• Humanities--Study and Teaching (Higher)--Data Processing
• Humanities--Research--Data Processing
• Information Storage and Retrieval Systems--Humanities

Jeesh!

Beyond just reading books (paradox that it is), what else can you do to keep up to date with DH, or even just get a basic foundation? This is a question my graduate students often ask me. Well, blogs are certainly one of the primary communications channels of the DH world. Here is a listing 20 of the best. Individual institutions also host DH blogs, like New York University, or MIT. I would add Digital Humanities Now and Stanford's blog to your reading list too.

Many of these blogs are linked to Twitter feeds, another *extremely* important DH communication channel. Try following one of the biggest names in DH, @nowviskie. That's Beth Nowviskie at UVA. Or #digitalhumanities. Wow. Hunting for good Twitter feeds on Google, I stumbled across this comprehensive list of resources. Such is the world of DH - endlessly rich and seemingly endless.

I'll close (for now) on a new DH resource, and one that illustrates a main concern of the digital humanities - the future of publishing. The MLA just brought online an evolving anthology of essays - Literary Studies in the Digital Age. This is perhaps the shape of things to come in scholarly humanities publishing. It at least bears watching.

Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 26, 4-5pm
Location: Electronic Resources Center, M-Level, MSE Library

But you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to benefit.

• Do you want to learn how to find rare research materials such as A Narrative of the British Embassy to China published in 1795?
• Or how to locate government documents such as recent statements from both Chinese and Japanese governments on disputed islands?
• Or learn how to navigate between Google and our library resources and enjoy the best of both worlds?

If you say yes to any of these questions, you will find our Google Workshop just right for you! The good news is that we still have a few spots left, so sign up now!

Now for most of us perhaps, this is no big deal. We read and write in English, right? But words from other languages have crept into English. Think coup d'état or soufflé from French. And we encounter names of authors that include diacritical marks. The chair of the Hopkins German Department several years ago was named Rüdiger Campe. His name could really give you fits if you were looking for books he had written, depending on whether or not you tried to resolve the umlaut into "ue".

One blogger has amusingly written that the Internet hates her name. This isn't really far from the truth. But perhaps the problem with accented letters really just stems from the fact that the accents change pronunciation, that is spoken language, and aren't really all that important for simple writing and reading. You can make sense of a text in French that contains no accents whatsoever. But speaking would be severely impaired.

The basic rule in searching online is to ignore accents. That is, don't even try to type them in. Ignore them. When searching our own libraries' catalog for example, you can ignore accents. So for books or articles by Rüdiger Campe, just type in his name without the umlaut over the "u". For books or articles about Gabriel García Márquez, you can also ignore the accents in his name.

But when you write, you should use the correct accented letters. There are several systems for adding diacritics to digital and online texts like email, Word documents, and Web pages. I keep one pinned to my bulletin board, based on the ASCII codes, and have memorized many of the codes I use every day. Here is the Windows system based on ANSI standards. If you are coding in HTML (anyone still do that?), use these codes. Here's a handy chart I found that has all 3 systems.

We have a ways to go before the Internet speaks a truly universal language. The problem with accents is but one small stumbling block that is slowly being corrected.

• Renew all your books now. That way, you won't have to worry about anything coming due.
• Keep all your checked out books someplace that you can access, in case one is recalled. You will have to get it back to the library by hook or by crook.
• De-clutter your dorm room, carrel, or office, and return any library material you no longer need.

Writing papers over the winter break? Need a book that's checked out here, or just plain not available to you? Try Google Books. There is SO much current content there. You can often find the chapters you need online. You can find many e-books as well in our catalog, Catalyst. Many of our databases also have e-book collections, as well as other online resources, that you can use no matter where you are spending your break. So no excuses for not having the right materials to finish that project!

You also have the online research guides available to you, under "Guides by Topic" on the libraries' home page. And the Ask-A-Librarian service, just in case you need to contact us for assistance.

What’s EBL, and why should I care?

EBL (Electronic Book Library) is one of the JHU libraries’ e-book “packages” that we buy so that you can have access to many, many, many e-books (about a million; I'm not kidding).

During 2011, you – our beloved patrons – looked at EBL books almost 2,800 times. You like EBL.

So where do I find EBL books?

The same place that you find ALL of the libraries’ books: in the library catalog, Catalyst. Do a search, and maybe your list of hits will include a few books with a link to www.JHU.eblib.com.

EBL e-books aren’t like most of the other e-books that we have. Here are the differences:

• When you click that link, you have to log in with your JHED ID, even if you're already logged in (it’s an extra layer of authentication)
• You can only download their e-books to your computer or laptop -- downloading to a tablet or e-reader or smartphone needs another step
• To download an EBL book to your computer or laptop, you need to have free software, called Adobe Digital Editions
• You can't download EBL books from the library computers to your tablet, e-reader, or smartphone

How can I learn more?

