DH Twitter List Educates About Corporate DH

Sorry for the late post, I spent the morning compressing high resolution tif files of William Morris material scans to email to Wired magazine (at their request)!

Typically I find twitter annoying. Too many people just seem to be shouting out and its feels like no one really wants to engage in conversation. I’ve tried following various cultural heritage institutions but frequently they start dominating the stream and drowning out any other information, individuals do this much more often. But I have found myself enjoying checking in on Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities list more than I anticipated.

For example today, Jane Fleming tweeted an article about the Google Cultural Institute’s 42 digital exhibits that are now live. I wasn’t even aware that Google had a Cultural Institute so I clicked through to checkout their work. The exhibits were definitely interesting and the format resembled an idea I had been playing with for a DH project.

As I went back to twitter, I noticed that Alistair Dunning had tweeted the link to the Google Cultural Institute Partnership Request Form. This sent me thinking back to MITH’s first Digital Dialogue for the year with Donald Brinkman from Microsoft Research. In case you missed it, I have a summary of the presentation here on my blog.

While I came to UMD’s iSchool because I wanted to learn more about DH and gain the skills necessary to contribute to DH projects, before this semester I hadn’t considered DH creation beyond Universities and cultural heritage institutions. Even though Google and Microsoft are probably less likely to employ humanities scholars it warms my heart to see them dedicating some of their resources to these very meaningful projects and participating in humanities scholarship.

Have a great day and keep smiling! :)