“Technology and Society”

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The Digital Humanities Initiative would like to thank everyone who participated in the 2/26 panel discussion “Technology and Society.” In particular, we are grateful to our panelists, DHI Advisory Committee members Josh Gellers, Assistant Professor of Political Science; Mitch Haney, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies; Margaret C. Stewart, Assistant Professor of Communication; and Karthikeyan Umapathy, Associate Professor of Information Systems. Cosponsored by the DHI as part of the International Studies Senior Seminar Lecture Series, this interdisciplinary event provided an opportunity to consider the role of technology in our lives on personal, societal and international levels.

TEI-XML training opportunity: Digital Mitford Coding School: June 25-27, 2016

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The following is a re-posting of an announcement that was distributed on the Scholarly Editing Forum (SEDIT-L):

Dear friends and colleagues,
Please share this information with anyone who may benefit. We’ve scheduled the Digital Mitford Coding School to follow immediately after the Keystone DH Conference (see http://keystonedh.network/2016/) , so we hope the timing may be convenient for people participate in both. Here’s the official invitation to our project’s Coding School with information on how to register:

We invite you to join members of the Digital Mitford project team fromSaturday June 25 through Monday June 27, 2016 for the Fourth Annual Workshop Series and Coding School, hosted by the newly established Center for the Digital Text at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. As featured on its public website, http://digitalmitford.org, the Digital Mitford project has two major purposes:

  1. to produce the first comprehensive scholarly edition of the works and letters of Mary Russell Mitford, and
  2. to share knowledge of TEI XML and related humanities computing practices with all serious scholars interested in contributing to the project.

Our editing team meets face-to-face to brush up on project methods and make major decisions, and we invite participants and prospective new editors to learn our methods and think with us about project management challenges during the Coding School. Please join us if you want to learn text encoding methods and their applications in the Digital Humanities through hands-on participation in a large-scale digital archive project. We will orient you to coding by giving you hands-on experience with literary and historical documents, from the careful encoding of markings on manuscript material to autotagging enormous and complicated texts with regular expression matching. And we invite you to think with us about how best to build a site interface and visualizations to help explore the data we are gathering on nineteenth-century networks of people, places, and texts.

Our workshops are held at the lovely Pitt-Greensburg campus, recently namedone of the five most scenic college campuses near Pittsburgh. This year’s Coding School is part of a series of Digital Humanities events in the Pittsburgh area, as we are coordinating it to follow immediately after the Keystone DH Conference(from June 22-24) in Pittsburgh. Our editors will convene in the days preceding the conference, and the Coding School begins immediately afterwards. We expect people to arrive on Friday afternoon or evening June 24 and depart on Tuesday morning June 28,  with our Coding School in session from Saturdaymorning June 25 through Monday afternoon June 27.

Who participates?

Though we draw our active editors from researchers of 19th-century literature, we hope that all who join the Mitford project (whatever their primary research field) will find good resources for professional scholarly research and publication, and gain beneficial experience for individual projects. Joining our workshop leads to a free first-year membership in the Text Encoding Initiative, the international consortium establishing best practices for encoding of digital texts.  We anticipate hosting two kinds of audiences:

1) those who wish to join the Mitford project as active editors, and

2) equally welcome, those who wish to learn our methods to apply them to their own projects.

What we teach and share:

  • Discussion of best practices for preparing digital scholarly editions as digital databases
  • Textual scholarship and paleography (working primarily with 19th-century manuscript correspondence)
  • Participation in an active “dig site” for important data on networks of women writers, theaters, and publishers from the 18th and 19th centuries
  • Hands-on learning of text encoding, including the following:
    • TEI XML encoding and best practices for project sustainability and longevity
    • Autotagging and regular expression matching to prepare digital texts
    • Hands-on experience with XPath, code schemas, XSLT, and an XML database

How to register:

Send me an e-mail (at ebb8 at pitt.edu) by Friday April 8, 2016, indicating your interest in the Digital Mitford Coding School. A registration fee is required of all who are not actively affiliated as editors with the project:

  1. Students, Adjunct Instructors, or Independent Scholars: $180
  2. Full-Time Faculty Members and Librarians: $300

All registration fees are to be paid by check to the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, and are due by mail by May 16, 2015.  Please mail checks to: The Digital Mitford Project, c/o Elisa Beshero-Bondar, U. of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, 150 Finoli Drive, Greensburg, PA 15601-5804. (Donations to the project above and beyond this amount are, of course, quite welcome.)

