Library News

Northeastern University Library Receives Two National Endowment for the Humanities Grants

August 8th, 2018 – The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Northeastern University Library a $500,000 Infrastructure and Capacity-Building Challenge Grant. The funded project – Research Infrastructure for Digital Scholarship – will further propel Northeastern’s commitment to digital scholarship, the synthesis of archival materials and data, and experiential education. This challenge grant will expand the Library’s technical capacity through the creation of four new staff positions to undertake technical development, data design, and semantic data integration.

Northeastern University Library also received $197,000 from the NEH’s Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program to support “Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist: Institutes on Critical Teaching and Research with Vector Space Models”, a series of four three-day institutes that will explore the use of word embedding models for textual analysis.

Formed in 2013, The Library’s Digital Scholarship Group has undertaken several important digital humanities projects, including Design for Diversity, Our Marathon, TAPAS, and the Women Writers Project. This challenge grant will continue to support these projects, as well as provide support for the recently announced Boston Research Center, which will be housed in Snell Library. The director of the Digital Scholarship Group, Julia Flanders, will provide leadership on both grants, and Sarah Connell is a co-director on the “Word Vectors” grant.

“In many ways these grants recognize and reward the great progress we’ve made over the past five years in establishing the Library as a significant research partner in the digital humanities at Northeastern, and affirm Northeastern’s status as a leader in this space” states Patrick Yott, Associate Dean for Digital Strategies and Services.

“We deeply appreciate this major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and are truly excited about the additional projects and overall capacity this funding will underwrite in the Library and across Northeastern,” said Dan Cohen, the Dean of the Libraries.

Religion, Sex, and Politics: Taboo Subjects at the Hub

After displays about spaceships and dragons, Club Snell is tackling more serious and intriguing topics. “Religion, Sex, and Politics” takes on the difficult and often taboo subjects. We have material types ranging from books, graphic novels, memoirs, movies, to ebooks. So whether you’re looking for a light read or material for a paper, we have you covered!

Subjects range from anything like LBGTQ+ rights to Native American Memoirs. There’s a little bit of everything for everyone. In particular, we are highlighting our e-book Too Hot to Handle: A global history of sex education by Jonathan Zimmerman, the movie Loving, and the book The African Union: Autocracy, Diplomacy, and Peacebuilding in Africa.

We even have the movie Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Did you know that Jedism is considered a legitimate religion by the United States? Watch the movie and look for parallels with current world religions like you can find in the e-book Exploring Spiritualties in World Religions. If there’s tough questions or topics you’ve been wanting to read about, feel free to explore them at the Hub’s new display, “Religion, Sex, and Politics”



Read the Rainbow at Snell!

  Summer arrives with a celebration as June is the national LBGTQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender, and Queer) Pride month. Snell Library is honoring LGBTQ month with our curated Hub display of movies and books by or about an LGBTQ person. Pride month was started in 1995 to honor the 1969 Stonewall Riots in Manhattan, NYC While it originally began as a 1 day “Pride day” on the last Sunday of June, it has now evolved into a month-long celebration. Across the United States, cities and towns will host parades, bands, workshops, and speaker events focusing on creating a safe space for the LGBTQ community to connect Snell Library is taking part of that celebration by highlighting select works in our Hub collection that touch upon sexuality and gender. We have the newly released movie Carol, which focuses on two women’s affair in the background of the 1950’s where homosexuality was forbidden. Sonnets of a Dark Love by Federico García Lorca is a collection of poems and essays which centers heavily on the poet’s Spanish heritage and internal struggle with homosexuality during the early 20th century. These poems were written in the later part of his life before his untimely execution by Nationalists at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.                   We also have Moonlight, which is the first film with an all-black cast and the first LGBT film to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Lastly, the author of Young Adult novel Little & Lion discusses topics such as mental illness, bisexuality, and intersectional identity This pictures follows the main character through three main stages of his life as he comes to terms with his identity and past relationships. These are but a few of the great movies and books that we’ve put on display at the Hub, come check it out!     

