Dear friends,
I'm very honored to be your GO::DH chair for 2017-2018. My deep thanks to those of you who voted, and to the members of the executive for giving me their vote of confidence. Time to roll up our sleeves!
Our dreams of a community of digital humanities practitioners in dialogue and collaboration with each other across continents and language barriers has not changed. The new executive is actively planning a series of exciting programmatic activities and structural changes along these lines to help us tap into the potential of our global community, but we should not and could not do this work without you.
Before we start rolling out any new team initiatives, we wanted to bring back the conversation to all of you, our members, especially around the existential question: who are we and what do we want? As you know, we were founded as a special interest group of ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organization), but our work was never limited to activities within the organization. In fact, some of our best work happened decidedly outside of it. At the same time, we know that we have been able to facilitate engagement between ADHO and many of our members and friends here, for their professional benefit at home.
We find ourselves now at a crossroads. For a year now, the executive of GO::DH has been in conversations with ADHO about becoming a Constituent Organization (CO). Depending on the specific model to follow, this would give us some voting power at the highest level of the organization, comparable though perhaps not equal to the COs with paying members. Besides voting power, we might be able to create more opportunities for our members to participate in the annual conference and receive exposure for their work. The hard question we have been asking ourselves is whether becoming a CO would draw us away from the possibilities of acting independently to focus our energies on a vibrant, critical conversation with each other, and away from innovative projects that can help us understand and promote the global landscape of digital humanities.
That said, I wanted to come to you and ask *you*, how do you feel about ADHO in 2017? What level of engagement should we have with them? What would you like to see?
Looking forward to resuming our conversations!
All best, Alex.