August 2023
LC LABS LETTER
News from the Library of Congress Labs Team
Coming soon: Join the LC Labs team!
Interested in joining the LC Labs team? The Library will soon be posting a position for a fully remote GS14 Senior Innovation Technologist (“Program Specialist”) to join our team! Keep an eye on USAJobs for the posting.
Connecting Communities Digital Initiative Award Opportunities
The Connecting Communities Digital Initiative (CCDI), part of the Library’s Mellon-funded Of the People: Widening the Path program, has three open award opportunities to provide financial and technical support for projects that creatively use Library of Congress digital collections and center one or more of the following groups: Black, Indigenous, Hispanic or Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and/or other communities of color from any of the 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and its territories and commonwealths (Puerto Rico, Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands).
Applications for the Artist/Scholar in Residence program closed on August 7, 2023.
Applications for Libraries, Archives, and Museums and for Higher Education Institutions are due September 7, 2023. Visit loc.gov/ccdi to learn more.
Find out more about previous awardees’ experiences on the Of the People blog:
Library of Congress Civics Video Game Challenge closes November 27, 2023
Calling all aspiring computer scientists and coders! The Library of Congress is sponsoring a public competition to make history and civics education accessible in the form of a video game.
The Library will award a cash prize of $20,000 for the winning entry, $10,000 for the second-place entry, and $5,000 for the third-place entry. In addition to the cash prizes, the Library may invite the winners of the competition to Washington, D.C., to present their work. Visit Challenge.gov for more information.
Library of Congress API documentation gets a refresh
In addition to its web interface, the Library of Congress makes information available to the public via a series of application programming interfaces (API). LC Labs recently collaborated with the IT Design and Development Directorate to revise technical documentation of Library of Congress APIs in light of feedback gathered from people who have worked directly with them for research and computing. Find out more about these content and formatting changes and methodological approaches on The Signal Blog.
Join Jeffrey Yoo Warren, 2023 Innovator in Residence, for September 19 event
Join us September 19th at 4pm ET for Seeing Lost Enclaves: A Virtual Visit of Providence’s Historic Chinatown with Innovator in Residence Jeffrey Yoo Warren
Over the past year, artist and educator Jeffrey Yoo Warren has been working with Library staff and collections to digitally re-construct destroyed Chinatowns around the United States. He is also teaching the public his relational reconstruction methods including employing atmospheric techniques, to bring virtual spaces, such as Portland’s Chinese vegetable gardens, to life.
In this public event, Warren will lead attendees on a virtual visit of Providence’s historic Chinatown and connect them to resources for building their own reconstructions of lost places. This event will also preview what’s coming in 2024 – a glimpse of the next Chinatown site and info on workshops taking place around the country. Join us!
Zoom info for this event will be posted at https://labs.loc.gov/events/ by September 1st. Learn more about “Seeing Lost Enclaves” on the Labs’ experiment page and follow Jeff on Instagram @unterbahn.
Experimenting with machine learning continues
AI isn’t just in the news! LC Labs continues to experiment with the application of machine learning technologies. Our recent efforts include generating catalog records for e-books and developing frameworks for responsible adoption. On June 29, Labs presented on “AI and Public Archives” alongside representatives from the National Archives and Records Administration, Smithsonian Institution, and Virginia Tech university at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. The Library of Congress also joined ai4lam as the most recent member of the group’s Secretariat.
Curio
- Geography & Maps Division spotlights Austro-Hungarian data package: in a recent guest post on the World’s Revealed blog, Rachel Trent, Digital Collections and Automation Coordinator, dives deep into the “secret life of geotiffs” that can be accessed as part of a derivative data package created through the Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud initiative.
- Webinar series for teachers spotlights innovation in the classroom: In April, Jackie Katz, the Library’s Einstein Educator Fellow, led a series of professional development webinars for K-12 educators on how to innovatively combine historical sources, experimental interfaces, and science teaching.
- NEH Intern uses loc.gov API to experiment with title essays of Chronicling America: earlier this year, the Library of Congress added two new Jupyter Notebooks to its GitHub. In collaboration with the Serials and Government Publications division, National Endowment for the Humanities intern, Daniel Evans, pulled together all of the title essays in the Chronicling America database and transformed this corpus using Natural Language Processing techniques. He shared more about his process on the National Endowment for the Humanities blog.
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Questions? Contact LC Labs at [email protected]