Speaker: Glen Layne-Worthey, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: In a bona fide classic in the Digital Humanities canon, John Unsworth proposed seven “scholarly primitives” for humanities research: shared methods in the “traditional” humanities that he suggested should be reflected in the digital tools we create. Although Unsworth articulated these thoughts more than a quarter-century ago, he meant them to reflect longstanding scholarly practice, and by the same token they should reflect future scholarly practice as well — digital, AI-enhanced, and whatever comes next.
Consistent with the stated purpose of the GLOW-Ready project, Unsworth’s scholarly primitives begin with “Discovery” — but crucially, they go beyond that. This talk will focus on a few more of Unsworth’s scholarly primitives that I would hope we keep in mind as we make government information “GenAI-Ready”: Annotation, Comparison, Reference, Sampling, Illustrating, and Representing.
Bio: Glen Layne-Worthey is the Associate Director for Research Support Services in the HathiTrust Research Center, based in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences. Glen was Digital Humanities Librarian in the Stanford University Libraries from 1997 through 2019, and was the founding head of the Libraries’ Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), and a founding member of the Stanford Literary Lab.
Long active in the international Digital Humanities community, he hosted the international DH2011 conference at Stanford, and was co-chair of the Program Committee for DH2018 in Mexico City. He recently served as Executive Board Chair in the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), and as co-convener of its “DH in Libraries” Special Interest Group. He is co-editor (with Isabel Galina) of The Routledge Companion to Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities, published in 2025.
In 2021 through 2023, Glen served as US PI (with Lise Jaillant as UK PI) of the international AEOLIAN project, jointly funded by the US National Endowment for the Humanities and the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council. Lise, Glen, and other AEOLIAN colleagues co-edited the volume Navigating Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Heritage Organisations, also published in 2025.