Now that I’m out of the application woods, I’d love to have a conversation about the more difficult DH task I’ve been working on: how to form, organize, and motivate distributed scholarly platforms, like the one I’m contemplating under the “Modernist Letters Project.” I think building the infrastructure for quicker, more transparent, open-source scholarly knowledge creation and review will be one of the major projects for the next decade, as it has already been in the case of NINES. And I tend to think that the new platforms that are successful will be both field and object-specific (thus, in my field, the Modernist Journals Project, now Modernist Versions Project, etc.).
I’ll work through today referencing and organizing this problem, but it seems to me that first of all this should be approached by examining the following questions: I’d appreciate others’ thoughts about this, or sources to look at.
A. What has worked (NINES, Whitman Archive) and why?
B. What hasn’t been successful?
C. What sorts of contracts for collaboration are most succesful? What organizational structures, forms? (I know Lynn Siemens has written a good deal on this.)
D. How does the work get incentivized? How credited? What are good models for developing pedagogical units, etc (an interest of one of my collaborators)?
E. How do we include the non-digital (native) scholars in the field? What sorts of ongoing mechanisms for peer-review could be included?
I’ll come back and reference this a bit later, as well, once I’ve gone through some of the available material. Folks interested in participating in the Modernist Letters Project are particularly welcome to get involved here, of course.
