Today is Day of Digital Humanities, so I figured it would be fitting to write a blog post (don’t worry: I also wrote a Twitter thread). Once the semester wraps up here in a few weeks, my plan is to blog a little more. People with blogs tend to say that they plan to blog a little more and then they never blog a little more. I have been one of these people before! We will see what happens.
I first participated in Day of DH in 2014, I think (I also posted in 2015, as part of a group blog co-authored by Northeastern’s Digital Scholarship Group). I found a blog post where I talk about presenting on Our Marathon at the annual Digital Commonwealth conference (an event I presented at again in 2019 and attended virtually this year!). Six years later, I am a few weeks in to work on another crowdsourced digital archival initiative: the Rhode Island COVID-19 Digital Archive.
This project is co-run by Kate Wells of the Providence Public Library and Becca Bender at the Rhode Island Historical Society. Myself, Jeremy Ferris (PPL), and Dana Signe K. Munroe (RIHS) round out the core project team right now. My specific role will have a specific title in the next week or so as we update our “About” page, but I’ve been supporting the project in a range of areas: project development, design, and scope, Omeka-related work, user experience, outreach, approaches to crowdsourcing, curation, and long-term preservation (among other things). But everyone in the core team has been attending to these areas and other project contexts in various ways; we clearly delineate particular tasks and bring our own various forms of expertise to the table, but we also value everyone’s perspectives on all aspects of the project. It’s a small team (which makes that last bit easier than it would be otherwise) but it’s been a really positive collaboration so far. We currently have over a hundred contributions. Materials include photos of fliers and signs, expressions of concern for neighbors, documentations of home life in quarantine, mask selfies, zines, puppet shows, and more. Work is shared under a Creative Commons license. The project definitely has some iterative dimensions to it and we’re refining things on a daily and weekly basis.