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…
This podcast by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) offers an excellent overview of “how technology can support researchers working in the arts and humanities…”. It provides a useful supplementary resource to my last post. It can be found in its original context here and on iTunes here.
‘Open Letters’ are often dramatic affairs, but this one has a more pragmatic purpose: to give New Zealand university staff working in the humanities a leg-up into the digital humanities, and point out where they should focus their attention. My activities over the past few years have hit the radar of some of my close colleagues, and latterly a slightly wider audience with the publication of this blog and www.humanitiesmachine.org.nz, but I’m constrained by only working in the digital humanities in my spare time, and outside a university setting. I’m grateful to Paul Millar at the University of Canterbury Humanities Computing Unit for both setting up the unit (it represents a significant advance) and adding me, and therefore my occasionally intemperate ideas, as a Research Associate, but we need to get more people onboard.
For those of you who follow my blog but aren’t on Twitter, a quick note that New Zealand now has a digital humanities portal. Humanities Machine is presented in partnership with the University of Canterbury’s Humanities Computing Unit, and has been put live slightly earlier than expected because of the recent earthquake. I view this very much as ‘Version 1.0′ and hope it can be developed further, perhaps even being completely remodeled and extended as part of an antipodean One Week One Tool kind of program.