I would like to propose a session to discuss the ways in which different digital tools could be incorporated into both the research and dissemination of a dissertation. I already take advantage of things like online text databases, digitized images, and cloud storage but I’d like to hear what everyone else finds handy in their everyday workflow and if they have any thoughts on what might be useful in the way of technology for the final product. A few of the possibilities I’ve been contemplating are an annotated e-book, an accompanying image database, or the use of 3-d modeling. As an early modern art historian working on text and images, I am interested in finding methods of dissemination that allow for greater reader interaction and which play with the relationship between text and image. I imagine this panel to be a swapping of tips and experiences between scholars of varying DH skill levels and at different points in their academic careers.

I would like to propose a session on some of the open-source, web-based, web-publishing tools available that bridge cultural, scholarly, library and museum worlds, such as the open source platforms, Omeka, and Mukurtu. My own interest in this session is to situate myself as a beginner technology user who would like to play and talk with other people about their interest/experiences with these tools. As a literary researcher and student archivist working with the personal papers of Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera, I am interested in utilizing these tools to create an online resource for scholars interested where I hope to publish her archival finding aid, publicize an upcoming conference on her works, plan for collaborative digitization projects, and create a digital scholarly edition of her unpublished manuscript. Relevant discussion topics may include collaboration and project management, crowdsourcing, digital communities and cultural heritage, archives and collections, digital scholarly editions and research methods. I am hoping that this session offers a nice compliment to Heather Home and Jeremy Heil’s session on the role of Archives in DH projects.

Jeremy Heil and I propose to talk about the role of Archives in DH projects and research. Primary sources are often the focus of much digital humanities work through digitization, transcription or analysis and as such we are interested in (1) sharing what the Archives has done to date and (2) asking how the Archives can do more to foster this research. We plan on talking about a few digital initiatives and projects we have been involved with, such as one of the first “machine-readable” finding aids for the Lorne Pierce collection of Canadiana, to a current and ongoing digitization project using the George Whalley papers. We wish to engage with the participants, utilizing them as a focus group, about their impressions and opinions regarding the roles that institutional repositories can, or should, play in the field of digital humanities.