Welcome to the middle of the week! Here are some recent digital humanities news stories that have come across our feeds here at the MHL…
From the Digital Koans blog (a great resource for ‘quick hit’ digital scholarship news), news about the release of Version 7 of the Google Books bibliography, a selection of English-language resources that are “useful in understanding Google Books.”
Via the same blog, the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography for July 31, 2011. This is a great collection of journal articles and blog posts about digital scholarship, including recent articles from the EDUCAUSE Review on linked data, First Monday on non-traditional book publishing, and the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology on the digital revolution in scholarly communication (warning: clicking this link will open a .pdf in your browser). Older “issues” of the bibliography are available on the same webpage; just keep scrolling down.
From Roy Tennant’s Digital Libraries blog, commentary about the Google Fusion Tables tool. The tool is still in beta-testing, but is aiming to allow users to mash-up data-sets onto maps, charts, or through various filter functions.
And via JISC News, the Wellcome Library has made its Arabic medical manuscripts available online! This fantastic new resource is the result of a partnership between the Wellcome, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, King’s College London, and the JISC Islamic Studies Program. The collection includes about 1,0000 manuscripts and manuscript fragments relating to the history of medicine from the Wellcome’s Asian collections. The manuscripts have been photographed in their entirety and recreated carefully next to detailed descriptions; researchers have access to various levels of search specificity, including partial transcriptions of passages and the ability to compare manuscripts side-by-side. The online collection also allows researchers to search with the old Arabic alphabet using a virtual keyboard.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!