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Trevor Muñoz

Publicly engaged digital humanities
Archive 2012–2016
17 posts

Previous Work

These are older pieces published here on my own site. I might not agree with everything in them anymore but I'm keeping them online for the record.

  • From Research Ideas to Projects Presentation to the Resilient Networks Initiative workshop
    A version of the slides I presented to the “Resilient Networks to Support Inclusive Digital Humanities (DH)” workshop at George Washington University, August 10–12, 2016.
  • Against Cleaning
    Trying to more precisely say what we mean by "data cleaning" can be fruitful because this effort directs our attention to an unresolved conversation about data and reductiveness. In turn, this might help us to develop new work that blends the tradition of cultural criticism from the humanities with research that is also digital and data-intensive.
  • Recovering a humanist librarianship through digital humanities
    How part of the history of humanism in librarianship might explain why digital humanities work is often treated as external to the core mission of academic research libraries.
  • New article in jTEI Issue 8
    A new article co-authored with Raffaele Viglianti on the encoding model for the Shelley-Godwin Archive was published in Issue 8 of the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative.
  • Stewarding Digital Humanities Work on the Web at MITH
    A piece I wrote for the MITH blog about our digital stewardship strategy.
  • Making Digital Humanities Work
    Lightly edited text of the paper that Jennifer Guiliano and I co-authored and delivered at the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • Data Driven but How Do We Steer This Thing?
    Abstract, slides, and references for a talk given at the Data Driven: Digital Humanities in the Library conference, June 20–22, 2014.
  • When a Woman Collects Menus
    An in-depth look at Frank E. Buttolph, the woman who created the New York Public Library's menu collection, and what a better understanding of her life can tell us about the crowdsourced data created by the What's on the Menu project.
  • Borrow a cup of sugar? Or your data analysis tools? More work with NYPL's open data, Part Three
    In the service of my ongoing project to explore curation strategies for the data from the New York Public Library's menu transcription project, I felt it necessary to switch tools—from Open Refine to a Python library called Pandas, which is primarily used for data analysis in scientific computing. With this new tool, I was able to start showing results for de-duplicating the names of dishes in the dataset. Like the earlier posts in this series, what follows will be a mix of technical notes (what technologies, workflow steps, fateful decisions) and any accompanying conceptual insights about data curation that strike me as I explore.
  • New Publication in the Journal of Digital Humanities 2.3
    My piece "Data Curation as Publishing for the Digital Humanities" is newly published in Volume 2, Number 3, of the Journal of Digital Humanities.
  • Refining the Problem More work with NYPL's open data, Part Two
    In pursuit of the goal of an authoritative index of the 'dishes' represented in data from the New York Public Library's historical menu transcription project, I turn to Open Refine, "a free, open source, power tool for working with messy data." The NYPL data proves to be too large to use according to the tool's standard workflow, so I experiment with some programmatic workarounds. Initial results are encouraging enough to merit pursuing further.
  • What IS on the menu? More work with NYPL's open data, Part One
    The open data generated by the New York Public Library's historical menu transcription project is a great testbed for experimenting with certain kinds of practical curation work. Speculative work with this data explores what data curation that goes beyond the common (vital!) goals of preservation and basic access could look like. How might a reliable index to the dishes in the menus data set help improve the usefulness of the data to researchers and how might a potential curator of this fascinating humanities data set approach the challenge?
  • New Writing in Archive Journal 3
    Two new pieces published in Archive Journal 3
  • In Service? A Further Provocation on Digital Humanities Research in Libraries
    An exploration of the diverse and complex histories of "service" and the "service ethic" in librarianship.
  • Data curation as publishing for digital humanists
    Data curation activities can be viewed as a kind of "publishing" that would serve the needs of the digital humanities community. Moreover, data-curation-as-publishing is strongly aligned to the values and mission of libraries.
  • Digital humanities in the library isn't a service
    Framing digital humanities in libraries as a service to be provided and consequently centering the focus of the discussion on faculty members or others outside the library seem likely to stall rather than foster libraries engagement with digital humanities. I want digital humanities work in libraries that is innovative and iterative but that contributes back to the mission of (academic) libraries. The MITH-University Libraries Digital Humanities Incubator is a local effort to make that happen.
  • Knowledge Organization and Data Modeling in the Humanities A Workshop at Brown University, March 14-16, 2012
    I will be one of the participants at a three-day workshop on "Knowledge Organization and Data Modeling in the Humanities" co-sponsored by the Centre for Digital Editions at the University of Würzburg and the Brown University Center for Digital Scholarship.