Sign Library

The main aim of the SignLibrary is to facilitate access to literature and cultural knowledge by translating World Literature into Sign Language. You can 'read' Sign Language Books  in different Sign Languages on this site or download the files to your computer or mobile-device.

http://www.signlibrary.eu/

Books: Evaluating & Measuring the Value, Use and Impact of Digital Collections

"A huge investment has been made in digitizing scholarly and cultural heritage materials through initiatives based in museums, libraries and archives, as well as higher education institutions. The ‘Digital Economy’ is an important component of institutional planning, and much attention is given to the investment in digital projects and programmes. However, few initiatives have examined the actual use, value and impact of digital collections, and the role of digital collections in the changing information environment.
As the creative, cultural and educational sector faces a period of restricted funding, it is timely to re-examine the use of the digital collections that have been created in the past twenty years, and to consider their value to the institutions that host them and to the communities of users they serve.
This book brings together a group of international experts to consider the following key issues: [...]"

http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=7203

News: Patron Driven Acquisition - Lehmanns und De Gruyter testen neues Erwerbsmodell für Bibliotheken

"Für Bibliotheken, die sich mit schrumpfenden Budgets auf die zunehmende Nachfrage nach digitalen Medien einstellen wollen, zeichnet sich eine neue Perspektive ab. Das „Patron Driven Acquisition“-Modell von Lehmanns und De Gruyter stößt auf hohes Interesse. [...]"

http://www.buchreport.de/nachrichten/nachrichten_detail/datum/2011/12/19/kunde-gibt-kaufimpuls.htm?no_cache=1&cHash=7ee5fec54bf13084349ac8339af799d9

Feuilleton: „Digital Humanities“ Auf dem Weg zur digitalen Großarchitektur, FAZ - 13.12.2011

Ein Beitrag von T. Thiel:

"Forschungsinfrastrukturen zählten bisher nicht zu den Magneten unter den geisteswissenschaftlichen Tagungsthemen. Dass in Bonn mehr als zweihundert Wissenschaftler der Einladung des Wissenschaftsrats und der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft folgten, um sich durch die Funktionslyrik dieses Themas zu kämpfen, verlangt deshalb nach einer Erklärung. Sie hat, man ahnt es, viel mit Daten und Rechnern zu tun. [...]

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/forschung-und-lehre/digital-humanities-auf-dem-weg-zur-digitalen-grossarchitektur-11561481.html

Handschriftencensus: inventory of German medieval manuscripts

The 'Handschriftencensus' provides an inventory of the manuscript transmission of German mediaeval texts. Currently (January 2011) it contains information concerning the transmission of more than 5,000 works from more than 22,000 manuscripts preserved in more than 1,300 libraries and archives.

Der Handschriftencensus bietet eine Bestandsaufnahme der handschriftlichen Überlieferung deutschsprachiger Texte des Mittelalters. Er gibt momentan (Stand: Januar 2011) Auskunft zur Überlieferung von mehr als 5.000 Werken aus über 22.000 Handschriften, die in über 1.300 Bibliotheken und Archiven aufbewahrt werden.

http://www.handschriftencensus.de/

Books: Writing History in the Digital Age

Has the digital revolution transformed how we write about the past — or not? Have new technologies changed our essential work-craft as scholars, and the ways in which we think, teach, author, and publish? Does the digital age have broader implications for individual writing processes, or for the historical profession at large? Explore these questions in Writing History in the Digital Age, a born-digital edited volume, under contract with the University of Michigan Press for the Digital Humanities Series of its digitalculturebooks imprint.

http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/

Report: Digital Humanities Software Developers Workshop (Cologne, 28-29 Nov 2011)

"The first workshop for Digital Humanities Software Developers took place at the University of Cologne from the 28th to the 29th of November. The main aim of the workshop was to bring together the DH developers, discuss ideas, and work collaborative in projects. Around 40 participants attended to the workshop, with a large majority of developers and some researchers [...]"

http://blogs.cch.kcl.ac.uk/wip/2011/12/13/digital-humanities-software-developers-workshop/

Interedition

Interedition is a COST Action; our aim is to promote the interoperability of the tools and methodology we use in the field of digital scholarly editing and research.

