Digital Humanities: Curation & Preservation
This guide supports Digital Humanities scholarship & practice at the University of Otago, by connecting people to the methods & tools, projects & other people transforming humanities scholarship in the digital realm
Getting Started
Online exhibitions
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Omeka
Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog.
Data curation & preservation
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On preserving digital culture & digital projects | Digital Humanities at Berkeley
"[H]ow and what should we preserve for future generations and for research? What is deemed valuable (and financially feasible) for preservation? And does this archived information perpetuate a certain uneven representation of the past?"
Do More
Curate & exhibit image and text
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Flickr
An online photo hosting site. Upload an enormous number of images (organised into albums). Use licencing, such as Creative Commons licenses, to protect your work. Subject tags can also be applied and you can also use geotagging. Additional information and hyperlinks can also be applied to images. Many Archives, Museums and Libraries are sharing their digitised collections online via Flickr Commons. -
Zotero
Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources -
Library Thing
LibraryThing is an online service to help people catalog their books easily. You can access your catalog from anywhere—even on your mobile phone. Because everyone catalogs together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth. A free account allows you to catalog up to 200 books. A paid account allows you to catalog any number of books.
Curate & preserve Data
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Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR)
COPTR describes tools useful for long term digital presesrvation and acts primarily as a finding and evaluation tool to help practitioners find the tools they need to preserve digital data. -
Heurist
HEURIST’s research-driven data management system allows any confident researcher or data manager to design, create, manage, analyse and publish their own richly-structured database(s) within hours, through a simple web interface, without need of programmers or consultants. -
Managing your research data
This guide presents information to assist with data management in five major areas of data-related activity.
Learn More
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Digital preservation [report]
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2011 report from the Association of Research Libraries. -
Digital curation for beginners: an archival view for librarians [webinar]
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A webinar for beginners that explains the major components of the digital curation lifecycle. Relevant to all digital humanities researchers interested in curation, despite the 'for Librarians' title. -
Digital Humanities Data Curation (DHDC)
Intended to help students and those new to the field, the DH Curation Guide also provides a quick reference for teachers, administrators, and anyone seeking an orientation in the issues and practicalities of data curation. -
Digital preservation briefing | DPC Digital Preservation Handbook
A useful 2016 introduction and synthesis of current thinking on digital preservation issues, and to provide a focus for further debate and discussion.
What is Digital Curation? | DigCurV
A 2013 video produced by DigCurV that invites leading experts in the curation and preservation of digital objects (including databases, photos, videos, websites, etc) discuss what exactly is digital curation, and why it matters to everybody. DigCurV is a project funded by the European Commission under the Lifelong Learning Programme to develop a curriculum framework for training in Digital Curation.
You might also enjoy:
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Bit rot (on digitial vellum) | Vint Cerf | TEDxRoma
Vint Cerf is a renowned American computer scientist, recognized as one of the "fathers of the internet," sharing this title with American computer scientist Bob Kahn with whom he invented the TCP/IP protocol. In this short talk he outlines some of the challenges of digital preservation including the loss of access to digital data through obsolescence, and his search of what he calls “digital vellum” — a method to read digital data for centuries. -
Preserving digital art: How will it survive?
In recent years, many have made an effort to digitize physical art in an effort to preserve it for future generations and make it accessible to a wider audience. Google Arts & Culture has recently partnered with Rhizome to address some of the challenges in preserving digital art. Technological obsolescence is a real threat to digital art—and a major challenge as its use continues to increase.
We want your feedback!
This guide continues to evolve, and we really welcome your feedback so we can continue to improve it. Please let us know if you find:
- Incorrect or irrelevant details, tools that don't work, dead links or otherwise unhelpful information
- Helpful details, tools, links or information that you think need to be on the guide, but aren't currently.
We'd also love to hear from you if you want to have your project featured on the guide, or would like to be profiled on the Connect&Collaborate@Otago page. Email Alexander Ritchie, with any comments or suggestions on how we can improve it.
Viva Digital Humanities!