This winter, I’ll join an MLA conference panel sponsored by the discussion group on Computer Studies in Language and Literature.  I’m among friends! and am looking forward to talking with Laura Mandell, Jason B. Jones, Timothy Powell, Jason Rhody, and our moderator, Tanya Clement.  Our panel is called “Links and Kinks in the Chain: Collaboration in the Digital Humanities.”  Here’s what I’ve offered for my bit:

New modes of interdisciplinary, tech-enabled research and production drive us to collaborate across an array of boundaries in the digital humanities.  It is no longer unusual for a scholar to lead a tight-knit, interdepartmental research group or function as part of an ad-hoc team that may include faculty colleagues, graduate students, designers, programmers, systems administrators, and librarians or other instructional technology and information specialists.  This is a good thing, and (in my experience) the most productive and interesting collaborations are grounded in a kind of professional and intellectual egalitarianism, or openness to the contributions of all team members.  But not all of the social boundaries inherent in digital humanities project-work can or should be ignored.  Read the rest of this entry »

This is a follow-up to my previous post, to say that the Scholars’ Lab has now issued an open call for applicants to its NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship. We’ll run three tracks of the Institute, with the first two (Stewardship and Software) happening concurrently this year, from November 15th to 18th (which happens to be GIS Day). The third track (Scholarship) will be held May 25th-28th, 2010. NEH will generously cover travel, lodging, and working meals for ten attendees in each of the first two tracks and twenty attendees in the third track. We’ve even built in a special funding for graduate student participants in track 3.

Because one goal of the Institute is to build the capacity of participating institutions (from the policy-and-collections-building side to the infrastructure-and-interfaces side to some serious scholars-bootstrapping-each-other goodness!), we encourage you to collaborate with your colleagues in IT, the library, your local (digital?) humanities center, and interested academic departments. We’ll be giving careful attention to applications from institutional “teams” who can be represented in each track — but individual applicants are encouraged, too.

The deadline for consideration for tracks 1 and 2 is September 1st. Track 3’s deadline is the 1st of December. Read all about the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, check out our amazing faculty, and apply at our website.

Graceful Degradation: Managing Digital Humanities Projects in Times of Transition and Decline

First announced at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, the “Graceful Degradation” survey is now open at:

http://graceful-degradation.questionpro.com/

This is a survey of the digital humanities community — broadly conceived — on project management in times of transition and decline, and what we see as the causes and outcomes of those times. We invite participation by anyone who has worked on a digital project in or related to the humanities.

Read the rest of this entry »