Dear GO::DH Members,

Voting is now open for elections to the GO::DH Executive Committee.

All members of the mailing list as of today, Sunday, February 22, 2015, are eligible to vote in the election. To vote, please use this Google Form and select up to four candidates. Voting will be open until March 1st, 2015. Election results will be announced shortly afterwards.

We are pleased to have such an exciting slate of candidates from around the world and with a range of experiences for this year's election. The bios and candidate statements for each of the nominees are below, in alphabetical order:

Barbara Bordalejo

Bio: Barbara Bordalejo is professor of Digital Humanities at KU Leuven, where she teaches digital textuality and electronic literature. She is part of the executive of the European Association for Digital Humanities and has been part of the executive of GO::DH since its foundation, to which she was elected last year.

Statement: GO::DH has become an important forum for the  initiation and promotion of collaboration with others. With the institutional support of KU Leuven and  as the head of the Digital Humanities Task Force in the Faculty of Arts, I am in a good position to continue to contribute to this community. For the next term, I would like to renew efforts to open new lines of communication with places that continue to be underepresented (Africa, South and Central America) and to create more spaces to initiate productive dialogues leading to a richer, polifonic future. In order to achieve this, I will build on KU Leuven’s history of cultural exchange and enrichment and expand this to different areas of DH.


Gimena del Rio

Bio: Gimena del Rio is a researcher at the Seminario de Edicion y Crítica Textual (SECRIT-IIBIRCIT) of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Argentina and a fundamental promoter of the Argentinian Association of Digital Humanities. S

Statement (from nominator): Part from her academic activities in Digital Humanities, she has been instrumental at grounding the field in Argentina by promoting transdisciplinary community practices. Her involvement with other DH communities around the world would be a definite asset for the Executive Committee as GO::DH increasingly builds a sense of a global DH community. She could offer a interesting point of view on the Latin American development of DH and an enthusiastic member of the DH Community in Spanish.


Alex Gil

Bio: Alex Gil specializes in twentieth-century Caribbean literature, with an emphasis on critical bibliography, digital humanities and textual scholarship. He has published in journals across the Atlantic and the Americas, while sustaining an open and robust online research presence. In 2010-2012 he was a fellow at the Scholars' Lab and NINES at the University of Virginia. He now serves as co-chair of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities initiative and is actively engaged in digital humanities projects at Columbia University and around the world.

Statement: As vice-chair and then as co-chair of GO::DH in the 2014-2015 period, I oversaw the creation of the AroundDH project with other GO::DH members, which highlighted one project each day around the world. This project helped make visible the wonderful work that folks are doing around the world in digital humanities by any name. During the DH2014 in Lausanne, with the leadership of Elika Ortega, we launched the Whispering Program, which re-started the conversation around translation for ADHO and led to a vibrant conversation with many communities around the world on the role of language in DH. Supporting the initiative of James O´Sullivan, we redid our site to make it more simple and began the process of aligning it with principles of minimal computing. During this period I also coordinated the creation of the affiliate program that brought us together to the RedHD, the AHDig and the SADH group. At the moment, I am working with the minimal computing working group to kickstart a Jekyll site that can serve as a position site and resource for minimal computing. If elected I would continue to support all of our groups, and help in the formation of new ones, as I have in the two years I have been involved at GO::DH. As a member of the executive for a third term, my major policy contribution would be an amendment to the by-laws that would guarantee representation by a member of each affiliate organisation in the executive, pushing GO::DH towards the truly diverse global organisation for which we have laid the seeds together already.


Martin Grandjean

Bio: Martin Grandjean is a contemporary history researcher at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). He is interested in cultural relations and scientific exchanges during the interwar period. Combining network analysis and data visualization, his research are impregnated by the digital humanities (see his blog). Martin Grandjean is a founding member and the current spokesman of Humanistica, the french-speaking association for digital humanities.

Statement: The GO::DH executive committee interests me for two reasons. I am personally convinced that this is an area of both reflection and action in which our community need to make urgent progress. On the other hand, as the spokesman of the French DH association, I know how much we need this kind of relay. We are also facing similar problems inside the Francophonie, which extends from Canada to many African countries, with several European countries and individuals residing in many other countries.


Dan O'Donnell

Bio: I am one of the founding members of the group that eventually became GO::DH and served as its first chair. Prior to chairing GO::DH, I fulfilled a number of administrative roles in the Digital Humanities, including chair of the Text Encoding Initiative, co-President of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Societé canadienne des humanités numériques, and founding director of Digital Medievalist. I am currently editor-in-chief of the ADHO supported journal Digital Studies/Le champ numérique.

Statement: I see the main tasks of GO::DH over the next two years as being a) to maintain its momentum and willingness to experiment and innovate, and b) develop a more robust scholarly infrastructure (annual or semi-annual conference, regular cfps and special issues). In the last two years, GO::DH has had an astounding impact on the global understanding and practice of the Digital Humanities. I'm interested in ensuring that influence continues.


