Submitted by mikenutt on Feb 16, 2010, 06:41 PM

Here are my notes from one of the panel discussions at the CHAT festival today: Entrepreneurship & Collaboration.

Submitted by Jentery Sayers on Jan 28, 2010, 03:45 PM

Yesterday, on the University of Washington's Seattle campus, our local group of HASTAC scholars facilitated a conversation on "Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Expertise, Storage, Design." 

I was glad to see a wide array of folks (from various departments and programs) attend.  Now, a day after the event, it strikes me that the question of where digital scholarship is stored (and how it's stored) especially resonated with the group, as well as the question of what are the standards for digital scholarship. 

And I know "standards" can be off-putting for some; nevertheless, there's a lot to be learned about them from the work of Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and others in the field of Science and Technology Studies.  Put pithily, standards (e.g., metadata standards) aren't static or inflexible.  Of course, they change over time, and those of us who are engaged in digital scholarship might gain a lot from studying how, exactly, standards emerge and how they affect our respective fields, not to mention our everyday lives (for better or worse). 

For instance, yesterday, we spent most of our time discussing hypermedia scholarship (e.g., a blend of video, audio, images, and text) and the challenges such publications pose not just to evaluation, but also to archivists.  What's the shelf life or work life of hypermedia?  How will it be accessed in twenty years, where is it being deposited, and according to what guidelines? 

At MLA 2009, I spoke to these issues a touch, looking at my dissertation-in-progress as a working example.  Initially,  I was thinking of adding a digital component to my proto-print dissertation; however, now I am making two versions: one web-based, one print-based (each with different content and designs).  In so doing, I want offer a portable platform for composing digital dissertations (in the humanities), one that abides by archival standards and encoding guidelines and could be used by others, who (like me) are asking what a digital dissertation looks like, how it's designed to perform an argument, and---indeed---where and how it would be stored or deposited (with a library, for instance). 

And sure: that means that, for some folks, the content of the dissertation would be of no interest.  Fair enough.  That's really nothing new. Point being: creating contexts for others to produce scholarship is (or should be) as rewarding as producing more content in a given field.  (Think Omeka here.) 

That said, right now, I'm wondering about a few things, and I'd love to hear what others are thinking along the same lines:

What role, if any, do standards (e.g., metadata standards) play in your field?  Your individual or collaborative work?  And how do they intersect with how you compose/write? 

What does (or might) your critical approach to standards look like?  What is (or would be) its goals?  How does (or would) it simultaneously acknowledge the need for standards, what they historically tend to ignore or elide, and the ways in which systematicity is sutured to sets of contigent practices? 

Doctoral students: What's the form of your dissertation?  Are you considering a digital dissertation or digital components?  Why or why not? 

How do standards involve a template, and to what effects on scholarship?  (Ack!?  Templates!?)

Right now, for a project entitled, "Standards in the Making," I'm collaborating with Matthew Wilson (qualitative GIS, Ball State), James J. Bono (rhetoric and cultural studies, University of Pittsburgh), and Curtis Hisayasu (American Studies, University of Washington) on a digital publication that is unpacking questions like those above.  Since each of us is invested in a different field, we've quickly come to one realization: there are a lot of answers.

Let's welcome them all.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 18, 2010, 06:43 AM

That's one of the "big think" questions in ISIS 120, "This Is Your Brain on the Internet."  To think big, you have to begin by understanding what communication as a process really i

Submitted by fortune2 on Nov 18, 2009, 04:55 PM

The past year on the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign campus has been full of art activist projects. As an MFA candidate in New Media who is interested in work that exists in the world of art and the world of social change ,simultaneously, I have been particularly excited about this. I intend to use my HASTAC blog platform to highlight both past and current art and activist projects that have touched the UIUC campus in one way or another. First up, Oakland based artist Favianna Rodriguez and the artist collective she belongs to, Just Seeds.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Nov 14, 2009, 03:01 PM

What I had not experienced before was this particular method for dealing with contention.  We were told that, if ever there was a public conversation that seemed too heated without being filled with illuminating insights, the moderator would call for an impromptu coffee break and ask us all to talk together about the issue at hand.  Most important, those engaged in the heated discussion would talk together, not in front of the whole audience but face to face.

 

Submitted by Michael Widner on Nov 04, 2009, 01:37 PM

Collaboration is one of the concepts frequently discussed among those in the humanities and those studying social networking. How do we facilitate it? What tools make it effective? What cognitive models should we use? How can the drive for it inform pedagogy? These and many other questions we explore on a regular basis with the assumption that collaboration is likely to create new, useful knowledge, is a necessary skill for our students to learn, and is probably the direction toward which current technological tools are driving us, so we need to understand it. Nevertheless, one place where collaboration is rarely, if ever seen, is in the conventional research done by humanities scholars.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Sep 29, 2009, 11:12 AM

It was sometime in 2002 when a bunch of us were sitting around, thinking about what we wanted to call this visionary network of thinkers (not all of them professional educators) who were frustrated by the institutional, disciplinary, and field barriers that made it difficult to think of the interactive, linked in, global, creative possibilities of the future together.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jul 14, 2009, 10:02 AM

My conversational tour with Information Age visionaries continues today at Wikimedia Foundation, with co-founder Jimmy Wales. At its beginning, even Wales didn't think Wikipedia would amount to much. No one, not even the most radical science fiction writer, would have conceived, even five years ago, that volunteers worldwide, without remuneration, would create the biggest, most remarkable encyclopedia in human history.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jun 08, 2009, 07:46 PM

Today is a momentous day for HASTAC. Like this lovely image posted by Flickr community member "Mashunya," it's a sunset, it's a sunrise, the end of one chapter, the beginning of another. This week, Mark Olson, who has been part of the HASTAC team since before there was a HASTAC, will be leaving us in order to be a faculty member in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. He has successfully defended his dissertation, and the Department has voted on an appointment for him. Since I spent the year working on his "exit paperwork," I know that this

Submitted by jonippolito on Apr 09, 2009, 12:24 PM
Academia's goal may be the free exchange of ideas, but up to now many universities have been wary--if not downright dismissive--of their professors using the Internet and other digital media to supercharge that exchange. Yet in a signal that digital scholarship is the future, the latest issue of MIT's Leonardo magazine showcases the recently approved academic guidelines of the University of Maine's New Media Department as a model for other universities to consider.