Harvard has been hard at work on implementing some big ideas when it comes to integrating technology into scholarship. On June 9, there is a big event being held at Harvard Business School where dozens of panelists and speakers from across the university will gather to share best-practices and offer a glimpse into some of the ground-breaking work they have been doing.
It’s called the Digital Scholarship Summit and it’s free and open to the public. Digital scholarship is the use and production of digital forms of research by scholars in the creation of new knowledge. These digital forms are characterized by their distributed and collaborative nature.
The Details
- June 9, 2010 from 8:30 am – 5:30 pm
- Harvard Business School, Hawes 201
A Showcase of Ideas
Examples include digital repositories, research collaboratories, computing grids and web-based publishing platforms. Here’s a look at just some of the projects being displayed:
Connectivity Map: A Tool for Biomedical Research – Willis Read-Button, Todd Golub, Justin Lamb
Connectivity Map is an online biomedical discovery tool developed at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University designed to help any researcher with a computer rapidly identify functional connections between diseases, genes, and drugs. It comprises a public database of gene-expression profiles from cultured human cells treated with 1,309 bioactive chemical compounds (including most of the FDA-approved drugs) coupled with a web-enabled self-service pattern-matching query tool. Just like an internet search engine, where one types a word or phrase and is presented with a list of web pages relevant to that text, a Connectivity Map user uploads a gene-expression signature from a disease of interest and is immediately returned a list of compounds predicted to modulate that disease state.
Connectivity Map has more than 10,000 registered users from thirty countries. These include academics, non-profits, government organizations, and drug companies. Thirty papers reporting discoveries based directly on Connectivity Map results have been published in peer-review journals since its introduction in 2006. Connectivity Map can be found at www.broadinstitute.org/cmap.
Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization
The Digital Atlas of Roman and Medieval Civilization (DARMC) makes freely available on the internet the best available materials for a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) approach to mapping and spatial analysis of the Roman and medieval worlds. DARMC allows innovative spatial and temporal analyses of all aspects of the civilizations of western Eurasia in the first 1500 years of our era, as well as the generation of original maps illustrating differing aspects of ancient and medieval civilization. A work in progress with no claim to definitiveness, it has been built in less than three years by a dedicated team of Harvard undergraduates, graduate students, research scholars and one professor, with some valuable contributions from younger and more senior scholars at other institutions. http://darmc.harvard.edu
China Historical GIS and G. W. Skinner Archive
The China Historical GIS project, established in 2001, has developed a series of datasets that track the changing administrative geography over the course of 2,000 years of Chinese History. Beginning with the Qin Dynasty (221 CE) and ending with the Qing Dynasty (1911 CE), the GIS layers of administrative divisions were developed in collaboration with senior researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai, and have been published for free academic use as downloadable files, as well as made available for browsing online using a gazetteer search engine, dynamic webmap, and an XML web service. Project website – http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/ The G. W. Skinner Archive and Spatial Analysis Project is hosted by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and will establish a permanent digital archive of the research datasets created by the late Prof. Skinner and his research team at the Regional System Analysis group of U.C. – Davis. The Archive project will make available all the basic GIS and statistical datasets that Skinner used to develop
Spatial Scholarship Support from the Harvard Map Collection and the Harvard Geospatial Library
The Harvard Map Collection is one of the largest map libraries in North America, and has a wide variety of materials both paper and digital. We are working to scan many of our paper maps so that researchers will have access to a range of materials in digital form. These resources, both the scanned paper and “born digital” materials, are made available for download from the Harvard Geospatial Library (HGL: http://hgl.harvard.edu), a search engine and repository for geospatial data. We also provide support and collaboration in the use of geographic information systems, including the incorporation of scanned paper maps into modern spatial analyses.
Two recent project collaborations will be presented. The first, a project with Noam Maggor, Ph.D. Candidate in the History of American Civilization Department, was a study of business census data from Boston enumerated by ward for the post Civil War period. Historic maps were used to delineate the wards, and the census data was then joined to the spatial in order to highlight relationships that were not apparent when looking at the data in tabular form.
The second project, “Element of Survival: Isolating the Causal Effect of Access to Iodized Salt on Child Health in India.” won the Howard T. Fisher Prize in Geographical Information Science for Shubha Lakshmi Bhat, 2009 graduate of Harvard College. This project used GIS analysis techniques to predict the level of access to iodized salt and the impact of that access on health outcomes.
These scholars relied on the Map Collection and HGL for technical expertise and for data discovery and creation. The projects illustrate the breadth of scope of the Map Collection and HGL holdings in terms of both time and space.
