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Day in the Life of a Digital Production Librarian

Posted by & filed under Digitization, Services & Resources.

The life of a Digital Production Librarian very much depends on the time of year and the project of priority. I work in a lab that digitizes materials you can find in The Portal to Texas History and the UNT Digital Library.  My job includes the intake/output work of inventorying project, hiring and training students, assisting with project documentation/management and quality control. And– as a part of all librarian jobs at UNT–conducting and presenting on original research and providing service to the libraries, university, and librarianship field. My day generally begins with an hour or so of research work. Today’s was a content analysis on the Digital Public Library of America’s contributing institution’s scrapbooks. Basically finding examples of how other digitizing institutions scan scrapbooks. Around 9:15am I read and answered e-mails—noting absences of student assistants, communicating with prospective student hires, working on event plans and marketing, and handling other administrative tasks like policy or reminder e-mails. Read more

A Day in the Life of a Foundation Network Librarian

Posted by & filed under Funding Opportunities, Services & Resources.

  “A day in my life often involves helping digital humanists, scholars, students, or nonprofit personnel search for grant funding. I work with grant seekers who come in to the UNT Eagle Commons Library, to use our funding resources. We are proud to offer access to community members as well as UNT-affiliated individuals. My colleagues and I also coordinate community outreach and programming on grant seeking, grant writing, strategic planning, and other topics relevant to the work of nonprofits.” Jennifer Rowe Social Sciences & Community Engagement Librarian  

RAW Data Visualization: Treemap

Posted by & filed under Tools and Toys.

A treemap is a space-filling visualization for displaying weighted hierarchical data using nested rectangles. The rectangles can be coded by color and size to show patterns that may be difficult to visualize in other ways. RAWGraphs give the user the option of incorporating as many colors into the visualization as they like, making it easy to represent several different categories from a set of data. For this demonstration, I used a dataset of track listings from Now That’s What I Call Music (volumes 1- 61). The dataset included specs about each track, including the duration and ratings for danceability, speechiness, energy, tempo, and instrumentation. I thought it would be interesting to see how genres varied across the volumes, but I quickly realized displaying genre data for over sixty volumes would get out of hand. Instead, I did some research and looked up the genre of each song listed for volumes 1, 30, and 60, as I felt this would provide a fair representation of how the composition of the albums have changed across time. When multiple genres were listed for a song, I chose to use the first genre listed in the song description. I pasted this data into RAW and used the treemap to display it. The section on the top left is volume 1, the one below it is volume 30, and the one to the right is volume 60. I found quickly (and unsurprisingly) that as more compilations have been released, there has been more of an emphasis on the pop genre, with volume 60 being almost exclusively pop. The treemap also shows that volume 30 had the most variability of the three sets I looked at. It may be interesting to look at the other volumes released around that time to see if there was a similar variability. Read more

Getting Started in Video Games

Posted by & filed under Video Games.

Newcomers to the video game community have a high bar to entry. Video games are complex beasts of entertainment and art, often making them difficult to approach and hard to understand; heck, even skills learned in a certain type of video game aren’t transferable to another type of video game. And all of this is already ignoring the lack of understanding and definition to the idea of game literacy within the industry. I’ll include the video that inspired me to make this post here, for clarification: Read more

16 mm and 35 mm Content in the UNT Media Library

Posted by & filed under Digitization, Film & Video, Media.

Before streaming media, DVDs, or even VHS were common classroom teaching tools, a “multi-media” or audiovisual presentation typically meant 16 mm motion picture films or 35 mm film strips and slides. These presentations often included a musical or audio accompaniment on vinyl records or cassettes as well as a script and activities to be used by the instructor.

