As the first series of the Göttingen Dialog in Digital Humanities (GDDH) has just come to a close (sob!), it’s time for us to take a few minutes to reflect on its outcome and on the things we’d like to bring to the next series.
GDDH turned out to be a great success! We did not only accept 14 full papers from 11 institutions in 5 countries, but have secured a deal with Digital Humanities Quarterly to publish each contribution in a special issue. The series touched upon numerous different fields, joint by the thread that is Digital Humanities: Digital Classics, Topic Modelling, Text Visualisation, Digital Editions, 3D Motion Capture, Social Networks, Television Media, Web History, Digital Collections, Geographic Information Systems and Text Mining… (*catches breath*) WOW! We’re also currently busy evaluating the best paper and presentation – the winner, who will receive a 500€ cash prize, will be announced very soon.
Those of you who’ve looked closely at this map will have noticed that only one out of all the contributors was a woman. The dots on this map represents speakers, not authors, so while we only had one female speaker, papers were co-authored by female academics.
For the next series, we’ll focus on better and wider publicity (online, oral and print); we plan on creating a dedicated web-space for GDDH (currently, it’s spread across the eTRAP and the GCDH websites); we will register GDDH as a credit-bearing course to attract more students; and we’ll try to procure recording equipment to facilitate remote participation. These improvements might seem trivial, but they require significant time, resources and support. Nevertheless, we’ll work hard to secure their implementation.
In conclusion, I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate the GDDH Board on a very successful series and to thank our speakers for making this year’s Dialog the most varied and thought-provoking event I’ve attended in a very long time!
Bring on 2016!
The GDDH 2015 programme and speaker slides can be accessed here. Pictures of the speakers can be viewed over at our Gallery.