Padmini Ray Murray

Bio: I am currently on the faculty at the Srishti School for Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore, India, working in conjunction with the Centre of Public History, where I am setting up a collaborative programme in the Digital Humanities and Public History. I have been a recipient of two Arts and Humanities Research Council funding awards: on the disruption and disintermediation in the publishing industry under the aegis of the Digital Transformations programme; and as one of five Unbox Fellows,  during which my research focused on videogames in India. In the absence of a cohesive digital humanities presence in Scotland, I founded DHNetS earlier this year (Digital Humanities Network Scotland) and am at the helm of the newly established South Asian Digital Humanities Network, which has just launched its website, and has already attracted a modest membership. I am on the Editorial Board of the peer-reviewed journal Technoculture and have served as an elected Trustee for the past year on the board of Wikimedia UK.

Statement: It’s an honour to submit my candidacy for an organisation that does so much to foster outreach and build community amongst scholars—and it is my hope that, should I be elected, I could do much to uphold these aims through the following: As someone who will be working in, and has trained in the global south, I feel it is important to address how local contexts shape and inform our understanding of the digital humanities as a discipline. I am keen to facilitate conversations between the wider DH community and the newly launched South Asian Digital Humanities Network that addresses questions of access, infrastructure, economic and government policy, the exigencies of working in languages other than English, rate of technological growth and obsolescence, and our different institutional histories to broaden these horizons. In practical terms, I hope my role will enable me to ensure a greater representation from this part of the world by fostering training initiatives, exchanges and network-building activities.


Nuria Rodríguez Ortega

Bio: Nuria Rodríguez Ortega is the head of the History of Art department at the University of Málaga (UMA). She also directs the research group i-ArtHis_Lab (iarthis.hdplus.es) and leads ReArte.Dix (the international network of Digital Studies on Artistic Culture. Since 2010 she coordinates the MA program in Social Devlopment and Artistic Culture also at UMA.
Her reseach focuses on the intersection between computing languages, dgital media ant art history. She has also worked on the junction of entrepreneurship and culture and is the co-founder of the award-winning spin-off Culturacy

Statement: Given the cultural and geopoligical expansion seen in Digital Humanities practice, I believe it is extremely necessary to further develop initiatives like GO::DH in order to explore the diversity and plurality of these practices in a global context so as to discover that which brings us together but also identifying what the idiosincracies of each context are. GO::DH provides an exceptional context to work towards that. Furthermore, I believe that my training as an art historian, artistic culture, and cultural heritage in general will add a perspective that is not always present in DH disussions.


Mari Sarv

Bio: Mari Sarv works at Estonian Folklore Archives (Estonian Literary Museum) since 1996, as a senior researcher since 2008, since 2012 she is leading the research group of Estonian Folklore Archives. Her main subject of study is older Estonian folksong (regilaul). She has published two monographs on the topic (2000 and 2008), has organized conferences on regilaul and edited proceedings from these conferences. She has been contributing to the developing of the database of Estonian regilaul including almost 100000 songtexts by now and she has been widely using the computational methods in her research (metrical and poetical analysis, cartographic representations, social network analysis). Since the very beginning of her career she has been trying to initiate a digital turn in the archival system of her home archives, and later on has been contributing to several projects related to establishing and developing the digital archival system of Estonian Literary Museum. Together with her colleague Kaisa Kulasalu she organized the first conferences on Estonian digital humanities in 2013 and 2014, established the web page and mailing list for Estonian DH community.

Statement: GO:DH is a great and necessary initiative, the existence of it already brings awareness on the problematics of non-english DH
As there is definitely a linguistic gap between the english speaking world and the rest in the field of DH, the SIG should contribute to the diminishing of it
- explaining the problems of non-english DHers to the wider audience
- helping to spread awareness of the DH tools and projects between English and non-English world
- contributing to the organizing of training events for non-English developing DH communities
- forming a network for people with common problems
- spreading awareness of the need for dh tools and standards to be accustomizable for multilingual use.


David Joseph Wrisely

Bio: I have been living and teaching in Beirut since 2002 where I am an Associate Professor in a department of English.  My research interests include medieval studies, Mediterranean studies, as well as various elements of the spatial humanities:  literary GIS, historical gazetteers, ground-up community mapping.  While on sabbatical this year I launched a set a workshops "Topics in Digital Mapping" at Fordham University co-taught with graduate students, in order to build a community of practice around digital mapping. This year I have also organized two major DH activities at my home university: the Arab World's first That Camp, and the first sustained DH training opportunity in the region, the Digital Humanities Institute – Beirut (dhibeirut.wordpress.com).  The institute is offering 8 courses and will bring together 80+ participants (students, faculty, chairs, library, IT)  from a dozen local and international universities/research centers, as well as members of local NGOs, government and industry.

Statement: I am fascinated in a digital humanities that arises organically from community--in its languages and its world views--that learns from the global community and gives back to it with its own special touch.  I am interested in building local, regional and international partnerships for DH training and research. I can be found on twitter as @DJWrisley.


All best,
Élika Ortega and Roopika Risam
(Returning Officers and Nominations Committee)