Blog Planning

Purposes

The DQH blog is meant to serve several purposes:

1. to provide dynamic content for the website (beyond regular releases of publications)
2. to provide a forum for commentary and discussion on other DHQ publications (in additions to the editorials), and perhaps on LLC issues
3. to provide a ready-made blogging environment for guest bloggers who may not otherwise blog – guest bloggers would volunteer / be invited to blog for a set period of time and on a set of coherent topics
4. to provide reports from relevant events including conferences, workshops and meetings
5. to aggregate clearly related content from existing blogs

Timeline

Though the DHQ Blog could justifiably be launched before the full launch of DHQ (in order, perhaps, to start attracting traffic), there may be a stronger argument for waiting until DHQ is officially launched. Among other things, this may provide a more positive first impression for visitors, as there would be less "in construction" signs floating around and the blog could be fully integrated into the ecology of DHQ.

In preparation for the launch of the blog, it would be good to get buy-in from as many regular bloggers as possible, as well as having a tentative schedule of rotating guest bloggers and themes. Depending on when DHQ is launched, we can also try to line-up special events bloggers would would report on the proceedings of conferences, workshops and meetings.

Bloggers

Needless to say, the success of the DHQ Blog will depend on a steady influx of content from a variety of perspectives. Without coordination of bloggers, it will almost surely fail. In particular, we need to avoid coming out of the blocks at full speed and slowly petering out. The proposed list of categories, names, and possible dates below is a first attempt to plan some continuity in the blogging input (inasmuch as a fluid mechanism like blogging can be planned). This part would especially benefit from the suggestions of other participants in DHQ.

Please note that at this point, no one in the list below has been approached about the possibility of being involved.

Regular

• Stéfan Sinclair
• Geoffrey Rockwell
• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
• Vika Zafrin
• Grand Text Auto

Thematic Guest Bloggers

• Willard McCarty? on community building
• Claire Warwick on library studies
• Ray Siemens on electronic books
• Noah Wardrip-Fruin on game studies
• Mark Olsen on larger corpora

Special Events Bloggers

• Society for Digital Humanities SDH/SEMI (May)
• Digital Humanities Summer Institute (June)
• Digital Humanities (June-July)
• Extreme Markup Language (August)
• Digital Resources in the Humanities (September)
• Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis (October)
• Text Encoding Initiative (October)

Technical Issues

As a proof of concept the page at http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/blog/ pulls in blogging content from several regular bloggers. Although a the moment this doesn't distinguish between DHQ-tagged content and not, that would be trivial to do. In other words, that prototype content is an aggregator.

Aggregation is performed through a plugin for WordPress? . There's also a full-blown WordPress? installation (http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/blog/wp/ – temporary address) that would allow individuals with the appropriate credentials to post "born DHQ" content. In any case, it seems clear that the open source package WordPress? will provide all the functionality we may need and that it will be just a matter of determining how to integrate views of the blog into the DHQ site.

-- StefanSinclair? - 05 Jul 2006