Contribute to the TxDHC Newsletter

Would you like to raise awareness among the Texas digital humanities community about a new program or grant, recent hire, upcoming event, open opportunity or other news item? Contribute your news to the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium’s upcoming newsletter. We plan to distribute the newsletter online and via email to members of the TxDHC’s website in early August.  (And if you’re not a member of the TxDHC website, please sign up–ideally using your professional email address.) Please submit your news item(s) by August 1, 2017 at https://goo.gl/forms/t56S5SROS7OFSgZr2.

While the audience for the TxDHC Newsletter is Texas digital humanists, folks from outside Texas are welcome to contribute items of interest to this group. Note that the newsletter editor retains discretion over what will be published.

We look forward to learning about what’s new!

(Cross-posted from TxDHC website.)

Advertisement

Submit Your Proposal for the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium One-Day Conference

I love the open, freewheeling conversations commonly found at THATCamps, but I sometimes wish that some sessions were more grounded in specificity–and that participants could get CV-worthy credit for leading them. At the Texas Digital Humanities Consortium’s May 27 mini-conference, we aim to mashup the best of THATCamp and traditional conferences: to provide a forum where a researcher or group of researchers will present their work for 15 minutes and then lead the participants in discussion or experimentation inspired by the presentation for the rest of the hour. We hope that this hybrid approach will give presenters the opportunity to share their work, get credit for it, and receive feedback on it and participants to explore issues raised by the session and generate new insights. This approach resembles one of my favorite class formats: begin with a brief lecture to establish the context, then launch into a dynamic discussion to allow for deeper exploration. For example, presenters might discuss a project to create a digital audio archive, then facilitate a discussion about challenges such as annotation and digital preservation. Or a session might focus on a GIS project to map patterns of oppression in a particular region, opening up into a conversation about how to deal with uncertainty in data and include the perspectives of oppressed communities. We’re open to a variety of approaches. All proposals will undergo peer review, which will ensure the quality of the conference. Please see the CFP at https://conferences.tdl.org/tcdl/index.php/TCDL/index/pages/view/txdhc

The Texas Digital Humanities Consortium is organizing this mini-conference in collaboration with the fine folks at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL); it will be held immediately after TCDL at the Commons Learning Center on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in Austin, Texas. We intend to keep the mini-conference to about 50 registrants, which should allow for rich conversation and networking. Through the event, we hope to deepen connections among scholars, librarians, cultural heritage professionals, technologists and graduate students.

The deadline for proposals is coming up soon on February 12, 2016 (note the new deadline). Feel free to send any questions to lisamspiro@gmail.com, and please help spread the word about the event. We look forward to some terrific proposals.

[cross-posted to TXDHC]

More Data, Better Learning? A Balanced Look at Adaptive Learning Systems

Here at the slides from my second presentation at the IB Heads World Conference: “More Data, Better Learning? A Balanced Look at Adaptive Learning Systems.” See also my bookmarks.

Rev: Added missing citation 10-5-13.

Only Connect: Global Education and Networked Participatory Learning

I’m honored to be presenting at the IB Heads World Conference on global collaborative learning. Here are my slides. I’ve bookmarked many resources as well.

Call for Submissions to Anvil’s Built Upon Series

Following last week’s call for archives to participate in Anvil Academic‘s Built Upon initiative, I’m now pleased to announce that we’ve released our call for authors to contribute to the series. If you are interested in producing a work of digital scholarship that makes creative, effective use of digital collections, please consider submitting a proposal.

Current archives partners include:

• Civil War America: partners include Visualizing Emancipation, Valley of the Shadow, and the University of Florida Digital Collections’ Florida and the Civil War
• 19th-Century Studies: partners include many of the NINES federated projects, and the University of Florida Digital Collections’ The Parkman Dexter Howe Library and Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature
• Classical Studies: partners include Perseus, ORBIS, and Homer Multitext

We hope to announce additional partners soon. You’re welcome to work with digital collections other than the ones listed here.  Initial “Built Upon” works will be clustered based upon the broad categories listed above.

