By Shawn Proctor

This Memorial Day, Falvey and the Office of Veterans and Military Service Members at Villanova University wanted to share with our Villanova community a part of our project “The Voices of Villanova’s Veterans.” “Honoring the Fallen: An Interactive Memorial Map” displays the names of Villanova veterans killed in service, along with their branch of service, location, and year of death. For those veterans reported missing in action, we have mapped the nearest location of where they were last seen.

This project will honor the life and sacrifice of Villanova veterans who died while serving their country. Reflecting extensive research and collaboration, this interactive map will remember their service. This map allows users anywhere on the globe to access this map, and creates an access point for family members, the community, historians, and anyone else interested in learning about their legacy.

This Memorial Day—and every day—Villanova honors its veterans and pay tribute to their service and sacrifice by ensuring that they are never forgotten.

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

Falvey Memorial Library is pleased to announce “Falvey Fridays,” a workshop series drawn from our popular brown bag lunch sessions. Each workshop will provide new and exciting information on research methods, tools, and pedagogies for researchers of all levels. Registration is free and open to the Villanova community.

Please register for workshop sessions below. Once registered, you will be sent a Zoom link to the event.

Tabula: Extracting Tables from PDFs (Friday, March 26; 11 a.m.–12 p.m.)

Workshop led by Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian.

If you’ve ever tried to do anything with data provided to you in PDFs, you know there’s no easy way to copy-and-paste rows of data from tables out of PDF files. Come learn more about Tabula, an open source tool for extracting data tables locked inside PDFs and how to import that data easily into a CSV or Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Please REGISTER at the following link:

https://villanova.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEld-6qqT0jGtf_gLlSDe1fstCDdj2cNA-

Citation Management using Zotero (Friday, April 9; 11 a.m.–12 p.m.)

Workshop led by Sarah Hughes, Nursing & Life Sciences Librarian.

Serious research projects call for no-nonsense tools for taming citations. Learn how to use Zotero to save, organize, and share references.

Please REGISTER at the following link:

https://villanova.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0ud-qurTgqE9eNmezaCgojaU2-bjBTCpD-

Policy Map/Social Explorer (Friday, April 23; 11 a.m.–12 p.m.)

Workshop led by Deborah Bishov, Social Sciences & Instructional Design Librarian and Merrill Stein, Social Sciences Librarian.

Explore features of two easy-to-use, online demographic data mapping tools which draw on a combination of governmental, proprietary and open resources.  Map data of interest and export and save visualizations for research or teaching. Knowledge of GIS (geographical information systems) is not required.

Please REGISTER at the following link:

https://villanova.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEscOGtqTwuGN1SqGzFYONpmNA65dIQ5H_h

This spring Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital Scholarship Program will be offering two lectures in its Digital Seeds Speaker Series. Check out the details below and be sure to REGISTER in advance! Once registered, you will be sent a link to the event.

“Mapping Indigenous Landowners in 19th-Century Los Angeles: Historicizing GIS and the Public Land Survey System“

Julia Lewandoski, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of History, California State University San Marcos

Thursday, February 18, 4:00-5:00 pm

REGISTER HERE

After the 1848 U.S. conquest of Mexican California, the federal government negotiated, but declined to ratify treaties with Indigenous peoples in California. Tongva, Tataviam, and Chumash peoples around Los Angeles turned to property ownership to keep communities intact and in important places for decades, generating local property maps of their lands.

This project uses ArcGIS to locate, layer, and analyze property maps of Indigenous land in southern California. These local property maps show the persistent existence of important Indigenous places. They also challenge understandings of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) as a visual project that replaced Indigenous geographies with rationalized settler space. Indigenous properties and landscapes are clearly visible on historic maps, and in the patterns of the present-day PLSS. Their presence raises questions for GIS practitioners about the tensions between social and mathematical frameworks for locating peoples and places.

Julia Lewandoski is a historian of early North America and is an Assistant Professor at California State University, San Marcos. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in History and the Digital Humanities at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in History with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in August 2019. Her dissertation was awarded the 2019 prize by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR). Her current book project explores how small Indigenous nations across North America exploited imperial transitions to defend land as property in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is also at work on a digital companion to the book project, using GIS to examine how Indigenous property has been mapped and measured. Website: https://www.julialewandoski.com/

This event is ACS- approved and is co-sponsored by Villanova’s Department of History, the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, and Falvey Memorial Library.

