Slides used for the Digital Humanities (DH2013) keynote closing lecture. These go together with the talk available at: http://humanidadesdigitales.net/blog/2013/07/19/is-there-anybody-out-there-building-a-global-digital-humanities-community/

1. Is There Anybody Out There?
Building a global DH community
Isabel Galina
Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
(UNAM)
Is There Anybody Out There? Building a Global DH
Community by Isabel Galina is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
.

2. Overview
• Inclusiveness and openness in DH
– Community building example Red de
Humanidades Digitales (RedHD)

3. Defining DH
• What we are and what we do
• What we are and what we do

4. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
UNAM
Located in Mexico City
300, 000 students (under graduates and post
graduates)
45,000 academic staff (11,000 full time)
Aprox. 40% of national research productivity

5. 4 main objectives
• Raise awareness of DH
• Identify key scholars and projects
• Investigate key local issues
• Consolidate internally and link
externally

6. How?
• Are you a digital humanist?
• Finding DH resources and tools
online is hard
• Finding DH projects?
• Auto identification?

7. Methodology
• Scoping
– Four workshops
• Between September 2010 to July 2011
• Concrete actions
• From workshop to network (to
association)

8. Scoping
7 key topics
• organizational context including institutional recognition
and support
• planning and development;
• intellectual property and copyright
• human resources and training
• dissemination and use
• completion and sustainability
• digital humanist career
Galina, I. Retos para la creación de recursos digitales en las Humanidades, El
Profesional de la Información, 21(2), pp185-189, 2012 (ISSN: 1386-6710)

9. Institutional support
“There are other people like me”
Small personal initiatives
“University authorities have a vague
notion that this sounds important”
Lack of coherent policies or structures
to have an real impact

10. Funding
• “Surprisingly I have never had any
trouble getting funding”
• No lack of access to computational
technologies
• 1-3 year periods

11. Human resources
• Finding, training and retaining human
resources
• “We know now what we want”
• Little learning support
– no centres, programs
• Rigid university structures
• Best practices and guidelines
• Help with the steep learning curve

12. Sustainability
• Server hosting
• “when does a project become a
university service and therefore
somebody else’s responsibility?”
• Absence of library community
• Preservation aware but not
addressed

13. Who did we find?
• “I am a digital humanist” (and I
would like to do something about it)
• Aproximately 20 to 30 practitioners
in four Mexico City universities
Continue the snowball effect (now
70 suscribers to our mailinglist)

14. Challenges
• Increase involvement of DH scholars
• to discover and register more research
and projects
• develop best practices and guidelines in
Spanish
• document
• incorporate the library community
• expand the group and develop
mechanisms to increase national and
international collaboration

15. Actions
• News/Courses
• Evaluation committee
• Regular meetings
• Special issue on DH of Revista Digital
Universitaria
• Courses
• Beginning of 2012 “1er Encuentro de
Humanistas Digitales”
• Larger/complex/sophisticated proyects
• Recognition
• Outreach (Mexico and Latin America)

16. A focus on expanding

17. Other international associations
• Red de Humanidades Digitales (June 2011)
• Japanese Association for DH (JADH) (can’t find
the date but I think it is around 2010).
• Associaziones per l’Informatica Umanistica e la
Cultura Digitale (March 2011 official but as
network has functioned for longer)
• Australasian Association for Digital Humanities
(March 2011) – also a result of a workshop
• Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas (HDH)
November 2011

18. DH conference
Freedom to explore
(12 languages)
Digital diversity: Cultures,
languages and methods
(7 languages)
Big Tent Digital Humanities
(CfP: 5 languages)
What we have to do now is see if when the CfP is published in
another language does this increase the number of submissions?

19. Working groups
• Multi-lingualism and Multi-Culturalism
Committee
Is responsible for developing and promoting policies in ADHO
and its constituent organizations that will help them to become
more linguistically and culturally inclusive in general terms, and
especially in the areas where linguistic and cultural matters
play a role.
• Inclusivity

20. Special Interest Groups
•Global Outlook (GO:DH)
The purpose of GO::DH is to help break down barriers
that hinder communication and collaboration among
researchers and students of the Digital Arts, Humanities,
and Cultural Heritage sectors in High, Mid, and Low
Income Economies.//www.globaloutlookdh.org/
•GO::DH is not an aid or an outreach programme.

21. Discussion Lists
• GO:DH (globaloutlookdh-l@uleth.ca)
• RedHD
(redhd@humanidadesdigitales.net)
• How are they being used?
• Different to say TEI or Humanist?
• Is this a cultural or a subject
difference?

22. Finding projects and people
• Around DH in 80 Days (#s13dh, #arounddh)
– http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/around-dh-
in-80-days/
• RedHD database of DH projects. Currently
UNAM ones. Working on other Mexican and
LatinAmerican universities
– Inteface is in Spanish
– Help is in Spanish

23. • 10 June 2013
• 97 blogs (72 in Spanish and 21 Portuguese)
– Spain 31
– Mexico 22
– Portugal 13
– Brasil 6
– EU 6
• Many blogs were projects and not individuals
• Reflections on what DH (philosophical)
• Visualizations (mapping who and what is out there)
• Comments (ideas, let’s work together, did you know?)
– Organized (CenterNet, RedHD, HDH, Universidad
Nova de Lisboa and Universidade de Sao Paulo).
Hosted by UNAM. (dhd2013.filos.unam.mx)
DíaHD

24. On Twitter
• #transformDH Transformative Digital
Humanities: Doing Race, Ethnicity,
Gender, Sexuality and Class in DH
• #DHPoco Postcolonial DH
• #RedHD Info about events, articles,
projects and general

25. Events
• 1er Encuentro de Humanistas
Digitales (Mexico City May 2011)
• 1er Congreso Internacional de la
HDH (Coruña July 2013)
• JADH having their 3rd conference
(Kyoto September 2013)
• I Seminário Internacional em
Humanidades Digitais (Sao Paulo,
October 2013)

26. So what or now what?

27. • Isabel Galina
– igalina@unam.mx
– @igalina
• RedHD
– www.humanidadesdigitales.net
– @Red_HD