Call for Digital Collections to Participate in Anvil’s New Built Upon Series

Although there are a number of excellent digital collections in the humanities, I’m troubled that many don’t get the scholarly recognition and usage that they deserve.  Moreover, it seems that there are too few examples of works of digital scholarship that make use of such collections in imaginative ways, such as by employing text mining, image analysis, or other algorithmic approaches,  crafting scholarly arguments that take advantage of the affordances of digital publishing, or inviting the audience to explore supporting evidence. I suspect that one reason for the paucity of such scholarship is the lack of appropriate publishing venues (although there are some terrific journals in this space, including Vectors, Southern Spaces, Kairos, Sensate and Archive).

That’s why Anvil Academic (the start-up digital publisher for which I serve as program manager) is launching the Built Upon series.

Building Blocks by Holger Zscheyge

Contributors to Built Upon will develop digital scholarly arguments or pedagogical projects that make innovative use of digital collections and tools. These contributions will be arranged into thematic clusters (such as “Civil War America”), and we expect that the contributions will be in conversation with each other and with their larger audience.

Soon we will release our call for authors, which will provide more details about our expectations for Built Upon contributions. At this stage, we are inviting digital collections (aka digital archives, digital libraries, etc) in the humanities to participate in the Built Upon series.  As Built Upon partners, digital collections would make their resources available for scholarly use (which many already do) and provide limited technical assistance to authors. We also invite partners to participate in the peer review process and to assist with outreach and promotion efforts. Already Anvil has lined up some first-rate partners, including Visualizing Emancipation, Valley of the Shadow, many of the NINES federated projects, and ORBIS.  For more about this initiative, please see yesterday’s announcement on the Anvil web site.

Presentations on the Future of Libraries and Open Humanities

Yesterday I started the day by discussing the future of academic libraries with an sharp, engaged group of faculty, librarians and staff at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and ended it by advocating for open humanities at WPI’s conference Digitize This: Exploring/Exploiting the Rise of Digital Arts & Digital Humanities. It was a kick that three people whom I consider to be leaders in open humanities–John Unsworth, Julia Flanders and Tom Scheinfeldt–were at my evening presentation.

Here are the slides from my presentations (PDF):

• “Perceiving and Shaping the Future of Academic Libraries”
• “What If We Give It Away?”

For those who want more, I’ve been obsessively bookmarking resources on open humanities and the future of libraries.

Thanks to Dr. Tracey Leger-Hornby, WPI’s Dean of Library Services and my classmate at the Frye Leadership Institute (go class of 2003!), for hosting my visit, and Prof. Joshua Rosenstock for making it possible for me to speak at the DH symposium.

Update, 11/16/12: After being notified by an attentive reader (thanks Dad!) that my slides contained some typos, I’ve uploaded corrected versions. I hope I caught ’em all.

Anvil Academic Launches

Since June, I have been working as program manager of Anvil Academic, a new all-digital, open publisher for the digital humanities. Over the past four months, we’ve built a stellar editorial board, met with our advisory board and with colleagues at the University of Michigan’s MPublishing, done some preliminary work identifying potential publications, and developed a web site in partnership with Interactive Mechanics. I’m pleased to announce that our web site is now publicly available and that Anvil is officially launched. Like Anvil itself, we expect that the web site will undergo significant changes; for now it functions mainly to promote our vision and to offer basic information for potential authors. In the coming months, it will provide an access point for our publications.

So what sort of publications will Anvil produce? Anvil focuses on born-digital humanities scholarship that could not exist in print form, such as works that are built upon rich collections of data and offer tools for analyzing and exploring that data; multimodal compositions that incorporate audio, video, images, simulations, and/or other rich media; works of networked authorship, which engage the community in ongoing online conversation; and flexible, interactive educational content. But we are open to forms and genres beyond what we’ve identified here. In evaluating potential projects, Anvil will consider factors such as their quality, contributions to scholarship, technical robustness, level of innovation, and likely audience.  Please get in touch with Fred Moody, Anvil’s editor, if you would like to discuss a potential project.

