“Build a better panel: Women in DH” is the title of one of Jacqueline Wernimont’s latest projects, a crowdsourced DB of women in DH. –Add yourself to it if you have not yet!– Projects like this remind us that often in the midst of constructing the democratic discourse of Humanities’ digital future, we forget to look at the inequalities, hierarchies, and access barriers that exist today. Is DH really so white and so male? Now that we have broader reach, can we afford not to consider the responsibilities of the public intellectual?

The tools that digital humanists use have changed dramatically since people began using the term.  Often, DHers find and adapt existing technologies to new purposes.  However, sometimes software developers build software with the purpose of solving problems digital humanists have already identified (see chnm.gmu.edu/tools/).

I’m a software developer and I like to solve digital humanities problems.  I’d like to learn more about what unfulfilled digital needs digital humanists have:

• What are the problems you have that feel like they need a software solution?
• What area of your work is full of almost-there technologies that accomplish half of what you need them to, but lack essential features to make them really useful to you?
• What sorts of tools do you dream about having access to?
• What tools do you use that feel inadequate to the tasks you put them to?

This discussion could go in a bunch of different, beneficial, ways.

• We can identify common problems for digital humanists and begin to imagine solutions for them
• We can probably identify existing resources for people who just haven’t been matched with the right technology for them.
• We can feed the todo lists of future hackathons and the plant seeds in the minds of open-source and university-based developers.

The degree to which students engage with the broader communities surrounding their academic institutions varies hugely. At campus universities, particularly those more physically separate from towns/cities, it can be common for students to remain ignorant of the current issues and past histories unique to their surroundings. Public humanities initiatives are increasingly offering an antidote to these divisions. At the same time, the open access nature of many digital projects and the growing number of accessible digital tools provide educators with a wide range of opportunities to collaborate with students on this type of work. By engaging in community education, students develop valuable skills such as writing for diverse audiences. Furthermore, breaking down some of the boundaries between their lives on- and off-campus helps show them the ways in which humanities scholarship might remain relevant to their lives after graduation.

This session will be focused on issues specific to Public Humanities projects with a digital pedagogy element, discussion of best practices, and the value of alternative modes of writing. A similar workshop is taking place at MLA16 (session #461, “Public Humanities Pedagogy Workshop,” Sat 8.30am). We can configure our session to serve as a complement to this workshop if there a number of THATCamp participants interested in attending both. If there is sufficient interest, we will also use the session to begin organizing a proposal for a Public Humanities workshop at the Digital Humanities 2016 conference in Krakow in June (proposals due 2/17).

What is Academic Entrepreneurship?  How can one become a Humanist Entrepreneur? What does that mean?

AE education – How do we adapt and how do we apply to a Humanities ecosystem the training and resources about becoming an entrepreneur that are available to scientific disciplines? Why is AE so important to those disciplines? Is it equally important to the practice of DH?

Is the marriage of DH and AE a powerful instrument of democratization of cultural values? Does AE contribute to the scientific debate of a Humanities discipline? What are the major roadblocks, psychological, cultural, and institutional that make it challenging to blend Humanities research with business?

The digital sphere offers humanities instructors a rare and valuable opportunity to have students create knowledge that can transcend the classroom and the class assignment. Whether this knowledge takes the form of Wikipedia entries, websites, contributions to crowdsourcing platforms, or online maps and timelines, it shows undergraduates that they can be contributors to our disciplines, not just consumers. But for this work to become “real”, it must be publicly available online. This raises a number of questions. How do we protect student privacy? What are our legal obligations with respect to student work published online and student online identities? How do we guarantee the quality of the information produced? Should we offer it to the world with caveats about its sources? What kind of citation practices should we demand of our students? How do we deal with the widespread copy-paste plagiarism that characterizes the web and frequently emerges in such assignments? How do we make it possible for students to participate while protecting their own privacy? How do we accommodate students who wish to opt out of the public component of such assignments?

This session will involve a frank discussion of these issues and how the participants have dealt with them in their own teaching. It will also include a review of FERPA laws as interpreted at UT Austin, as well as an overview of solutions some other institutions and individuals have come up with in this area.

In this session, participants will share ideas, challenges (either anticipated or experienced), and best practices for engaging students as scholar-collaborators in digital projects that extend beyond the classroom.  We will discuss digital projects that hinge on collaboration between classrooms and community partners such as non-profit organizations, archives, and libraries.  Such collaboration can provide valuable opportunities for undergraduates to conduct research and build digital literacies while advancing the mission of community and library partners by, for example, enhancing access to digital archival collections.  However, such collaborations require careful planning and execution to ensure relevance for everyone involved.  Whether you have led or contributed to a digital classroom collaboration with a community partner, or are interested in potentially doing so in the future, this session will provide an opportunity to pose questions and share expertise, experience, and considerations for planning and assessment.  Local faculty and instructor participants are encouraged to invite undergraduates they have supervised on digital classroom projects to contribute to the discussion about the benefits and challenges of undergraduate participation in collaborative, community-engaged digital projects.