International initiatives in the digital humanities and eScholarship

Abstract

In this workshop, the presenters will discuss their recent experiences with international initiatives and collaboration, and consider future developments. Ross Coleman will report on a recent Library-funded trip to institutions in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada to present on, and monitor, developments in digital libraries and eResearch. He will discuss some issues related to mass digitisation programs (e.g., the Google project in Michigan and Oxford, and the Internet Archive in Cornell and Toronto), scholarly publishing, open access and repositories. He will consider some collaboration platforms as well as the impact of new research funding mandates in North America and Australia. Ian Johnson will talk about the Archaeological Computing Laboratory's (ACL) long-term relationship with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), ACL’s work for a number of ECAI's international partners, and recent work for the network of Digital Humanities Centers (CenterNet). Steven Hayes will talk about the DIU's role as a partner in an EU project and collaboration with the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London. He will discuss the difficulties and solutions to long-range collaboration and provide some perspective on EU-funded projects. Willard McCarty will discuss opportunities for the digital humanities in relation to experiences with previous programs. Professor McCarty suggests that the most important initiative is the establishment of institutional models for humanities computing. He will discuss why the great centres of yore have failed and are all now gone. Professor McCarty’s second initiative is to establish what a colleague has called "evidence of value", or rather, to discuss how humanists go about constructing a disciplinary rhetoric that would allow them to understand what is happening in contemporary scholarship. The participants will invite the audience to participate in a discussion about international initiatives in the digital humanities and eScholarship.