Presentation by Paige Morgan and Brian Gutierrez at HASTAC 2015 on the subject of building DH community and the Demystifying Digital Humanities curriculum.

1. Building & Sustaining DH
Communities
Brian R. Gutierrez, Graduate Student,
English, University of Washington
Paige Morgan, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow,
Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship,
McMaster University

2. The tales grad students tell…
• Project origins
• Essential activities
• Successes & failures
• Portability & sustainability
• The question of community

3. What is community?
What does the work of building
community look like (when it’s
done by graduate students?)

4. Origins of DMDH
• Founded by Paige Morgan and Sarah
Kremen-Hicks in 2012
• The need for DH credentials
• The importance of DH projects
• The lag between critical knowledge and
technical skills
• Knowledge of what would fit into the local
environment

5. The curriculum
Introduction
What is DH, and Why Should I Care?
--Original values: http://www.dmdh.org/values-of-dh/
--Revised values: http://tinyurl.com/dhvalues2-0
Managing & Professionalizing Your Online Identity
Data wrangling
Exploring Programming in the Digital Humanities
Programming on the Whiteboard
Project management
Big Project, Small Project: Steps in Ideation and Development
Available Tools: Free, Cheap, and Premium

6. Associated DMDH
activities• Play with your data!
sessions
• Select skills
workshops
• DH office hours
• DH happy hour /
social
• UW Digital Projects
Showcase

7. Digital presence
• DMDH website
(http://www.dmdh.org) &
Simpson Center website
• DMDH Twitter (@dmdh_uw)
• Slideshare (for workshop
slides)
(http://www.slideshare.net/paig
emorgan/)
• Choosing priorities

8. Building Institutional
Relationships
• What kinds of relationships? Between
whom?
• UW Libraries
• UW-IT & Instructional Technologists)
• Departmental partners (UW iSchool,
Geography)

9. Departmental
pushback
• “If we have successful workshops, why
do we need classes?”
• Student interest and energy in a field
doesn’t necessarily convince faculty
that it’s worthwhile.

10. Successes
• Steady and growing attendance over 3
years, with participants from 21
departments plus external institutions (UW
Press, Seattle Art Museum)
• Developing a trajectory between
workshops and DHSI and DH Commons
Summer Project Grant
• English Department’s new DH Colloquium
oversubscribed

11. Failures
• (Failure is
valuable!)
• Running a program
is a lot of work
• Linking with larger
digital projects on
campus

12. Portability
• The future of DMDH
at UW
• From Digital
Humanities to Digital
Scholarship at
McMaster University

13. Sustainability
How sustainable is
community when it’s built
by graduate students?

14. Community is … “a group of people who are
fairly like-minded or are interested in the
same goal.”
--Miriam Posner,
“Here & There: Creating DH Community”

15. “The DH Community is a campus network of faculty
from a range of disciplines who are interested in
how humanities research and scholarship are
advanced or expanded by digital tools and
multimedia platforms, and how digital humanities
impacts what and how we teach our students.”
--The Humanities Institute website,
Wake Forest University

16. “’Community’ implies reciprocal care &
shared memory & a lasting social
organization that isn’t 100% dependent
on the personality & actions of a handful
of unique individuals for its genesis &
continuance.”
--Brian Reed (Chair, UW English Dept.)

17. Think | Pair | Share
What does DH community look like at
your institution?
• Which nodes are involved?
• What does content look like? (classes,
workshops, etc.)
• Who drives the activity? Who could be
driving the activity?

18. Thank you!
DMDH & DMDS content is CC-BY-NC
licensed – feel free to fork our work!