Balisage Paper: Doing digital humanities today: what does it take? A view from the NEH
Brett Bobley
Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities
Brett Bobley is the Chief Information Officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also serves as the Director of the Office of Digital Humanities. Brett has a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago and an M.S. in computer science from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2006 Brett received a Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council Leadership Award from the Office of Management and Budget. In 2007 he received a Presidential Rank Award from the President of the United States in recognition of his exceptional long-term accomplishments, such as cofounding the federal government’s Small Agency CIO Council and establishing the NEH Office of Digital Humanities.
Author's contribution to the Work was done as part of the Author's official duties as an NEH employee and is a Work of the United States Government. Therefore, copyright may not be established in the United States. 17 U.S.C. § 105. If Publisher intends to disseminate the Work outside the U.S., Publisher may secure copyright to the extent authorized under the domestic laws of the relevant country, subject to a paid-up, nonexclusive, irrevocable worldwide license to the United States in such copyrighted work to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies to the public and perform publicly and display publicly the work, and to permit others to do so.
Abstract
What does it take to do good digital humanities work nowadays? What counts as solid work? What counts as cutting-edge? Projects involving cultural-heritage data and serving long-term scholarly goals have often illuminated issues in the management of information. The Director of the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities tells us about the current state of the art in digital humanities: what trends are visible in the field, and what tradeoffs face those working in this field.