At AADHum, we’ve been thinking a lot about what we’ve learned over the past year or so, running both a large fellowship and developing more than a few dozen #BlackDH events and projects during the panny. In our conversations re what’s next, we found ourselves compulsively avoiding framing our ideas as “we’ve gained insight into x” while adjusting to these times. But at the same time, things have indeed changed and it is our job to know that, as well as we can. As well as we can: In balance against our hesitation to lemonade the pandemic, this year we’re doubling down on developing programs and activities that respond to / learn from the complexities of scheduling, hybrid-work, and distant collaboration that characterized last year. Last year we were all moved by the breadth, depth, and sincerity of audience participation at our events, generating so much community-feeling, sparking so much new #BlackDH thinking, inspired by the intellectual energy of the @aadhum.umd scholars and their interlocutors. So we’ve been thinking about the smart + generous generativity of those gatherings—the relative success of our virtual event formats, & how to bring the insights of those experiences over to how we plan new programs, workshops, and project ideation/creation structures. How do we honor and support artists & scholars in relation to digital work? In other places I and others have argued for the numerous ways DH properly shares roots with and must always learn from the hard lessons survived and negotiated by ethnic and women and gender studies. Yes. But how do we move from critical DH insights around labor, sustainability, community-build, and project accountability (for instance), to new or improved configurations for funding, developing and supporting digital scholarship? So that is the nut we’ve been trying to crack in our moment of pause and evaluation. There are a lot of good models out there, and we have thus been thinking about how to grow our work, given what we continually learn from our own and others’ experiences. Now we must begin! . #tweetphoto (at University of Maryland, College Park) https://www.instagram.com/p/CcnKCisu8GP/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
