I’ve been taken by the final report of the Comité des Sages (‘the reflection group on bringing Europe’s cultural heritage online’) , The New Renaissance (January 2011). It articulates a moral imperative that has long been a driving force of the digital humanities but is infrequently surfaced, perhaps for good reason given the dangers of mixing intellectual and cultural movements with claims that they coincide with the morally correct.
A few comments (specifically from @jasonaboyd) about infrastructure at the recent Victoria THATCamp sparked an idea, and I’ve thrown together a site called Academic AMIs: Ready to Eat Digital Humanities Infrastructure. The idea is that, while Amazon Web Services might not be suitable for all (or even many) digital humanities projects, and the platform isn’t exactly user friendly to people uncomfortable with the command line, it does offer an extremely scalable cloud infrastructure and a nice way to package up web application stacks for distribution.
The Story of Linux, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. A video from the Linux Foundation.
Tom Scheinfeldt’s recent blog entry ‘What Digital Humanists Like’ suggests the discipline is structured in a similar way to social networks, with the main conversation based on Twitter and an organizational structure best conceived as a series of horizontally (as opposed to vertically or hierarchically) organized nodes. My feeling is that the digital humanities also need to be conceptualized from the point of view of engineering and the history of technology, but that’s another issue.
People keeping an eye on the digital humanities Twitterverse (or Digital Humanities Now) may have already come across this set of slides describing CUNY’s move to develop a social university. I’m reposting here to pick up those people – hopefully New Zealanders! – who missed it. It’s time to get with the program…