Newbie session: how does one go about building, managing, and coordinating your personal research, writing, and teaching work into a successful team project?

You have a great idea. You have a project that is timely, innovative, unusual, intellectual stimulating, and no one else is doing anything like it. You fully embrace models of scholarship and research in which print is not the sole medium or means by which knowledge is produced. You begin to think about making a shift in your academic work from single-scholar research and writing to a more collective collaborative model.

Since digital humanities projects demand knowledge sets and skills that are particularly well-suited for teams, one could expect a variety of individuals, including scholars, experts in various content areas, archivists, library professionals, researchers, tech adepts, designers, programmers and developers, and others to be involved at each stage of the project development.

How does one go about finding these collaborators?

I would like to propose a session for those of us who relatively new to THATCamp, who are thinking about dh/Religion projects, planning dh/Religion projects, applying for funding for dh/Religion projects, or who find themselves at any other stage and who want to find potential co-conspirators collaborators.

In this session, I would like to hear from others who have successfully developed dh/Religion projects with a group: how did your project team come together? What kinds of strategies did you employ in organizing the team and launching the project? What about identifying individuals? Once projects are initiated around a particular area of research or question, how does one go about getting others on board with the program? What planning and management challenges are specific to digital humanities collaborations? What things should one look out for?

Are there particular social media (twitter, blogs, groups) that are most useful in organizing and pulling together interested parties?

I’m not going to be able to make it to THATCamp but I’m not letting that stop me from proposing a session…

Recently there has been a bit of a kerfuffle over the use of the term “data” to describe the people and traditions religious studies scholars study. On one side, some scholars find this term to be dehumanizing. On the other side, some scholars think it is a useful term for cordoning off one’s object of study. The debate can be found here, here, here, and here.

Yet, it strikes me that the use of the term “data” in this debate is not the same “data” that many digital humanists use. Or is it? That’s what I’m wondering. How do digital approaches to religious studies alter our notions of “data” and what counts as “data?” Is a digital religious studies de-humanizing? What is our data?

This session will consider the ways in which “difference” makes a difference in broaching zones of contact between religious studies and the digital humanities. I am proposing an open conversation to address silences as well as critically rethink the problems and possibilities of engaging race (as well as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, ability, and class) for digital humanities and the study of religion. Potential topics for discussion include this overly ambitious but hopefully fruitful list:

• Representations of people of color and the religion-related cultural productions created by people of color on the Internet.
• The recovery/preservation of works about and by people of color in the study of religion.
• Sharing ways that we might incorporate digital tools, coding and software applications (i.e. Blogs, Live Group Video Broadcasting, Virtual Environments , Cloud Computing, and Augmented Reality) into teaching and collaborations in race and religion research.
• The development and application of digital research methodologies for the study of race and religion.
• Questions concerning how identities (gender, race, class, sexuality, religious identifications) could inform and transform the theory and practice of digital humanities.

  Note: This session is limited to afternoon scheduling times. 1:00-2:30 pm or 2:45-4:15 pm.