Building & Sustaining DH Communities

Brian R. Gutierrez, Graduate Student, English, University of Washington

Paige Morgan, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow, Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship,

McMaster University

The tales grad students tell…

•Project origins

•Essential activities

•Successes & failures

•Portability & sustainability

•The question of community

What is community?

What does the work of building community look like (when it’s done by graduate students?)

Origins of DMDH•Founded by Paige Morgan and Sarah

Kremen-Hicks in 2012

•The need for DH credentials

•The importance of DH projects

•The lag between critical knowledge and technical skills

•Knowledge of what would fit into the local environment

The curriculumIntroductionWhat is DH, and Why Should I Care?

--Original values: http://www.dmdh.org/values-of-dh/ --Revised values: http://tinyurl.com/dhvalues2-0

Managing & Professionalizing Your Online Identity

Data wranglingExploring Programming in the Digital HumanitiesProgramming on the Whiteboard

Project managementBig Project, Small Project: Steps in Ideation and DevelopmentAvailable Tools: Free, Cheap, and Premium

Associated DMDH activities• Play with your

data! sessions

• Select skills workshops

• DH office hours

• DH happy hour / social

• UW Digital Projects Showcase

Digital presence• DMDH website

(http://www.dmdh.org) & Simpson Center website

• DMDH Twitter (@dmdh_uw)

• Slideshare (for workshop slides) (http://www.slideshare.net/paigemorgan/)

• Choosing priorities

Building Institutional Relationships

•What kinds of relationships? Between whom?

•UW Libraries

•UW-IT & Instructional Technologists)

•Departmental partners (UW iSchool, Geography)

Departmental pushback

•“If we have successful workshops, why do we need classes?”

•Student interest and energy in a field doesn’t necessarily convince faculty that it’s worthwhile.

Successes•Steady and growing attendance over 3 years, with participants from 21 departments plus external institutions (UW Press, Seattle Art Museum)

•Developing a trajectory between workshops and DHSI and DH Commons Summer Project Grant

•English Department’s new DH Colloquium oversubscribed

Failures•(Failure is valuable!)

•Running a program is a lot of work

•Linking with larger digital projects on campus

Portability•The future of

DMDH at UW

•From Digital Humanities to Digital Scholarship at McMaster University

SustainabilityHow sustainable is

community when it’s built by graduate

students?

Community is … “a group of people who are fairly like-minded or are interested in the same goal.”

--Miriam Posner, “Here & There: Creating DH

Community”

“The DH Community is a campus network of faculty from a range of disciplines who are interested in how humanities research and scholarship are advanced or expanded by digital tools and multimedia platforms, and how digital humanities impacts what and how we teach our students.”

--The Humanities Institute website, Wake Forest University

“’Community’ implies reciprocal care & shared memory & a lasting social organization that isn’t 100% dependent on the personality & actions of a handful of unique individuals for its genesis & continuance.”

--Brian Reed (Chair, UW English Dept.)

Think | Pair | ShareWhat does DH community look like at your institution?

•Which nodes are involved?

•What does content look like? (classes, workshops, etc.)

•Who drives the activity? Who could be driving the activity?

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