Back in Melbourne #dh2010

I am back in Melbourne after attending the Digital Humanities conference at Kings College London and in my short experience of the event; it was by far the best. I get the feeling that the field is at a pivotal moment in its history and without continued institutional support and strong academic leadership, the field isn’t going to make the transition easily into the next stage (what ever this next stage may be).  We really need to build the field in Australia in a similar way to the Canadians by offering career options, degrees, research funding; all within strong academic departments and centres. The field will always have a service function; this is important, but in Australia we also need to push further into the ‘methodological commons’ and academic research beyond simply delivering someone else’s research from one place to another (or the ‘delivery boy’ scenario). I will write about this over coming weeks. I will try and not aggregate so much on this blog and keep that to 2cultures.net.