Digital Humanities Special Interest Group: Annual Meeting Notes – Digital Humanities Special Interest Group

For those who were able to join us in Salt Lake City, feel free to comment below with any important points that were missed.

The Annual Meeting was held on Wednesday, March 27^th at 12:30pm.

Announcements/Introductions:

The new DH SIG coordinator, Ellen Tisdale of the University of Manitoba, was introduced to attendees.

The Digital Humanities Bibliography by John Taormina of Duke is now available on the Dukewired site http://www.dukewired.org/ as a PDF.

Around the room, updates on what’s new with DH at our institutions
Collections as Data – Cohort 2 – Additional calls for projects will come out in the fall. These are well funded by the Mellon foundation and may be applied to broader DH types of projects.
A member mentioned the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching: HILT opportunity
University of Utah has 5 pilot projects this year with collections as data

Are any members interested in contributing to the SIG Blog? Those of you that have DH related degrees or programs at your institution, please make sure they’re represented on the blog.
Suggested blog area: A Collection of Art-Specific DH projects to list on our blog
- It was noted that this project is underway, and that we can coordinate with other groups within ARLIS/NA that are taking the lead on this.
It may be time to review our SIG Mission statement, written in 2012. Please take a look at our statement on the blog and forward any thoughts on potential updates to Ellen.

Maintain our separate dh-sig list or just use ARLIS-L?
We have a blog, a Twitter account, and an inactive Slack channel
Members expressed the importance of both a Twitter account and a sig-specific listserv.

Members expressed an interest in an open access GIS tools workshops and workshops/sessions devoted to other open access DH related tools.
GIS 101 could be a useful session – geared towards those with no previous experience with GIS. Ellen would be ready to coordinate this session.
GIS plays into the Getty Provenance index and reconciling geo names. Getty vocabularies just built a tool that will work with open refine and can reconcile to the thesaurus of geographic names. Members also discussed the importance of the incorporation of native place names in such projects. Should there be levels of access to certain DH data, such as culturally sensitive locations? Communities should have input into what is done with cultural data.
Other workshop content ideas are Power BI and Tableau for data visualization and statistical mapping – and perhaps textual analysis tools. Perhaps there are art historians working with text analysis.
Also suggested was the use of exhibition data in DH projects as well as DH pedagogy and critical DH pedagogy, including ways to help faculty include DH in existing courses.

Summarized by Courtenay McLeland
March 27^th, 2019