One of the things I hope to spend a little time discussing with people at THATCamp is how we can get digital humanities off the desktop and out into the community.

To give you an idea of what I’m up to on that front, next summer I’m teaching a “field studies” course here at George Mason that will take a dozen or so undergraduates down into the Northern Neck of Virginia (the peninsula  between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers) to begin building a website called Becoming Warsaw. Warsaw? It just so happens that there is a small town in this region called Warsaw (I’m an East European historian, hence my curiosity about it) that took the Polish name back in 1831 in solidarity with Polish revolutionaries who were attempting (unsuccessfully) to throw off Russian rule that year. This is a very interesting historical moment that raises lots of questions, the first being how the hell people in a rural Virginia community even knew what was happening over in Russian Poland?

We’re going to spend two weeks in the area gathering raw historical information by working in local archives, at historic sites, plantation ruins, cemeteries, etc., etc. Everything we gather will be dumped into an Omeka database and will then become the stuff of a website on our course topic.

In addition to the field work, we’ll be establishing connections to the local community of historically interested parties–historical societies, genealogists, museum directors, history teachers–and will be inviting them to join in our effort, adding material to the database throughout the year. My hope is to have the students see this as both a historical research project and a community outreach project.

Will it work? Who knows. But I’m going to find out the hard way…