Project brings together a number of different communities supporting research and academic innovation.
Institutional teams – 2-5 participants per institution, including arts/humanities faculty, IT, library reps.
It’s to be a Community Design process – this workshop is to be a “listening tour”, guided by a framework of broad goals and a commitment to action. Janet Broughton calls it an “upward spiral of conversation”. Looking for a search for commonalities – common needs where investment and effort will make sense.
Chris Mackey notes that there’s going to be a lot of sausage making going on in this project, and the end results are not likely to be elegant and clean, but could be really useful.
Mellon is interested in the diversity of participation in this project, including community colleges and liberal arts colleges. They are excited about the possibility of an implementation project down the road.
Arts & Humanities are different from the sciences. One way is that you can find world-class researchers in nooks and crannies, unlike in, say, high energy physics. What does an indigenous a&h cyberinfrastructure look like?
In Mellon’s experience so far, the smaller institutions have more than held their own, and often act as leading indicators of new and interesting sets of issues.
We’ll spend the next two days trying to understand how humanists work and to build out lists of scholarly practices in the arts and humanities with a series of exercises and quick talks (4 minutes of presentation, 6 minutes of questions max).
The question is raised about places in the humanities where digital scholarship is problematic and perceived as not leading to tenure. The organizers are cognizant of the issue, but hopeful that it won’t dominate the discussion. Kathleen Woodward notes that the Bamboo Project itself helps lend legitimacy to digital scholarship at our institutions.
Now on to the reception and dinner!
Oren Sreebny 