Until very recently I was the program director for the Carnegie Mellon University Library Publishing Service and the digital scholarship strategist in the CMU Libraries. We define digital scholarship broadly as the use and reuse of digital evidence, methods, and tools for research, pedagogy, and publication. Although this is a very broad umbrella, in practice it tends to be applied as a complement to open science (digital science) and digital humanities, with more focus on web-facing, interactive research tools and multimodal environments. The research questions and data sources may vary from discipline to discipline, but digital tools can be applied in dynamic, multidisciplinary research using text- and data-mining, qualitative data analysis, data visualization, textual analysis, distant reading, and interactive, online annotations as varieties of methods and approaches. 

As the program director for the CMU Library Publishing Service, I also administered the journals hosted on the LPS’s Janeway digital publishing platform. As administrator, a portion of my time is dedicated to tracking down bugs or piecing together undocumented features using involving a variety of web technologies. I also run our LPS pilot programs for multimedia (Scalar), digital collections and exhibits (Omeka-S and Omeka), and public-facing student scholarship (WordPress multisite). The LPS pilots are intended to discover and highlight the dependencies of these emerging forms of interactive scholarship, including inbuilt obsolescence that challenge traditional library missions including preservation, access, and discovery.

I also provide consultations and collaborate with CMU scholars and researchers. As a generalist, basic DH consultations include scoping DH projects, tool familiarization, and limited trouble-shooting. Far more often I try to direct clients to the resources they need, including potential partners, hosts, and funding bodies. My collaborations with CMU faculty include front-end design, coding HTML & CSS, encoding TEI XML, and customizing Omeka and WordPress sites.

My collaborations with faculty outside CMU have been projects with more complex research questions and needs. For example, the Frankenstein Variorum is both a digital scholarly edition and an innovative interface to display the variances between these texts. This project includes faculty from CMU, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Maryland.

Select Collaborations

The Latin American Comics Archive

Project URL: http://mlrcdev.hss.cmu.edu/omeka/

Hosted by the Modern Language Resource Center at CMU, this is a curated exhibit of comic strips and comic books created in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico between the 1920s and the present. The exhibit highlights one example of comics published by commercial and independent publishers each decade. Most comics were scanned, transcribed, and encoded in the Comic Book Markup Language (CBML) of the Text Encoding Initiative’s (TEI) XML for academic purposes thanks to a A.W. Mellon Digital Humanities seed grant from the Dietrich College at CMU. Some authors generously donated their digital files. For others, scans were downloaded from the web. Permissions for academic use were generously granted by their creators and/or publishers.

Project Team

Felipe Gómez Gutiérrez (CMU Modern Languages), Daniel Evans, Rikk Mulligan, and Scott Weingart.

dSHARP Project Interns: Allison Paige Kuester and Olivia Winkle

Technologies and Methods

The Omeka classic web-publishing platform for single-instance digital collections and multimedia online exhibits. The Comic Book Markup Language (CBML), a TEI-based XML vocabulary (including DTD and schema representations) designed to accommodate the XML encoding of comic books and graphic novels, it can also be used for other forms of graphic narrative including illuminated manuscripts, children’s books, and sketchbooks. 

Related Publications

Gomez, F., Evans, D., Mulligan, R., Weingart, S.  “The Latin American Comics Archive (LACA): an online platform housing digitized Spanish-language comics as a tool to enhance literacy, research, and teaching through scholar/student collaboration.” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación, Año 22, Vol. 89. (March 2020) 47-67. ISSN: 1853-3523

Presentations

“The Latin American Comics Archive: An Online Platform for the Research and Teaching of Digitized and Encoded Spanish-Language Comic Books Through Scholar/Student Collaboration” with Daniel Evans, Felipe Gomez, and Scott Weingart, Digital Humanities 2018, Mexico City, Mexico, Jun. 29, 2018.

The Frankenstein Variorum

Project URL: https://frankensteinvariorum.github.io/

This is a scholarly digital edition and collation of the five distinct versions of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, produced between 1816 and 1831. Scholarly anotations focused on the changes between witnesses have been added, as has the prototype for the digital variorum viewer to facilitate browsing and comparisons.

For a brief discussion of technical aspects of the completed prototype, Matthew Lincoln provides a gloss of the first phase, including the Mellon DH Seed Grant awarded by the Dietrich College, in this blog post: Assembling a Monster: The Frankenstein Variorum (12 January 2020). Also, please see The Frankenstein Variorum Challenge: Finding a Clearer View of Change Over Time, presented on July 12, 2019 at Digital Humanities 2019 by Elisa Beshero-Bondar, Rikk Mulligan, and Raffaele Viglianti.

Project Team

Elisa Beshero-Bondar (PSU-Eerie), Steven Gotzler (CMU), Jon Klancher (CMU), Matthew Lincoln (CMU), Rikk Mulligan (CMU), John Quirk (Brown), Emma Slayton (CMU), Raffaele Viglianti (UMD), Scott B. Weingart (CMU), and Avery  Wiscomb (CMU).

Technologies and Methods

Over its four years this project has used JUXTA, TEI XML, XSLT, collation and text comparison using Python and a variety of NLP libraries, and Hypothes.is for annotation.   

Related Publications

Klancher, J., Quirk, J., Gotzler, S., Wiscomb, A., Beshero-Bondar, E., Viglianti, R., Mulligan, R., Lincoln, M., Weingart, S.B. (2020): Frankenstein Variorum – Annotations. Carnegie Mellon University. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/11440689

Beshero-Bondar, E., Viglianti, R., Mulligan, R. (2020): Frankenstein Variorum – Collations. Carnegie Mellon University. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/11538798

Related Presentations

“The Frankenstein Variorum Challenge: Finding a Clearer View of Change Over Time,” with Elisa Beshero-Bondar & Raff Viglianti, DH 2019, Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands, Jul.12, 2019. [http://bit.ly/fv-change]

“Digital Frankenstein Variorum,” Colloquium Digital Demonstration and Poster Reception, Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria, BC, Jun. 8, 2018.

The SF Nexus

Project URL: https://sfnexus.org

The Speculative Fiction (SF) Nexus is a collaboration between members of the Science Fiction Collection Libraries Consortium over the coming decade to curate, digitize, and preserve thousands of underrepresented magazines and books of mass-market science fiction from the “Golden Age” through “New Wave” eras. The project hopes to support innovative research in the study of speculative fiction by creating a bibliography of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and a multitude of related subgenres, sharing extracted texts and non-consumptive datasets, and hosting digital tools and examples of textual analysis . Many of these works are among “the great unread” – those not added to the various canon and anti-canon, including works by women, people of color, indigenous writers, and others who were neglected by many editors and publishers.

Project Team

Alex Wermer-Colan and Jasmine Clark (Temple University Libraries’ Scholars’ Studio); Jeremy Brett (Texas A&M Libraries); Elspeth Healey (University of Kansas Libraries); and Rikk Mulligan (CMU Libraries), with additional support from Digital Scholarship and Digitization units and students assistants.

Technologies and Methods

This project is continues to create specialized digitization workflows, train ABBYY FineReader OCR for specific formats and media, extract non-consumptive data for textual analysis, experiment with new tools to work with this data online, and develop a union bibliography and catalog for the extended mega-corpus of speculative fiction mass market paperbacks and pulps.   

Related Presentations

“SF Nexus: A Comprehensive Corpus of Speculative Fiction for Non-Consumptive Research,” with Alex Wermer-Colan, ACH 2019, Pittsburgh, PA, Jul. 23, 2019.

Past Digital Humanities Projects