Designing a Digital Humanities Lab

Since 2008, the Townsend Center for the Humanities
at UC Berkeley has been developing an online
digital media lab to facilitate interdisciplinary and
collaborative research projects in the humanities.
The principle motivation for the project was to
lead researchers in the humanities—students, faculty
and the scholarly community-at-large—toward more
creative methods of conducting research, and new
ways of conceptualizing intellectual relationships
through the use of Web 2.0 technologies. While many
humanists have begun to use digital resources in
their research, there is a segment of the community
who, for various reasons, are not using even the
most basic resources to their advantage. By providing
these resources in a format familiar to academics,
the Townsend Humanities Lab aims to be the
place where humanities scholars can explore and
experiment with digital resources.
In our workshop, we will address the challenges
of developing and implementing such a project,
including the institutional challenges that face
small departments wishing to undertake a large
project requiring ongoing support and the individual
challenge of addressing the needs of traditional
scholars in the humanities. For institutions
interested in implementing a similar project, we
will provide information about how we have
supported and sustained this project, with opensource solutions possessing a key role in this
process. For those interested in the broader issues
of opening digital tools to a wider academic base,
we will also discuss the importance of adapting
functionality, interface design, and language to
special constituencies.
In addition to these broader discussions, we will
demonstrate our current implementation of the
Townsend Humanities Lab, discussing the specific
strategies used to attract and support humanities
scholars. We will then guide workshop attendees
through creating a Lab Project, demonstrate all of
the resources available to project managers, and
explain the social networking opportunities available
to project members. We will also discuss future
goals for the Lab, including integrating WorldCat
and Zotero functionalities for organizing Project
resources. Finally, as the Lab is in Beta phase, we
wish to engage participants in a design critique
and a general discussion about the kinds of digital
tools that are most helpful for interdisciplinary and
collaborative projects.
Two hour workshop: Morning, 6 July