In 2013, the Berkman Center helped to launch the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. This online portal delivers incredible resources and artifacts from all over America to the fingertips of students, teachers, scholars, and the public at large. Meanwhile at Harvard and many universities across America, libraries of all kinds are negotiating the opportunities of the digital with enterprise, ingenuity, and experimentation.
Join Dan Cohen, Jeffrey Schnapp and Andromeda Yelton for an exploration of how libraries are drawing on their past, and using technology to create new resources for scholarship and education.
About Dan
Dan Cohen is the founding Executive Director of the Digital Public Library of America, which is bringing together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and making them freely available to the world.
Until 2013 he was a Professor of History in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and the Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. His personal research has been in digital humanities, broadly construed: the impact of new media and technology on all aspects of knowledge, from the nature of digitized resources to twenty-first century research techniques and software tools to the changing landscape of communication and publication.
He is the co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), and co-editor of Hacking the Academy (University of Michigan Press, 2012). He has published articles and book chapters on new media, the history of mathematics and religion, the teaching of history, scholarly communication, and the future of the humanities in a digital age in journals such as the Journal of American History, Victorian Studies, and Rethinking History. His work and thought has been featured frequently in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Times Higher Education.
He is an inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Innovation Fellowship. In 2011 I received the Frederick G. Kilgour Award from the American Library Association for my work in digital humanities. In 2012 he was named one of the top “tech innovators” in academia by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
About Jeff
Jeffrey T. Schnapp is Professor of Romance Languages & Literature and Comparative Literature, and on the teaching faculty in the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He is the faculty director of metaLAB (at) Harvard and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
His most recent books include The Electric Information Age Book (with Adam Michaels [Princeton Architectural Press 2012]); an anthology of essays on 20th century Italian art, literature, design, and architecture entitled Modernitalia (Peter Lang 2012); The Library Beyond the Book (Harvard University Press 2014), an experimental publication co-authored with Matthew Battles that explores future scenarios for libraries in the digital age; and Digital Humanities, a lecture on cultural heritage issues recently published in Italian in the Meet the Media Guru series. He is the editor of the metaLABprojects series with Harvard University Press. (Other current or future projects are described under the In the Works tab of this website).
His work in the domains of media, design, digital arts and humanities, and curatorial practice includes collaborations with the Triennale di Milano, the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Canadian Center for Architecture. His collaborative Trento Tunnels project—a 6000 sq. meter pair of highway tunnels in Northern Italy repurposed as a history museum—was featured in the Italian pavilion of the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture and at the MAXXI in Rome in RE-CYCLE. Strategie per la casa la città e il pianeta (fall-winter 2011). Panorama of the Cold War, carried out with Elisabetta Terragni (Studio Terragni Architetti) and Daniele Ledda (XY comm), was exhibited in the Albanian Pavilion of the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture and in Erasmus Effect – Architetti italiani all’estero / Italian Architects Abroad at the MAXXI (Dec. 2013-April 2014). He also served as chief consulting curator for BZ ’18-’45, a documentation center built under Marcello Piacentini’s Monument to Victory in Bolzano/Bozen open to the public since July 2014.
Effective June 2015, he assumed the position of Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Piaggio Fast Forward.
About Andromeda
Andromeda Yelton has been a math major and a middle school Latin teacher. Now she is a librarian and technologist, and the thing that keeps her up at night and makes her smile is empowering librarians through code. In particular, Andromeda teaches librarians to code. She's taught Python through the American Library Association in the United States and the Mozilla Foundation in Canada. She is an independent web developer, primarily working in Django. Most of her coding time is taken up these days contracting for CustomFit (if you’re a knitter who wants an amazing sweater that fits you perfectly, check it out). She is a Director-at-Large for LITA, the Library Information Technology Association, for 2013-2016. She speaks and writes about coding and learning to code, gender in library technology, conference codes of conduct, ebooks, copyright, technology, and personal branding.
This event is part of Boston's Hubweek.