Dear all,
I just came back from a very exciting MLA http://www.mla.org/ meeting. The MLA, for those of you who are not familiar with the organization is the largest professional organization in the United States for scholars working in modern languages, including English, Spanish and French. This year was particularly exhilarating because of a confluence of factors. This year's president, Michael Berubéhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_B%C3%A9rub%C3%A9, received a standing ovation for his impassioned presidential adress in defense of adjunct faculty. DH continued to be on the rise, showcasing now active detractorshttp://chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/01/05/on-the-dark-side-of-the-digital-humanities/. Finally, the world of digital scholarship is opening up to the idea of a true internationalization as a cadre of bright mindshttp://www.nitle.org/live/events/151-race-and-the-digital-humanities-an-introductiondebates race, gender, sexuality and the digital archive bravely and productively.
As you can imagine, I was quite busy myself. I offered two talks that touch on our shared goals and made many new friends who share them. My first talk was about us directly and the need to get involved this year. The second was about the possibility of distributing DH archives "through other means," especially when those archives can meet needs outside of the rich countries that produce them.
The purpose of these talks was to open the conversation, of course. I was happy to learn that Cathy Davidsonhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Davidsonand HASTAC http://hastac.org/ have already begun plans to host their annual conference in Peru, with the collaboration of digital scholars from South America. We are planning to meet virtually in February to see where our efforts overlap, and hopefully begin a collaboration with them with graduate students as the main focus.
I also had a chance to have a long cup of coffee with Geoffrey Rockwellhttp://www.geoffreyrockwell.com/, of DH fame. We talked about possible collaborations with 4Humanitieshttp://humanistica.ualberta.ca/, who as some of you may remember, started a 'correspondent' program in 2011 to learn more about digital scholarship from around the world. We will continue those conversations with Geoffrey and Alan Liu in the days to come. Hopefully we will have some good news to report back to you.
In the meantime, I created a couple of *early *drafts for the Around DH in 80 Dayshttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1Km_LuypvHyWacct24KAsOKjLzWKQo2kwMgPL7x9RuBE/editproject, which will eventually highlight projects and teams from around the world. I invite you to become a contributor to the GoogleDochttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1F3cHJpo4lN0xUYVnTLHuOLWdFGEgEWLy5W-b8YcPSiw/editas soon as you can. In order for us to keep track of who edits what, you should request permission to edit if you haven't done so already. Just shoot me a line if you're interested.
I look forward to working with all of you this year!
All the best from New York,