There are a great many researchers out there in the field of textual scholarship. Some of you have written some amazing computer tools in the course of your research, and others of you could benefit greatly if these tools were openly available. The primary purpose of Interedition is to facilitate this contact—to encourage the creators of tools for textual scholarship to make their functionality available to others, and to promote communication between scholars so that we can raise awareness of innovative working methods.

http://www.interedition.eu/

http://www.interedition.eu/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Workshop: Methods and Means For Digital Analysis of Ancient and Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Leuven, 2-3 April 2012)

This workshop aims at mapping the various ways in which digital tools can help and, indeed, change our scholarly work on “pre-modern” texts, more precisely our means of analyzing the interrelationships between manuscripts and texts produced in the pre-modern era. This includes the history of textual traditions in a very broad sense, encompassing several fields of research, such as book history, stemmatology, research on textual sources, tracing of borrowings and influences between texts, etc.

http://medievalacademy.org/blog/2011/12/12/methods-and-means-for-digital-analysis-of-ancient-and-medieval-texts-and-manuscripts/

Podcast: The Humanities in a Digital Age

On November 11th, the University’s new Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures hosted a daylong symposium on “The Humanities in a Digital Age.” The symposium included two panels—one on Access & Ownership and the other on Research & Teaching—and two keynote talks.

http://www.scholarslab.org/podcasts/humanities-in-a-digital-age-symposium-podcast/

Newton Papers

Cambridge University Library holds the largest and most important collection of the scientific works of Isaac Newton (1642-1727). We present here an initial selection of Newton's manuscripts, concentrating on his mathematical work in the 1660s. Over the next few months we will be adding further works until the majority of our Newton Papers are available on this site.

http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton

Digital Vatican Library

The Vatican Library is one of the largest in the world. Now it's also one of the most modern. The library is taking a giant leap to the web. By using NASA technology, it's planning on scanning 80,000 of its manuscripts. 

http://www.romereports.com/palio/vatican%27s-library-begins-to-digitize-80000-of-its-manuscripts-with-nasa-technology-english-5590.html

Cambridge Digital Library

Over the course of six centuries Cambridge University Library's collections have grown from a few dozen volumes into one of the world's great libraries, with an extraordinary accumulation of books, maps, manuscripts and journals. These cover every conceivable aspect of human endeavour, spanning most of the world's cultural traditions. While parts of the Library's manuscript collections have already been published in print, microfilm and digital formats, we are now building a substantial online resource so that our collections can be much more accessible to students, researchers and the wider public.

http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/

Text transform to picture - Textrapic

Am Institut für grafische Wissensorganisation, einem Startup der Universität Rostock ist mit dem Text-Mining Algorithmus „Textrapic“ ein Verfahren zur Analyse von Texten entwickelt worden, mit dem sich insbesondere wissenschaftliche Texte auswerten und in interpretierbare Bilder umwandeln lassen.


http://idw-online.de/pages/en/news455291

http://grawis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=117&Itemid=145

Journal: Computational Culture

Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of the culture of computational objects, practices, processes and structures.
The journal’s primary aim is to examine the ways in which software undergirds and formulates contemporary life. Computational processes and systems not only enable contemporary forms of work and play and the management of emotional life but also drive the unfolding of new events that constitute political, social and ontological domains. In order to understand digital objects such as corporate software, search engines, medical databases or to enquire into the use of mobile phones, social networks, dating, games, financial systems or political crises, a detailed analysis of software cannot be avoided.

http://computationalculture.net/

Historische Bibliographie Online

Die Datenbank zur Geschichte
Die Datenbank Historische Bibliographie Online umfasst derzeit 326.849 bibliographische Einträge von publizierten Titeln historischer Fachliteratur seit 1990: Monographien, Beiträge aus Zeitschriften und Sammelwerken. Sie wird ergänzt durch das Jahrbuch der historischen Forschung mit 8.790 Einträgen entstehender, noch nicht veröffentlichter Forschungsarbeiten.

Die Suchmaske ermöglicht zunächst eine schnelle und einfache Volltextsuche über den Gesamtdatenbestand, die bei Bedarf dann präzisiert werden kann.

 http://www.oldenbourg.de/verlag/ahf/

Project: European Historical Bibliographies

European Historical Bibliographies is a joint project of fifteen subject-specific bibliographies from thirteen countries. It shall promote continuous cooperation among the participating institutions and bring together, on a European level, their various national bibliographic resources so that trans-national historical research is facilitated. The common platform is hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften).

