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 […]
Continue readingLet’s face it: intellectual property is confusing, and the concept of “open” is even more confusing. I’ve had collection directors assert that if they make low-resolution thumbnail images of their collections available online then they have satisfied the requirements of “open access.” The Open Knowledge Foundation has published a working definition of what open means, […]
Continue readingA bunch of people locked in a conference room for a weekend is a poor way to decide who gets funded and who goes away empty handed. There has to be a better way. I’d like to explore how we might use the rapid, iterative, team-based methodologies of “scrum” to create a fairer, more accurate, […]
Continue readingWhen the grant funding for the THATCamp project runs out at the end of March 2014, my position as THATCamp Coordinator will also end. I personally am not too worried about the future of THATCamp: it’s already sustaining itself very well, and to some extent I think that even if people cease to organize or […]
Continue readingIn 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 […]
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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 […]
Continue readingFirst of all, I should explain what I mean by “carpentry” in this context. I’m borrowing the idea from Ian Bogost, who describes carpentry as the practice of making philosophical and scholarly inquiries by constructing artifacts rather than writing words. Instead of writing an essay about Thoreau’s Walden, why not make an argument by building […]
Continue readingTHATCamp 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 […]
Continue readingThis is a session for those of us who are digital humanities enthusiasts and users, but not technical whizzes or programmers. How do we become better advocates for the digital humanities in our institutions? How do we integrate the development of digital libraries into our strategic plans/processes? How do we find “best practices” for institutions […]
Continue readingAs a member of the #transformDH collective, I want to propose a session where folks can discuss some of the transformative work in DH that is addressing issues of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nation, etc. Additionally, I hoped that we could create a zotero Library of these sources. Adeline Koh created a wonderful google doc […]
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