In line with a couple of other posts, I’d love to have a discussion about the audience for digital humanities projects. Do we have any obligations in terms of who we create these for? What are the expectations of them? How can we widen the scope of who is being reached? It’s exciting to think that tools are being created that can be used for instruction in the classroom, to advance scholarly work, and to create communities; I wonder how to balance all these different roles within one project. Or should they be created with one goal in mind? It’d be great to hear first-hand from those who develop projects to see how these considerations are evaluated and used to shape projects. I’d also love to hear what others think about the different environments generating this work. As a student newly entranced by the excitement of digital humanities, I’m still a little unsure of the lay of the land. Perhaps we could talk about the different ways and places from which this work can be happened upon.
Along this vein I think it might also be interesting to talk about unintended audiences as well. When you put a project out on the web, you can’t always anticipate the potential uses that other people will find for it. What sorts of things should we have in mind to open up these possibilities and allow for a proliferation of applications for a project in the future? On the flip side, what is our ethic responsibility then regarding the misuse of a project, tool, code, etc?