What’s the best DH project you know?  How do you talk about how great it is?  What comes after “that’s cool”?  Let’s find out what really moves us, and how to get more of it.  Share some links and conversation at this General Discussion session.

The CIC Digital Humanities Summit is being held the week before OSU THATCamp and a few of us will be attending both events.  The purpose of the Summit is to form a stronger CIC faculty community and networks in digital humanities and identify potential collaborative research opportunities in digital humanities that cross CIC universities.  This working session will offer an opportunity for those attending the Summit and THATCamp to share what happened there with OSU colleagues and hear what you think about opportunities and gaps for engaging in cooperative projects with other institutions. In the context of what we learned at the Summit, Louie Ulman, Harmony Bench and I will be asking you to help us identify where the OSU community might engage with other CIC institutions and where there might be a leadership role for us. 

“Problem”:  How might OSU engage and lead digital humanities initiatives in the CIC.

Questions: 

• Are you collaborating with other CIC institutions on any of your digital humanities projects?  How have those cooperative efforts gone?
• What might be preventing you from reaching out to your colleagues at other institutions to start up, be included in or include others in a project?
• As University leadership asks those of us who attended the Summit to report back on opportunities and gaps, what do you want to make sure they know about collaborating with the CIC?
• What could the University do to encourage you to participate or lead a cooperative project?

In addition to gathering information to include in our evaluation of the Summit, we hope that this session will get participants to reflect on the nature of collaborations and ways to ensure their success.

[I’ve had this post in the works for a couple of days now, and Blake Wilder beat me to the punch with an interesting session proposal. I hope the thoughts and links below will inform his and other sessions. –Melanie]

Digital Humanities is a highly collaborative field. There are some practical reasons why this is the case – DH projects tend to be large and complex, and they often require skill sets as diverse as humanities research design, digitization, programming, and organization and description of digital resources. However, the collaborative nature of DH is also a result of its interdisciplinarity. A DH project may involve cutting-edge work, not only in the humanities, but also in computer science, library science, the social sciences, etc. Keep reading for more thoughts on collaboration in DH and some ideas for THATCamp OSU sessions on the topic…

While I think we can all agree that collaboration is good in a motherhood-and-apple-pie kind of way, it does present challenges. This is especially true in academia, where the single-author article or monograph is king, and where the idea of the individual scholar toiling in solitude holds a lot of power. One challenge presented by collaboration is how to give credit to collaborators. (Also see the FairCite initiative for work in this area.) Another is how to go about working together in the first place. A fascinating recent New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer debunks some common misconceptions about the best ways to collaborate and offers some interesting examples of successful collaborations. Some takeaways from the Lehrer article:

• Brainstorming doesn’t work, but criticism does
•  Spaces where different people are thrown together are most effective at producing innovative ideas
• The best work is done by teams with some familiar faces and some new ones

THATCamps are collaborative by nature, but we could see some sessions specifically devoted to exploring collaboration in our environment. Here are some ideas:

• An ‘idea generation’ session where a group of people come up with solutions to a problem or ideas for a project, using one or more specific collaboration techniques
• A discussion about how to encourage collaboration and cross-pollination at OSU

Other thoughts on collaboration or ideas for collaborative sessions?

I’ve been using both iMovie and prezi as platforms for composition assignments in my classes. I’m wondering if we could get a a group together and collectively compose some short project in one of these platforms. Obviously there would be several issues:

First, captaining such a ship of fools. According to the “propose a session” post, I would be responsible for chairing. I believe I could handle this. I’ve been in numerous student organization, where I have been responsible for making a decision happen without making the decision myself. I’d be managing editor and we would have no editor-in-chief.

Second, the subject. With limited time, I think we’d have to jump straight into composition choices. So we’d need to have big picture content issues decided ahead of time, via commenting here I presume. My suggestion for content is actually THATcamp itself. If we have this session late in the day, our composition can share our collective experience of the un-conference. We’d probably also want to decide which platform ahead of time.

Third, technology constraints. I think we’d be pretty safe with Prezi. But if we decided on a short movie, there’s importing/exporting time constraints as well as the gathering of raw footage. If this session goes forward, perhaps people planning to attend could check out flipcameras in the morning and shoot bits during the day. As managing editor, I could collect these at the lunch, or at least sometime before the session begins, and start importing. We could export at the close of the session. This way, we could spend the majority of the session selecting clips, sequencing, adding titles, and other editing details.

I’d like to hear thoughts on which platform people would prefer to work with, if it even seems feasible to try to work with iMovie, and also about the content. We could decide content live in the room as this is certainly part of the composition process. I’m just afraid that too much time spent in initial brainstorming wouldn’t leave us enough time to do the actually composing and editing.