I’ve been working with a group of digital humanists from a variety of institutional types who are seeking to break down silos between large and small institutions in the world of digital humanities. We are especially interested in how we can can help the isolated digital humanist connect with the rest of the community.
DHCommons seeks to ameliorate the isolation of digital humanists at colleges and universities without the institutional infrastructure to support digital scholarship. At a number of research institutions, digital humanities centers reduce isolation by providing technology, expertise, and mentoring to scholars. Such resources, however, are not available to many scholars, especially at smaller institutions. Lone digital humanists must independently (and repeatedly) argue for the value of their work. Their disconnection prevents them from learning about standards, resources, and ongoing projects, so that their work may not inter-operate with other projects or may reduplicate efforts. To address these challenges, DHCommons will build an inter-institutional infrastructure for digital humanities collaboration through several related innovations:
- A new hub at dhcommons.org will help digital humanists discover and contact potential collaborators: to find and join projects.
- Microgrants to encourage scholars to develop curriculum in conjunction with existing projects, travel to partner digital humanities centers for training or project mentoring, etc.
- Expertise sharing among schools without digital humanities infrastructure
Groups like CenterNet are helping by connecting centers, and THATCamps certainly help isolated digital humanists build regional ties. DHCommons hopes to complement these efforts. We envision a dual audience, both identified and potential digital humanists.
As we develop this idea, we are seeking the following input:
- How does the technology and human infrastructure relate to one another?
- Do you know of failed experiments with similar projects? (or successful ones?)
- How do you compel and encourage participation?
- How do we launch such a thing?
- What would be most useful for you?
- One idea we had was using microgrants to encourage development of curricular modules, e.g., student reviews of Tools in the DiRT wiki (which I proposed as another session)
- What elements would the technology tool need, e.g., profile lists the tools they use, projects looking for collaboraters,etc.?
- With what resources or hubs should this integrate, e.g., DHAnswers, etc.?
- What kind of help would you want from such an effort?
- What questions are we not asking?
#1 by Ben Brumfield on April 14, 2011 - 2:50 pm
It seems to me that there might be a lot of value in a community concentrating on the lone DHers within academia, even if such a community would exclude folks like me who are outside it. Issues regarding tenure and promotion–even pedagogy–might well be central to such a community while being irrelevant to the rest of us.
So I wouldn’t say that DHCommons should necessarily attempt to include the entire DH big tent — especially if it’s not trying to supplant the other places (DHAnswers, Twitter) where that conversation takes place.
#2 by Jasmine Mulliken on April 14, 2011 - 4:07 am
I like this proposal very much. I’m about to graduate from the University of Texas at Austin, which has a fantastic infrastructure and potential for the digital humanities. I feel I’ve had a lot of great opportunities there to work with new technologies and talented people, but I’m worried that the job I end up getting will be quite limiting in comparison. I’d be very interested in ways to keep up with the DH community even if the institution I work at does not provide as much support as larger universities like UT.
#3 by Rebecca Davis on April 13, 2011 - 2:42 pm
Ben, you pose a good question. I work primarily with small liberal arts colleges, but so we’ve been thinking of faculty, librarians and technologists in academia. But, I think it would be helpful to think of institutions outside of academia, as well. In addition, liberal arts colleges value community-based learning, so I could imagine some interesting partnerships developing that might allow students to work with museums, archives, etc.
For example, in 2010 a student from Hamilton College who interns in their Digital Humanities initiative (DHi) had two summer internships in NYC, including the chance to select material to preserve and showcase from a large collection called Homovisiones, from a cable news program dedicated to queer Puerto Ricans and Latinos in NYC. She also worked in public programming for a museum in Spanish Harlem.
#4 by Ben Brumfield on April 13, 2011 - 12:59 am
It would be useful to know more about the community you hope to serve. Will DHCommons be restricted to academia, or will it be open to similarly isolated digital humanists at museums, archives, libraries, or other/no institutional types?
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