Sustainability hangs like an albatross over many DH projects. Funding is short term, projects come and go. Granting foundations have made it abundantly clear that they expect continuity measures beyond the period of a grant to insure greater permanence to their investments. Moreover, many DH practitioners find themselves in conditions of contingent funding, one grant rejection from ejection from their field.

While it seems like a given that sustainability is desirable, we need to better unpack issues around what gets sustained and how. The current framing of “sustainability” centers around organizational and project continuity made possible by clever business models that market some sort of service for fees. (Those of us working on open access or open data efforts need to be especially clever!).

Ideas about what sustainability means and how we should attain it draws very heavily from neoliberalism. Grants are a kind of no-interest venture capital loan. They are there to seed a project, get it going, and then it is up to the project to maintain itself. Success means a project (and its associated institution) has enough continued income to continue or even grow through non-grant sources. The need for sustainability whips us into shape, making us hard nosed, rational cost optimizers and entrepreneurs. Such discipline has a value, but at the same time, many practitioners when into the humanities because their passions and skills happen to align to (sadly difficult to monetize) humanistic interests.

What do we lose if we demand entrepreneuralism in every walk of life, even (digital) scholarship? Is this kind of vision of sustainability always desirable?

One danger may be the encouragement of monopolies or oligarchies where “sustainability” is not just a means to an end (some sort of public service), it becomes an end unto itself. Dominating a market place and crowding out rivals is surely sustainable. But what is the larger community cost of that sustainability? Secondly, the humanities and social sciences themselves are inherently “unsustainable”. They do not turn a profit, but rely on continued philanthropic or public support. Both funding sources are now stretched to the breaking point as politicians, pundits, university administrators, and increasingly debt-burdened students demand tangible, easily monetized returns on investing in these areas of scholarship. Do finance-centric models of sustainability in DH further aggravate these problems?

One runs the risk of sounding naïve and highly entitled to even raise these issues, like spoiled children asking to be spared from the harsh discipline of the marketplace. However, a critical and more expansive perspective on “sustainability” may be very timely, since all areas of the humanities are threatened by the reductionist balance-sheets of neoliberalism.

What other dimensions do we need to consider when we discuss “sustainability”? Do we need to think more in terms of sustaining knowledge and information “ecologies” rather than single efforts that happened to dominate now? How do we sustain our community’s human resources, their expertise, dedication, and passion, when so many of them only have contingent employment?

What connections currently exist between developments in digital humanities and developments in online education (whether the much ballyhooed MOOCs or other varieties of online education; whether in the K-12 context or that of higher education)? What connections might be productively made? In what ways is the public discourse about online education likely to affect–or even set–the agenda for work in the digital humanities? In what ways have projects in the digital humanities been feeding into face-to-face education and what might that suggest about continuities and differences about the ways in which digital humanities projects might feed into online education? Is online education a self-evident “partner” for work in digital humanities or is the relationship between these two enterprises more complicated than that? I’d be interested in hearing about people’s experiences at the intersection of these two trends and their thoughts about future developments along these lines.

In a recent essay, “Critical Theory and the Mangle of Digital Humanities,” Todd Presner identifies as the core Utopian idea of the Digital Humanities, “participation without condition.” For Presner this concept begins with how DH is making the walls of the academy porous through its “conceiving of scholarship in ways that foundationally involve community partners, cultural institutions, the private sector, non-profits, government agencies, and slices of the general public,” thus expanding “both the notion of scholarship and the public sphere in order to create new sites and nodes of engagement, documentation, and collaboration.” In so doing, DHers “are able to place questions of social justice and civic engagement, for example, front-and-center; they are able to revitalize the cultural record in ways that involve citizens in the academic enterprise and bring the academy into the expanded public sphere.”

