Digital Humanities and the larger community / communities

The aim of the public panels is to approach important topics of the Digital Humanities by bringing together representatives of different fields and the participants of the Summer University to have an open discussion.

As the collaborative nature of the new epistemology "Digital Humanities" is changing the attitude of the scholars with respect to the larger community, the focus of this year's panel discussion, scheduled for Thursday 28.07.2016 16:15 - 17:45 most probably in the lecture hall of the Albertina, is on the engagement of DH with the larger community.

Obviously field work in dialectology, language geography, spoken language, endangered languages and so on has always included the non scholarly community. The community was, however, present much more in terms of object of study or as a number of carefully chosen representatives (informants) who were supposed to provide the data linguists for example wanted to collect for their own research, and much less in terms of active contributor to the research (project) itself.

In the last years Digital Humanities and akin scholarly fields have developed different types of engangement with the larger community: direct involvement of students in research, engagement of citizen scholars / the community in the research process / in the production of a digital edition (see for example Transcribe Bentham), including the public in the work on traumatic events / crows-sourcing (see for example The Letters of 1916), serving not only the experts but also the public, building environments for open social scholarship, to name but a few. See also the EU's Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI).

As our lecturers Susan Brown, Ray Siemens, Lorna Hughes, Sebastian Drude and Alicia Fornés are themselves involved in such projects or have a profound experience with their outcome and / or consequences, the panel will be composed of the four lecturers who are still around. As two of the projects which are presented by participants are also based on an engagement with the larger community, their presenters, Jirka Lewandowski and Carol Chiodo will join the panel.

Panellists will discuss questions like: should DH engage with the larger community or individual communities and if yes, why? Are there problems involved and if so, which? Which type of sensibility towards the history, traditions and values of such communities is needed? What mistakes have been made? Which are the positive outcomes?

Participants