Brian Rosenblum

Co-Principal Investigator

Brian Rosenblum , Founding Co-Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, and Librarian for Digital Scholarship at the University of Kansas Libraries

Brian Rosenblum has expertise in open access and scholarly communication, electronic publishing, and digital humanities. He collaborates with faculty, students, librarians and technologists in digital humanities initiatives that support teaching, learning, and research, and he leads the day-to-day activities of the IDRH, which include administering a DH Fellows program, awarding digital humanities seed grants, mentoring graduate students, teaching, consulting, and project support.

Brian has led or played a significant role in developing dozens of digital scholarly projects, including many with an international or cross-border (geographical or linguistic) element. Relevant recent projects or initiatives include:

  • African Digital Humanities at KU, an initiative devoted to exploring digital humanities from an African and African diasporic perspective. AfricanDH addresses topics such as language, digitization, artificial intelligence, education and infrastructure.
  • The Urarina Digital Heritage Project (in development), an international collaboration seeded by cultural heritage from the Urarina community in the Peruvian Amazon that are held at the University of Kansas. The trilingual project aims to facilitate digital spaces for the Urarina communities to maintain, access, narrate, and exchange their digital history and heritage in culturally relevant and ethical ways.
  • The Public Digital Humanities Institute, an NEH-funded institute to support academic/community partnerships in the digital humanities.
  • Huellas Incómodas, an  international collaboration among  students, scholars, and community members dedicated to documenting, contextualizing, and digitally preserving the traces of local social protest movements in the Americas. Phase 1 focused on feminist protests in Toluca, Mexico.
  • Margaret Cavendish: Philosophical and Physical Opinions, a digital edition of the 1663 version of the first version of this text to be transcribed and available to the public. The text was transcribed by 70+ participants from around the world in a transcribe-a-thon in the Fall of 2019, and published online using the Ed platform for static, minimal digital editions.

In Fall 2024, Brian will began leading the KU Libraries’ Institute for Globally Engaged Librarianship, a new initiative that seeks to develop global collaborations, exchanges, trainings, and other library-related programs with other libraries around the globe.

  • Courses taught

As a full-time librarian, Brian does not teach semester-long courses but has had the opportunity to lead shorter courses or sections of courses. As a Fulbright Specialist in 2022 he led a 6-week Introduction to Digital Humanities course at the University of Ghana. Since 2017 he has collaborated with Professor Rosario Rogel at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at  the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (Toluca), to incorporate student-driven digital humanities work into the classroom. A representative example is the website for the 2021 course “Founders of Sociology: Max Weber”

Research Interests

Brian’s current research interests include minimal computing approaches to digital humanities for those in low-resource regions; the intersection of public humanities and digital humanities; the emergence and use of shadow/pirate libraries for access to scholarship; and global perspectives in digital humanities and librarianship.

Contributions to TDHC and proposed project

Brian’s contribution to the TDHC  group will be to provide guidance–through workshops, consulting, and other programs–in developing digital projects with attention to appropriate platforms, metadata, planning, and sustainability, and to help facilitate cross-border partnerships for TDHC initiatives. Brian’s proposed project will relate to collaborative cross-border library initiatives to support digital archives and other digital humanities efforts.

Community and International Partners

Brian has served with or worked with organizations such as the Ghana  Library Association; EIFL, a not-for-profit organization that works with libraries to enable access to knowledge in developing and transition economy countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America; and Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, a special interest group dedicated to facilitating global collaboration and communication in digital humanities. He has worked with or established partnership  agreements with the University of Ghana, the University of Cuenca (Ecuador), and the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico; and has supported various community-driven digital humanities projects through the NEH-funded Public Digital Humanities Institute. He will be able to draw on those relationships as potential contributors to the TDHC consortium.