Digital Scholarship

By Sean LisSean is a student assistant at the Digital Scholarship Centre and a graduate student in the Digital Humanities. If you’ve ever been on Cameron Library’s second floor, you’ll have doubtlessly encountered the glowing sign and glass walls of the Digital Scholarship Centre (DSC). If the doors are open, come take a look and maybe chat with staff; take it from me, the DSC is the place to be! Whether you…

It has now been well over five months since a group of us University of Alberta Library staff began a data physicalization project to stitch Covid-19 data in Canada. It’s a project that we called “Stitching the Curve”. This is a little update on this data physicalization project’s progress.  To quickly recap the project, members of our team have all selected provinces to either knit or crochet. Our colleague and fellow knitter,…

By Abbie Schenk Imagine a programming workshop: students sitting behind monitors and laptops, quietly  typing line after line of code to make their computers spit out words, solve math problems, and manipulate pixels on those same screens. Their education is almost entirely contained to the virtual realm.  But a different form of computer science education has emerged in the last few years: physical computing. “A recent growth area in computer science education…

Written By Abbie Schenk When we think of data visualizations, we often think of charts, maps and other forms of expressing data in digital ways. But humans have visualized data for thousands of years, long before computer screens were invented. Some of the earliest data visualizations go back to 5500 BC when Mesopotamians used clay tokens to visualize data. Today, representing data in a physical manner is called data physicalization. The Digital…

Staff profiles tell the story of an organization. Here at the University of Alberta Library, this is ours… In early March I had the opportunity to interview Erin O’Neil about her role as the University of Alberta Library’s first Wikipedian in Residence from February until August of 2020. This interview was recorded prior to University of Alberta Library closing our physical locations temporarily due to COVID-19. Because of the temporary closures, Erin…

University of Alberta Library staff share a great passion for information and we are always looking for new ways we can engage with it and make it more approachable for ourselves and our community. In March, when the COVID-19 crisis brought a sudden change to all our lives, some library staff with yarncraft inclinations had an idea to start a unique making project. The “Stitching the Curve” project seeks to capture the…

Last month, in honour of Pride Week 2020, we got together at the Digital Scholarship Centre to talk about Gender & Sexuality Primary Resource collections. Now that most of us are hunkering down to do research at home, we wanted to share those collections online! In the last few decades, research into LGBTQ2S+ studies have grown exponentially. As a result, there are growing numbers of projects which aim to collect materials that…

Written by Sarah Severson Did you know that the University of Alberta Library has a huge collection of digitized items, many of them dating back a century or more? 2019 has been a busy year for the University of Alberta Library’s digitization program and has seen us add almost 22,000 new items to our Internet Archive collection. For several years, we have partnered with Internet Archive as our digitization partner, and this…

Staff profiles tell the story of an organization. Here at the University of Alberta Library, this is ours… Meet Sean Luyk!Sean Luyk is our Digital Projects Librarian, working on the 2nd floor of Cameron Library. You have an interesting title of Digital Projects Librarian. What kind of projects does a Digital Projects Librarian do? In my role, I’m responsible for our media archiving service (ERA A+V). This involves working with our users to archive…