Conférence Laura Mandell : BigDIVA: Nourishing and Sustaining a Scholarly Infrastructure

Value of the Information & Strength of the Argument

The talk provides valuable insights into the practical operation of a digital humanities infrastructure. The speaker offers concrete examples of how ARC and BigDIVA serve scholars, such as faceted searching, visual exploration, and the promotion of open educational resources. She argues convincingly for the importance of peer review for digital projects, illustrating with her own experience and the success of NINES. The argumentation is solid, built on years of hands-on experience and a clear vision for sustainable scholarly infrastructure. She also addresses potential criticisms, such as the controversy with Early Modern Print, and explains the benefits of improved OCR access.

Scientific Rigor, Source Quality, Title Accuracy

The presenter refers to specific projects, such as NINES, 18th Connect, MESA, and the Text Creation Partnership, but does not provide formal citations or URLs. The talk is based on her role as director of ARC and reflects a personal, experiential viewpoint. The title accurately captures the focus on BigDIVA and its sustaining infrastructure. There is no explicit reference to published articles, except for a mention of Susan Brown’s work on ’tensions and pressures in digital scholarship,’ but it is not formally cited. The information is likely reliable given the speaker’s authority, but the lack of verifiable sources limits its scientific rigor.

The title accurately reflects the content, which focuses on the BigDIVA visualization tool and the broader ARC infrastructure, discussing its design, sustainability, and value for digital scholarship.

8/10

The speaker is a recognized scholar in digital humanities, and the talk provides a detailed, well-structured account of a real scholarly infrastructure project. The information is based on direct experience and includes concrete examples, but relies primarily on anecdotal evidence and the speaker's own perspective rather than formal evaluation or peer-reviewed analysis.

Markers derived by PSI from the transcript: the creator did not define chapters.

• 01:00Introduction by the host and presentation of Laura Mandell's background.
• 05:00Explanation of ARC (Advanced Research Consortium) and its constituent scholarly communities.
• 10:00Description of the ARC infrastructure: Solr server, Collex interface, and metadata standards.
• 15:00Demonstration of BigDIVA visual interface, including genre, discipline, and format views.
• 20:00Discussion of peer review process for digital projects and the role of TypeRight for OCR correction.
• 25:00Addressing infrastructure tensions: credit, stability, and simplicity, and how ARC mediates them.
• 30:00Conclusion and final remarks on the sustainability of scholarly infrastructure.

• BigDIVA website — The web-based search and discovery service described in the talk.
• NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) — One of the scholarly communities under ARC, peer-reviewing digital projects.
• 18th Connect — A scholarly community for 18th-century studies, part of ARC.
• TypeRight — A tool developed for correcting OCR in ECCO/EEBO documents.