Notes from the session on building a public humanities website.  Thanks to Suzanne Churchill!

Notes for Interplay Between Archival Materials and (Digital) Humanities.

Here are shared collaborative notes for the Publishing Makerspace session.

Publishing Makerspace is a publishing environment that is reconfigured as a place where all the components of a scholarly project — books and e-books, virtual and physical exhibits, visualizations, live performance and film — can be integrated using a collaborative process. This place enables the creation of a multimodal publishing environment that fully integrates digital content with manuscripts and ‘traditional’ scholarly content.   The goal is to create a multimodal publishing environment that fully integrates digital content with manuscripts and ‘traditional’ scholarly content.

It is important to note that Publishing Makerspace is not solely a digital project or approach. We are interested in crossing the analog-digital divide to recognize the ongoing interaction and interplay between the analog and the digital. The result, we hope, will be a more efficient, interoperable process of knowledge creation and production and an enhanced, more meaningful experience for multiple audiences.

Members of the Publishing Makerspace team will share a bare bones outline of the process and lead a discussion about the value of this model and its potential for expanding traditional publishing models to integrate DH work.  

How can we communicate our scholarly work to a broader public?  In 2012 I co-founded a public humanities website — with the support of the Wake Forest Humanities Institute — that aims to do just that.  What are the payoffs and the pitfalls of this kind of public, digital project?  In this “Talk” session I will outline the history of The 18th-Century Common, “a public humanities website for enthusiasts of 18th-century studies.”  I’ll describe how the project dovetails with — and sometimes diverges from — institutional goals and priorities.  I’ll discuss challenges in generating public-oriented scholarly contributions.  In particular, I’ll focus on our recent addition of the WordPress tool “Press Forward,” which we hope will facilitate additional contributions from scholars to the site.  This THATCamp session will generate conversation beyond The 18th-Century Common to the topics of public engagement with scholarly work, institutional support for public humanities, and the use of Press Forward.

As an archivist, I approach the digital humanities specifically with an eye towards how to position my work and outputs so that they can be used by researchers, scholars, students, and other interested communities. But there’s a lot to unravel in those considerations. Some questions to bat around in this session include

• Technical aspects: What sorts of files or information would be useful for archival repositories to provide? How can we make our (digital or analog) materials more discoverable and accessible to all? What technical skills should we cultivate to be useful to our humanities colleagues? How can we document the digital works of scholars that are being created?
• Historical realities: How do we all work around the silences of archival records? What can we do about all the materials that remain minimally available or completely unavailable due to limited archival labor?
• Systemic issues: How do technologies like Wikipedia (which adheres to notability guidelines and lacks diversity but also less restrictive than many institutions, allows widespread access to information, and benefits from edit-a-thons) expand or restrict access to scholarship? What institutional policies do we have that restrict additions to collections, access, use, and even future research? How can we, individually and institutionally, work together to define “notable” and collect “important” materials while not overly burdening collecting institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums (LAM)?

Link to session notes: docs.google.com/document/d/1kxulS1sSEaXIaIqeGt5Ei1w3qj62vFPkdh7ZgRXpJTI/edit?usp=sharing

I’d like to hear from you about institutional support models for Digital Scholarship, particularly—but not exclusively—in the Humanities. Questions would include: Is there a unit at your institution that supports digital scholarship? Where is it based: library, digital scholarship center, …? How is it funded? Are you working with such a unit on a project/Are you part of such a unit? What has been your experience?