No matter your level of experience with Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship- whether you are a practitioner, a researcher, a professor or an administrator – you will be able to learn a thing or two from the panelists at this year’s DH/DS Special Interest Group program, at the 2018 WLIC IFLA general conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We will meet from 13:45 – 15:45 on Saturday, August 25 in Conference Hall 1/2 for a lively session as we explore the transforming worldview of Digital Humanities and Digital Scholarship.

The two-hour program will consist of two parts. The first part will feature lightning talks with speakers from five continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America). It will capture emerging global development trends of DH/DS practices in library and information services settings, with particular attention given to new trends that elevate a library-based DH/DS center from a service unit to be recognized as an academic and research unit in a higher education environment. For the second part, the panel of speakers will be joined by the DH/DS SIG programme committee members to have open conversation with the audience. The confirmed speakers are:

Title: Digital Humanities in China: Rapid Growth and More Practices

Zhu Benjun is an associate professor at Peking University Library and the Secretary-General of CASHL (China Academic Social Science and Humanities Library), a library consortia of university academic resources co-construction and sharing. His research interests include digital humanities, area studies literature support (such as Belt & Silk resource development and service) and historical research (mainly in China’s Warring States Period). He has authored articles on the above fields in the Journal of Academic Libraries (大学图书馆学报), Historical Geography (历史地理), and published 2 academic books.

Three years ago he hosted a DH project about the Chinese historical geography database (www.histchina.com) to facilitate his own historical geography research and produced an academic works named Chinese Historical Map of the Year 333 B.C. (战国诸侯疆域形势图考绘——公元前333) which will be published by Peking University Press. In 2017, he hosted and finished a DH report for Peking University suggesting that Peking University take steps to strengthen digital technologies in humanities. Currently, he is doing research in cyber infrastructure for humanities.

Title: Granular markup for enhancing precision in text retrieval from large corpora

Theo Bothma is professor emeritus/contract professor in the Department of Information Science at the University of Pretoria. He is the former Head of Department and Chairperson of the School of Information Technology (until his retirement at the end of June 2016). His teaching and research focus on information organization and retrieval (including aspects of information literacy and technologies for e-dictionaries), web development and electronic publishing, as well as on curriculum development.

He is chair of the IFLA Library Theory and Research Standing Committee and an expert adviser for IFLA FAIFE, as well as a former member of the Knowledge Management Standing Committee. He is editor and co-author of the IFLA World Reports 2007 and 2010 and joint editor-in-chief of LIBRI. He has published widely and presented many papers nationally and internationally. For more detail, see https://www.up.ac.za/information-science/article/1913355/prof-t-j-d-bothma.

Title: Digital Scholarship and the Promise of Data across Disciplines

James Lee is the Academic Director of the University of Cincinnati Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Center and a faculty member in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Lee’s first book, “The Two-Soul’d Animal,” is forthcoming from the Northwestern University Press. He is currently completing his second book entitled “The Anthropocene and Empire” using machine learning methods on the Google Books corpus to understand how the rise of European empires set the stage for the human disruption of the global ecosystem.

Dr. Lee’s work has been published in Cultural Analytics (2018), Digital Humanities Quarterly (2017), Studies in Philology (2016), New Literary History (2013), Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (2001), and by the Korea Foundation (2012). His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, University of Iowa’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, the Taft Research Center, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Intel Corporation.

Title: European infrastructure for digital arts and humanities and engagement of libraries in digital humanities research

Martin Lhotak works from 1997 at the Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences. For nearly 10 years, he was responsible for library automation as the head of the IT Department. In 2003, he established the Library’s Digitization Center, which is still one of the largest and most productive digitization library workplaces in the Czech Republic. From 2007 he was for two 5 year terms appointed as the director of the Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences and currently he is in the position of the Library deputy director responsible for research, development and technologies.

At the research level Martin Lhotak focuses on the development of open source solutions supporting digitization processes and dissemination of digital documents. He is the leader of the development team of the Kramerius digital library open source system https://github.com/ceskaexpedice/kramerius and currently he is also responsible for two national projects “The Czech Digital Library” http://www.czechdigitallibrary.cz and “The Central Portal of Czech Libraries” http://www.knihovny.cz. He has been involved in the open access movement and he initiated the Open Access Policy of the Czech Academy of Sciences adopted by the Academic Council and the start-up of the institutional repository of the Academy.

Martin Lhotak is also engaged in digital humanities projects concerning mainly development of new tools and building of information infrastructures. He represents the Czech Republic in the European project DESIR with goal to establish full membership of the Czech Republic in the European digital humanities infrastructure DARIAH-EU.

Title: Data activism for libraries from Colombia to Latin Amarica and the Caribbean

David Ramírez-Ordóñez is librarian, blogger and teacher. He has focused his work on copyright, freedom of expression and freedom of access to information and how the Internet affects our lives. He has participated in regional meetings for exceptions and limitations to copyright for libraries. He is a professional in information science – librarian and has a MA in education.

He creates the Colombian Public Domain Calculator, helps to develop the Colombian legal deposit and works in digital libraries.

David writes a blog, Nomono.co (in Spanish). Actually, for the 10 years of the blog, Leo and David made this book (in Spanish).

Xuemao Wang, DH/DS SIG Convener and Session Moderator, is the Dean and University Librarian of the University of Cincinnati Libraries, a position he has held since August 2012. As the dean, he oversees the entire university library system with focus on strategic leadership, operational oversight and community partnership building. In addition to his deanship, he also serves as a Special Advisor to the university’s President and Provost on China Affairs. Prior to working at UC, he was the Associate Vice Provost of University Libraries at Emory University. He also held positions at Johns Hopkins University’s Sheridan Libraries, the Metropolitan New York Library Council, and Queens Borough Public library.

Xuemao has over 30 years of progressive, diverse library, information management and leadership experience, with a career that spans the public, academic and large library consortium worlds. He has held global leadership positions in the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), he is currently serving as Director of the Board and Treasurer for the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), is a member of multiple committees within the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and serves on the steering committee for Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). He has strong connections and networks with global libraries, in particular connection with China’s academic and library leaders.

Members of Digital Humanities/Digital Scholarship Special Interest Group (SIG) Programme Committee:

Xuemao Wang – DH/DS SIG Convener, Dean and University Librarian, University of Cincinnati, USA

Jennifer Mackiewicz, Coordinator of Special Projects and Programs, University of Cincinnati Libraries, USA

Spencer Acadia, Assistant Professor and Librarian, Social Sciences, University of Kentucky, USA

Tomáš Foltýn, Collections Management Division Director, National Library of the Czech Republic

Edwin Qobose, Acting Director, University of Botswana Library

Sophie Vandepontseele, Directrice Collections contemporaines, Directeur Hedendaagse verzamelingen, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique – Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België

Zheng (John) Wang, Associate University Librarian, Digital Access, Resources and Information Technology, Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame, USA