Report on Summit Meeting for Planning a Coalition of Digital Humanities Centers

This report documents the national summit meeting of digital humanities centers and major funders, which took place on April 12th and 13th at NEH headquarters, in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the meeting was to take seriously the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure Commission’s call for digital humanities centers to become key nodes of cyberinfrastructure in the United States. The summit was especially concerned with assessing the value of and the desire for greater collaboration and communication among the centers; among the funders; and between both groups. The NEH and the summit steering committee invited participants from a representative group and range of 17 digital humanities centers, as well as 14 key funders of the field, including NEH, Mellon, NSF, IMLS, ACLS, the Getty, and the Luce, Macarthur, and Sloane Foundations, plus two representatives from Google

"Collaborators’ Bill of Rights"

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Teamwork and collaboration are key components of any project, particularly digital ones. However, clear models for recognizing team-member contributions to digital projects are not present within the humanities, what with its historical emphasis on the single author. As a result, the participants in the “Off the Tracks—Laying New Lines for Digital Humanities Scholars” workshop developed the “Collaborators’ Bill of Rights” with the fundamental principle that “all kinds of work on a project are equally deserving of credit” (par. 1). Anyone starting a digital project with other individuals will want to refer to this document to guide discussions about the different ways to recognize effort within the project. It could also serve as a foundational document for the development of project charters (see “Toward a Project Charter” and “The Iterative Design of a Project Charter for Interdisciplinary Research” as well as the Center for Digital Humanities’ “Student Collaborators’ Bill of Rights,” which is an artifact included in the keywords “Labor” and “Collaboration”)

The MOO as an Arcade: Minimalism and Interpretive Literary Games

Classic arcade videogames are engaging and immersive for counter-intuitive reasons, precisely because they are schematic and iconic, because they require a collaborative act of imagination on the part of the player, and because playing them is about being part of a shared arcade-based culture. As we have found in our own experiments in the Romantic Circles MOO, graphic minimalism forces us to maintain gameplay in a wider contextual setting. It’s not just retro fashion that gives these games their continued appeal; it’s that we are called on to make something of what is only sketchily suggested, and optimally we do so in a setting that is outside the frame of the screen, that widens to encompass the cabinet, the arcade (even if these features are only fictive constructs in today’s emulation play), and other players. Any arcade is a social, RPG space, and the MOO at its best emulates features of the arcade as a setting

The MOO as an Arcade: Minimalism and Interpretive Literary Games

Classic arcade videogames are engaging and immersive for counter-intuitive reasons, precisely because they are schematic and iconic, because they require a collaborative act of imagination on the part of the player, and because playing them is about being part of a shared arcade-based culture. As we have found in our own experiments in the Romantic Circles MOO, graphic minimalism forces us to maintain gameplay in a wider contextual setting. It’s not just retro fashion that gives these games their continued appeal; it’s that we are called on to make something of what is only sketchily suggested, and optimally we do so in a setting that is outside the frame of the screen, that widens to encompass the cabinet, the arcade (even if these features are only fictive constructs in today’s emulation play), and other players. Any arcade is a social, RPG space, and the MOO at its best emulates features of the arcade as a setting