Anvil has the potential to make a significant contribution to the humanities and to academic publishing. It addresses the need to bring publishing services such as peer review, distribution, and editing to the digital humanities. I hope that Anvil will help to increase the visibility and credibility of digital humanities scholarship and perhaps assist the field in continuing to develop argumentative and interpretive frameworks. Since I’ve had a long-standing interest in open access publishing models for the humanities, I welcome the opportunity to help build the structures to support open scholarship. I see open access as an ethical obligation, a means to increase the value and visibility of humanities scholarship, and an opportunity to foster scholarly conversations with diverse, engaged communities. As a start-up, we have latitude to experiment with different dimensions of publishing in a way consistent with the values of the digital humanities, including peer review (open, peer-to-peer, hybrid), business models, genres, etc.  We plan to share the results of such experiments.

If you’d like to learn more about Anvil, please participate in a Twitterchat with  me (@lisaspiro), Fred Moody (@moodyfred), and Korey Jackson (@koreybjackson, Program Coordinator and Analyst) on Friday, October 5 at 12 EDT; we will be using the #anvil hashtag. The Twitterchat will be facilitated by editorial board member Adeline Koh (@adelinekoh), who recently wrote two ProfHacker pieces about Anvil: an introduction to Anvil and an interview with Fred Moody.  Of course, I also welcome questions and comments.

Startups and the Digital Humanities

THATCamp ranks as my favorite conference experience, mostly because it blows apart the passivity and formality of a traditional conference to get to the essence, bringing people together to share ideas. After attending Startup Weekend Houston a few weeks ago, I now have another event to add to my list of favorite conferencey experiences. Just as THATCamp challenges attendees to set and steer the agenda, Startup Weekend leaves a lot up to the participants, who have 54 hours to pitch a product idea (typically tech-related), form teams, validate their idea, develop a business model, and put together a demo and a longer pitch.

Houston Startup Weekend Saturday Nov 2011-4 by sarahmworthy

Like THATCamps, Startup Weekends are low-cost ($99 or less), community-driven events that take place around the world and are run primarily by volunteers, who receive help from the Startup Weekend’s central office in staging the event. Startup Weekend provides the key challenge, overarching structure, and access to many of the resources you need to build your project, such as excellent mentors, tools that help you to flesh out your ideas, coffee, good food (including a nirvana-inducing chocolate malt cupcake from Houston’s fabulous Kitchen Incubator), and meeting space.

Kitchen Incubator feeds Houston Startup Weekend Nov 2011-2, by sarahmworthy

Some might wonder what entrepreneurship training has to do with the digital humanities (DH), but I believe that the two communities have much in common and can learn from each other.  As startup guru Steve Blank suggests, startups exist to “search for a repeatable and scalable business model,” which itself is “how your company creates, delivers and captures value.” While DH projects typically don’t form companies and don’t aim to make a profit, most do need to consider how to define their value, find users and sustain themselves. To get off the ground, DH projects go through a process similar to a start-up: identifying a need and potential solution, drafting project plans, putting together a team, building a prototype, iterating on that prototype, and disseminating the product (whether a tool, collection, model, publication, or large-scale research). Both the DH and lean startup communities have embraced similar principles, such as agile development, user-focused design, open source software, and iteration. In a broader sense, I believe that DH brings the spirit of entrepreneurship–taking risks, experimenting, building something that serves a need, innovating, tolerating failure–to the humanities. We can see this spirit manifested in the NEH’s Digital Humanities Start-Up grants, the many digital humanities “Labs” (a term also used frequently by startups and tech companies), and One Week One Tool, which was inspired by “crash ‘startup’ or ‘blitz weekends’.” In a sense, many DH centers serve as startup incubators, providing the know-how and support to help get an idea off the ground.

