Blogs

FYI! This is a valuable opportunity for graduate students.

Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2010 Graduate Student Colloquium June 8-11, 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS: The DHSI will be sponsoring its second annual graduate student colloquium in June 2010. Graduate students attending the Institute are invited to participate in the 2010 colloquium entitled "Making
Connections: Emerging Scholars in the Digital Humanities."

FYI! Call For Papers
***Deadline Extended to September 30th***
The Past’s Digital Presence:
Database, Archive, and Knowledge Work in the Humanities

A Graduate Student Symposium at Yale University

February 19th and 20th, 2010

How is digital technology changing methods of scholarly research with pre-digital
sources in the humanities? If the “medium is the message,” then how does the
message change when primary sources are translated into digital media? What
kinds of new research opportunities do databases unlock and what do they make

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.

The Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities at UCLA has published a "Digital Humanities Manifesto": http://dev.cdh.ucla.edu/digitalhumanities/2008/12/15/digital-humanities-...

Some of the more interesting propositions:

"9. Large-scale complexity: need for teamwork as new model for the production and reproduction of humanistic knowledge. Teams sometimes fail because they take risks. This is the heart of digital humanities: Risk-taking, collaboration, and experimentation."

With the new semester, we have a new website for the Digital Humanities Commons. The DH village green. The area where we can all come together on common ground that belongs to no one and everyone. With that in mind, we've moved almost all of the old content to this new site and added a few capabilities to support the Commons.

This last year has been busy and fun. Based on conversations I've had with others in the Digital Humanities Program, 2009 looks to be at least as busy and interesting. We've come quite a ways since I was hired in November, 2007.

I've been to five conferences evangelizing what we are doing here at TAMU in the digital humanities, ranging from workshops in the digital humanities (DHSI) to impromptu gatherings of scholars (THATCamp) to industry conferences.