I hope the sessions will include exploring the possibilities for collaboration within a liberal-arts campus. Jacque’s call for working with DH centers and other institutions is right on the mark, because we at LACs get leverage for our own projects from working together with those large efforts. But I believe we also get leverage from working with our colleagues on our own campuses.

Full disclosure: I’m a collaborator, not a humanist. Also, it may make perfect sense for a humanist to master some key form of technology that is essential to his/her work. But I suspect there are many cases in which a colleague in my field (Computer Science) could work together with a researcher, saving that researcher from an unnecessary digression away from what he or she does best, and taking advantage of the technologist’s expertise.

I am finding that my undergraduate CS students and I can feasibly work together with lots of diverse collaboration projects, given appropriate support for that work, without anyone having to become an expert in the other person’s field. This lowers the entry bar for both humanists and collaborators interested in interdisciplinary projects.