Organic and Locally Sourced Growing a Digital Humanities Lab with an Eye Towards Sustainability - Rebekah Cummings, David S. Roh, Elizabeth Callaway, Digital Humanities Quarterly

This resource first appeared in issue #41 on 11 Sep 2020 and has tags Strategy: Working across an organization, Strategy: Working with Stakeholders, Strategy: Working with Decision Makers, Working With A Research Community: Digital Humanities

Organic and Locally Sourced: Growing a Digital Humanities Lab with an Eye Towards Sustainability - Rebekah Cummings, David S. Roh, Elizabeth Callaway, Digital Humanities Quarterly

A useful article on setting up a Digital Humanities “pop up” lab in the University of Utah’s Marriott Library, after an earlier attempt had failed. The story told here of learning from (and building on) previous attempts and using the lab not simply at a thing in and of itself but as a concrete thing for a nascent cross-campus effort to nucleate around is a nice example of planning and community building to make something as tricky as an interdisciplinary centre take off. This article is part of an issue which has several case studies of digital humanities labs. The group putting this together fended off (or at least de-prioritized) administration views on what was important (visualization wall!) and focus on:

• Real Academic Partnerships/Collaboration producing real outputs
• People and trained staff, and
• Figuring out how to let the lab identity emerge rather than be prescribed (the above partnerships helped with that)
• Allowing individual things to be tried and fail while ensuring the effort as as a whole was sustainable, and
• A portfolio of efforts and outcomes

It’s a good overview of what’s involved in putting together something that connects so many different moving parts.