‘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.

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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.

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I’ve been blogging a bit more than I planned to these last few weeks, but want to draw readers attention to this video of Krisztina Holly, Vice Provost for Innovation at the University of Southern California, speaking about the way digital scholarship will change university research. It’s doing the rounds of academic Twitter streams and is associated with the recent buzz over an article on open access review policies that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on August 24th. Click here to see Holly’s video.

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People involved in the digital humanities will presumably be interested in this, but it will probably be of interest to anyone involved in developing university courses in situations where proof of alignment to the ‘real world’ is required. I’m referring to the UK’s Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA).

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DARIAH has published the results of a survey into the state of the digital humanities in Greece that should interest New Zealand humanists. Greece is at an early stage of development and work is being done to identify present and future requirements. The report can be read here. It may interest more traditional researchers to learn how digital humanities infrastructures are being built around the world; simply put, it isn’t as organic as it was in the ‘early days’, when communities of like-minded researchers found each other and worked to gain critical mass.

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