On April 12th and 13th, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the University of Maryland’s Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) hosted a successful summit meeting to plan a national and international network of digital humanities centers.

Attendees included representatives from 17 different digital humanities centers across the nation, and 14 major funding agencies. This was the first gathering of its kind. In addition to a series of breakout and plenary discussions, the event included keynotes and remarks from NEH Chairman Bruce Cole, Maryland’s James Harris (Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities), John Unsworth (Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Illinois), Vint Cerf (Chief Internet Evangelist for Google), and Ray Orbach (Director of the Office of Science for the US Department of Energy). The meeting was chaired by MITH’s Neil Fraistat and Brett Bobley, director of NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative.

Notable press coverage with further details of the meeting includes articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, as well as the University of Maryland Newsdesk (where MITH also made the University’s main homepage!).

At the close of the summit, five of the attendees were elected and charged with establishing a steering committee to guide an emerging network of centers, responding in part to the report of the American Council of Learned Societies report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006: Julia Flanders (Brown), Neil Fraistat (Maryland), Matt Kirschenbaum (Maryland), Mark Kornbluh (Michigan State), and John Unsworth (UIUC). This group has already drafted a call for participation whose distribution is imminent. Follow-up meetings are also being planned. Some early initiatives are likely to include:

• workshops and training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students

• developing collaborative teams that are, in effect, pre-positioned to apply for predictable multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary, multi-national funding opportunities, beginning with an upcoming RFP that invites applications for supercomputing in the humanities

• exchanging information about tools development, best practices, organizational strategies, standards efforts, and new digital collections, through a digital humanities portal

Finally, we have also opened a Wiki site (thanks Dan Cohen!) to serve as a clearing house for information on national and international digital humanities centers. Please consider contributing:

http://digitalhumanities.pbwiki.com/

Please watch this space for further information.