Is There Anybody Out There?

Building a global DH community

Isabel Galina

Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

(UNAM)

Is There Anybody Out There? Building a Global DH Community by Isabel Galina is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

.

Overview

• Inclusiveness and openness in DH

– Community building example Red de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD)

Defining DH

• What we are and what we do

• What we are and what we do

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

UNAM

Located in Mexico City

300, 000 students (under graduates and post graduates)

45,000 academic staff (11,000 full time)

Aprox. 40% of national research productivity

4 main objectives

• Raise awareness of DH

• Identify key scholars and projects

• Investigate key local issues

• Consolidate internally and link externally

How?

• Are you a digital humanist?

• Finding DH resources and tools online is hard

• Finding DH projects?

• Auto identification?

Methodology

• Scoping– Four workshops

• Between September 2010 to July 2011

• Concrete actions

• From workshop to network (to association)

Scoping

7 key topics

• organizational context including institutional recognition and support

• planning and development; • intellectual property and copyright • human resources and training • dissemination and use• completion and sustainability• digital humanist career

Galina, I. Retos para la creación de recursos digitales en las Humanidades, El Profesional de la Información, 21(2), pp185-189, 2012 (ISSN: 1386-6710)

Institutional support

“There are other people like me”

Small personal initiatives

“University authorities have a vague notion that this sounds important”

Lack of coherent policies or structures to have an real impact

Funding

• “Surprisingly I have never had any trouble getting funding”

• No lack of access to computational technologies

• 1-3 year periods

Human resources

• Finding, training and retaining human resources

• “We know now what we want”

• Little learning support– no centres, programs

• Rigid university structures

• Best practices and guidelines• Help with the steep learning curve

Sustainability

• Server hosting

• “when does a project become a university service and therefore somebody else’s responsibility?”

• Absence of library community

• Preservation aware but not addressed

Who did we find?

• “I am a digital humanist” (and I would like to do something about it)

• Aproximately 20 to 30 practitioners in four Mexico City universities Continue the snowball effect (now 70 suscribers to our mailinglist)

Challenges

• Increase involvement of DH scholars• to discover and register more research

and projects• develop best practices and guidelines in

Spanish• document• incorporate the library community• expand the group and develop

mechanisms to increase national and international collaboration

Actions

• News/Courses• Evaluation committee• Regular meetings• Special issue on DH of Revista Digital

Universitaria• Courses• Beginning of 2012 “1er Encuentro de

Humanistas Digitales”

• Larger/complex/sophisticated proyects• Recognition • Outreach (Mexico and Latin America)

A focus on expanding

Other international associations

• Red de Humanidades Digitales (June 2011) • Japanese Association for DH (JADH) (can’t find

the date but I think it is around 2010).• Associaziones per l’Informatica Umanistica e la

Cultura Digitale (March 2011 official but as network has functioned for longer)

• Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (March 2011) – also a result of a workshop

• Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas (HDH) November 2011

DH conference

Freedom to explore(12 languages)

Digital diversity: Cultures, languages and methods(7 languages)

Big Tent Digital Humanities(CfP: 5 languages)

What we have to do now is see if when the CfP is published in another language does this increase the number of submissions?

Working groups

• Multi-lingualism and Multi-Culturalism CommitteeIs responsible for developing and promoting policies in ADHO and its constituent organizations that will help them to become more linguistically and culturally inclusive in general terms, and especially in the areas where linguistic and cultural matters play a role.

• Inclusivity

Special Interest Groups

•Global Outlook (GO:DH)The purpose of GO::DH is to help break down barriers that hinder communication and collaboration among researchers and students of the Digital Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Heritage sectors in High, Mid, and Low Income Economies.//www.globaloutlookdh.org/

•GO::DH is not an aid or an outreach programme.

Discussion Lists

• GO:DH (globaloutlookdh-l@uleth.ca)

• RedHD (redhd@humanidadesdigitales.net)

• How are they being used?

• Different to say TEI or Humanist?

• Is this a cultural or a subject difference?

Finding projects and people

• Around DH in 80 Days (#s13dh, #arounddh)– http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/around-dh-

in-80-days/

• RedHD database of DH projects. Currently UNAM ones. Working on other Mexican and LatinAmerican universities– Inteface is in Spanish– Help is in Spanish

• 10 June 2013

• 97 blogs (72 in Spanish and 21 Portuguese)

– Spain 31

– Mexico 22

– Portugal 13

– Brasil 6

– EU 6

• Many blogs were projects and not individuals

• Reflections on what DH (philosophical)

• Visualizations (mapping who and what is out there)

• Comments (ideas, let’s work together, did you know?)

– Organized (CenterNet, RedHD, HDH, Universidad Nova de Lisboa and Universidade de Sao Paulo). Hosted by UNAM. (dhd2013.filos.unam.mx)

DíaHD

On Twitter

• #transformDH Transformative Digital Humanities: Doing Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Class in DH

• #DHPoco Postcolonial DH

• #RedHD Info about events, articles, projects and general

Events

• 1er Encuentro de Humanistas Digitales (Mexico City May 2011)

• 1er Congreso Internacional de la HDH (Coruña July 2013)

• JADH having their 3rd conference (Kyoto September 2013)

• I Seminário Internacional em Humanidades Digitais (Sao Paulo, October 2013)

So what or now what?

• Isabel Galina– igalina@unam.mx– @igalina

• RedHD– www.humanidadesdigitales.net– @Red_HD