(I’m participating in Reverb 10. You can, too!)
Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?
To my great surprise, I discovered community in my field.
When I went to my first digital humanities conference in 2001, back when it had the unwieldy name ACH-ALLC, I thought I’d discovered community. Perfect strangers sought you out and asked you about your work. Then you asked them about theirs, and next thing you knew, you were spending the many coffee breaks and every evening chatting about text encoding and digital map work and dogs and cooking. Seasoned scholars mentored us whipper-snappers, first informally for several academic generations, then formally through mentoring programs. There’s a vibrant DH presence on Twitter and in the blogosphere.
I’ve felt part of a community ever since then. Even so, work was quite lonely sometimes. Writing the dissertation is inherently lonely. And between graduation and about a year ago, my immediate vicinity was pretty low on DH.
Within the last year, things have shifted. My own horizons expanded: I’m finally comfortable with my place in the digital library world, insofar as anyone with no library degree can be. Digital humanists on Twitter have prompted me to write and think about new DH topics. I disovered DHSI for myself, and met even more brilliant people, among them Julie.
Can hardly wait to start the new job. (On Monday!) The pragmatic (if not explicit) mandate to build community is practically in the job description. And next year, more of the same, please.
And more of my personal community! Which I’d write about here, but it’s late, and I didn’t discover it this year. No, it’s been around for a long time, for me. The whole DH thing, though… still startles me at the end of the year. It’s been a long year, fundamentally a good one! So yes, more of the same, please.
Nice! What’s your new job, Vika? Did I miss that announcement?
@Amanda French Institutional Repository Librarian — and I just announced it within the last hour on Twitter, so you didn’t miss it by much!