Bethany Nowviskie (CLIR) has shared a “blended” version of two recent talks in her post, “On Capacity and Care.” Addressing the dual topics of sustainable digital humanities and the future of graduate education, Nowviskie frames her discussion using the notion of “care”:
I offer care as a hard-nosed survival strategy, and as a strategy to increase the reach and grasp (which is at the root of the word “capacity”—the “capture”) of the humanities. We must take practical steps to prevent fatigue at the individual and community level in digital humanities and cultural heritage fields …
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What if we more self-consciously drafted DH design specs to center on care? What if we did a better job of placing key humanities interests and concerns at the very heart of big-data humanities infrastructure? Doing so might help ensure our digital tools are truly open and more sustainably constructed, so that anyone with a reasonable level of training (the level I think our graduate and even undergraduate humanities programs might usefully provide) could look under the hood, change a spark plug in a moment of need—and build her next conveyance, to go further than we have imagined.
