I mentioned this in my earlier post–there are many faculty grappling with how to define and evaluate the quality of applied, public, collaborative, and/or digital scholarship. The digital work takes many forms including publishing a monograph as an electronic book, developing research tools and models, blogging, building Web resources for education, and producing public projects like Mark’s Euclid Corridor Oral History Project in Cleveland. I’ve written about this a bit on Tellhistory. I would like first to learn, from those more directly involved, about broader digital humanities initiatives on this front and to discuss what more needs to be done. When departments with public history graduate programs do not recognize traditional peer-reviewed print publications about public history as scholarship — it seems like there is a lot that needs to be done to support the greater emphasis on methodology, collaboration, and organization that Tom Scheinfeldt addressed in “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?”

I, too, like hearing about the range of projects as well and hope to carry home a much better understanding of digital humanities.

I am looking at the intersection of digital history and civic engagement. I directed public history at Wright State University for eight years and collaborated with area archives, museums, cultural organizations, and schools on various projects. My students and I had initiated a digital exhibit project looking at Dayton and the Miami Valley in the progressive era. Our initial plan, which required my sabbatical and research time over several years as match, became entangled in debates about what constitutes scholarship for promotion. Although this delayed our project, I signed on to beta-test Omeka in hopes that it would provide an alternative to the very expensive, highly produced digital exhibit that we had planned.

The Omeka platform supports some new directions with this work as well. The initial project—while it began with the students, local history partners, and I—would have been largely turned over to a production company. Now, the project may grow more gradually through student input over time or this may lead to a series of smaller, related but more focused projects. Public engagement would have been a feature of the final exhibit project but it may now become an integral aspect of the Omeka-based project. New partnerships with organizations may change the project goals as well.

Beyond the local project, I serve on the Ohio Humanities Council. The OHC has been interested in cultural heritage areas and civic tourism. Tom Sheinfeldt will be in Columbus tomorrow to talk with the OHC and others about Omeka. My thought has been that the OHC could encourage local organizations to do more to engage their audiences and to work with both humanities scholars and local history resources by developing online exhibits and collections using Omeka.

I would also like to talk with others about how humanities disciplines will evaluate work that is digital, interdisciplinary, collaborative, and/or public/applied in the future.