Day of Geoffrey Rockwell

As my Day of DH comes to an end I find myself thinking about the project and what can be done to improve it and so on. Some thoughts in no particular order:

• As some will have noticed, this is now a centerNet initiative. centerNet is an international organization of digital humanities centres and they have encouraged international participation. I’m pleased to say that we seem to have more non-English folk participating this year, though we won’t know until the dust settles. We also seem to have a lot of students, but again, I may be looking for them.
• More importantly, the time has come to hand the Day of DH project off to another centre. The Canadian Institute for Research Computing in the Arts organized it and now the time has come for this to migrate to another centre. This is where centerNet will take leadership as this project is now a shared project that we can all use to build community. Is your centre interested?
• A lot of good stuff is happening on Twitter under the #dayofdh hashtag. We need to find a better way of integrating the two. Perhaps we should think of the project not as a particular technology, but as a harvesting problem. How could we design it so that people use whatever they like, but enhance it so that we can find the posts and aggregate them? Would this make the project too diffuse and abstract for new folk?
• My sense is that the Day of DH, like a theme park, is a lot more fun for people new to it. It is a project that builds community, especially for people newish to DH or people isolated where they are. It does so without falling, as we often do, into a rhetoric of DH vs. the “traditional” disciplines. For people who have been in the field for a while or people who have an audience, this project may be too dispersed and unfocused.
• We always have to guard against the project become just navel gazing. We have conferences for that. Fortunately the new participants bring an enthusiasm and seriousness to this that helps us avoid the worst. Perhaps we should introduce themes so that people can focus on issues rather than just themselves.
• Speaking of conferences, it also strikes me that this format would work as an alternative form of online conference. It doesn’t force people to attend at a particular moment. Everyone gets a voice. You can pick and choose what to listen to. Would thematic versions work?
• There is no doubt that the Day of DH is not an “objective” account of what we do. We all perform differently when presenting ourselves and documenting what we do. I certainly reflect more. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t help us understand what we do better.
• I’m tempted to say that the Day of DH is an antidote to Stanley Fish’s blog posts that we are just the next pseudo-revolutionary theory. He reads us as another postmodernism, but he is reading what he recognizes as text. Reading the Day of DH feed I hope a different picture would emerge that shows us as practicioners in community.