Welcome to Fall Term! We have a lot to do this term, and with doing a lot comes communicating a lot both with the rest of the DHA team and also with the faculty, staff, and students we support on campus. Digital Humanities is a team sport, and good teamwork runs on good communication, so I’m kicking things off by laying out our broad schedule for the fall.
Communication this term
First, we’ll be managing our projects using Asana. Each team member should have an invitation to join an Asana Workspace, and in that workspace you’ll find our major projects laid out in the left-hand menu (available under the little hamburger menu icon)
One of your first projects should be to familiarize yourself with Asana – how to put tasks into projects, tags, attaching various kinds of things, having team conversations, assigning tasks to others, etc. I’ll start a blog post for that assignment soon and you can all use the comments to help us all learn useful things about Asana, or you can write your own blog post if you have something more long-form you want to say.
The other main communication tool we’ll use is this blog. Meeting notes and project updates might be published as “private” (meaning only we can see them if we’re logged in), but one really interesting thing about the digital humanities is how much people share with each other via blogs and Twitter and Facebook, so we’ll participate with the community and with each other that way, commenting on blogs and writing posts, sharing knowledge and ideas and asking for help.
Team Meeting Schedule
So those are the two main overarching things for this term. And here is the sketch of our meeting schedule for the term. We will have team meetings most weeks and then individual meetings as necessary.
Week 1: Orientation and beginnings
- Introductions
- Orientation to the DHA job responsibilities
- Project descriptions and updates for current projects (from returning DHAs)
- Assignments
- Divvying up projects between team members (projects have initial tasks pre-loaded into Asana)
- Learning Asana Assignment
- “What is Digital Humanities” assignment.
Week 2: Professional academic blogging
- Project Updates
- Conversation: What is blogging and how do you do it well in digital humanities?
- DHA blog redesign – early conversations about design and content for our blog
- Conversation: What is Digital Humanities?” Based on Week 1 assignment.
- Assignments for the week
- Find some best practices for blog design.
- Find a theme or two to suggest for the blog.
- Begin a review of blog content.
Week 3: Writing for the Web
- Project Updates
- DHA Presentation #1 (one DHA presenting to the rest of us on skills or ideas that will help us all and that the presenter has learned from current projects)
- Presentation/Conversation: writing for the web with special guest Doug Bratland [schedule still being finalized]
- Assignments for the week
- Write bios for the blog
- write an About page for the blog
Week 4: 3D projects
- Project updates
- DHA Presentation #2 (one DHA presenting to the rest of us on skills or ideas that will help us all and that the presenter has learned from current projects)
- Presentation/Conversation: 3D projects in digital humanities with special “guest” Austin Mason.
- Assignments for the week (TBA)
Week 5: Content Management Systems
- Project updates
- DHA Presentation #3 (one DHA presenting to the rest of us on skills or ideas that will help us all and that the presenter has learned from current projects)
- Presentation/Conversation: content management systems with special “guest” Austin Mason.
- Assignments for the week (TBA)
[Week 6 – no scheduled Team Meeting]
Week 7: Hitting our Stride
- Project Updates
- DHA Presentation #4 (one DHA presenting to the rest of us on skills or ideas that will help us all and that the presenter has learned from current projects)
- Assignments for the week (TBA)
[Week 8 – no scheduled Team Meeting]
Week 9: Preparing for December Break
- Project Updates
- DHA Presentation #5 (one DHA presenting to the rest of us on skills or ideas that will help us all and that the presenter has learned from current projects)
- Assignments for the week
- Prepare documentation and tasks/goals for next term for each of the projects you’re working on.
Week 10: Individual Meetings
- Each DHA should set up a meeting with Iris and/or Austin. During this meeting we’ll review each DHA project (the project’s goals and what we’ve done so far to work toward those goals). Then we’ll set up goals and tasks for next term so that we can hit the ground running in January. Be sure to gather notes and files and other documentation in preparation for these individual meetings.
To help a class get up and running next term, I created a set of interlinked google docs to walk students through the process of getting started with Omeka.net, adding items, managing their collections, and creating exhibits. Then I realized that a slightly redacted version of these docs might be more generally useful, so I started with copies of the course-specific documents and took out or edited the parts that were aimed specifically at that course. And here’s the result:
The 
Out in the wide world of the Digital Humaties blogosphere and twitterverse, this is a question that really preoccupied people for a long, long time. And here on the Carleton Campus, it’s still a bit of an open question for a few reasons. First, it’s relatively new. Second, the definition for what we do here at Carleton in terms of digital humanities will differ from what other institutions do because we’ll be driven by the research questions of our humanities folks, the staffing capacities and skills on our campus, and the technical infrastructure of our institution.