Building a DH Culture from the Ground

So my proposal is late-breaking, but here ’tis: I’m currently moving to a new institution where I will help start a new DH center. I’d like to think collaboratively—well, about how that happens. I want to get at this question, however, not by talking about getting grants or picking a pithy acronym for the center’s name. Instead, I’d like to jump off Stephen Ramsay’s recent post, Centers are People, and think about how one begins building the kinds of communities where “a bunch of people…[are] committed to the bold and revolutionary project of talking to one another about their common interests.” I’d especially like to think about how to draw in those people on campus who are interested in DH but don’t yet know it: that history professor with a personal archive she’d love to make public, that librarian crafting the library’s ebook strategy, or that computer science undergrad with an odd side interest in Renaissance poetry. Topics might include:

1.) organizing and effectively promoting DH events to the wider college or university
2.) creating and fostering hacker-friendly spaces on campus
3.) building on-campus partnerships between departments, libraries, &c. &c.
4.) seeding DH incursions into the curriculum

This topic may well tie into hmprescott’s “More Disruptive Pedagogy: Thoughts on Teaching an Un-course” proposal or Kimon Keramidas’s “Of courses, curriculum, networks, and unconferences”.

About Ryan Cordell

I'm currently Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Writing-Across-the-Curriculum at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. In the fall of 2012 I will join the English faculty at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm building a digital edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Celestial Railroad" at http://celestialrailroad.org that will aim to allow scholars, teachers, and students to follow the rich history of publication and editing "The Celestial Railroad" in American periodicals during the 1840s and 50s. This site will provide images and the text of each printing of the story, highlighting significant amendments or deletions, as well as any editorial introductions appended to the texts. I hope to build a web version of Juxta into the site, which will allow users to compare the text of reprintings on the fly and draw their own conclusions about the story's reception and influence. I'm also hoping to build an interface to the texts that will incorporate timeline and geospatial data, so that users can correlate changes made to the story with its progress through the nineteenth century and across the United States. I maintain a "Celestial Railroad" development blog on which I report new historical and textual findings, discuss the technologies that I'm using to create the site, and update visitors on the project's progress. I write about technology in higher education for the group blog ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

1 thought on “Building a DH Culture from the Ground

  1. I would very much like to participate in this, because it seems to address many of the questions I raised earlier in my not-quite-a-session-proposal post.

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