We had a great discussion in the crowdsourcing session, with special thanks to Ben Brumfield for sharing his expertise and the Collaborative Manuscript Transcription Blog and to Elizabeth Hansen for sharing her practical experience with the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. We took notes in a Google Doc, which you can see here: Crowdsourcing.
Posts Tagged collaboration
Crowdsourcing Notes
Apr 19
DH Commons
Apr 12
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?
