On Friday, NITLE (National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education) hosted a webinar: “Building Scholarly Networks: Digital Humanities Commons.” The webinar was very useful in terms of orienting people to DHCommons and the digital humanities. I particularly like the speakers who shared their own experiences in getting started with digital humanities research and who noted that they were doing digital humanities work before they knew or identified with the term.
I’m a relative newcomer to identifying with and embracing the digital humanities as a label. I was initially concerned about possible limitations and loss of the humanities in the digital, at least until reading Johanna Drucker’s brilliant SpecLab:Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. I would argue that this should be required reading. Drucker’s approach to and explanation of others working in speculative computing led me to embrace the digital humanities with the understanding of it as inclusive of all sorts of work that is unified by the goal of the humanities, essentially as the humanities in and for a digital age. Given my initial hesitation and subsequent my joy at finding how much of the work I appreciate can be identified as and furthered through understanding it as digital humanities, I’m always happy to hear of others with similar positive experiences where they come to the digital humanities to find an enhanced and enriched way of doing what they’ve always done.
The NITLE Webinar on Friday was excellent and luckily this is one of many. In the Webinar, the speakers mentioned that, among many others, there will be an upcoming NITLE Webinar on digital humanities pedagogy. This is certain to be of great interest to many people. While I don’t know the date for the upcoming webinar, NITLE also offers many materials on digital humanities pedagogy, as with 2011 “Digital Scholarship Seminar: Digital Scholarship in the Online Archive,” which includes materials on digital archives as they expand the range of texts available for teaching and how those materials and archives can be used in teaching traditional humanities areas as well as in teaching new and different questions and different approaches.
2012-02-04