WMU offers summer seminar series on digital research

KALAMAZOO—Western Michigan University is offering a series of presentations and a workshop for graduate students, faculty and staff on creating and using digital research.

Sponsored by University Libraries and the Graduate College, the workshops beginning Thursday, May 30, will help participants:

• become familiar with the vocabulary of digital research, projects and publications;
• see models of digital projects undertaken by WMU faculty and supported by the library as well as projects undertaken by other institutions; and
• learn how to incorporate these projects into teaching and become acquainted with tools to build a digital project.

All events will take place in Waldo Library's Classroom A.

• Thursday, May 30, 2:30 to 4 p.m., "Digital Gower and the Virtual Library."
  
  Dr. Eve Salisbury, professor of English, will discuss and demonstrate the "The Gower Project," a multi-site collaborative enterprise providing access to manuscripts, editions, sources and links advancing the study of 14th-century poet John Gower. She will also discuss her involvement with the online publication, "Accessus: A Journal of Premodern Literature and New Media."
• Tuesday, June 4, 2:30 to 4 p.m., "The Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Publishing."
  
  Dr. Kenneth Steuer, Department of History, will describe working with the American Historical Association’s Gutenberg-e digital publishing initiative at Columbia University, his collaborative work with Indiana University and various United Nations Archives Collections in Geneva, and his current digital archive.
• Wednesday, June 5, 2:30 to 4 p.m., "Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and His Governorship of the Río de la Plata and other projects: Digital Manuscripts and Images."
  
  Dr. Pablo Pastrana-Perez, associate professor of Spanish, will present his project on "Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca" and will discuss how to bring archival materials from the 16th century in manuscript form to a modern reader, and the transition from parchment or paper to the computer screen. Pastrana-Pérez works primarily with medieval and early-modern texts. Also, Sheila Bair, cataloger and librarian, will discuss her work with metadata and Text Encoding Initiative using WMU Libraries’ Civil War Diaries digital collection. She has served on a number of national working groups on standardizing and optimizing searching on the Web.
• Tuesday, June 11, 2:30 to 5 p.m., "Models and Resources for Digital Scholarship: Tools offered by Waldo Library and Beyond – University Libraries Digital Experts" workshop.
  
  Topics include to build a digital project including tools and methods such as data-mining, metadata, mapping, the WMU digitization center and Scholarworks.

To register, visit surveymonkey.com/s/digitalscholarship.