I wanted to add another voice of support in favor of the ideas expressed in Allegra Gonzalez’s post on Nuts and Bolts.  I couldn’t get the comment feature to work on this post, so I’m adding a new posting.

I think a session that delves into practical support for DH would be great, particularly if we can develop a set of core needs and best practices to support those needs.  This might involve skill sets for staff, physical and virtual spaces for working, tool kits to equip and encourage DH work, and implementable solutions for the grand question of how we encourage experimentation and provide support in ways that ensure success.

I think any of these topics could warrant sessions of their own, but starting as a mashup of previously proposed ideas might be a way to get started.  I appreciate the interest expressed by the other session proposals.

Digital Humanities covers a wide breadth of disciplines, methodologies, and interests, but one thing all DHers seem to have in common is a set of digital tools, apps, and websites that help us in our work.  While we may have discovered these tools from reading about them on sites like Lifehacker or Profhacker or by trolling the Internet on our own search, I suspect we mostly learn about them through conversation with colleagues.  What if we could speed up the serendipity by having a tool kit exchange where we share some of our technology tools for doing our work?

Categories we might consider include:

• If you were stranded on a desert island, what two or three tools would you most want with you?  What can you absolutely not do without?
• What are your favorite tools for pedagogy and to engage students?  Why do you like them?
• What do you use for your own research?
• Do you have a favorite repository site for images, digital texts, maps, etc.?
• What do you wish someone would develop?

Here’s the catch:  the tools must be free.

We could have a lightning exchange where we share the tools, how we’ve used them, and why we like them. In the tradition of “open mike” time, we could have a laptop connected to a projector (if the room allows) and let anyone step up to the computer and show the site, subject to a 5 minute limit.

It would be a quick and fun way to learn if there are a standard set of utilities that form the core of our collective tool kit and well as to discover that new tool we might have been looking for all along but didn’t know existed.