"Are We Speaking in Code?" (Voicing the Craft & Tacit Understandings of Digital Humanities Software Development)

FAIN: HD-51674-13

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)
Bethany Nowviskie (Project Director: October 2012 to August 2014)

A two-day workshop that will bring together digital humanities scholars and software developers for critical discussion and hands-on activities to further articulate and theorize the intellectual work behind the technical development of digital projects.

The Scholars’ Lab at UVa Library proposes a summit and planning meeting for 20 intermediate-to-experienced digital humanities software developers. Its first aim is to document what has been too quietly internalized and tacitly embodied in DH platforms and tools: developers’ expert knowledge about the intellectual work of code-craft and their unspoken understandings about the relation of code and praxis to ethics, scholarly method, and humanities theory. Its second aim is to formulate pragmatic responses and spark initiatives to bridge the communications gap between scholars and developers—bringing technical conversations that may seem too informal, inaccessible, or telegraphic into open, inclusive humanities discourse. This meeting will foreground theoretical and intellectual dimensions of DH craftsmanship—in software developers’ own terms—and foster needed discussions of the functional significance of source code in venues legible to and frequented by scholars and developers alike.