Today's Inside Higher Ed ( http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/26/digital ) reports on a joint effort by the Modern Language Association and HASTAC to "offer guidance for departments on approaches used by various colleges to evaluate digital scholarship, resources available to scholars wanting to get a take on some project, and policies that could be adopted to assure the fair treatment of those coming up for tenure." Geoffrey Rockwell is hosting the wiki for this project on at http://www.philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/MLADigitalWork

When I work on a computer, be it building up the infrastructure or creating a fairly complex web application, I work with layers. Each layer does its own thing and builds on the previous layers while leaving itself open enough that it can be used to build the next higher layer. This comes in part from my experience with FORTH, a stack-based language that organizes code into dictionaries of word definitions so that the programmer works entirely bottom-up. The result is often a set of tools for attacking a problem instead of a monolithic application.

The Commons is on Facebook -- just search for the unimaginative but effective phrase "Digital Humanities Commons at Texas A&M" and you'll find us. So please visit us there, too, post a topic, and join the discussion.

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research awards Stipendiary Fellowships of $1500 to tenured and tenure-track faculty pursuing research projects in Digital Humanities. The deadline to apply is March 2. Apply online at http://glasscock.tamu.edu/Funding_Opportunities/faculty_funding.html

If you would like to chat about a potential project, please contact me or James Smith (jgsmith at tamu dot edu).

My system administration work for the last year has focused on doing what I can to eliminate as many of the non-humanities concerns as possible from the front end of a digital humanities project. We can worry about getting a large server when the project requires more CPU or memory or disk than we can offer. If we need to have a dedicated server for a project, then there are enough people who find that project useful that they generate that much traffic. At that point, the project should be important enough to garner grants or other financial support.