Library Dean visits Northeastern Alumni and Parents in Rome

May 27, 2018 Dan Cohen, Dean of Libraries, Vice Provost for Information and Collaboration, was welcomed by a dozen alumni and parents in Rome to enjoy lunch and conversation. This was the first gathering for the Northeastern University community in the area, expanding on our mission to engage globally. The unique innovative ecosystem at Northeastern University continues to be a catalyst for our global community of agile, creative thinkers. Guests enjoyed meeting Dan and each other with conversation ranging from digital media and technology to various successful initiatives and professions our alumni and parents experience. We look forward to continuing to evolve and strengthen the wonderful connections made in Italy!

“Storytelling, Archives, and Resilience”: reflecting on the role of community archives in the Boston Marathon bombing

On Monday, April 23 – five years and a week after tragedy struck Boston in the form of the Boston Marathon bombing – faculty, staff, students and members of the community gathered in Alumni Center to share reflections on remembering traumatic events and processing grief through collections and digital archives. The event commemorated five years of collecting objects and memories in “Our Marathon: the Boston Bombing Digital Archive,” a project that originated at Northeastern through efforts in the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks, the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, and the Northeastern University Libraries. This year, faculty, staff and graduate students worked to migrate the site’s contents and metadata onto a new digital space under library management, giving it a long-term home where the collection can be preserved. Megan Barney, Lauren Bergnes Sell and David Heilbrun will reflect on their experience completing this migration in future blog posts. The event featured a panel of scholars whose work has been grounded in collecting and preserving so-called “grief archives,” including:
  • Dan Cohen, Vice Provost for Information Collaboration and Dean of University Libraries and co-director of the 9/11 Digital Archive
  • Ashley Maynor, award-winning filmmaker behind The Story of the Stuff and currently Digital Scholarship Librarian at New York University
  • Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Our Marathon Principal Investigator and currently Professor of English at Northeastern University
  • Kristi Girdharry, the Our Marathon Oral History Project Manager and currently Assistant Professor of English at Johnson and Wales University
  • Jim McGrath, Co-director of the Our Marathon project and currently post-doctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities at Brown University.

Amanda Rust introduces panelists

Amanda Rust, Assistant Director of the Digital Scholarship Group, introduced the panelists to a packed crowd including university professors, graduate students, library staff, community members and project partners from outside Northeastern. As moderator, Cohen discussed findings and recollections from his experience as co-director of the 9/11 Digital Archive. He noted the emotional intelligence required to do this kind of work, especially in regards to community engagement. Maynor, the filmmaker behind The Story of the Stuff, set the stage by discussing the therapeutic effect of saving and organizing objects across various circumstances like family archives and spontaneous shrines. She noted that the value of such archives can be that they protect objects, put away for safekeeping; we know they are there, but we don’t have to look at them anymore.

Ashley Maynor

Girdharry and McGrath joined Maddock Dillon in a discussion of the process and outcome of the Our Marathon digital archive. Girdharry spoke to her work as Oral History Project Manager, where she discovered the clusters of stories that emerged from a wide range of personal experiences. She pointed out the different angles of narrative involved to tell a more complete story of the events of that day. Maddock Dillon, the project’s principal investigator, also highlighted the collective nature of the archive, drawn from crowdsourced objects and memories, and the collective labor that went into producing and maintaining it. These aspects, she said, along with the desire to enable the community to reclaim the narrative, drove the project’s name, “Our Marathon.”

From left: Jim McGrath; Kristi Girdharry; Elizabeth Maddock Dillon; Dan Cohen

As co-director of the project, McGrath has been highly involved in the archive from conception to its move to a new home in the library. McGrath initiated the collection’s move to a more permanent web space, and it is thanks to his persistence and care that the Our Marathon digital archive will continue to be accessible. During the panel, he pointed out the critical importance of community engagement in doing this kind of work, and how listening to the needs and values of multiple communities can correct our assumptions. He has written more about his long-term experience on the project at the National Council on Public History blog History@Work. After listening to the panel presentation, the audience asked questions about the labor and process of managing such collections and the role of the digital in future work. The Our Marathon: Boston Bombing Digital Archive is viewable at https://marathon.library.northeastern.edu/about/.