Dear all,
As we all know one of the anxieties around digital humanities is how we define the field/practice. What gets called DH, who gets to 'do' DH, how many resources, how much funding, do we need to 'do' DH?
Without calling it 'DH', I led a little (but labour intensive) project in which we worked with an open online resource that collects, curates and shares good practice in dementia care. (Dementia, by the way, is one of the major societal changes today, as we live longer and social care keeps suffering budget cuts).
What we did was follow Human-Computer Interaction Design research processes to work with users in not only testing the online resource but in figuring out whether we could adapt some of the stories collected by the resource in comic book form.
The result is a digital-and-print publication. The 'digital publication' is a simple static PDF, mostly meant to be shared via the open access institutional repositories of the participating institutions. The print publication is distributed to the public by request and is currently being distributed within the UK to libraries, NHS Trusts and mental health charities.
Whether we could have done something more interactive and properly born-digital is unquestionable--that we lacked the funding and working conditions is unquestionable too. However we are happy with the result and the feedback we are receiving. I think this may be an example of how with relatively small resources one can at least aspire to a significant impact amongst targeted demographics hopefully beyond academia. (We already have data the comic has reached different occupations-- percentages chart attached).