Herdict and OpenNet Initiative: Tracking Internet Censorship
The OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership of three institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; and the SecDev Group (Ottawa). Our aim is to investigate, expose and analyze Internet filtering and surveillance practices in a credible and non-partisan fashion.
Herdict, a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, is a portmanteau of ‘herd’ and ‘verdict’ and seeks to show the verdict of the users (the herd). Herdict Web seeks to gain insight into what users around the world are experiencing in terms of web accessibility; or in other words, determine the herdict.
Collaborating to build digital collections: Reading and other Open Collections Program projects
Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History
is the latest project of the Open Collections Program (OCP) of the Harvard University Library (see http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ ). The purpose of OCP is to make digitized materials from Harvard’s libraries, archives, and museums – particularly those that have been inaccessible to most users – broadly and freely available to promote learning, teaching, and research. Key advice from a Harvard faculty advisory committee, as well as in-depth participation by librarians and archivists, helps to shape OCP topic parameters and selection of key materials. Near-term impact of OCP collections are measured by tracking citations in blogs and lists, email inquiries from users of collection web sites, and, most critically at Harvard, inclusion of materials in classes. Released on March 1, 2010, Reading primary sources were incorporated in History of Science 189, The History of Communications Technologies.
The success of OCP projects requires consultation with key stakeholders, project planning and coordination, expertise in conservation, cataloging, and digitization, and flexible and robust infrastructures for the management, discovery, and delivery of digitized material.
Discovery: Undergraduates and Primary Sources in Musicology
Work with primary sources is an integral part of research in historical musicology. Detail matters: marginal notations or a copyist’s handwriting can be just as important as the simple fact of the notes on a page of music. Annotations reveal minor changes to an orchestral score, or transformations as radical as the rewriting of a vocal line from baritone to tenor range. During the nineteenth century, even published, successful operas underwent drastic recomposition to suit the styles of different European opera houses.
While many libraries and archives worldwide have digitized important sources from their holdings, they are often not represented in libraries’ union catalogs, or are buried in much larger collections. By drawing on the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library’s collections and publicly-available digital facsimiles from libraries around the world, this site helps to connect undergraduate music concentrators with the tools of their trade: not only by providing quick access to scores from the syllabus, but by drawing attention to the intricacies of musical research with primary sources.
Clickframes: An Open Source Metaframework for Advancing Digital Scholarship Via High Quality Web Applications
Clickframes is open source metaframework developed by the Informatics Solutions Group of Children’s Hospital Boston. Clickframes is an XML based application that facilitates the otherwise tedious tasks of web applicaiton development including dynamic requirements gathering, interaction design, iterative testing and code generation. Clickframes has been used to accelerate the process of high quality web application development. Since 2008, Clickframes has been used as a backbone for several key academic and translational web applications currently deployed within the Harvard community.
1. Grant Central- A grant writing and collaboration professional networking application for Harvard Catalyst. http://grants.catalyst.harvard.edu/
2. The Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP). A process management application for recruitment into a Delrium reduction intervention at Hebrew Senior Life Center.
3. Boston Migraine & Contraceptive Study (BMAC). A research platform with an email and text message intervention for Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Planned Parenthood Boston.
4. The Provider Portal- A application to facilitate care transitions at Children’s Hospital Boston.
In all 4 endeavors, Clickframes successfully allowed a small research and technology oriented team to create innovative and scalable web applications by introducing new synergies in the web application development process. Clickframes is free and open source at htttp://clickframes.org/
HCL’s Annotated Bibliography Tool
Using the Annotated Bibliography Application, librarians and other authors can compose bibliographies by harvesting bibliographic data from HOLLIS or other Harvard resources, enrich and annotate the entries with tags and further information, and present the results as a research guide.
Bibliographies are presented in a flexible search interface that also provides navigation through tag clouds and links to original and related resources. Bibliography authors can import original bibliographic data into the application through the OIS PRESTO Data Lookup Web Service and keep it up to date using a backing store derived from the OIS Virtual Collection service. The application has presentation front-ends for both the HCL public website and the iSites platform; authors maintain their bibliographies through the iSites tool interface.
Surgical Safety Web Map
CGA created a web map for Harvard School of Public Health researchers involved with the World Health Organization Safe Surgery Saves Lives challenge.
The goal of this challenge is to improve the safety of surgery around the world by defining a core set of safety standards that can be applied in all WHO member countries.
