Hi all,

Things are proceeding apace with the charter from the ADHO steering committee. I've been asked to tighten some language and provide additional information about concrete activities we are undertaking, but I believe we are close to finishing the proposal.

Having the proposal accepted will be an important first step for the idea we had of running a special session on DH in and on China: as you'll remember, we put together what looked like it might be a decent programme as the DH deadline came, but, partially as a result of how new we are, were unable to finalise the speakers in time to place a competitive proposal. We are hoping once we are approved at ADHO to ask for some time for a special sponsored session instead.

Another opportunity is rapidly approaching as well: the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities meeting in Victoria from 3-5 June (submission deadline December 17): http://csdh-schn.org/2012/11/16/cfp2013/ Since this meeting also abuts the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (something that is going to become a regular feature of the Congress), this may also provide a very constructive opportunity for speakers to work closely with others from the larger community.

For this one, I was thinking that it might be interesting to put together a session on DH in Africa. Titi Babalola who is a member of this list and a graduate student in English here at Lethbridge has just written a very interesting paper on impediments to and promises of DH in Nigeria, which I think could make for a very interesting contribution. We have also been discussing DH issues with the organisers of the Afro-Hispanic conference scheduled for this Spring which will deal in part in a more general way with some of the same issues. There was just a discussion in the Chronicle about development issues in Higher Education in Africa, including the need for networking initiatives such as ours. And finally, the president of the Canadian Funding agency, Chad Gaffield (a long time friend of our discipline) was one of a number of people who approvingly retweeted a reference to our proposal to ADHO.

We still have two weeks to put together the three papers we would need. If members of this group thought this was an interesting idea, I'd be willing to work with anybody who was interested in in putting together some language for a call later this week. I spoke with our Vice President Research, and it seems like we might even be able to use some of the money the University of Lethbridge is providing to provide partial travel support to speakers from Africa who might not be otherwise able to make it to Victoria... though of course the amount available is quite limited. We could put in for a "Connections" grant as well to find support.

What do you think? If we are going to do it, we should act this week to get the call out.