Events like Startup Weekend could address a need in the DH community for more training in successfully launching projects. Often graduate training in the humanities does not prepare people for the complexities of getting a major DH project started and keeping it going. Such training is now being offered at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (taught by Lynne Siemens, a professor in U Victoria’s school of public administration who does research in entrepreneurship and academic team development), at THATCamp workshops (such as Sharon Leon’s Introduction to Project Management in Digital Humanities), as part of DH educational programs such as UVA’s Praxis Program, and in publications such as Sharon Leon’s Project Management for Humanists:Preparing Future Primary Investigators.  I think StartUp Weekend offers another compelling model for providing training in a fast, fun and experiential way.

Here some ideas from Startup Weekend that I think have relevance for the DH community:

• challenge & competition: At Startup Weekend, your team competes against others to persuade a panel of expert judges that your product is the best. Competition adds energy and intensity to the weekend (and a little stress).
• criteria: In evaluating projects, judges assess customer validation, business model, and execution, as well as overall effectiveness. These criteria help to structure the challenge and give teams concrete elements on which to spend their limited time. If you look at grant guidelines, different terms are used, but the criteria are similar. Have you conducted needs analysis to determine whether there is an audience for your project? Have you validated whether your ideas will meet those needs? Do you have a model for sustaining the project?
• collaboration: Like many DH projects, Startup Weekend requires collaboration among a range of people, including developers, designers, and business development specialists. Not only do you create a better product, but you also learn from each other–and have more fun in the process.
• mentors: Startup Weekend Houston recruited a great group of mentors who gave up part or all of their weekend to work with project teams. Mentors asked tough questions, suggested ways to approach problems, connected us with people who could help us test or advance our ideas, and provided feedback on startup ideas and business plans. The DH community also offers mentors, such as through the ACH mentoring program.
• communication: As you try to explain your project to a range of people, from a provost  to your next-door neighbor, it helps to know how to pitch an idea succinctly and persuasively. At Startup Weekend, the first big event (following noshing and networking) is the pitch, where you have one minute to describe your project idea and persuade others to join your team. Startup Weekend culminates in a pitch contest, where teams make four-minute pitches to convince the judges that their project is the best. Mentors can help you to develop an effective pitch, and you learn by doing.
• tools: The startup community has created some handy templates that help teams crystallize the core elements of their startup idea, particularly the Lean Canvas or Business Model Canvas. Developing such a model forces you to think through key questions and gives you a handy reference as you share your ideas with others.

Startup Weekend has recently begun sponsoring events focused on education, as documented by Audrey Watters’ great series of posts on gatherings in DC, Seattle and San Francisco. Why not Startup Weekend Digital Humanities? Of course, the digital humanities community already offers some events that serve a similar purpose. For example, at this year’s MLA Convention the DH Commons is hosting a workshop in which veteran digital humanists will share tips on succeeding in the digital humanities and lead small group sessions on topics such as project management, community building, and topic modeling. Although the workshop is now full, DH Commons is also sponsoring a project mixer where people can learn about DH projects that they can help out with. If you have a DH project and want to recruit volunteers or spread the word about it at the mixer, please sign up. (I’m a member of the DH Commons team and would be happy to answer any questions.)  In a broader sense, I believe that entrepreneurial thinking can help higher education tackle some thorny challenges, such as improving learning, reducing costs while maintaining quality, and reforming scholarly communication. Thus I’m exploring how to bring entrepreneurial thinking to the liberal arts community through my work at NITLE.

Getting Started in the Digital Humanities

Last week I presented at the Great Lakes College Association’s New Directions workshop on digital humanities (DH), where I tried to answer the question “Why the digital humanities?” But I discovered that an equally important question is “How do you do the digital humanities”?  Although participants seemed to be excited about the potential of digital humanities, some weren’t sure how to get started and where to go for support and training.

Building on the slides I presented at the workshop, I’d like to offer some ideas for how a newcomer might get acquainted with the community and dive into DH work. I should emphasize that many in the DH community are to some extent self-taught and/or gained their knowledge through work on projects rather than through formal training. In my view, what’s most important is being open-minded, experimental, and playful, as well as grounding your learning in a specific project and finding insightful people with whom can you discuss your work.

