The Digital Public Library of America: An Introduction

You are cordially invited to attend:
“The Digital Public Library of America: An Introduction”

Thursday, May 23
3340 Moore Hall
University of California, Los Angeles
3:30 - 5:00 p.m.

campus map | parking

The Digital Public Library of America launched on April 18, 2013. Founding Executive Director Dan Cohen will outline the three main elements of the DPLA: a portal that knits together the collections of America's libraries, archives, and museums; a technical platform that will enable new, transformative uses of these collections and let others build upon them; and advocacy for a strong public option for reading and research in the twenty-first century, including an expansion of available open-access materials. Cohen will also discuss how the DPLA complements the roles of public and research libraries, and explore some unique ways that the DPLA will be used.

Daniel J. Cohen is an Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He has recently been appointed as the founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America, which is launching in April 2013. At the Center, Cohen has overseen projects ranging from new publishing ventures (PressForward) to online collections (September 11 Digital Archive) to software for scholarship (the popular Zotero research tool). His books include Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (with Roy Rosenzweig) and Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith. Cohen was an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Innovation Fellowship. In 2011 he received the Frederick G. Kilgour Award from the American Library Association for his work in digital humanities, and in 2012 he was named one of the top “tech innovators” in academia by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Cohen blogs at dancohen.org and tweets @dancohen.

Co-sponsored by the UCLA Library and the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies.

No RSVP necessary; all are welcome.

DH SoCal Research Slam Photos

We had a great time at the Research Slam! Thanks, Scott Kleinman, for organizing it!

Audience members take in the Slam.

Digital Cultural Mapping: From Social Media Feeds to the Deep Time of Urban Pasts

This Friday, Todd Presner, chair of the Digital Humanities program at UCLA, is giving a talk on digital cultural mapping as part of the Marschak Colloquium. It's open to the public, so please come by if you're interested in geospatial technology and the digital humanities.

Friday, May 3, 1-3 pm, 2343 Public Affairs
More on the colloquium
Campus map

Beyond categorization on Wikipedia

[Cross-posted from HASTAC]

There are 508 articles in the category “English women writers” and 30 in the subcategory “English women dramatists and playwrights”. Is that how many writers there actually are? Absolutely not. Am I concerned that not every Wikipedia article is properly tagged? Not really. Why?

Because many articles have not been created that should have been, such as “Mary Cooper (publisher)”, who was one of the first publishers of children’s books in England and many of the articles in those categories have abysmal articles. Let’s take a case in point: Charlotte Lennox. This is a typical biography of a woman writer - it has an unreferenced “Life” section and a “Works” section that consists only of a list. While the article does - surprisingly for Wikipedia - describe the relationship between Lennox’s economic status and how she made her way as a woman writer with some detail, it does not explore the themes and styles of her works at all - a reader will not come away from this article understanding what kind of writer Lennox was. Also, much of Lennox’s life and works are discussed in terms of male writers. While their role is important in her life, Lennox’s own life almost disappears in this article. This article is a good first step for a biography on Wikipedia, but it cannot be left in this incomplete state.

So, what can you do to improve articles like this on authors on Wikipedia?

• Create a list of reliable sources that can be used to write a good encyclopedia entry and put it on the talk page of the article (you can get to the talk page by clicking on the word “talk” in the top left of the wikipedia window - this is where editors go to discuss what information will be in an article)
• Add sections to an article to help give it structure
• Add paragraphs with relevant material (with citations to reliable sources)
• Draw up an outline of what an ideal article would look like and put it on the talk page (for examples of well-written and well-structured author articles, see Mary Shelley, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson)
• Add images (images must be your own, public domain, or CC-by-SA)
• Add a complete list of the author’s works
• Remove spurious information
• Reorganize information so that it is more coherent
• Copyedit

Categories are one way we structure knowledge and are important, but the knowledge has to be there to be structured first. Help us shape the world’s knowledge - join Wikipedia! You can start today. Women around the world are making efforts to counter Wikipedia’s systemic bias by writing global women into Wikipedia!