Digital Humanities Centers as Cyberinfrastructure - 2 views
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Centers are the most efficient way for institutions of higher education to make this investment
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It's actually worse than that: the humanities tend to hold the private sector in contempt, as the culprit in the corporatization of the university.
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If you are going to make an institutional investment in cyberinfrastructure for humanities and social sciences, as a university, you are obviously better off making that investment once, and in a high-impact, high-profile way, than many more times, with less impact, at a higher cost, across more units. Aside from the economies-of-scale argument, there is an argument to be made about the benefits of interdisciplinarity: it is still, in most universities, a relatively rare thing for faculty in humanities and social sciences to have ready access to compelling opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration within their own institution.
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I distinctly remember a workshop that Matt and I did for other graduate students in the English department on the subject of electronic dissemination of work in progress, and electronic publishing of work from dissertation research. Most of these students were extremely skeptical of our encouragement to do these things, which they clearly regarded as extremely risky. What did they fear? They were worried that this kind of publication wouldn't count. They were worried that learning how to do this would be a distraction from their real work. They were worried that someone would steal their ideas. We argued that the only way to protect one's claim to an idea was to publish it, but to no avail: they were receiving advice to avoid the web from at least some of my colleagues in the department, particularly (at that time) those responsible for counseling students on how to navigate the job market