• Determine what goals or questions motivate you. As with any project, a research question, intellectual passion, or pedagogical goal should drive your work.  Digital humanities is not technology for the sake of technology. It can encompass a wide range of work, such as building digital collections, constructing geo-temporal visualizations, analyzing large collections of data, creating 3D models, re-imagining scholarly communication, facilitating participatory scholarship, developing theoretical approaches to the artifacts of digital culture, practicing innovative digital pedagogy, and more.
• Get acquainted with the digital humanities
• The CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide, which was produced collaboratively, offers an excellent introduction to digital humanities, covering sample projects, syllabi, “hot topics,” journals, and more.
• Ask or answer a question on DH Questions & Answers, a “a community-based Q&A board” where people weigh on everything from designing a digital history curriculum to computational analysis of perspective in art.
• Look through Blackwell’s Companion to the Digital Humanities, which collects essays from some leading thinkers in DH (and based on my preliminary research seems to be the most commonly assigned text in DH courses). Another frequently assigned text is Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web.
• Skim journals in the Digital Humanities, including  Digital Humanities Quarterly, LLC, and Digital Studies / Le champ numérique.
• Participate in the DH community. Frankly, I think that the energy, creativity and collegiality of the DH community is one reason to become a digital humanist.
• Attend a THATCamp. At a THATCamp, participants spend the first session setting up the agenda, drawing from blog posts they contributed prior to the event. They devote the rest of the time to hands-on workshops and discussions about topics such as pedagogy, text visualization, and collaboration.  These inexpensive, interactive, non-hierarchical unconferences typically are organized regionally (Toronto, New England, Bay Area, New Mexico) or by theme (pedagogy, publishing, liberal arts colleges, games, museums). You can learn a lot just by browsing the session proposals and summaries from past THATCamps, so I’m excited that PressForward, the innovative publishing venture from the Center for History and New Media, will soon publish Proceedings of THATCamp.  (I enjoyed my THATCamp experience  so much that I worked with Andrew Torget and Anita Riley Dryden to organize THATCamp Texas.)
• Go to a DH conference. The annual Digital Humanities conference sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), features the latest research and a lively community. Disciplinary conferences such as the Modern Language Association and American Historical Association include a number of DH-related sessions.
• Participate in–or start up–a regional group, such as Decoding Digital Humanities (with chapters in London, Melbourne, Bloomington & Lisbon), Toronto Digital Scholarship (DISC), Digital Humanities in Boston & Beyond or Digital Humanities Southern California.
• Support a professional organization in digital humanities, such as the Association for Computers and the Humanities (I’m privileged to serve on the Executive Council) or the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing.
• Participate in an online community, such as the Digital Americanists (I’m one!), Digital Classicists, Digital Medievalists, HASTAC, EighteenthCentury.org and Romantic Circles.
• Take part in crowdsourcing projects that engage the public in contributing to scholarly work, such as Transcribe Bentham.
• Review work in the digital humanities, such as through the open peer review process for Writing History in the Digital Age.
• Follow & interact with DH folks on Twitter. Not only is Twitter a great way to keep tabs on what’s going on in the community, but it can help connect you with people, so when you meet them for the first time at a conference you already feel that you sort of know them.
• Read and respond to blogs.
• Stay informed
• I always learn something from ProfHacker, a fantastic group blog focused on teaching, tools, and productivity. (By the way, ProfHacker was hatched at a THATCamp.)
• Subscribe to the Humanist Discussion Group, which is expertly facilitated by Willard McCarty and has supported conversation and information sharing since 1987.
• Check out Digital Humanities Now, which features the days’ most-discussed items among DH folks on Twitter and will be re-launching soon (so I learned through Twitter).
• Follow what people are bookmarking on Diigo or Delicious. (I’m a compulsive bookmarker, but not so good about annotating what I come across.)
• Explore what’s going on at digital humanities centers. Check out CenterNet, an “international network of digital humanities centers.”
• Explore examples for inspiration and models. To find projects, see, for example,
• NEH Office of Digital Humanities’ library of funded projects, browsable by type of project (e.g. toolbuilding, public projects, education).
• NINES lists peer reviewed projects in 19th century studies; 18thConnect is doing the same for 18th century studies
• Arts & Humanities.net allows you to browse projects by discipline, funding body, and content type.
• the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship’s catalog of Spatial Humanities Projects
• Patrick Sahle’s Catalog of Scholarly Digital Editions
• Pursue training.
  Workshops and Institutes
• The Digital Humanities Summer Institute, hosted at the University of Victoria, has an excellent reputation and offers week-long workshops on topics such as text encoding, multimedia, Geographical Information Systems, project management, and digital pedagogy, taught by leaders in the field. Scholarships are available, and the ACH provides travel bursaries for graduate students.
• the Nebraska Digital Workshop, sponsored by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL), enables a select group of early career scholars to present their work to and get feedback from senior scholars.
• NEH Institutes explore key topics in the digital humanities and often cover travel costs.  Upcoming institutes focus on text encoding, spatial humanities, linked data, “computational and corpus linguistics methodologies,” and “digital cultural mapping.”
  
