Basic guidelines:

• keep the video short (about 1-2 minutes – no longer)
• make the video self-contained (with narration and/or titling)
• post the video on YouTube with the tag #dhcentervideo
• let Stéfan Sinclair (stefan.sinclair@mcgill.ca) know your video is available

Examples of project videos from centerNet members are available here: http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/centers-screencasts/ (though please note that this call for videos is meant to focus more on centres than individual projects).

We encourage you to convey the local culture, humour and soul of your centre.

This partnership promises to be mutually beneficial for centerNet and DHCommons while helping to create and solidify the emerging infrastructure for digital scholarship in the humanities. As a centerNet initiative, DHCommons will help lower the cost of entry into digital scholarship and bridge gaps between large humanities centers and solo practitioners around the world. DHCommons will complement the mission of other centerNet initiatives, such as, arts-humanities.net, aimed at supporting collaboration in the digital humanities. Through DHCommons, centerNet will foster increased collaboration among digital humanities centers and—most importantly—between centers and those previously outside of the center network.

DHCommons is an online hub focused on matching digital humanities projects seeking assistance with scholars interested in project collaboration. This hub responds to a pressing and demonstrable need for a project-collaborator matching service that will allow scholars interested in DH to enter the field by joining an existing project as well as make existing projects more sustainable by drawing in new, well-matched participants. DHCommons helps break down the siloization of an emerging field by connecting collaborators across institutions, a particularly acute need for solo practitioners and those without access to a digital humanities center. Working with centerNet, DHCommons will strive also to reach solo digital humanists in countries or regions without robust digital humanities infrastructure, helping them find communities of potential collaborators to further their work. DHCommons began in a session on interinstitutional collaboration at THATCamp Chicago in October of 2010. Session participants Ryan Cordell (St. Norbert College), Quinn Dombrowski (University of Chicago), and Christopher Dickman (St. Louis University) began developing the hub soon thereafter with the support of the Texas A&M Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (http://idhmc.tamu.edu/) and the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (http://www.nitle.org/). The DHCommons Advisory Board includes Rebecca Davis (NITLE), Christopher Dickman (St. Louis University), Quinn Dombrowski (University of Chicago), Laura Mandell (IDHMC), Katherine Rowe (Bryn Mawr College), and Lisa Spiro (NITLE).

centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action to benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. Since its inception in April 2007, centerNet has added over 250 members from about 120 centers in over 20 countries. Regional centerNet affiliates have been established in Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, and the U.K. and Ireland, each with a steering committee. In 2009, centerNet became a founding member of CHAIN: the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks (with DARIAH, CLARIN, Project Bamboo, and ADHO). In 2010, centerNet formally affiliated with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), the Digital Library Federation, and 4Humanities, in each case to pursue an ambitious agenda of initiatives on matters of mutual interest. On 1 January, 2012, centerNet became a fully fledged ‘Constituent Organisation’ within The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO).

centerNet will join three current Constituent Organisations in ADHO. These are the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the Association for Literary and Lingistic Computing (ALLC), and the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l’Étude des Médias Interactifs (SDH-SEMI).

The agreement reached by ADHO and centerNet followed 18 months of discussions, led by Neil Fraistat and Kay Walter for centernet and Harold Short and John Unsworth on behalf of ADHO. The key challenge arose from the membership basis of the various associations. ACH, ALLC and SDH-SEMI are individual-member associations; individuals become members by subscribing to ADHO’s print journal LLC (at which time they indicate which association they wish to join). centerNet, in contrast, is an association of institutions. In order to preserve the ‘subscription’ principle, centerNet has agreed that from 1 January 2012 centres wishing to join centerNet will do so on the basis of an institutional subscription to LLC.

As a constituent organisation within ADHO, centerNet will play a full role in ADHO activities, will have equal representation on the ADHO Steering Committee, and will be fully integrated into the revenue sharing process carried out each year to disburse the profits received from OUP in respect of LLC. The revenue sharing will include an annual subvention to support a centerNet publication venue.

The intellectual focus of the discussions and the agreement has been the shared aim of promoting digital scholarship in the humanities world-wide. It is intended and expected that centerNet will be participant and beneficiary across the range of ADHO activities, which will in turn be broadened and enhanced by centerNet participation. Not least of centerNet’s benefits will be the stable financial basis that it will gain from ADHO membership.

At a local level, individual ADHO members are already very involved in existing centres, and will continue to support their development and the creation of new centres where none yet exist. The centres, for their part, will continue to provide a focus of scholarly support for existing individual members, but will also seek actively to draw new scholars into the field, encouraging them to take up individual membership within an ADHO association.

