We held our second DDH last night in the Price Alfred Hotel in Carlton. Individuals from the Public Records Office, the University of Melbourne, Victoria University, and VeRSI showed up. As it was no longer the beginning of semester, the pub was safe from pub-crawling students. We discussed issues such as history online (and its limitations), the THATCamp in Canberra (in which a number of us are attending on the weekend), and the use of the TEI in history. I am not sure we actually touched upon the issue that we were supposed to discuss; ‘the free software movement’, but we did touch upon some important broader Digital Humanities issues. One of which is somewhat ephemeral nature of ‘digital humanities’ practice in Melbourne in terms of the ebbs and flows of the field. There had been numerous computing in the humanities initiatives over the past 15 years that had come in waves of rewards structures and incentives. Many of these had been forgotten, but most of us agreed that it was again a good time to become involved in the field as there is a lot of interesting activity occurring in the field.
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