Budgeting for the June 2016 Workshops:

  • We will cover the costs of residence in suites (with kitchens and good wireless internet) at the Pitt-Greensburg campus and will arrange for licenses for an extended (90-day) period to use our XML editing software .
  • We cannot cover the costs of travel to Pitt-Greensburg, but we can and do coordinate rides from the Pittsburgh International Airport, the Latrobe regional airport, and the Amtrak train stations in Pittsburgh and in Greensburg.
  • We ask each participant to investigate local funding sources to help cover the costs of travel here.

Thanks, everyone, for reading and sharing with interested parties! We look forward to seeing many new and familiar faces at beautiful Pitt-Greensburg in June. Please feel free to write me with any questions in advance of our application due date of Friday, April 8.

Sincerely,
Elisa

Elisa Beshero-Bondar, PhD
Director, Center for the Digital Text
Associate Professor of English
University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg
Humanities Division
150 Finoli Drive
Greensburg, PA  15601  USA
E-mail: ebb8@pitt.edu

about.me/ebbondar


Ondine LeBlanc, Director of Publications
Massachusetts Historical Society
1154 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02215
Tel: 617-646-0524, Fax: 617-859-0074
www.masshist.org – America’s First Historical Society – Founded 1791

Job posting: Visiting Digital Publishing Specialist

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The job posting below may be of interest to UNF students or recent graduates.

 

Visiting Digital Publishing Specialist

University Library

Academic Professional

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 

Position Available: The expected start date is as soon as possible after the closing date. This is a 100%, 3-Year Visiting Academic Professional appointment, with the potential of becoming permanent.

 

Responsibilities: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign seeks an innovative and motivated professional to serve in the position of Visiting Digital Publishing Specialist. Reporting to the Head of Scholarly Communications and Publishing, the Digital Publishing Specialist will provide the Library’s Scholarly Communications and Publishing Unit with project management and production workflow support as part of the Library’s effort to offer high quality, open access publishing services to the Urbana-Champaign campus and beyond. The Specialist will also participate in the Andrew W. Mellon-funded “Publishing Without Walls” initiative (https://news.illinois.edu/blog/view/6367/256174).

 

This position performs document modelling and text-structure cleanup processes along with administering the day-to-day coordination and completion of digital publishing projects. The incumbent will interact with other members of the Scholarly Communication and Publishing team, Library IT, and the Scholarly Communication and Repository Services team, and will, in collaboration with the unit head and the research programmer, troubleshoot and streamline digital publishing production workflows. She or he will also assist in developing new publishing projects.

 

As a member of the Scholarly Communication and Publishing Unit, the Digital Publishing Specialist will join the broader Library Office of Research, a highly collaborative program that also includes the Scholarly Commons (http://www.library.illinois.edu/sc/), the Research Data Service unit, and a growing researcher metrics program.

 

Specific Responsibilities Include:

 

  • Assisting in the definition of project scope and objectives, involving all relevant stakeholders and ensuring technical feasibility.
  • Communicating with publishing partners regarding content and features of online publications.
  • Establishing and managing internal communications for the launch of new digital publications.
  • Evaluating feasibility of emerging formats and workflows for digital publishing to guide integration into the library’s evolving scholarly publishing toolkit.
  • Creating and documenting procedures for preparing and loading content into digital publishing platforms, including conversion of draft-format publications into final format, to ensure consistent practice across unit and library.
  • Converting and preparing materials for online publication, including creation of metadata, formatting of text documents, and running scripts to convert from PDF, InDesign, or Microsoft Word format (among others).
  • Proofreading for obvious structural, grammatical, or stylistic errors.
  • Editing and creating simple web sites for publications using HTML and CSS templates.
  • Assisting in educating authors about the publishing process.
  • Other related duties, as assigned.

