxta, press, scholarly projects, software | No Comments »

New resource in NINES: Journal of Emily Shore

Monday, June 1st, 2009

The revised and expanded edition of the Journal of Emily Shore,  edited by Barbara Timm Gates, has now been aggregated into NINES. This digital edition, which includes material discovered after the print edition issued in 1991, is published by the Rotunda Imprint of the University of Virginia Press.

Click here to read more about the project, or here to browse its content in NINES. All users can search the full-text of this edition in Collex, but access to the site will require a subscription.

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Posted by Dana Wheeles in digital humanities, scholarly projects | No Comments »