The E-books research guide will tell you more about our collection. (Did I mention that we have about 1 million of them? I did? Well we do.) The Downloading E-books page will tell you more about EBL books, and also has a short video showing exactly how to get an EBL book to your tablet, e-reader, or smartphone, if you want to read it on one of those instead.

And don't miss the library's E-books workshop on Tuesday, October 16, 5-6 pm. Please register, and bring your devices!

Now that you found reams and reams of good stuff, how can you keep it from becoming a jumbled up PDF mess on your desktop? Luckily, there are various tools available to help you get your work sorted out and organized, and even better, the Library offers you an upcoming workshop to help you get right to the bottom of what tool might work best for you.

Each tool has different strengths and features, some of which might appeal to you more than others, depending on what is important to you. For example, maybe you want to automatically upload and extract metadata about the PDFs on your computer or perhaps creating custom bibliographic styles is the ultimate feature for you. Understanding what each package offers can help you decide which one will work best for you and save you time in the long-run. Imagine having more time to write your paper rather than trying to hunt down the great article you read or figure out how to create a specific bibliography in RefWorks.

Even more good news…some of these tools are free and online…but still wondering which one you should use? Give us one hour and we will provide you with an overview of five popular tools currently on the market: RefWorks, Endnote, Zotero, Mendeley, and Papers 2.  You’ll also get an opportunity to try some of these tools live. Participants will come away understanding the bottom line about what each of these tools offers and the best reason to use it.

Reservations are preferred, but if you find yourself in the Brody on Wed, September 12 at 11 am, please stop by. Since the workshop is in the BLC, please BYOW (bring your own wireless-device). Hope to see you there!

So, there are new instructions on how to configure your Mac to print successfully; please disregard older instructions as these new instructions are quite a bit different. And, if you’re printing to the fancy schmancy color printer on A Level, there are new instructions for color printing, too.

If you are still experiencing problems, please let us know by sending us a message through Ask-a-Librarian. Thanks for your patience!

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All props to the graduate student in Sociology who alerted me to this wonderful time saver. I knew that researchers could set up RSS feeds and e-mail alerts for tables of contents, but I wasn't practicing what I preached. I've got my e-mail alerts set up for tables of contents of favorite library science journals (an oxymoron, I know), but truth be told, those were starting to feel a little old school. I've got RSS feeds set up in Google Reader for all my favorite library blogs (NOT an oxymoron). But, although we promote this, I hadn't set up any RSS feeds from our databases. When a student in the Soc department asked me a question about his RSS feed, I finally set one up myself to see what he was seeing.

You can do this in almost any database but my example above is from two databases we get via ProQuest: Sociological Abstracts and International Bibliography of the Social Sciences. These databases can be searched simultaneously and an RSS feed set up for their combined results. New citations that match my search show up in my feed reader, and as a bonus, the feed results import Find It links so if the articles are in full-text, I've got immediate access to them. Best of all, my time is saved by setting up this feed. I'm not constantly checking these databases for new articles on my topic. Instead, they're delivered to me!

So just what is this “digital humanities” I speak of? The University of Alberta, which sponsors the event, has created a wiki page devoted precisely to this question. You can go broad with your definition: digital humanities = good ole humanities but with digital tools, especially when those tools facilitate participation beyond specialist audiences. Or you can go micro, naming all the different forms these practices might take:

• Creating digital editions, archives, websites, maps, visualizations and exhibits that allow for new explorations of humanities subjects, often across traditional disciplinary formations.
• Involving students in the research and creation of such editions, archives, websites, visualizations and exhibits, so that students gain hands-on experience with the production of knowledge.
• Studying the history and culture of media, often in alignment with the history of the book, the history of technology, film studies and material culture studies.
• Studying social media, digital culture, human-computer interactions and cultural informatics.
• Creating algorithms for studying humanities questions at large scale, or employing such “scaled up” analytic methodologies.
• Reconsidering and reinventing traditional practices and ideas of scholarly communication: publication, peer review, intellectual property; as well as traditional definitions and locations of scholarship: professor, library, book, journal, faculty, humanities.

You can look at the stream of posts from the event's many participants here--or follow specific contributors here.

There is a lot of talk now about the wisdom of multi-tasking and the dangers of distraction from the many electronic devices in our lives. While it once was thought that listening, watching, checking, texting, reading, AND talking simultaneously meant we could accomplish more, quicker, the value of unplugging and good old-fashioned concentration is fast becoming trendy.

There's actually a National Day of Unplugging set for March. And Web sites like "Unplug and Reconnect" are popping up. There are Huffington posts on unplugging and articles on multitasking. Did you know multitasking makes you dumber than being stoned?

Check out tips on being more productive by doing LESS. And try turning everything off once in a while, to see what silence and solitude feel like. There's a whole big world around you. Look up from your screens and phones once in a while, listen to sounds of nature, connect with people, do ONE thing really well, and see what happens!