[UPDATE: We are happy to announce that the Around DH in 80 Days project launched on June 21. For the next 80 days we delivered on our promise to take you to different parts of the globe every day to visit a digital humanities project or team. We hope you enjoyed the journey, but more importantly, we hope you can use our project in the classroom and beyond.]
It is my pleasure to introduce to you one of our first pilot projects at GO::DH, Around DH in 80 Days!
AroundDH hopes to be a fun way to introduce the work of colleagues around the world to those who are just starting out. Everyday for 80 days we will visit a group or projects across the globe. An editorial board will select a total of 80 groups or projects out of master list created by volunteers like you. Groups in the list will be approached to describe themselves and highlight their work in 200 words or less. We will do our best to bring attention to digital scholarship outside of Canada, Europe, the US and Japan. In that sense, we are departing from a broad and inclusive vision of DH. Besides the audience of new comers, the global scope of the tour should also attract some of the more seasoned DH’ers. The greatest challenge of the editorial board is to balance the geographical margins with the greatest-hits of the northern mainstream. The greatest hope of the project is to paint enough of a broad picture of digital humanities to redefine it in the process. Thus, AroundDH can be read not only as a tour of the globe, but also as a dance around the periphery of DH.
The project began as an email experiment. One email was sent daily from my outbox to all the librarians in the H&H division at Columbia with the subject “The DH Daily.” Everyday, our librarians, who are in the middle of a 2-year professional development program to become the consultation arm of our Digital Humanities Center at Columbia, would visit a different DH center or project. Others outside of Columbia heard about the experiment and wanted to be included in the email list. The appeal was the small dosages. Like the librarians, the rise of DH across the land has brought crowds of DH-curious academic professionals and students to our doors asking, where do I begin?’ At the same time that the emails were going out, I was slowly but surely becoming part of the conversations around Global Outlook DH. There we were trying to discover as much as we could about the world outside the fields of vision of the member-nations of the ADHO. Eventually these two sets of concerns blend into one, and thus was born the idea for Around DH in 80 days.
The project is currently being developed by Ryan Cordell’s Doing Digital Humanities graduate class (#s13dh). You are still welcome to contribute to our global list. After Ryan’s class develops the first stage of the project, the project will be passed around the world for refinement and translation. Around DH indeed!
If you or your team would like to volunteer to translate the project once it’s ready, and/or become part of the editorial board that makes the final decisions for inclusion, please send me a line.
The working group is still in flux. Current partners include:
- Ryan Cordell and his wonderful graduate class.
- The growing number of contributors to our master list.