MITH congratulates Tanya Clement (Associate Director, Digital Cultures and Creativity), Dave Lester (Assistant Director, MITH), and Doug Reside (Associate Director, MITH) on the receipt of two new Digital Humanities Start Up Grants in the latest round of competition from the National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities. Both awards will support events addressing major issues in field, to be hosted at Maryland in the coming year.
Tanya Clement and Doug Reside will plan and lead a workshop on Professionalization in Digital Humanities Centers, which will address the rapidly emerging phenomenon of alternative academic careers among the hybrid scholar-programmers now staffing many DH centers. Such staff members are not well accounted for by the normative division between the “research” usually associated with faculty positions and the “service” usually associated with staff. As a result, career trajectories and methods for their professional development are unclear. This Digital Humanities Level 1 Start Up grant will support a MITH-hosted two-day workshop this December and online discussion that will result in a white paper and a set of recommendations for establishing career paths within digital humanities centers.
Dave Lester will plan and lead a workshop on the pressing technical challenge of developing APIs (Application Programming Interfaces—technology for allowing different tools and software to interact effectively) for the Digital Humanities. The workshop, to be held this winter, will gather 40-50 digital humanities scholars and developers who are using or interested in using APIs in their digital projects, industry leaders (likely including Google Maps, Freebase, and Open Library) who will demonstrate their APIs, and practitioners who will help guide the group through the "working weekend." Presentations will be video recorded, and recordings made available online through the workshop Web site, which will act as a clearinghouse and publication of all workshop-related content.
Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH, comments, "With these two grants, MITH continues to address some of the most pressing issues in the field of digital humanities in innovative and substantive ways.”