I have an active project underway that could benefit from a burst of great minds working together. Case method teaching (done at HKS, HBS, HLS) requires students to ‘prep for a case’ by close reading and reflection on a written case. Yet, at the core, a great case is about storytelling, in this case a story about the ethics of public officials who are navigating their response to a Supreme Court ruling. Can we turn a PDF text case into a more engaging digital format while retaining the complexity and nuance found in the words? We’re not replacing the words but building enhancements for them. We might look at the rough prototype I’ve started Creatavist.com (in beta), tear it apart, build it back up, think of ways to make it work with interactive timelines, images, video(?) and then publish it. We might think of how the digital format can be used to draw (not distract) from student focus, comprehension, self-direction…. Want to roll up sleeves and hack on the prototype with me?

I would love to be part of a session where people trade stories of success and failure at collaboration. I’m thinking especially of collaboration between technology-skilled people and those focused on humanities teaching or research. I have been on both sides of this divide, sometime trying to get help from people with much more tech-savvy, but at other times trying to help people with tech who understand less. If you’ve been in either situation, what have you learned that others could learn from?

In an increasingly interdisciplinary academic climate, students working across majors are collaborating and creating DH projects. During this talk, I’m interested in exploring the following questions:

• How are students first introduced to the concept of DH? How do we foster an organic adoption of DH for students?
• What are some representative DH student projects that you’ve seen around? Have you been a part of a DH student project? If so, share yours!
• What are some ideas for DH student-driven projects that you’d like to see in the future?
• How can we inform students across majors/concentrations that DH is even an option?

There are very few project-based courses in the humanities compared with science, engineering, and the social sciences. Does that put digital humanists at a disadvantage when it comes to building teams for projects? What are some good techniques for pulling disparate groups (scholars, undergrads, coders, artists) together to tackle an innovative problem in the digital humanities? What are the roles of the traditional university units and activities (e.g., the library, a freshman seminar, an art exhibit, academic computing) in helping to hatch such collaboration? Come contribute a case study (of success or failure), lessons learned, a new project looking for partners, your best source for developers willing to explore new fields, or any other thoughts and experiences that bear on this topic.

Ann Whiteside and Jud Harward