• the NINES Summer Workshop offers in-depth training to scholars in 19th C British and American literature
• Oxford offers a week-long summer workshop in DH
• The University of Virginia’s Rare Book School often includes sessions of interest to digital humanists, such as ” Born Digital Materials: Theory & Practice,” “XML in Action: Creating Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Texts” and “Digitizing the Historical Record.”
• The Women Writers Project (WWP), which has significant expertise in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), provides seminars and workshops.
• Digital Humanities Commons is offering a workshop on “Getting Started in Digital Humanities with DH Commons” at the 2012 MLA conference.  While this workshop is full (we were very impressed by the level of interest in it), we hope to hold future workshops, perhaps as part of conferences in addition to MLA. (I’m a member of the DH Commons team.)
• Online tutorials
• Overviews:  Stanford’s Tooling Up for DH provides helpful introductions to digitization, pedagogy, data visualization and more
• Doing online research: William J. Turkel’s Going Digital
• Geographical Information Systems: the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship’s tutorials on Spatial Humanities, UCLA’s GIS tutorials
• Text Analysis: TAPoR Portal Recipes (I’m a fan of TAPoR, which provides tools for analyzing and visualizing texts, and a member of the TAPoR advisory group)
• Text Encoding Initiative/ XML: TEI by Example; the WWP’s Resources for Teaching and Learning about Text Encoding; Laura Mandell, Brian Pytlik-Zillig, Syd Bauman, et al, XSLT-for-Humanists; John Bradley, Elena Pierazzo and Paul Spence, An XSLT Tutorial
• Programming: William J. Turkel and Alan MacEachern, The Programming Historian; Jason Heppler, The Rubyist Historian

