2 Ideas
I am already committed to talking about historical visualizations and event standards with my buddy Jerm. But I’d also really like to see/attend/crash two additional panels:
1) Something on management: Project management, organizational management, staff management, financial management, resource management. Digital humanities work has put a lot of us in the position of managing fairly large “businesses”—work for which our graduate work emphatically did NOT prepare us. I’d love the chance to discuss management challenges and strategies with other campers. A group therapy session, if you will.
2) Something on funding, and more specifically on sustainability, both for digital humanities projects and digital humanities organizations. Dan, Mills, and I talked about sustainability on the last Digital Campus, but there’s a lot more to be said. It’s a huge issue both for us and for our funders, and one around which there’s a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding. It would be nice to start a dialog at THATCamp.
Anyone interested in either of these ideas, please chime in with comments.
Tags: funding, management
May 24th, 2008 at 1:24 am
These are both great ideas for one or more sessions on starting, managing, and sustaining digital humanities projects (or research projects in general). I wonder how digital history projects differ from “ordinary” research projects? Should digital humanities projects be run as separate initiatives, or should they be incorporated as part of the research infrastructure in larger, more thematic projects? We will probably have people at THATCamp with experience from both strategies (and probably several other strategies as well), so I think it would be good to have a session like this to share our experiences.
May 25th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I would be very interested in hearing about both topics, but I am particularly interested in the project management aspect, as that relates more to my current job. I’m especially interested in hearing whether people think digital research projects are any different from any other research projects or digital projects in the commercial realm (i.e. development of a commercial website). My instinct is that they are a cross between the two. I’m also interested in hearing what others think about the distribution of responsibility among staff members of a digital project. What matters- Experience? Education? Seniority?
May 26th, 2008 at 9:56 am
I’m very interested in the topic of funding and sustaining digital humanities projects. I’m thinking through myself how to create an organization (for-profit or non-profit) that could focus on developing tools and infrastructure for humanities computing. There are tools that I’d like to create that would be very helpful for humanists, but the same tools (with some tweaking) could also be useful to people with deeper pockets. Is it possible to build things for people with more money to subsidize work for people with less money? That’s a question I’m trying to answer.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Tom: I am definitely in if there is going to be a session on sustainability and funding. I think that Raymond Yee is on track with talking about creating for-profit entities. Every THATcamper has skills that are very marketable, so perhaps we should be thinking more about marketing them . . . anyway – great topic!
May 28th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Tom:
This is all we talk about! How do we sustain. I will post something separate in a moment with some more sustainability questions/ideas.
May 29th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
[…] development in higher ed — so I was glad to see that Tom is thinking more broadly, but along similar lines. (And of course all the sustainability talk fits right in […]
May 4th, 2010 at 2:54 am
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