15-20 Minute Paper
Daniel Powell
Electronic Textual Cultures Lab
Department of English
University of Victoria
Biography
Daniel Powell is a second-year doctoral student at the University of Victoria, where he researches the digital humanities, new media, digital research infrastructure and training, and pre-Shakespearean English literature.
Abstract
Writing in 2004, Cathy Davidson and David Theo Golberg argue that the “new humanities” “require new structures . . . new models for researchers to work across disciplinary boundaries, making use of databases and resources that no one scholar, or department, can maintain. That requires planning at an institutional level.” This paper outlines and discusses one such potential resource: a regionally focused, multi-institutional, multimodal digital cultures collaboratory based in the Pacific Northwest. I suggest that one possible scenario for “glimpsing the digital future” of humanistic inquiry is a “thickening” of collaboratory models, joining a broad based, already successful digital structure—HASTAC—with deep, local focus on “on the ground” cultural content, stakeholder investment, and institutional buy-in. In this way, such a collaboratory might combine the strengths of a group like HASTAC (diachronic participation, accessibility, and swift communication), regional humanities centres (a focus on the history and culture of unique areas), and formalized and direct networks of researcher transfer and enrichment (postdocs, graduate student transfers, and sabbaticals that explicitly engage various communities in research).