 

Academic Professional employees are encouraged to use “investigation time” to pursue areas of interest, not directly in support of an immediate program need, in accordance with the University Library’s policy on Investigation Time for Academic Professional Employees <http://www.library.illinois.edu/administration/human/resources/investigationtime.html>. Some investigations originating in this manner may evolve into regular work assignments or production activities.

 

Environment: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library is a leader in the delivery of user services, and active programs in information, instructional, access, and scholarly services that help the Library to maintain its place at the intellectual heart of the campus. The Library also holds one of the preeminent research collections in the world, encompassing more than 13 million volumes and a total of more than 23 million items. The Library is committed to maintaining the strongest collections and service programs possible, and to engaging in research, development, and scholarly practice – all of which support the University’s missions of teaching, research, and public engagement. The Library employs approximately 90 faculty members, and more than 300 academic professionals, staff, and graduate assistants. For more information, see: http://www.library.illinois.edu/.

 

The Scholarly Communication and Publishing Unit synthesizes a wide range of expertise in both traditional and non-traditional areas of library practice associated with every aspect of the scholarly communication cycle, including consultations in the preparation of scholarly articles and other outputs, consultations related to intellectual property and copyright, digital archiving of intermediate-stage scholarly work, compliance with Open Access mandates and policies, and establishment and maintenance of new publishing platforms and publication workflow processes for direct Open Access publishing of final-stage scholarship.

 

Required Qualifications:

 

  • Bachelor’s degree
  • Strong computer literacy skills in desktop word processing and database applications (e.g., MySQL)
  • Demonstration of strong organizational skills and attention to detail
  • Experience with creating and maintaining documentation
  • Experience managing projects, prioritizing among multiple projects, and meeting deadlines
  • Familiarity with content management systems (e.g., WordPress, Drupal, etc.)
  • Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively in teams and with users

 

Desired Qualifications:

 

  • Strong ability and desire to learn new technologies
  • Experience with markup languages, document modelling, and/or establishing data conversion and cleanup workflows
  • Service orientation toward helping others use technology to accomplish their work
  • Strong written communication skills and an ability to explain technical information to a non-technical audience
  • Familiarity with InDesign or other typesetting software
  • Familiarity with the publication process or digital libraries

 

Salary and Rank: Salary is competitive and commensurate with experience and credentials.

 

Terms of Appointment: Twelve-month appointment; 24 annual vacation days; 11 annual paid holidays; 12 annual sick-leave days (cumulative), plus an additional 13 sick-leave days (non-cumulative) available, if needed, each year; health insurance requiring a small co-payment is provided to employee (with the option to purchase coverage for spouse and dependents); required participation in State Universities Retirement System (SURS) (8% of annual salary is withheld and is refundable upon termination), with several options for participation in additional retirement plans; newly-hired employees are covered by the Medicare portion of Social Security and are subject to its deduction.

Campus and Community: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a comprehensive and major public land-grant university (Doctoral/Research University-Extensive) that is ranked among the best in the world. Chartered in 1867, it provides undergraduate and graduate education in more than 150 fields of study, conducts theoretical and applied research, and provides public service to the state and the nation. It employs 3,000 faculty members who serve 31,000 undergraduates and 12,000 graduate and professional students; approximately 25% of faculty receives campus-wide recognition each year for excellence in teaching. More information about the campus is available at www.illinois.edu.  The University is located in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana, which have a combined population of 100,000 and are situated about 140 miles south of Chicago, 120 miles west of Indianapolis, and 170 northeast of St. Louis. The University and its surrounding communities offer a cultural and recreational environment ideally suited to the work of a major research institution. For more information about the community, visit: http://illinois.edu/about/community/community.html or http://www.ccchamber.org/.

 

To Apply: To ensure full consideration, please complete your candidate profile at https://jobs.illinois.edu and upload a letter of interest, resume, contact information including email addresses for three professional references.  Applications not submitted through this website will not be considered. For questions, please call: 217-333-8169.

 

Deadline: In order to ensure full consideration we urge candidates to submit application materials on or before April 4, 2016.

 

The University of Illinois conducts criminal background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer.

 

Illinois is an Affirmative Action /Equal Opportunity Employer and welcomes individuals with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and ideas who embrace and value diversity and inclusivity. www.inclusiveillinois.illinois.edu