Date: Friday, September 16, 2016

Time: Separate morning and afternoon events (see below)

Co-sponsors: Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry: A Grinnell College/University of Iowa Partnership & the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies

Presenter Bio:

Tom Scheinfeldt is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and Director of Greenhouse Studios, a scholarly communications design studio at the University of Connecticut. Formerly Managing Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Tom has directed several award-winning digital humanities projects, including THATCamp, Omeka, and the September 11 Digital Archive. Trained as an historian of science and public historian with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and master’s and doctoral degrees from Oxford, Tom has written and lectured extensively about the history of museums and the role of history in culture. Among his publications, Tom is a contributor to Debates in Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press) and co-editor of Hacking the Academy (University of Michigan Press). Tom blogs at Found History (http://foundhistory.org). You can follow Tom on Twitter at @foundhistory.

10:30-12:00 “Collaboration-First: New Pathways for Scholarly Production” 

Location: 1117 UCC, International Program’s Commons

(All are welcome—no registration required)

“Collaboration” has been a byword of digital scholarship very nearly since its inception. The complexity of producing digital works requires scholars to work closely with designers, developers, digital librarians, and editors. Often, however, collaboration happens fairly late in the research and publication process, well after the scholar’s initial idea for the project, usually after she has completed the bulk of her research, and sometimes even after she has decided on the final format for the research, whether that’s a book, an article, an Omeka instance, or a Scalar interactive. All too often, collaborators are brought on board merely to implement scholarly projects, not imagine them. Greenhouse Studios: Scholarly Communication Design at the University of Connecticut aims to change this status-quo. A transdisciplinary collective, Greenhouse Studios reframes the practices, pathways and products of scholarly communications through inquiry-driven, “collaboration-first” approaches to the creation and expression of knowledge. With start-up funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Greenhouse Studios draws on art and design processes and the speaker’s prior experiments in radical collaboration to solve the problems and explore the opportunities of scholarship in the “digital age.” This talk will present the history and meanings behind this rethinking of scholarly communications and explore some directions for future research.

2:30-4:00 “Managing Collaborative Humanities Projects: 10 Lessons from Digital Humanities” 

Location: Executive Boardroom, 2nd floor 2390 UCC

(Registration is limited to 20 participants. Email shookjen@grinnell.edu to rsvp. We will confirm guaranteed registration and contact others to see if you would like to be added to a waiting list)

Drawing on the instructor’s 15 years of digital humanities practice, this workshop will consider both the practical, day-to-day work and the intangible aspects of managing collaborative projects and organizations. Pragmatic lessons will include picking projects, building partnerships and engaging stakeholders, attracting funding, budgeting and staffing, setting milestones and meeting deliverables, managing staff, publicity and marketing, user support, sustainability, and the range of tools available to support this work. The workshop will also consider several harder to pin down, but no less important, aspects of management, including communication, decision making, and leadership.