“Libraries of Babel: An Expansive Future for the Humanities”

Ted Underwood, Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign

Thursday, March 11, 4:00-5:00pm

REGISTER HERE

The last twelve months have not been kind to optimists. It may sound especially implausible to predict a bright future for the humanities right now, since enrollment and hiring are down in many disciplines. But, as paradoxical as it sounds, we are living in an age of unprecedented opportunity for the study of culture and history. Some of the opportunities are well publicized: for instance, digital libraries have opened up fundamental new research questions for literary scholars. I’ll give examples of that work, but the broader point of this talk is to propose that we’re living through a digital transformation that will matter for everyone, not just for academic researchers. In making it possible to explore culture as a latent space—a space of possibility—machine learning facilitates a kind of creative play that is akin to rigorous self-understanding. This is good news for the humanities, although our disciplinary institutions are admittedly struggling to seize the opportunity.

Ted Underwood is a professor in the School of Information Sciences at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. After writing two books that describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature using familiar critical methods, he turned to new research opportunities created by large digital libraries. Since that time, his research has explored literary patterns that become visible across long timelines, when we consider hundreds or thousands of books at once. He recently used machine learning, for instance, to trace the consolidation of detective fiction and science fiction as distinct genres, and to describe the shifting assumptions about gender revealed in literary characterization from 1780 to the present. He has authored three books about literary history, Distant Horizons (The University of Chicago Press Books, 2019), Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies(Stanford University Press, 2013), and The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science and Political Economy 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2005). Website: https://tedunderwood.com/

This event is ACS- approved and is sponsored by Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library.

If you are interested in learning more about Falvey Memorial  Library’s spring events line-up, please see our events page for an up-to-date listing: https://library.villanova.edu/events

By Shawn Proctor

Philadelphia is a haunted city. Not by ghosts, necessarily, but by unresolved tragedies echoing through the culture, haunting the people who must live on.

In the Kensington neighborhood of the city, Gordon Coonfield, PhD, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, happened upon vernacular memorials, created by ordinary Philadelphians to remember people who died, often violently. Flowers. Candles. Graffiti. A cardboard sign scrawled in marker. Each element is an important (if temporary) gesture to make a tribute that says to anyone who sees it: this person lived and died here.

Vernacular memorials have appeared in many places around the world. But they have a special meaning in Philadelphia, the city that originated graffiti art.

“This is home for people in a city with a very, very long history. And these memorials are a part of that history,” he says. “There is a desire to express loss that is not being met in current society.”

Dr. Coonfield, who lives in the area, began photographing and making notes about each memorial, including its location. As his entries grew, his digital scholarship project “Kensington Remembers” took shape. With the expertise of Erica Hayes, Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital Scholarship Librarian, and Professor James Parente, MFA, Communication and Media, these ever-changing, temporary memorials will be preserved, placed on an interactive digital map, and studied.

In fall 2019, Dr. Coonfield discussed with Hayes his vision for the website and, together, they reviewed and selected the website platform and Geographic Information System (GIS) best suited to his project. They continued to meet and refine the project over the next several months–memorial by memorial–with Parente contributing to the project’s web design and the custom logo.

“This digital scholarship project examines these public memorials created throughout a historic neighborhood in northern Philadelphia. Mapping technology connects these disparate locations, making them easy to navigate and understand, thanks to Dr. Coonfield’s photographs and textual explanations,” Hayes says.

“The Library staff has been enormously helpful, and are a great resource for faculty with projects like this. The Digital Scholarship Program at Falvey and the Library Technology Development department, including David Uspal, are experts in the ethics and methods of digital preservation. And Erica provided insight about the technology as well as an understanding of how best to develop this project. Without her, ‘Kensington Remembers’ would not exist,” Dr. Coonfield says.

In the future, Dr. Coonfield plans to continue expanding the project, publish articles in communication studies journals, and present on his findings at academic conferences.

If you have an idea for a digital scholarship project and would like to collaborate with Falvey Memorial Library, contact Erica Hayes or visit the new Digital Scholarship Lab online, which is scheduled to  open in Fall 2021.

