Hello all,
I'd like to thank you for the great interest you have shown in this
list. I see that a welcome message I had set up to explain the list's
goals did not always go out. I thought I'd break the ice, therefore, by
mentioning a bit more about our goals for this list.
As I said in the notice announcing the list, <dm-l(a)uleth.ca> is the
first part of the Digital Medievalist Project. In its final form, this
will be a "Community of Practice" for medievalists working with digital
media. There will be a refereed on-line journal for research articles,
commentary pieces, project reports, bibliography, and reviews, and a
notice board/community centre where we will be able to exchange
expertise, establish and announce new projects, share tips, post
examples, and work together on common problems. Our designer is working
on the site right now. We hope to have it up by September, with the
first issue of the journal following later in the Fall. I'll be issuing
a cfp for some remaining slots in the first two issues of the journal
very soon. As some of you know, we also began sponsoring conference
sessions at Kalamazoo this year. We hope to do the same next year, and,
in the near future at Leeds.
Our goals for this list are similar to those for the project as a
whole. We hope that this will become a collegial forum for the exchange
of expertise and the development of best practice in the use of digital
media by medievalists. There are a number of other lists that cover
aspects of the material we will be discussing here (e.g. tei-l for Text
Encoding Initiative encoding matters; humanist-l for general aspects of
computing and the humanities). Our hope is that the distinguishing
feature of this list will be its focus on the practical needs of a
specific community rather than a specific topic. I.e. rather than
specialising in one aspect of research involving digital media, we hope
to serve as a clearing house and community centre for information on the
entire process of producing digital resources by people with an interest
in medieval studies. The topics covered, therefore, may be specific to
the middle ages (e.g. problems encoding or producing digital images of
manuscripts or archaeological artefacts), or of more general application
(e.g. questions involving interface design, or advice on tools). We
imagine our discussion will often involve material from other, more
specialised lists and resources, and encourage you to direct members to
these lists (and report back on the answers) when they are better suited
to the questions involved.
In short, the goal of this list is to build a community of people
with a common interest. By sharing expertise and information, we hope
gradually to improve the ability of all to work in the new media.
-dan
--
Daniel Paul O'Donnell, PhD
Associate Professor of English
University of Lethbridge
Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4
Tel. (403) 329-2377
Fax. (403) 382-7191
E-mail <daniel.odonnell(a)uleth.ca>
Home Page <http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/>
