listening to repeating

Yesterday, on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, our local group of HASTAC scholars facilitated a conversation on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Expertise, Storage, Design.”

I was glad to see a wide array of folks (from various departments and programs) attend.  Now, a day after the event, it strikes me that the question of where digital scholarship is stored (and how it’s stored) especially resonated with the group, as well as the question of what are the standards for digital scholarship.

And I know “standards” can be off-putting for some; nevertheless, there’s a lot to be learned about them from the work of Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and others in the field of Science and Technology Studies.  Put pithily, standards (e.g., metadata standards) aren’t static or inflexible.  Of course, they change over time, and those of us who are engaged in digital scholarship might gain a lot from studying how, exactly, standards emerge and how they affect our respective fields, not to mention our everyday lives (for better or worse).

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Just a quick announcement for the next installment in the “What does digital scholarship do?” HASTAC Scholars series at the University of Washington:

On Wednesday, January 27th at 3:30 p.m, I’ll be facilitating our next meeting, on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Expertise, Storage, Design,” which is open to the public at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.  Below is a description of what to expect, and here is the flier (in PNG).  Looking forward!

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Today, at 7:15 p.m. in Room 405 of the Philadelphia Marriott, I’m giving my “Digital Publication Projects and Their Publics” talk.  If you are at the MLA convention, then I would love to see you there.  If you can’t make it, then feel free to contact me and request the slides for the talk.

Since yesterday’s wonderful panels (see Mark Sample’s list), I’ve revised the talk just a touch, attempting to pick up where some left off and address some questions—especially those about the afterlife of digital projects and the use of digital media for collaboration/coherence across communities of practice—that have been raised during several Q&A sessions at MLA ’09.

That said, the primary question I’ll be unpacking throughout the talk is:

What do humanities scholars have to gain from publishing boundary objects in tandem with publishing texts?

P.S.: I finally admit it.  Twitter is useful for scholarly purposes.  I joined just before the convention, and I’ve enjoyed keeping in tune via #MLA09.