Jennifer Howard (EdSurge) has written an article entitled “What Next-Gen Digital Humanities Looks Like,” detailing the recent NEH Office of Digital Humanities Project Directors’ Meeting in celebration of its ten years in existence. The program featured talks by ODH grant recipients, discussion of the broader history of humanities computing and contemporary DH, and a keynote by Kate Zwaard, Chief of National Digital Initiatives at the Library of Congress.
…she emphasized that the scale can also make experimentation possible. The recently created LC Labs taps into the Library’s digital collections and uses them as engines for experimentation and play. There’s LC for Robots, which shows users how to do bulk downloads of bibliographic data from the collections, and serves up APIs for those who want to play around with essential digitized holdings such as Chronicling America and the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
Attendees celebrated the work that ODH has enabled and considered the organization’s impact on DH research.
ODH’s influence has “far exceeded the amount of money it was able to give to people,” Neil Fraistat, professor of English and former director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland-College Park, said over cake at the meeting. “One of its most important and foundational effects was to give an imprimatur to people who were doing work in the field,” Fraistat said. “That enabled the work to go on.”
