THATCamp session: ”’Using Versus Building’ in the Digital Humanities”

In a recent Inside Higher Ed blog posting entitled “The Incredible Privilege of ‘Building’”
www.insidehighered.com/blogs/college-ready-writing/incredible-privilege-%E2%80%9Cbuilding%E2%80%9D, Lee Bessette raises the issue of “using versus building” in digital humanities work and “who” does it. It is a topic that Matthew K. Gold and Stephan Ramsay have also engaged in their discussions about how “building and making” operates as a heuristic.

This session looks “behind-the-scenes” of two Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) chdr.cah.ucf.edu/ archive projects. It examines the rationale behind an archive about “digital archiving”—the Digital Archiving Information System dais.cah.ucf.edu/ —and the range of topics, from planning, preservation, copyright, “representation,” and archive management, that anyone needs to engage in order to plan and build a digital archive. It delves into how we can better understand the potential of “the archive” as both a scholarly and teaching tool. In addition, it examines how the NEH-funded Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive www.brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/archive/index.php follows, and departs from, standard conventions of “archiving” in regard to primary and secondary sources—and some of the specific issues that were encountered in building a searchable collection of texts, images, and other data.

The session welcomes discussion about the practical aspects of doing digital humanities work in general, and digital archive work in particular.

Mark Kamrath
Patricia Carlton