The web map is a Google mashup, featuring participating organizations, hospitals, a global surgical rate map, and more. Project website: http://maps.cga.harvard.edu/surgical_safety
Africa Map
The Africa Map project addresses a basic problem for all scholarship on Africa that treats where things happen as necessary to understanding how and why they happen: finding places on a map. Numerous Harvard academic departments are collaborating with the CGA on this project, with the following goals:
1) Allow interaction with the best available public data for Africa,
2) See the whole of Africa yet also zoom in to particular places,
3) Accumulate both contemporary and historical data supplied by researchers and make it permanently accessible online, and
4) Work collaboratively across disciplines and organizations with spatial information about Africa in an online environment. Project web map: http://africamap.harvard.edu
E*vue (Emergent Vegetation of the Urban Ecosystem) Website
The critical question faced by the professionals who design, build, and maintain our urban landscapes is not what plants grew there in the past, but which ones will grow there in the future.
The spontaneous vegetation of the urban environment, which flourishes without cultivation, is often marginalized as exotic or invasive. Yet many such species have also come to perform vital ecological functions like water filtration, soil stabilization, and carbon storage. This online resource helps to document the emergent vegetation of the urban Northeast and illustrate the environmental role that these species can play in creating sustainable urban landscapes.
The E*vue website is a collaborative project between the Library Information Systems Department and Professor Peter Del Tredici, a GSD faculty member in the Department of Landscape Architecture.
Research Computing Environment
The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) has developed the Research Computing Environment (RCE) as an easy and flexible way for social scientists to access scalable resources to perform statistical computing. The RCE provides the user with a persistent desktop environment that is accessible from any computer with an Internet connection. In particular, it is a statistics research computing environment preloaded with an array of popular statistics software, including R, Gauss, Mathematica, MATLAB, Octave, SAS, S-Plus, Stata, and SPSS. These applications can be run either interactively on shared servers or as dedicated batch jobs on a cluster of backend servers. RCE also provides a variety of desktop tools such as text editors, email and news clients, an office productivity suite, and a full range of command-line tools provided by the OS.
For more information about RCE and signing up for an account, please visit the RCE web site at
http://support.hmdc.harvard.edu/kb-14/research_computing_environment
The Dataverse Network
The Dataverse Network is a web application to publish and share research data with your collaborators or the rest of the world. Your data is archived permanently, while a formal persistent citation is generated automatically to allow you referencing the data forever. All data types are supported and can be uploaded to a dataverse (from data sets to images, up to 2GB per file, and no limit to the number of files), but the application provides additional services for tabular and network data, including subsetting and statistical analysis.
The Dataverse Network is continually being developed and supported at IQSS, is open-source and free. The IQSS Dataverse Network holds currently about 250 dataverses with more than 600,000 files, and more dataverses are being created every day. There are other Dataverse Networks hosted in Universities around the world. For more information about the project, go to http://thedata.org or start creating your own dataverse for free, in just a couple of clicks, by going directly to http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu.
OpenScholar
OpenScholar aims to redefine how research web sites are created in the future at Harvard and beyond. It allows faculty, graduate students and researchers to easily create their personal web site or a project web site, with publications, classes, announcements, events, people lists, feeds, blogs, image galleries and more. A scholar site integrates nicely with a dataverse, so all your publications, research information and data are in a central place.
OpenScholar is continually being developed and supported at IQSS, and is open-source, free, and built on top of Drupal. It is already used by hundreds of researchers here at Harvard, and the software is now being distributed and used in other Universities. To create an individual scholar web site, go to http://scholar.harvard.edu and get your site in seconds. To create one or multiple project sites, go to http://iq.projects.harvard.edu to get started.
The Details
From the Harvard website: On June 9th Harvard is holding a Digital Scholarship Summit to bring together Harvard faculty members, PhD researchers, technologists, and librarians who develop digital scholarship tools for themselves or provide digital scholarship tools and services for others.
The purpose of the event is threefold:
1. To discuss and identify shared interest in digital scholarship
2. To share the status on current digital initiatives
3. To begin a discussion on the existing and desired services and tools to support digital scholarship across disciplines
The audience for the Summit is an internal one: Harvard faculty from the Social Sciences, Sciences and Humanities conducting projects, and internal service providers and partners in the development of digital scholarship projects. Our goal is to bring the various initiatives together as a community, provide an opportunity for cross-pollination of ideas, and, where it makes sense, to connect various parts together.
June 9, 2010
8:30 am – 5:30 pm
Harvard Business School, Hawes 201 (Free)