Presner’s discussion of what might be called DH’s “Participatory Turn” can be reformulated for humanities scholars and teachers into a more specific and crucial question concerning how we might best reach productively beyond the walls of the literary classroom. Such a question gains added force from three relevant contexts: (1) David Marshall’s observation that the current academy is a 19^th century institution in which a 20^th century curriculum is taught to 21^st century students; (2) The fact that most humanities undergraduates don’t even know that there is such a thing as humanities research; and (3) The assertion made by Donald Brinkman of Microsoft Research that humanists don’t just need “big data,” they need “deep data.” These contexts raise at least three important questions: (1) How can humanists bring our research into the graduate and undergraduate classroom?; (2) How can we best curate and explore our datasets? and (3) How can we fruitfully engage the public, “citizen humanists,” in the work of the humanities, helping to deepen our data and the questions we ask of it?

I think these are key questions both for the future of DH and the future of the Humanities, well worth discussing at a THATCamp devoted to Leadership. They cut across many aspects of DH work, from teaching, to coding, to archives, to editing, to publishing, to licensing, and crowdsourcing.

There is lots of talk these days about  inclusivity and DH.  Some of this talk extends to disciplinary inclusivity.  In light of my own disciplinary background (“I’m not a humanist, but I hang around in the digital humanities community” blah, blah, blah…most people have heard my schtick) I’m really interested in talking about strategies that DH can use to engage with the the social science community (and the more digitally inclined scholars therein). Are there bridges to be built?  Are the bridges already there (and this discussion is pretty much moot)?  Are there things that each community can teach one another?  Is that link already there? Is this kind of discussion even valuable any more (given the fact that it could easily stray into the endless, pointless, and painful quagmire of “what is DH”). I’ve definitely got thoughts (given that I’m a social scientist who hangs out a lot with DH folks)…

In my university, the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, the Dean of Studies and the Academic Service decided recently to introduce systematically the use of an anti-plagiarism software. The reason is for single Ph.D. researchers to look at the various chapters and drafts of their dissertation during the four years research/writing process and verify the originality of the contents. We want to avoid to have researchers be shamed and expelled out of the community of scholars like this student in Norway!

So, at the end of the process, when the thesis is submitted, each supervisor should perform this new task against plagiarism directly on the manuscript of his/her supervise. This task -and the instruments that are available to perform it- are today an evidence of the worldwide shift towards digital. It is taken for granted that everything we write is somewhere in the virtual space and can be retrieved and analyzed to avoid using someone else’s ideas without acknowledging it. This is an extraordinary shift in the humanities sciences towards “other” humanities. It introduced a bit of digital humanities for everybody in a way!

At the EUI, this task which was performed by the staff of the Dean of Studies and the Academic Service, has now to be performed directly by the thesis supervisor before the decision taken by the departments to officially accept that a candidate submit a thesis for discussion with the jury. The software Turnitin has been chosen and new administrative rules introduced on how to use it. Now, scholars on both side of the Ph.D. writing process: he who writes it and he who is supervising it, are both involved with digital tools. This is something that never happened before.

Introductory courses to plagiarism, originality check, good academic practices and, finally, to Turnitin itself, have been organized for the first time this academic year 2013-2014 for all new doctoral researchers. As History Information Specialist, I was asked to give my contribution both to the general discussion about plagiarism and to the correct way to use quotations in one’s own research/writing activity. As far as the history department is concerned, I am helping to prepare all its members –researchers, fellows and professors- to understand how they should proceed with the software. I will teach some Atelier Multimédia courses about it. For doing so, I would like to have the input of THATcamp Leadership. The first introductory course, the 8th of October will be about Good Academic Practice and the Avoidance of Plagiarism. But it’s not this specific contribution -in the EUI context- that I would like to question here. I would like to bring to the attention of THATcamp Leadership participants, what were the many queries and reflections on the use of such a software that challenged –at least for me- a “simple” task: showing how to use Turnitin. This task became more complicated than I thought. I started to think beyond plagiarism and to look at what an “originality check” was meaning in a new digital scholarly process in the Humanities and History. What could we all do with Turnitin ?  And taken for granted that all EUI scholars will have to use it, what should I tell to those who never used any software before?