Although educational and training films are increasingly recognized by archivists as “historic” and worthy of preservation and digitization, less attention has been paid to the humble film strip and slide. At the Media Library, we believe that the content of these materials still has much to offer students and scholars and that they offer opportunities for discussing the evolution of learning technologies. In 2016 we embarked on a pilot project to digitize and provide access to a small number of filmstrip and slide presentations contained in the Media Library collections including university promotional materials, a mysterious orientation program, and a Cold War era film strip produced by the National Republican Congressional Committee. We hope that this type of work will allow valuable historical materials that are currently “hidden” and inaccessible due to obsolete technologies more widely available to students and scholars.  

                                     

 [News Clip: Hoffman reading] on The Portal to Texas History.

This 1980 news story from  the KXAS-NBC 5 News Collection shows Fort Worth students using this learning technology for reading and mathematics.

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Project Profile: 3DHOTBED

Posted by & filed under Project Profiles.

What is it? 3DHOTBED (3D-Printed History of the Book Education) was created to fill a growing need for affordable instructional materials in book history pedagogy. Last summer, Courtney Jacobs started searching for an authentic hand mould that was used to cast moveable metal type in the 15th Century to use for book history instruction in UNT Libraries Special Collections. She quickly found that, financially, such a teaching tool was out of reach. Working with Marcia McIntosh in the Digital Projects Lab, the two formed a plan to 3D scan and print a hand mould that could be used to teach in the classroom. Read more

DH @ UNT Head Receives TDL Innovative Outreach Award

Posted by & filed under Awards.

Dr. Keralis at DF16Dr. Spencer Keralis, Head for Digital Humanities and Collaborative Programs at the University of North Texas Libraries, is the recipient of the 2017 Innovative Outreach Award from the Texas Digital Library for his work on Digital Frontiers. From the TDL announcement:

As founding director and ongoing chair of Digital Frontiers, Dr. Keralis has created and continues to foster a space that blurs the often rigid line between the makers and users of digital resources utilized in humanities, research, teaching, and learning. Currently in its 6th year, Digital Frontiers is a project of the UNT Libraries that explores advances and research in humanities and cultural memory through the lenses of digital scholarship, technology, and multidisciplinary discourse. … Under Dr. Keralis’ leadership and vision, the project’s impact has moved beyond reflection and placed itself at the forefront of the field’s future

Dr. Keralis will accept the award on behalf of the Digital Frontiers community at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, May 23-25 in Austin, Texas.

Evaluating Video Games: What is a game?

Posted by & filed under Video Games.

Introduction

Video games have cemented themselves in modern culture as the kingpin of entertainment and art form. They are everywhere; in arcades, on our computers, on our phones; we even have dedicated computer systems devoted specifically as consoles for video games. It is hard to imagine someone living in western society that doesn’t play video games in some way, be it Candy Crush or Dark Souls. It is for this reason that I find it important to make distinctions in how we can distinguish and evaluate video game elements as means of better understanding their impact in our culture. In order to begin doing this, though, we must create some general definition of what can constitute as a video game. Read more

Project Profile: Organs of the Soul

Posted by & filed under Project Profiles.

Screen capture of “The Voice in Music” from Organs of the Soul

What is it? Dr. Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden (UNT College of Music) created Organs of the Soul: Social Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris when she was a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Duke University. The goal of this interactive multimedia project is to historically and culturally situate hearing and listening in eighteenth-century Paris by exhibiting archival and primary source materials from this time. Materials range from opera librettos and descriptions of church bells to writings from the Dictionnaire de musique. Read more

RAW Data Visualization: Delaunay Triangulation

Posted by & filed under Tools and Toys.

The Delaunay Triangulation is another visualization available through RAWGraphs that can be used to represent dispersions. The visualization creates a planar, triangular mesh for a given set of points. For the following example, I downloaded a public data set from Kaggle of data from 5000+ movies on IMDB. I refined the data set and decided to look only at movies from 2014. The Delaunay Triangulation only requires two fields: the x-axis and y-axis, both consisting of numbers or dates. In order to demonstrate the visualization, I chose to show the relationship between movie budget (x-axis) and gross revenue (y-axis). The result is shown below: Read more
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