• Learn standards and best practices. If you want your project to have credibility and to endure, it’s best to adhere to standards and best practices. By talking to experts, you can develop a quick sense of the standards relevant to your project. You may also wish to consult:
• Arts & Humanities Data Service’s Guides to Good Practice
• The NINCH Guide to Good Practice
  in the Digital Representation and Management
  of Cultural Heritage Materials 
• Peer review standards for NINES and 18thConnect
• Grant guidelines (e.g. from the NEH) for technical standards, particularly regarding data management and sustainability
• Find collaborators. Most DH projects depend–and thrive– on collaboration, since they typically require a diversity of skills, benefit from a variety of perspectives, and involve a lot of work.
• Making its debut at the aforementioned MLA workshop, Digital Humanities Commons will serve as an online hub (or matchmaking service) linking people, projects and tools. For instance, if you want to learn by doing, you will be able to use DH Commons find out about opportunities to work on existing projects. Beta accounts are now available.
• Talk with library and IT staff at your own institution. Although many library and IT professionals are necessarily focused on the day-to-day, there is also an increasing recognition that what will distinguish libraries and IT groups is their ability to collaborate with scholars and teachers in support of the academic mission. Be a true collaborator–don’t just expect technical (or content) experts to do your bidding, but engage in conversation, shape a common vision, and learn from each other. (Steve Ramsay offers great advice to collaborators in “Care of the Soul,” and the Off the Tracks Workshop devised a useful “Collaborators’ Bill of Rights.”) If you can bring seed funding or administrative backing to a project, that might make it easier to attract collaborators or garner technical support.
• Reach out to others in your community. By attending a THATCamp or corresponding with someone who shares your interests, you may discover people who can contribute to your project or help shape a common vision. You could also find a colleague in computer science, statistics or another field who has common research interests and would be eager to collaborate. You might able to hire (or barter with) consultants to help out with technical tasks or provide project advice; I understand that Texas A&M’s Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture is exploring offering consulting services in the future to help advance the DH community.
• Engage students. While there can be risks (after all, students graduate), students can bring energy and skills to your project. Moreover, working on DH projects can give them vital technical, project management, and collaborative skills.
• Consider a DIY approach.  As Mark Tebeau of Cleveland Historical wisely observed at the New Directions workshop, if your institution doesn’t provide the support you need for your DH project, why not strike out on your own? As Trevor Owens suggests in “The digital humanities as the DIY humanities,” it takes a certain scrappiness to get things done in DH, whether that’s learning how to code or figuring out how to set up a server. If you don’t think you have the time or skills to, say, run your own web server, consider a hosted solution such as Omeka. In the long term, it’s a good idea to affiliate with an institution that can help to develop and sustain your project, but you may be able to get moving more quickly and demonstrate the value of your idea by starting out on your own.
• Plan a pilot project. Rather than getting overwhelmed by trying to do everything at once, take a modular approach.  At the New Directions workshop Katie Holt explained how she is building her Bahian History Project in parts, beginning with a database of the 1835 census for Santiago do Iguape parish in Brazil and moving into visualizations, maps and more. This approach is consistent with the “permanent beta” status of many Internet projects. Showing how a project moves from research question to landscape review to prototype to integration into pedagogy, Janet Simons and Angel Nieves of Hamilton’s Digital Humanities Initiative demonstrated a handy workflow and support model for digital projects at the workshp.
• Where possible, adopt/adapt existing tools, particularly open source software. Too often projects re-invent the wheel rather than adopting or adapting existing tools.
  • Find tools via Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki (which I edit and which will soon be overhauled, thanks to the hard work of the fabulous Quinn Dombrowski and Bamboo).
  • SHANTI’s UVa Knowledge Base offers useful information about technologies, teaching, and research approaches. (Aimed at the University of Virginia, but more widely applicable.)
  • You can also poke around GitHub, which hosts code, to identify tools under development by members of the DH community such as CHNM and MITH.

NITLE Can Help

Let me end with a plug for NITLE (the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education), my (relatively) new employer. One of the reasons I wanted to join the organization as the director of NITLE Labs is because I was impressed by its digital humanities initiative, which my colleague Rebecca Frost Davis leads. Among NITLE’s activities in the digital humanities:

• Hosting a (free) online Digital Scholarship Seminar Series.  Archived sessions include Joining the National Digital Humanities Conversation: Communities, Conferences, Centers and Digital Scholarship in the Online Archive. New sessions will be announced soon.
• Producing white papers, book chapters and blog posts focused on digital humanities at liberal arts colleges, including
• Rebecca Frost Davis, How to engage in digital humanities at small liberal arts colleges?
• Rebecca Frost Davis & Quinn Dombrowski, “Divided and Conquered: How Multivarious Isolation is Suppressing Digital Humanities Research” (PDF)
• Offering (through collaboration between Rebecca and Kathryn Tomasek of Wheaton College) a workshop on “Integrating Digital Humanities Projects into the Undergraduate Curriculum“

If you’re a veteran digital humanist, how did you get started, and what do you wish you knew from the beginning? If you’re a newcomer, what do you want to know? What worries you, and what excites you? What did I leave out of this overview? I welcome comments.

[Updated soon after hitting publish to provide more info about TAPoR. I’m a reviser…]