centerNet

centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action that will benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. It developed from a meeting hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., and is a response to the American Council of Learned Societies report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006. You can view our wiki summarizing this meeting. Since its inception in April, centerNet has added over a hundred members worldwide. A start up committee, elected at the NEH meeting and consisting of Julia Flanders, Neil Fraistat, Mark Kornbluh, Matt Kirschenbaum, and John Unsworth, is currently in the process of adding international members to its ranks.

Some early initiatives include

• an already established taxonomy of centers
• an already established electronic discussion list
• exchanging information about tools development, best practices, organizational strategies, standards efforts, and new digital collections, through the development of a digital humanities portal
• workshops and training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students
• developing collaborative teams that are, in effect, pre-positioned to apply for predictable multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary, multi-national funding opportunities, beginning with an upcoming RFP that invites applications for supercomputing in the humanities

If you think your center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, then we’d be glad to have you join the network. We leave the definition of “digital humanities” up to you, but we intend to be inclusive, and we know that there will be cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts, and other related areas. This might include humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. The definition of “center” is only slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence.

Site navigation

For now, this site’s navigation links take advantage of either existing or ad hoc resources in the digital humanities community. Consolidating the kind of functionality and information they represent into state of the art cyberinfrastructure will be a primary aim of centerNet.