Observations from THATCampPhilly: things a beginner ought to think about regarding Digital Humanities

David Pettegrew and I are attending the THATCamp Bootcamp in Philly, so I thought I’d offer just a few observations based on the morning sessions.  I am very clearly an earnest beginning in some of this stuff related to Digital Humanities, and I’ve come to the Bootcamp just to learn what I need to learn.  Viewed in those terms, these past few hours have been an immense success.  I’ve figured out just how ignorant I really am.  Though not in any kind of hopeless way.  A few of the things that have seemed important and clear to me this morning.

• The notion of computer language is much more clear to me, and the notion that we all learn and become familiar with (and perhaps imprisoned by) the languages associated with our training is also very clear.  On the one hand, my intuition that we need to learn some basic languages to be able to understand each other across disciplines is very true.  I think coming to this Bootcamp has helped that, but as I was telling David, I’ve actually become convinced that I need something much more intensive, basic, and hands on.  I’m sure this is something I might get in one of David Owens’s intro classes, and David P. and I have both wondered whether it is worth our time to sit in on one of his classes.  I don’t know if this is the way to go, but I think Humanists interested in this area need to know enough of the language to understand what computers and computer science folks are doing.  Similarly, I would expect that most computer science folks would need to know enough of our languages in the humanities to be able to grasp the kind of things we’re after.  I think it is largely unrealistic for every humanist to become an expert at programming, or every computer scientist to become an expert in a humanities field.  But learning to understand each other is fundamental to success in this area.
• Outgrowth of first observation is that the only way forward is through collaboration.  Unlike our traditional way of doing things in the humanities, the idea of having an individual project is fundamentally impossible to imagine for a project of any kind of serious scope beyond elementary things like writing a blog.
• Outgrowth of that observation is that we would need to think seriously about how to promote that kind of collaborative work at the college.  We only imagine sabbaticals as awarded to individuals for individual work.  However, if I am correct that the horizon is inevitably and appropriately collaborative, we would have to imagine collaborative and group sabbaticals in which a collection of scholars (and students) are awarded release time to bring a complex project to fruition.  Either this or the project has enough people involved so that it can be sustained with a couple of people getting release time via sabbaticals etcetera to continue to devote to a collaborative work.  Our models of rewarding scholarship are highly individualistic and aren’t created to support this kind of work.  They need to be.
• It is important to think in terms of media appropriate to a project.  Does the project call for visuals, does the project call for audio, does the project call for text, does the project call for interactivity?  Rather than imagining that multiple media sources are automatically or necessarily better, the intellectual and pedagogical goals of a project ought to be paramount, and then the appropriate media for achieving those goals should be engaged.
• Our students in the humanities need to be encouraged, at a minimum, to take complementary courses in other areas that will prepare them for work in this area.  If I am correct that it is the way humanists will do work in the future, we will be amiss to train our students in the same old way.  Could we require our students to take supporting courses in computing or web design?  Could we require students to take a basic course in digital humanities?  Could we imagine tapping in to some of the organization structure of the Digital Media program, perhaps allowing students to pursue a certificate in Digital humanities by taking some of these courses and thereby being released from a couple of courses in their primary discipline (i.e.  maybe a student pursuing a 15 credit digital humanities certificate could complete their major with 3 to 6 fewer hours in the major, treating it as a kind of concentration that all students in the humanities could pursue.)

Well, that’s a few thoughts from the morning.  More later