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is a Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Regina Duffy

The Villanova Community is cordially invited to the 2020 Digital Seeds Lecture featuring Whitney Trettien, PhD, Assistant Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania. Trettien’s talk, “Experimental Publishing, Then and Now,” will take place virtually on Thursday, November 5 from 4:00-5:00 pm via Zoom.

Please REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to the Zoom meeting.

When we consider the role of the (digital) humanities today, we do so from within a fragmented field where the center no longer holds. This moment of creative destruction presents an opportunity to shift into a new register — one defined not by minute clefts between theories or methods but by a renewed commitment to how we compose and share our work. Specifically, how we publish — how we use media to make public the stories we spin about texts and their past lives. Drawing on her own experiments in creative/critical publishing (including most recently with the Manifold platform), as well as the deep history of writing with scissors and paste, Trettien will chart the politics, praxis, and urgency of digital publishing today.

To learn more about Whitney Trettien’s research, please visit her website at: http://whitneyannetrettien.com/

This talk is part of Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital Seeds series. For more information about Falvey Library’s support of Digital Scholarship, please contact Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian at erica.hayes@villanova.edu. Please also visit Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital Scholarship Program webpage to learn how the Library supports faculty, students, and staff interested in applying digital methods and tools to their research and teaching.

This ACS approved event, which is sponsored by Falvey Memorial Library, is free and open to the public.

  Regina Duffy is a Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library. 

By Regina Duffy

Interested in digital scholarship and scholarly communication? Join us this fall semester as Falvey Memorial Library offers several opportunities for you to learn more about digital tools, pedagogy, scholarly publishing, copyright, and more!

Throughout the semester, Falvey’s Digital Scholarship Program will host community conversations on digital scholarship tools as well as research and publishing topics. These informal virtual meetups are designed to facilitate collaborative learning and connection across all disciplines and departments at Villanova University.

Each meeting will begin with a 20-30 minute introduction to a digital scholarship or scholarly communication tool or reading (check out the list below), with the rest of the hour dedicated to informal chatting and related discussions.

All Villanova community members are welcome to attend, regardless of their prior experience with digital scholarship or scholarly communication! Feel free to stop by to join the conversation and meet other faculty members, students, and Villanova staff who share an interest in digital research methods, digital humanities, scholarly publishing, and the unique challenges we all are facing in our current remote environment. Workshops are sponsored by Falvey Memorial Library, are ACS-approved, and will be hosted by either Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, or Sarah Wipperman, Scholarly Communication Librarian.

Fall 2020 Digital Research Methods & Scholarly Publishing Demo & Discussion Workshops:

Choosing Creative Commons Licenses: Friday, Sept. 4, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Sarah Wipperman, Scholarly Communication Librarian, will discuss copyright licensing and how to share your work on your own terms.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

Map Warper and Story Map JS: Friday, Sept. 18, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, will provide a demo of Map Warper and Story Map JS and lead a discussion on how to bring historical maps into GIS in order to tell your own geographic story.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

SPARC Author Addendum: Friday, Oct. 2, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Sarah Wipperman, Scholarly Communication Librarian, will discuss retaining more rights when you publish your scholarly research.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

Voyant Tools: Friday, Oct. 16, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, will discuss Voyant Tools, a web-based text analysis and visualization tool.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

AntConc: Friday, Oct. 30, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, will speak on analyzing a collection of texts with AntConc’s concordance tool.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

CRediT: Friday, Nov. 6, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Sarah Wipperman, Scholarly Communication Librarian, will talk about how to credit collaborators with various roles on your scholarly projects.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

Hypothes.is: Friday, Nov. 20, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, will give a demo of Hypothes.is and lead a discussion on annotating online readings, collaboratively.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

Please be sure to register for the events you are interested in. Once you register, you will receive the appropriate Zoom link(s) so that you can attend the events.

Regina Duffy is Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Regina Duffy

Interested in digital scholarship and scholarly communication? Join us this fall semester as Falvey Memorial Library offers several opportunities for you to learn more about digital tools, pedagogy, scholarly publishing, copyright, and more!

Throughout the semester, Falvey’s Digital Scholarship Program will host community conversations on digital scholarship tools as well as research and publishing topics. These informal virtual meetups are designed to facilitate collaborative learning and connection across all disciplines and departments at Villanova University.