 http://www.histbib.eu/

Feuilleton: Bildung nach dem digitalen Klimawandel

"Wir befinden uns inmitten eines digitalen Klimawandels. Ein Buch ist in der Google-Ära nichts Festes mehr: eher so etwas wie eine vorübergehende Ballung von flüssigem Wissensstoff. Es ist kein Zufall, dass Flüssigkeitsmetaphern seit dem Web 2.0 allgegenwärtig sind..."

http://www.taz.de/Bildung-nach-dem-digitalen-Klimawandel/!83272/

Digitale Bibliothek Greifswald

http://ub-goobi-pr.ub.uni-greifswald.de/

Digitale Giessener Sammlungen

http://digisam.ub.uni-giessen.de/index.html

Jagiellonian Digital Library

http://jbc.bj.uj.edu.pl/dlibra/dlibra

The Future of Digital Publishing

Three of the most imaginative theorists and practitioners of digital publishing will describe their activities and perspectives on the digital frontier.

http://lecb.physics.lsa.umich.edu/CWIS/browser.php?ResourceId=4182

News: Report on the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)

 Jefferson's Taper: A National Digital Library

Robert Darnton "offer[s] a work-in-progress report on the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and [...] argue[s] that it is a feasible, affordable project as well as an opportunity to realize the Enlightenment ideals":

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/jeffersons-taper-national-digital-library/

CARPET - Community for Academic Reviewing, Publishing and Editorial Technology

Sie interessieren sich für ePublishing-Software oder suchen ein geeignetes Tool? Hier im Katalog finden Sie Software, Dienste und ePublishing-Projekte.

http://www.carpet-project.net/

Projekt: Forschungsnetzwerk und Datenbanksystem (FuD)

Das Softwaresystem FuD ist als integrierte Arbeits-, Publikations- und Informationsplattform für die Geisteswissenschaften konzipiert.

Es unterstützt die Zusammenarbeit in räumlich verteilten Arbeitsgruppen während der verschiedenen Phasen des Forschungsprozesses von der Inventarisierung und Erfassung der Primärdaten über ihre Erschließung und Analyse bis hin zur Ergebnispublikation und Datenarchivierung

 

http://fud.uni-trier.de/index.php?site_id=101

Projekt: Historisches Forschungsnetzwerk

„Virtuelle Forschungsumgebungen” können im Kontext einer „Digitalen Geschichtswissenschaft” als Verallgemeinerung der Bereitstellung und Integration unterschiedlicher netzbasierter Angebote und Dienste gelesen werden, welche die gängigen „Werkzeuge” der Erschließung, Bearbeitung und Veröffentlichung wissenschaftlicher Publikationen enthalten. Die Fachinformationsdienste H-Soz-u-Kult und Clio-online sind Teil einer Fachinformations und -kommunikationslandschaft, die sich zukünftig durch ihre Vernetzung semantisch angereicherter Informationen auszeichnen wird. Im Projekt “Historisches Forschungsnetz” werden verschiedene Bausteine für „Virtuelle Forschungsumgebung(en)“ in den Geschichtswissenschaften entwickelt, in die vorhandene Fachinformations- und Kommunikationsangebote integriert werden und die für zukünftige Entwicklungen offen ist.

http://www2.hu-berlin.de/historisches-forschungsnetz/

Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH)

The NeDiMAH Network will examine the practice of, and evidence for, advanced ICT methods in the arts and humanities across Europe, and articulate these findings in a series of outputs and publications. To accomplish this, NeDiMAH will provide a locus of networking and interdisciplinary exchange of expertise among the trans-European community of digital arts and humanities researchers, as well as those engaged with creating and curating scholarly and cultural heritage digital collections.

http://www.esf.org/index.php?id=8752

Die Zukunft der Bibliotheken und Archive im digitalen Zeitalter

"Frisst das Netz die Archive?" fragt Andreas Kilb in der FAZ:

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/digitales-kulturerbe-unsichtbare-vasen-fuer-die-menschheit-11539800.html

Distributed Search Engines

YaCy

YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world's users.


Possible applications: 

YaCy can operate as a single search appliance without networking with other peers. Such a search instance can be used for:

• Search for projects - a combination of wikis, forums and websites
• Topic-oriented search engine - combine a search for several web pages from different domains into a single search portal.
• Companies can host their own search engine in order to help guard company secrets (a company may give away secrets with the search words employees submit to a search portal).
• YaCy helps to preserve your anonymity when searching

http://yacy.net/en/

How to google?

Tips and tricks for efficient Googling:

http://www.hackcollege.com/blog/2011/11/23/infographic-get-more-out-of-google.html