This session looks at how we make transitions work for us rather than becoming moments of failure in archival and digital history work. Donors and communities rarely share the same expectations of a relationship with an institutional partner as an archivist, a scholar or project designer. After the project starts, we start to see that the words we use actually mean different things. “Preserve” can equate to a sense that an artifact will be permanently displayed. “Create access” can suggest that physical objects should be loaned out for community events. Donors may interpret deviation from their own perspectives to be a betrayal of the promise to “tell the story” of a community.

These mismatches are teaching moments, even opportunities for reconciliation between social groups in a community, as well as between community people and those of heritage institutions. Professionals and scholars engaged in documentary projects with non-academics who help us to preserve, create access to and tell the stories of a community’s past need to be resilient enough for handling difficult discussions with our partners. Only through those conversations can we find agreement about our common vocabulary and how to put it into practice.

Bring your stories of how your projects have earned trust or missed opportunities because critical connections were not made, as well as what you have learned about deciding when to sunset or dramatically revise a community project. What conversations and skills can make that an honorable process?

Proposed by Haven Hawley, who has experience working in a community museum and with ethnic archives, and who is currently chair of Special and Area Studies Collections at UF.

Every time I work on an online exhibit, it seems that a timeline would enhance the content and sometimes could even cover the entire exhibit.  An interactive timeline would be even better.  In this session, we look at a variety of timeline applications available online, some free, some not, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each, and consider different ways timelines can be used in or as online exhibits and as tools for course assignments.  Applications will include, but not be limited to, Tiki-Toki, Dipity, Capzles, and MyHistro.

Using my recently completed dissertation as a starting point, I’d like to explore how the approach I’ve adopted might be improved upon, extended, or simply serve as a discussion point for other projects.

For my dissertation, I digitized and marked up a 1794 English blank-verse translation of Virgil’s Aeneid using a customized TEI schema to identify common poetic figures and tropes used by the translator. Once complete, the XML document was rendered separately within two different content management systems (also customized) to display the various encoded features for assistance in poetic analysis.

How viable is the sharing of my schema with other texts or projects for poetic figure analysis? I know how I would apply it to more texts, but knowing how others might use it could vastly change the customization (most likely for the better!). If the schema itself lacks applicability to others’ projects, at least the project’s single-source model and the process I followed could prove of use to others, specifically: 1) digitization of a physical artifact; 2) production of a custom TEI schema; 3) production of a TEI-encoded document; 4) insertion of said TEI-document into content management systems such as XTF and TEI Boilerplate; and 5) customization of content management systems to display desired textual features.

Have you wondered about how successful DH grant-seeking is achieved? It begins with conversations about what we have in terms of resources, what we have done in the past, and what we want to do in the future. “Sharing experiences through stories is emerging ….as a powerful way to exchange and consolidate knowledge.” (Storytelling in organizations, Deborah Sole, 2002) Join us for a Talk session to explore the birthing of collaborative grant-seeking projects awarded to the Smathers Libraries and its partners. We also will brainstorm possible projects that might be hidden among session participants, and talk about the first steps to turn these project ideas into competitive proposals.

According to French literary theorist, Gérard Genette, paratexts are the aspects of a published work that surround the main text of a narrative (i.e. introductions, prefaces, marginalia, inscriptions, illustrations, etc.). However, finding these specific and sometimes ancillary parts of a literary work is difficult in the digital environment. As an increasingly important field of study in the humanities and digital humanities, paratextual scholarship can define readers’ engagement with books and other printed material, their degree of agency in reading a text, and the reading experience.

Important questions such as: how do we describe these materials when they lack a controlled vocabulary, how does one search for paratexts in the digital world, and how do paratexts inform culture and the reading experience will be explored during a facilitated discussion that could inform future projects with digital collections.

Digital humanities needs space to experiment and explore, but as David Graeber’s recent study reminds us university bureaucracies often make it hard to create or maintain that sort of sustained creative space (Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy). That means that to pursue digital humanities we need to understand bureaucracy and think about how to subvert it. In this session, I propose we use Graeber’s book as a starting point and brainstorm about ways to create successful spaces for experimentation, by carving out areas within the bureaucracy’s domain, by working at its margins, or acting outside its range.