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Summit Meeting of Digital Humanities Centers
April 12 - 13, 2007
The National Endowment for the
Humanities and the University
of Maryland are
pleased to invite you to a summit meeting for the planning of a national
coalition of digital humanities centers. The meeting will take place at NEH
headquarters in Washington
D.C., on April 12-13, 2007.
 The meeting is part of NEH's Digital Humanities
Initiative and was inspired by a recent report by the
American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure.
Discussion will be facilitated by Neil
Fraistat, Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the
Humanities, and will cover a wide range of topics, including the creation
of mechanisms for promoting timely exchange of information between centers and
identifying opportunities for collaboration among them; the articulation of
mutual research goals as well as particular areas of emphases so as to
avoid duplication of effort among centers; the development of joint policy
agendas and successful strategies for pursuing them; methods for optimizing
collaborative opportunities between humanities content specialists and the
technological community; and advancing the place of the digital humanities
on campus, including such issues as infrastructure and the role of the
digital humanities in promotion and tenure.
We hope that by the end of the meeting,
a framework will be in place for a national coalition of centers that will
begin functioning immediately thereafter.
One other key goal of the meeting is to
bring together directors of digital humanities centers and major funders of
the digital humanities to discuss topics of mutual concern. To this
end, representatives from the following organizations have been invited to
join NEH Chairman Bruce Cole and NEH CIO Brett Bobley at the table
throughout the conference and to participate on Friday in a roundtable
discussion on the funding of the digital humanities: Mellon Foundation,
Google, IMLS, NSF, ACLS, Getty Trust, MacArthur Foundation, Sloan
Foundation, Luce Foundation, Internet2, Department of Education, Department
of Energy, and the Library of Congress.
The conference begins on April 12, with
a welcoming address by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole and a plenary talk by John
Unsworth, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, entitled
"Digital Humanities Centers as Cyberinfrastructure." This will be
followed by talk from Vint Cerf, the Chief Internet Evangelist for Google.
A reception hosted by the University
of Maryland follows.
On April 13, there will be an all-day
meeting that will tackle numerous topics of interest to the group with a
focus on how to create a framework for a permanent coalition of digital
humanities centers.
Meeting
Information
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