Much of the work in archival processing, documentary editing, exhibition and digitization involves spending a lot of time doing a series of tasks one after another with the end goal of “the big thing.” At the end there is finding aid and a collection available to researchers, or a volume of edited manuscripts or a large exhibition. I’ve been increasingly thinking that it’s in our best interest to make these into smaller discrete products that would come at varying degrees of polish and finish.

Elsewhere I’ve suggested that it’s in the best interest of cultural heritage organizations to start doing less and doing it more often. That is turn out smaller work products on a regular basis. Short blog posts, description of items as they are done, etc. I still think that is important. With that said, I’ve seen a lot of situations where there are significant bottlenecks in attempting to do this work in serial, when much of it could happen in parallel and help get more of the stuff of digital collections out there and potentially create opportunities for members of the public to help out.

For example, I know of one organization that insists on doing item level description for every item they digitize. The result is that there is a massive bottleneck in cataloging. So why not just digitize things with minimal collection level metadata and let other folks describe.

So I’d be interested in thinking through this with anyone else interested. Specifically I’d imagine

1. Sharing a few example workflows for digital collection/exhibition projects at different organizations
2. Picking one or two that the group thinks to be generally interesting and making diagrams of them to identify bottlenecks
3. Thinking through and sketching out how we could make them turn out more frequent smaller products and get more of the work happening in parallel.

THATCamp has opened up many opportunities for participants to share and develop skills in areas such as text mining, project management, material culture, and digital pedagogy (to mention just a few of the topics I’ve seen in browsing past THATCamps). But I want to take a step back and ask what are the skills important to digital scholarship?  My interest in the topic comes in part from my work with colleagues on a Mellon-sponsored global benchmarking study examining the skills and competencies necessary to support (and practice) digital scholarship.  I think there are some important commonalities between this proposed session and Rebecca Davis’ proposal to explore “Learning Outcomes for a Globally Networked World,” but the focus here would be more on scholars/librarians/technologists/professionals than undergraduates. (It might be interesting to compare lists of skills and competencies important to these different constituencies.)

In addition to understanding what skills and competencies are important to digital scholarship, I’d also like to explore how best to cultivate these skills. How do digital humanities centers and programs help their members to gain the skills and knowledge to do innovative, significant work? I love the spirit of exploration, collaboration and play embodied by THATCamp, but I also see the need to enable digital humanists at various levels of experience to hone their skills over a longer period of time than a day or a day and a half. (Ryan also points to the need to go beyond 101 in some THATCamp sessions.) Could we imagine new variants of the THATCamp model? Are there possibilities for online/ hybrid training, mentoring, local reading groups, partnerships with DH centers, iterative THATCamps, etc?