A Digital Humanities umbrella?

(via Chris Chester at the University of Sydney from October of last year. I don’t think that the proposal went anywhere).

Is there any value in raising a Digital Humanities umbrella in
Australia?

Next Thursday 6-8pm, Arts Informatics and RIHSS at the University of
Sydney are hosting a talk by Harold Short, and a public forum to
probe the possibilities of establishing an Australian chapter of the
international umbrella body ADHO: the Association of Digital
Humanities Organisations (see my fibreculture-announce post last
week, or the RIHSS website: http://www.rihss.usyd.edu.au/short/ ).

The motivation for organising this event is our perception (and
experience) that there are many people in the Arts, Humanities and
Social Sciences working around ICTs, but they tend not to have
anywhere to go to connect with the full range of their peers.

There are some specific communities that have forums, including
fibreculture, the e-humanities network, empyre, Australian Network
for Art and Technology, panels at conferences of various associations
(Cultural Studies, The Australian and New Zealand Communication
Association, etc), experimenta, Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (MAAP) —
I’m sure I’ve left out a number of others.

However, people in new media arts, digital humanities, online
librarians, people in e-learning, digital designers, new media
studies, games studies, and cultural critics have nowhere to get
together in one group to talk about what they share: a common
experience of actively experimenting with, managing and theorising
ICTs. This is true even within institutions, let alone more widely.

I really don’t know if there are so many differences between these
communities that it’s not worth trying to connect them in some
manner. But I think there may be opportunities to gather a bit of
collective weight to throw around in research collaborations,
infrastructure-building, policy-development and lobbying. The failure
to mobilise a cohesive and compelling ARC Research Networks proposal
in the digital humanities last year is evidence that things could
work better with more communication.