Digital scholarship blog

Enabling innovative research with British Library digital collections

09 April 2013

The day after the #DayofDH

Yesterday was Day of DH 2013, a day long jamboree of posts from digital humanities sorts with the aim of promoting discussion and providing a snapshot into one day in DH history. Last year the stand out post came from Dan Cohen, then (as now) Director of Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and soon to be Executive Director of the hugely exciting Digital Public Library of America. Cohen's post is short and sweet:

What Is Day of DH? Charitable and Uncharitable Views

Uncharitable: 24 hours of navel-gazing and obsessive self-recording by members of a relatively young, slightly insecure field that already spends too much time defining itself or arguing over the definition of digital humanities, even though they basically agree.

Charitable: A group version of Reddit’s IAmA, which gives people unexpected insights into what day-to-day work looks like in a field, and which could be usefully extended to other fields so that outsiders or those interested in joining can understand better what disciplines actually entail.

Undeterred, Day of DH ploughed on as before adding to the mix some shiny swag.

 

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Answers on a postcard?... What is the identity of a Digital Humanist courtesy of Flickr user Craig Bellamy / Creative Commons Licensed


But what was 'as before'? Well the most curious element of Day of DH - pointed out by Ernesto Priego in his excellent rebel Day of DH post - is the single blog format. As opposed to DHers globally blogging and tweeting as normal, to participate in Day of DH 'proper' (ergo not like Priego) one must sign-up and blog on the official Day of DH platform, in a new space detached from one's usual networked spaces. The advantages of this from a data collection perspective are obvious, and yet - as Priego deftly emphasises - it renders the whole experience a little forced.

In spite of all this, I still took part: not least because the thrust of Cohen's 'charitable' perspective - Day of DH is a window into how people go about doing DH - remains compelling, and if you want to gaze into the windows of others it is courteous to draw back your own curtains.

My blog, entitled 'A Day of Digital Curation', can be found here. I hope the posts demonstrate what it can mean to be in and around DH today: to work on the fringes of libraries and academia, to enable digital research, to be part of a community, to promote openness of both research and data, to collaborate without borders. Idealistic this may seem, but good DH has to be in order to thrive.

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