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.

It goes without saying that eTexts or eBooks (there are important differences here) are an increasingly appealing option for both faculty members/instructors and students.  Mary Meeker has recently documented how 29% of adults in the US have tablet devices, up from 2% only a few years ago.   Publishers will/ do/should feel enormous pressure to create texts that are available in a variety of formats, at a reduced cost (which presents its own problems, one might say) and platform agnostic, even as companies such as Courseload, working in conjunction with publishers of all stripes, start to offer services in which pdf versions, etc., of textbooks can be embedded in a dynamic interface that seems to be nothing so much as a competitor of learning management systems.

So, all of this seems to suggest that the age of the eText or eBook or eTextbook is upon us.  To that end, it seems that definitions very well may matter here: while publishers or other companies may be making eTextbooks for our consumption in the future, faculty/instructors and students can very, very easily create an eText or eBook either inside or outside the classroom, using information that they either generate or use from elsewhere (a good opportunity to discuss internet and copyright with students who probably haven’t considered who owns what online).  What, then, would be the value of creating or producing these artifacts in our own classrooms and what should they look like?  How can we help to make these kinds of initiatives grown on our campuses with faculty members who may be quite averse to everything I’m talking about here?  How should liberal arts institutions talk about the value of eTexts (both as products and the process of constructing them) to students who have certain expectations about liberal arts colleges, to others outside the institution (such as the local community), to administrators?  Should we even identify artifacts of this kind, such as really cool archives of either born-digital items or non-digital texts, videos or collections of images (is a collection in the Google Art Project an eText), with the imprimatur of ‘eTexts,’ and if so, with whom would we use this title?  To end this long post, I would ask, maybe we shouldn’t define eTexts, but rather, ask where or how we draw the line between eTexts and things that cannot be eTexts, since everything, it seems could be one? Perhaps a book sprint is in order here-

Possible conversation mash-up of previously proposed sessions; “DH Swiss Army Knife: What’s in your tool kit?”,  Dawn Dietrich’s “Academic Library and/or Digital Learning Commons?”,  and dschnaidt’s “Beyond the enthusiasts and demonstration projects, how do you embed the practice of digital humanities in a small liberal arts college? What kinds of advocacy encourage experimentation? What kinds of support ensure success, and where should it reside?”

Conversation around focus for those looking to advocate, build and expand support, facilities, tools, staff expertise in the direction of Digital Humanities needs. Speaking of needs – at your LAC what is provided and works, what is provided and doesn’t work, wish-list on a budget or wish-list on a bottomless vat of cash, tools dreamt of, tosser tools, ideal support person job description … in other words what would be immensely beneficial to building new or reshaping existing DH centers?

Anyone thinking about/ planning for/ working on digital preservation and copyright issues?

Useful resource to compare who is doing what and how in terms of DH support and engagement
ARL SPEC Kit 326 www.arl.org/resources/pubs/spec/complete.shtml

The 2008 CLIR report on Digital Humanities Centers suggested that Centers were risking silo-style knowledge and infrastructure development (www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub143/pub143.pdf). At the same time, major private and public funding agencies have begun to target regional collaboration, both amongst LACs and between LACs and other kinds of institutions. Additionally, the recent DH Commons project has begun to facilitate collaborative relationships amongst individual scholars.

I’d like to have a conversation about what kinds of collaborations are both possible and desirable for LAC faculty, whether in the context of a center or otherwise. Rather than thinking in terms of “what can X offer Y,” I’d propose thinking about identifying research/teaching/tech synergies and building collaborations in this manner. In addition to thinking about how to find like-minded scholars, we might also discuss the nuts and bolts, so to speak, of collaborative projects.