So my questions to TC Leadership would be to look at this software (and other similar softwares) from a different viewpoint. Is it possible to allow our community of humanists and social scientists to integrate one of the most important methods that enriched the process of document retrieval and document analysis in the field of Digital Humanities -“text-mining”- when teaching how to use a plagiarism software? Here are some possible issues to discuss during THATcamp:

• Turnitin is a software against plagiarism. Are they any other softwares you would recommend and why? Anything in the OA/OS world ?
• Do you use these softwares only for originality checking and fighting plagiarism?
• Which other tasks could they perform ? Are they allowing us to know more and more easily about the deep web contents? And if so how and why?
• How could we trace the originality of translated texts -from English to other languages and vice-versa-, using different languages corpora?
• Could we think to use Turnitin to understand who is quoting what and in which contexts and the many other ways we interact with big online commercial textual databases like EEBO, ECCO, MOMW I & II, etc., or with open access web databases like Rousseau online ?
• Up to which extend, these textual databases accessed through Turnitin, would allow contextualized keyword searching, similarity searching, frequency searching, etc., so to understand if a quotation we plan to use has already been used entirely or partially in other writings, how, where and by whom?
• Could we perform with Turnitin a much more complex citations search then the one we were allowed to perform from years now with the Web of Knowledge (ISI) when, looking at the footnotes in a scholarly paper, we deduce that if somebody uses the same quotations, he/she may research in the same field and have similar ideas?
• Which text-mining activities are allowed using these software’s if we accept the fact that Turnitin is a good Digital Humanities tool, able to perform one of the most important tasks within “big amount of data’s”: distance/close reading, searching for contexts, origin of quotations, places of words in millions of documents?
• And, as a consequence, could we discuss if this is not only about plagiarism but if these kind of software’s may become a vector to introducing wider communities –not only the digital humanities community- to  new ways to perform their research activities? Are they taking care in a daily research activity -and even without knowing about it-, of some characteristics, of both the linguistic turn and the digital turn if we may use big concepts ?

Turnitin seems to be an instrument that allows new digital experiments with, unfortunately some technical limitations. Our session could try to problematically look at the systematic introduction of these tools in universities worldwide: now that you know how to use it and what’s in it, which tasks do you think you could perform with such a tool ? In what ways this instrument could become useful to you ? And, this is maybe the most important question, in a global world where digital documents and primary sources aren’t all written in English, how these experiments with digital texts could take care of  different cultural and linguistic frameworks ?

I’d like to propose a show-and-tell session for people who are making maps or want to get started with them. Anyone who wants to participate can spend a few minutes showing a map they made—and preferably, actually rendering the map in front of everyone else. Hopefully we’ll have a diversity of mapping methods which will give us a quick overview of the possibilities. Then for the remainder of the session, we’ll talk about what was interesting in the maps we saw, and how to make them. Perhaps we’ll break up into smaller groups so that mapping masters can give impromptu tutorials to beginners. By bringing together all the mapmakers into one place, I hope people will also be able to find someone who has already solved some of the problems they’re facing.

It seems like I know many early adopters in the digital humanities, especially at small liberal arts colleges.  I’m interested in how we can cross the chasm.  How do we move digital humanities into the mainstream? Having recently started a new position as Director of Instructional and Emerging Technology, I am conscious of the need to encourage innovation but also to move innovations into the mainstream (and figuring out which ones deserve to be moved).  We also have a task force on Academic Innovation and New Educational Approaches working right now.

One article about spreading innovation in science education is: Adrianna Kezar. “The Path to Pedagogical Reform in the Sciences: Engaging Mutual Adaptation and Social Movement Models of Change.” Liberal Education 98, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 40–45. It is available online here: www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-wi12/kezar.cfm

Discussion might center on successful strategies for evaluating innovation and spreading it across campus.