A week ago in this space, I announced Digital Humanities Questions & Answers (@DHAnswers), a community-based Q&A board you can participate in for free, sponsored by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) and in collaboration with those of us at ProfHacker.
Goals of DH Answers include:
- broadening the community by introducing people to topics related to digital humanities;
- serving the needs of multiple types of community members (not limited to or by academic discipline or rank);
- creating a friendly and inviting space where people can help each other with questions about languages, tools, standards, best practices, pedagogy, and all things related to scholarly activity in the digital humanities (broadly defined).
In just a week, nearly 200 people have registered with DH Answers, and there are close to 300 responses to questions across the topics of:
- Applications, Tools, Formats
- Databases & Data Structures
- Interfaces, Design & Usability
- DH in the Classroom
- Markup & Metadata
- Programming
- New Media & Games
- Project Management & DH Professions
- About DH Answers
We are all pleased as punch that so many people are finding DH Answers useful. Unsurprisingly, one of the most popular topics at the moment is “What is Digital Humanities?” Other meta-topics are also popular, such as “How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?” and “Seeking readings on open access in digital humanities.” There are also plenty of ProfHacker-like questions that have popped up, such as “What’s in your applications folder?” and “Is there a free (open) sofware to annotate PDFs, that can be used with zotero?”
We would love for more of you to join in the fun:
- Go to DHAnswers and register an account (or use an existing OpenID account such as your Google account).
- Click the “Ask a Question” link to ask a question, making sure to select the appropriate category for the question.
- Browse any existing questions and add your answer where relevant. For questions you have initiated, you will be able to mark one or more responses as “best answers.”
- If you’re on Twitter, you can follow @DHAnswers, where new questions will be automatically tweeted.
We hope ProfHacker readers (and others) continue to find Digital Humanities Questions and Answers useful. Please contribute your own questions and answers, and encourage your undergraduate and graduate students to participate as well. We are continually grateful to the ACH for thinking about outreach, community-building, and other issues related to the growth of the Digital Humanities “big tent.”
