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.

As we break our way into digital humanities, we run into more and more computer code. But do I need to know what it means? Or, better yet, how much of it do I need to know?

This has been a hot button question lately – do digital humanists need to know how to code? My take is that the answer is pretty nuanced and idiosyncratic. We must know how to understand some of the simple parts of the language that we use the most. And I think that we should know how to do some simple html/css – it’s too ubiquitous.

I’d like to see a session that talks about a few different things

1. What kind of code do I need to know for what I do?
2. How do I learn it?
3. What don’t I need to know? How can I tell?

I’d like to propose a session around questions of how mapping & design tools can help us both create and represent research on narratives and sociocultural structures whose impact is very real and significant but is often ‘naturalized’ as to be invisible. I can think, for example, of instances in which films and novels address how memory narratives are overlayed upon existing physical spaces, calling our attention to or intervening in the signification of these spaces. How could mapping tools help us visualize, analyze and communicate these intangible aspects of culture and society? How have maps been used to undermine or challenge certain intersections of narrative, power and place rather than to reinforce it in the “objective” tradition of mapping?

What is out there for mapping & presenting maps–or could be?