So I have been following digital humanities scholars and scholarship since around summer 2011, with a goal of developing a sabbatical project that I call “Bringing Digital Humanities to the Community College and Vice Versa.”  Happily, I was awarded the sabbatical, and I plan to take it Fall 2013 after I finish work on a Title III grant.

My commitment to DH so far has been first to follow scholars who post on the internet, to find published materials of interest and to read them as much as possible. But since our work at the community college leaves very little room for sustained concentration, my main commitment has been to find a DH site every day and to write some kind of meaningful and if possible substantive tweet about it every day. I haven’t missed many days, and so at this point, I say with Mark Sample that “serial concentration is deep concentration.” In fact, this form of concentrated but interstitial work has been something of a revelation. Zotero has been essential in this regard, because while I tweet about a great site I see or read, I want to go back to them all someday, and I work from 3 computers every day.

I’m taking on this blog as a way to record my thinking over the next year before I actually take my sabbatical, and to try to synthesize ideas that have come to me serially. There are many threads that are floating through the DH scholarly world right now, but NONE of them are about DH at the CC, and I think that this blog can help me to reflect on the relevance of the conversations I read for DH work at Lane.

For example, just yesterday I found a fantastic little collection at the NY Public Library. The menus themselves are fascinating–just seeing what people were paying a lot of money for in New York hotel restaurants helps explain why people were thinner in the 30s! But how is this relevant for a community college? It just so happens that the library is looking for transcribers! That’s right, if you have a few minutes to spare, you can go into the collection and transcribe the words on the menu, verbatim, with prices, and participate in digital humanities archiving. This would be a great service learning project for our Culinary Arts students. And while they’re learning culinary and dietary history, students are also getting practice at digital literacy and transcription. To understand that the menus are photographs and therefore not searchable is a really important lesson in how technology and marking up works.

In the “real” DH world as I see it practiced, the coin of the scholarly and reputational realm is coding and markup. And I sure hope to learn that. But I also think there’s a lot of DH that can be done at the freshman and sophomore level that may involve coding but that may not.Doing a service learning project such as the one I describe takes a tiny dip into understanding DH. These are the kinds of insights I’d like to collect in the coming year. And I’ll collect them here.