The admission of centerNet to ADHO is expected, therefore, to provide significant mutual benefit both to the centres in centerNet and to the individual scholars and their associations, and can be seen as a very exciting step forward with huge potential for the continued growth of the digital humanities internationally.

ADHO was established in 2005 with the aim of providing a co-ordinated framework to promote and support digital research and teaching across arts and humanities disciplines worldwide. Current activities include an annual conference, which will next take place at the University of Hamburg, Germany in July 2012, a number of publication venues, and support for young scholars and a variety of projects and training events. The publication venues include: the print journal LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, published by OUP; two refereed online journals: Digital Humanties Quarterly, and Digital Studies/le champ numérique; and two monograph series: Digital Scholarship in the Arts and Humanities, published by Ashgate, and Topics in the Digital Humanities, published by Illinois University Press.

centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action to benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. Since its inception in April 2007, centerNet has added over 250 members from about 120 centers in over 20 countries. Regional centerNet affiliates have been established in Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, and the U.K. and Ireland, each with a steering committee. In 2009, centerNet became a founding member of CHAIN: the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks (with DARIAH, CLARIN, Project Bamboo, and ADHO). In 2010, centerNet formally affiliated with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), the Digital Library Federation, and 4Humanities, in each case to pursue an ambitious agenda of initiatives on matters of mutual interest.

centerNet and The Council on Library and Information Resources’ Digital Library Federation program are delighted to announce today their formal alliance. Established in 1995, the Digital Library Federation is a community of library practitioners engaged and committed to building and sustaining digital libraries through collaborative effort and establishing best practices. The DLF community includes project managers, code developers, and digital curators.

The affiliation will focus on areas where digital libraries and digital humanities converge and need further exploration and understanding of each community’s roles and responsibilities. Areas of likely collaboration include the following:

* Data Curation–examining options for the preservation of digital scholarship objects and workflows, and digital products of research and instruction;

* Cyberinfrastructure–exploring interoperability, data mining, shared infrastructure, and linked open data;

* Internationalization–sharing work with international networks to increase awareness and cooperation; improving communities’ awareness of and influence on international initiatives;

* Scaling up and scaling down–working with Google books, HATHI Trust, and the Digital Public Library of America to explore the meaning of aggregating data, and the new types of research questions that can be asked using huge digital libraries; also examining how to leverage smaller scoped work, and understanding the unique preservation challenges this scholarship presents;

* Career paths–highlighting career opportunities in fields of digital humanities and digital libraries to better understand changing professional roles;

* Publication and distribution—exploring how we share research efforts to better inform practice.

Humanities (Dot) Net
Currents in the Digital Humanities
15 June 2011
Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto
Organized by centerNet and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI)

In 2009, centerNet and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) created a partnership to jointly pursue activities in the digital humanities over the next five years. The focus of this initiative will initially be the relation of digital technologies to the humanities disciplines and the formation of new collaborations and publics.

As the first major initiative in this partnership, CHCI and centerNet have organized a meeting to collectively examine currents in the digital humanities and provide networking opportunities for each organization’s members: to bring together a broad range of organizations and individuals, and enable specialists in the digital humanities to interact with organizations that are interested in developing projects in this exciting new area of scholarship. The meeting will feature plenary speakers John Unsworth (Illinois) and Brian Cantwell Smith (Toronto), panels on Digital Disciplines and Digital Publics, a roundtable discussion on the role of funders and programs that go beyond the academy, and opportunities for discussion. Schedule information can be found via the CHCI website, http://chcinetwork.org.

The meeting will take place on 15 June 2011 at the University of Toronto’s Jackman Humanities Institute. All centerNet members are encouraged to attend. A small registration fee of $25US will cover the direct costs of the meeting.

In addition, CHCI invites all centerNet members to join their international membership group for their 2011 Annual Meeting, Cities Humanities Archives, on 13-14 June 2011, at the same location. Registration for the CHCI Annual Meeting is $75US per organization plus a $40US fee for the Meeting dinner on the evening of Monday 13 June. The $25US registration fee for the CHCI/centerNet meeting is waived for anyone attending the CHCI meeting.

Complete information on both programs can be found at the CHCI website, http://chcinetwork.org, including travel and lodging information, and an online registration form.

For more information write to chci@duke.edu or contact centerNet via their website, at http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/

We look forward to the possibility of seeing you in Toronto!

ABOUT THE ORGANIZATIONS

Established in 1988, CHCI serves as a site for the discussion of issues germane to the fostering of crossdisciplinary activity and as a network for the circulation of information and the sharing of resources within the humanities and interpretive social sciences.

Established in 2007, centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action that benefits the digital humanities and allied fields in general, and has special resources in the domain of cyberinfrastructure to offer humanities centers in particular.