Digital humanities
One question I continue to hear from digital humanists and higher ed IT folks is "what book should I pick up to learn Drupal?" I never have a particularly good answer-- not because there aren't any good books out there (I assume there are), but because I've never used one. I learned Drupal 4 through trial and error, while not paying attention in a biology class I needed to fulfill a distribution requirement that I'd put off until my last year of college.
I've been at Digital Humanities 2011 since Sunday, and it's been as delightful and inspiring as always. This is the first time I've actively followed the tweet stream at a DH conference while I've been there in person, and while the extent to which it has added value has varied depending on the session, it may have been one of the most fascinating aspects of yesterday's plenary (Chad Gaffield's "Re-Imagining Scholarship in the Digital Age").
In the week since the joint session between THATCamp LAC participants and the people at THATCamp Prime, I've found myself reflecting on that conversation a number of times. As I said then (in person, and to the Twitterverse thanks to Rebecca Davis), the collaborations that work well aren’t between institutions, but between people.
Note: this post has been moved to the new Drupal-specific section of the site. Read the full post here.
I was deeply saddened to get word that Rick Peterson, CTO of Washington & Lee University, passed away yesterday evening after a long and difficult battle with brain cancer.
The Bamboo Planning Project, which consumed my life from 2008 to 2009, officially concluded on December 31, 2010, allowing me to publish a project I've been working on independently for over a year. You can read the full project description here, but in summary, I've organized the notes from the Bamboo workshops that have been public on the Bamboo wiki for 1.5 - 2.5 years by topic, and written summaries for the data that wasn't covered in the Project Bamboo Scholarly Practice Report; expanded summaries of topics related to scholarly practice are in progress.
After I hit "publish" on it all yesterday, it came to me that I've done this same project before. When I was 14, in the International Baccalaureate Program, I read The Chosen by Chaim Potok and came across a quote that's stuck with me ever since:
