The scholarly and cultural record is now a hybrid material reality—parts analog, parts digital. Vast commodified libraries and small, carefully-curated collections of digitized historical and cultural artifacts are now commonplace sources for our research; most of our writing for publication happens directly in and for the computer, with print being an after-effect; the venues themselves for such publications is increasingly online and opened. An enormous amount of data now carry our cultures and histories as a result. This data, as such, can also be manipulated using algorithms, often to detect patterns in corpora, and at other times to create new knowledge, or even convincing falsehoods; powerful networking tools seem to fuel a new kind of acknowledged collaboration, outside of service and clientelist relationships in the production and hoarding of knowledge. Digital scholarship speaks of this brave new world, and the material objects and architectures that enable our movements through it.
Sure. How about… The digital archives we use and produce for our research, and the new forms our research, teaching and publishing can take because computers.
This directory is sourced from a group of our colleagues—librarians and scholars. These colleagues have heard about the directory through social media networks and word of mouth. We did our best to promote the collection of data in order to make sure that most of us knew we were building this directory. We don’t know why your project is not here.
The website for this directory was built as a static site by design. It is meant to be a snapshot, a census, not a platform. We decided to do this because of our gravitation towards minimal computing practices, but also because of the history of project directories in the larger world of digital humanities. Simply put, we’re dealing here with Walter Benjamin’s angel of history: nothing but disaster has befallen most previous attempts at building these comprehensive, exhaustive, always-open-for-business databases of projects.
Do not despair, though. We are keeping an active data sheet on Google docs open and available to everyone. You can share your project there! A new column was added that asks for the year a new entry was added. Make sure to use it. We’ve decided to refresh the pretty web version of the directory this year, but we’re not commiting to doing it every year. The data sheet above can always serve as the on-time bibliography if we stop.
If the error is truly serious, talk to Alex Gil. He takes full responsibility for the contents of this site and its mistakes and misfortunes. Examples of serious errors include misattributions in the “creator” or in the “open access” category.
Ice. Maybe un poquito de limón.