Seven Claims for Digital Humanities

Rather than go into detail on any one idea, I thought I would list several claims and see which, if any, get some traction. I’m game to discuss any of these:

• Digital Literacy First
  More could be done to advance digital humanities by developing digital literacy with available social media and open tools rather than investing in large and proprietary humanities computing projects.
• Using and Making eBooks
  Teachers and students should begin using (and perhaps creating) eBooks since they are economically inevitable and ultimately a core component of the digital humanities.
• Authentic Audiences for Student Work
  Students should be guided toward creating humanities-related content targeted to real audiences and authentic applications.
• Open Educational Resources
  Digital humanists should be using, creating, and making available open educational resources that are creative commons-licensed and able to be repurposed and remixed by others.
• New Scholarly Models
  Consistent with the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (see their report, “Our Cultural Commonwealth“), digital humanists should be defining and creating best practices and evaluative standards for “born-digital” scholarly creations and activities, including those that are not clearly derivative from traditional text-based, interpretive scholarship.
• Hacking the Humanities 
  DIY, remix culture, and edupunks need to be welcomed into today’s humanities curriculum. Rather than thinking of digital humanities as a simple value-added proposition within established structures, we should see it as a mode of inquiry that invites true independence and creativity among learners and that can transcend and rethink basic modes of teaching, scholarship, and art (see HackingTheAcademy.org).
• Bring on Video
  We should be incorporating video into humanities teaching both for informal interaction, virtual office hours, and for things like telepresence, remote performance, guest interviews, and group “hangouts” on Google+. Having students create videos can also be a method of developing their ideas for more traditional academic work.