Each meeting will begin with a 20-30 minute introduction to a digital scholarship or scholarly communication tool or reading (check out the list below), with the rest of the hour dedicated to informal chatting and related discussions.

All Villanova community members are welcome to attend, regardless of their prior experience with digital scholarship or scholarly communication! Feel free to stop by to join the conversation and meet other faculty members, students, and Villanova staff who share an interest in digital research methods, digital humanities, scholarly publishing, and the unique challenges we all are facing in our current remote environment. Workshops are sponsored by Falvey Memorial Library, are ACS-approved, and will be hosted by either Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, or Sarah Wipperman, Scholarly Communication Librarian.

Fall 2020 Digital Research Methods & Scholarly Publishing Demo & Discussion Workshops:

Choosing Creative Commons Licenses: Friday, Sept. 4, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Sarah Wipperman, Scholarly Communication Librarian, will discuss copyright licensing and how to share your work on your own terms.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

Map Warper and Story Map JS: Friday, Sept. 18, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, will provide a demo of Map Warper and Story Map JS and lead a discussion on how to bring historical maps into GIS in order to tell your own geographic story.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

SPARC Author Addendum: Friday, Oct. 2, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Sarah Wipperman, Scholarly Communication Librarian, will discuss retaining more rights when you publish your scholarly research.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

Voyant Tools: Friday, Oct. 16, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, will discuss Voyant Tools, a web-based text analysis and visualization tool.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

AntConc: Friday, Oct. 30, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, will speak on analyzing a collection of texts with AntConc’s concordance tool.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

CRediT: Friday, Nov. 6, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Sarah Wipperman, Scholarly Communication Librarian, will talk about how to credit collaborators with various roles on your scholarly projects.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

Hypothes.is: Friday, Nov. 20, 11 a.m.–12 p.m.
Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, will give a demo of Hypothes.is and lead a discussion on annotating online readings, collaboratively.
PLEASE REGISTER HERE. Once registered, you will be sent a link to this Zoom meeting.

Please be sure to register for the events you are interested in. Once you register, you will receive the appropriate Zoom link(s) so that you can attend the events.

Regina Duffy is Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

Scheduled to open Spring 2021, the Digital Scholarship Lab will support the exploration and use of digital methods and tools. The lab will provide consultation space, software and hardware designed to cultivate experimentation and inspire researchers to investigate new opportunities for engaging in digital scholarship. Want to learn how to get started? Visit the Digital Scholarship Lab.

Due to COVID-19, digital scholarship consultations are currently being held remotely Monday through Friday, over the phone or Zoom. To arrange an appointment, contact Erica Hayes, digital scholarship librarian.

By Shawn Proctor

In spring 2020, Esri Story Maps, an open-source web-based application by ArcGIS, allowed the students in Professor Jennifer Santoro’s class to weave text, still and moving images, videos, and navigation tools to give GIS maps new interactivity and dynamism. It is a popular method of presenting map data, too–in 2019 alone, more than 400,000 new story maps were created using this web-based application. “All fourteen final projects from the GIS class are available online and will be exhibited on the touchscreens in Falvey Memorial Library’s new Digital Scholarship Lab opening Spring 2021.  Each map tells a persuasive story about conserving our fragile environment and endangered species,” Hayes says.

By Shawn Proctor

The University will soon have access to a new Digital Scholarship Lab at Falvey Memorial Library, which will promote the use of digital technology and cultivate experimentation, collaboration, and discovery of digital tools and methods to enhance Villanova’s research community.

Located on the second floor of the Library near the Learning Commons, the Digital Scholarship Lab will provide consultation space, workshops, training, and technical equipment and software for a variety of activities, including but not limited to GIS mapping, text and data mining, data visualization, digital publishing, and creating digital exhibits.

“We are committed to learning digital tools in collaboration with faculty, students, and staff through trial, error, and experimentation. Acting as a connector, this new lab will bring together community members interested in learning these new technologies, so they can apply them to their teaching and research,” says Erica Y. Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian.

The Digital Scholarship Lab is expected to be completed by mid-April.

For more information about the lab or digital scholarship, contact Erica Hayes at erica.hayes@villanova.edu or call 610-519-5391.

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is a Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.