One Week, One Tool: A Digital Humanities Barn Raising

FAIN: HT-50021-09

George Mason University (Fairfax, VA 22030-4444)
Tom Scheinfeldt (Project Director: February 2009 to February 2012)

A one week institute for twelve participants on the principles of humanities-centered tool design, development, and implementation, followed by a year of development support.

For one week in June 2010, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University will bring together a group of twelve digital humanists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds and practical experience to build a useful and useable software tool for digital humanities research. A short course of training in principles of open source software development will be followed by an intense five days of brainstorming and development. Following the workshop will be a year of continued development, testing and evaluation. The group members will be comprised of designers and programmers as well as project managers and outreach specialists. The group will conceive a tool, outline a roadmap, develop and disseminate a prototype, lay the ground work for building an open source community, and make first steps toward securing sustainable funding for the project.