CIRSS faculty, staff travel to Oxford for digital humanities workshop

GSLIS faculty and staff have collaborated with the Oxford e-Research Centre to organize a five-day workshop to be held this July. The workshop, Data Curation and Access for the Digital Humanities, is part of Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2014 and will introduce data curation concepts and practices to a group of students, faculty, and information professionals who work with humanities research data. Registration is open through June 23.

Interim Dean Allen Renear, Associate Dean for Research J. Stephen Downie, and Professor Carole Palmer will all travel to Oxford to present talks based on data curation research and education efforts in the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS), directed by Palmer, and activities of the HathiTrust Research Center, codirected by Downie.

Also presenting is Megan Senseney, senior project coordinator with CIRSS, who is co-organizing the event, and Nic Weber (MS ’10), GSLIS doctoral student.

“The workshop and internship program represent the first outcomes of an ongoing collaboration between GSLIS and Oxford. We are excited about this opportunity for greater international engagement across multiple areas of research and education,” said Downie.

Talks by GSLIS participants will include “Levels of Data Representation and Encoding,” “Unlocking the Potential of 3 Billion Books/Workflows and Research Objects,” and “Normalizing Metadata Using Open Refine.”

Other presentations will be made by staff from Oxford's Bodleian Library, Oxford e-Research Centre, and Oxford Internet Institute.

Renear and Palmer will also participate in the panel, “The Future of Data Access and Preservation,” chaired by David De Roure (Oxford e-Research Centre, University of Oxford). Other panel presenters include William Kilbride (Digital Preservation Coalition), Christine Madsen (Bodleian Libraries, Oxford), and Kenji Takeda (Microsoft).

GSLIS is also collaborating with the Bodleian Library and the Oxford e-Research Centre on a pilot internship program to provide students with first-hand experiences with data curation practices and problems in library and research center settings at Oxford. Two GSLIS master’s students, Elizabeth Wickes and Jamie Wittenberg, have been selected for the six-week internship. Wickes will work on a research data management workflow project with a subject librarian at the Oxford Forestry Institute. Together they will archive a set of data and publications and deposit them into the appropriate systems. Wickes will also work with the discovery team to facilitate discovery and access. Wittenberg will work on a project focused on research objects, which relates to the sharing, citation, and curation of bundles of digital artifacts to support reconstruction and reproducibility of research.

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