The Social Function

(Source)

There seems to be a common vein running through the projects that we have examined over the last few weeks that I want to address. We have talked about how collaborative and diverse they can be, as in the Digital Archimedes and Perseus projects. We've also seen how they can involve people from varying levels of academia or non-academic amateur savants as in a project such as Transcribe Bentham. As we encounter all these people of various backgrounds and project hierarchies one facet of DH that merits exploring is how, much more so than the traditional academic pursuits we have our backgrounds in, Digital Humanities has a social element that we need to be conscious of on a level of  Project Management, among other things. 

(Source)

Which will your DH projects look like? (Source)

 This program is, in theory, preparing us for environments and projects that are as collaborative as they are digital. One of the ways the program does this is by allowing for and encouraging group projects within its classes. This may seem like a novelty or trivial element, but I have not participated in a group project as part of a class in the last five years of my university education. Just think on that for a moment: almost all of my post-secondary education up to this point has consisted of solitary work. I think many of us are so acclimatized to this traditional structure that we're unused to blogs (and commenting on them), group projects and other efforts that are less formal or more collaborative. Yet I am really excited by the prospects that many of these new forms of communication hold, and want to take part in them and explore how traditional practices might be augmented to incorporate these ideals.
One such example I have heard of is the way people are changing the conference format.The director of the U of S's Digital Research Centre (DRC) once explained to me the collaborative quality of his discipline's paper presentations. Rather than give a twenty minute talk, the presenter gave his paper to the audience well in advance, presented the broad concept again in five minutes or so, and the rest of the session consisted of suggestions and collaborative feedback which the presenter could use to improve his or her project or paper. How fitting does such a format sound to DH? This is just one example of how we might tweak things to better fit our content and context.

Many of us entered this program wanting to leave it with nothing more than the ability to incorporate digital tools in our work. I, at least, now have a sense that there is more to DH, a socio-collaborative facet that I want to be able to engage with when I'm done this degree. The question that arises from such a desire is "Just how do we as students engage with this program to promote the collaborative elements of DH so that we may benefit from it?"

For a start we could probably leave a few more comments, what do you guys think?