Overviewing the Forum

The IMLS-sponsored Data Speculations: A National Forum seeks to advance the development of infrastructure, policies, expertise, and collections that enable computational research on copyrighted contemporary culture materials. The forum, to be held in January 2025, is led by a team of digital humanities and copyright experts, Alex Wermer-Colan, Sarah Potvin, Peter Jaszi, Brandon Butler, and Rachael Samberg, and will bring together specialists in digital humanities research, collections, and library data services. By convening a dedicated community of practice at a National Forum, hosting public talks, and producing findings and guidelines for wider dissemination, Data Speculations will be foundational to the collective work of removing access barriers for sharing copyrighted collections, serving libraries’ core mission to make information, including copyrighted data, available to researchers and teachers to advance teaching and scholarship.

At a time when multinational publishing houses and database vendors increasingly speculate (quite literally) on the landscape of digitized contemporary culture, charging libraries for licensed access to their collections of newspapers and magazines as data, Data Speculations seeks an alternative vision: a future where libraries can steward large collections of copyrighted cultural data. This National Forum will convene a diverse field of specialists, with the goal of producing recommendations for a wider range of use cases and contexts, empowering diverse communities to take ownership of their research data and, on their own terms, open it up to new modes of digital analysis and curation. By analyzing needs, developing a proof of concept legal framework, and convening relevant stakeholders and experts, Data Speculations will inform the next-stage development and implementation of partnerships, protocols, tools, and best practice guidance to unlock collection access.

Program Schedule

The National Forum will take place in January of 2025 The Forum will focus on a series of case studies, exemplified by the SF Nexus project.

Data Speculations: A National Forum will bring together a wide range of scholars and practitioners to discuss the future of computational access to copyrighted data.

Organizers

• Sarah Potvin, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University

• Alex Wermer-Colan, Interim Academic Director, Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio

Advisory Board

• Rachael Samberg, Scholarly Communication Officer, Berkeley Library

• Brandon Butler, Director of Intellectual Property and Licensing, University of Virginia Library

• Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law Emeritus, American University Washington College of Law

Science Fiction Collecting Libraries Consortium Members

• Elspeth Healey, Special Collections, University of Kansas Spencer Library
• Jeremy Brett, Special Collections, Texas A&M Libraries

Institutional Partners

Science Fiction Collecting Libraries Consortium

SF Nexus

The SF Nexus comprises a collaborative network of research and public libraries with collections of SF. The SF Nexus aspires to make a comprehensive dataset of science fiction literature.

For more information about the SF Nexus project, visit sfnexus.io.

For an overview of the SF Nexus’ approach to data curation of literary texts, see Alex Wermer-Colan’s and James Kopaczewski’s article, “The New Wave of Digital Collections: Speculating on the Future of Library Curation”(2022)

Paskow Science Fiction Collection, Temple University Special Collections Research Center

The Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio partnered with Temple University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) and Digital Library Initiatives (DLI) to build a digitized corpus of copyrighted science fiction literature. Besides its voluminous Urban Archives, the SCRC also houses a significant collection of science-fiction literature. The Paskow Science Fiction Collection was originally established in 1972, when Temple acquired 5,000 science fiction paperbacks from a Temple alumnus, the late David C. Paskow.

For exhibit of SF book covers from the Paskow collection, visit our companion Omeka site.

Science Fiction Collecting Libraries Consortium (SFCLC)

The SFCLC comprises a series of special collections across North America and England focusing on preserving and expanding access to the history of science fiction publishing. The SF Nexus aspires to leverage the SFCLC’s holdings to create larger science fiction datasets that can be shared through member-supported repositories like HathiTrust Digital Library and through digital scholarship centers at these universities.