How Did They Make That? at CUNY, March 27, 2014

Screen Shot 2014-03-27 at 4.19.59 PMHere’s a list of links for my talk at the CUNY graduate center, for the audience members who’d like to follow along:

My original “How Did They Make That?” post (with Dot Porter’s Zotero library!)

UCLA Digital Humanities 101

Ben Schmidt, A Year of Ships

University of South Carolina Digital Libraries, Negro Travelers’ Green Book Map

Radu Suciu, Medical Case Studies on Renaissance Melancholy

Kieran Healy, A Co-Citation Network for Philosophy

Rachel Deblinger, Memories/Motifs

Stephanie Evans and Moya Bailey, SWAG Diplomacy

Stanford University Library, Kindred Britain

 

Commit to DH people, not DH projects

We’ve seen digital humanities in terms of “projects” since Roberto Busa indexed Thomas Aquinas. But lately it seems to me that the imperative to continuously produce something is getting in the way of how people actually think and grow. What if we viewed digital methods as a contribution to the long arc of a scholar’s intellectual development, rather than tools we pick up in the service of an immediately tangible product? Perhaps we’d come up with better ways of investing in people’s long-term potential as scholars.

It’s natural for DH centers, especially newish ones, to want to spread the word about digital humanities. But increasingly I suspect that issuing a faculty call for projects is not the way to do it.

Continue reading “Commit to DH people, not DH projects”