“DHA2014: Expanding Horizons” will be held 18–21 March 2014, co-hosted by The University of Western Australia and iVEC. The local organisation committee will be chaired by Professor Jenni Harrison of iVEC and the program committee chaired by Professor Hugh Craig, aaDH and The University of Newcastle.

The Call for Papers for DHA2014 will be posted soon.

• The conference web site is: www.dha2014.org
• More details about the aaDH: http://aa-dh.org/

The WikiLeaks Party is a very interesting development in terms of rocking the boat a little; of reminding people that the usual political narratives of Australia are often an impoverished lens to view and address the many political challenges of today. The great unspoken history of Australia, our dirty little secret, is that our nation is dull, in fact on new global ranking that I just developed, we are the world’s second most boring nation and only Norway is more boring. Let’s hope that my calculations are wrong and that something interesting happens in the Australian parliament to remind us that its view of the world has severe limits.

Lynne Siemens, specialises in project management and team building. She stated that people aren’t always well-trained to work together and outlined some of the positives and negatives of working in teams. She claimed that some people are better able to collaborate than others, often because they have developed skills of listening, are flexible, can negotiate, and can compromise.  Lynne described these as the ‘soft skills’ of effective collaborative teams. A team approach often produces more diverse and possibly higher quality ideas (and is a good way to learn new skills and perspectives), but some projects are better done as an individual (but of course, some projects are beyond the scope and skills-sets of individuals).

Lynne outlined some of successful team interactions she had observed, partly through research she had undertaken through case –studies.  Good communication skills are vital, as is project management, and the ability to think across technology and the humanities and indeed, culture and language. Also the objectives of the team, the outcomes, and the individual tasks need to be clearly described with not too many grey areas that may be potential areas of conflict. And teams operate within institutional contexts so there are certain contingencies to negotiate either within or between institutions.  Still, one of the best ways to build teams is through casual conversations, lots of face-to-face meetings, and large bottles of rum (I put in the last one).

Ray Siemans is a Professor of Humanities Computing at the University of Victoria in Victoria, Canada and is well known for his work in the Digital Humanities and in particular, through the founding of the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute (that I attended 2 years ago and now attracts around 500 participants).  He discussed the important work of the digital humanities, particularly around content modelling and computational analysis of content (a core form of scholarship within the field). He also discussed the typology of curriculum development in the digital humanities either through stand-alone degrees or through digital humanities inflicted programs and in particular, the highly successful Summer Institute model.

DHSI (Digital Humanities Summer Institute) http://www.dhsi.org/

ETCL (Electronic Textual Culture Lab) http://etcl.uvic.ca/

It is this idea of ”unproductive” thinking that needs to be explored, especially in fields that exist in the gaps, ie. interdisciplinary fields such as ”STS” or the ‘Digital Humanities”.  Understandings of ”the social” and the tools and methods we use to do this advance rapidly. And tool and methods to understand the world through computer science change rapidly as well (ie programming methods change rapidly).  It is easy to get stuck in one camp and make claims that one is interdisciplinary whilst falling behind in one of the disciplines that are important for your particular ”interdisciplinary” practice. I see this all the time in fields such as cultural studies that are advanced in the finer skills of academic practice, but the technical objects of their study are often many years behind contemporary technical research .   And some technical areas such as eResearch tend to be bogged down in some very old-fashioned ideas of utility and are often unable to contribute to humanities research in a meaningful way because it is far too distant from it and lacks a sophisticated understanding of it.

Interdisciplinary requires deliberation and also empathy towards what one does not know. It is often very difficult if not possible to stay on top of a number of fields, but one can recognize this in ones-self and develop the skills and strategies to make good contributions to the interdisciplinary space that are both balanced and informed and aware of the key work and technical advances across fields.

I think the hardest lesson I learned as a historian is that technology doesn’t need history. And technology certainly doesn’t need an Australian historian; in fact I may just write a book about this! (or learn how to program a machine that writes books without human intervention; the ultimate revenge of the digital humanist).

The Party has a web site that is accepting members and will develop its social media strategy over coming months.

National Council of the WikiLeaks Party convenes for a meeting in Kindness House, Melbourne., Photo Omar Todd

Download .PDF version

(This work is a parody of Yellowism that is a parody of Art)

Tony Wheeler, the founder of Lonely Planet travel books.

I am attending the Australian Festival of Travel Writing this weekend at the University of Melbourne. I have never been to an event such as this before and I am finding it extremely useful as I feel as though two important life narratives; travel and education have come together. In my case, they have never really been linked except that a love of independent learning and learning for its own sake led to a love of traveling and traveling for its own sake.

There is a lot of wisdom at the festival. And this I find this very attractive, especially if it is a wisdom that manifests itself in a love of life and knowing that a love of life requires one to make uncommon choices. There are so many traps out there that prevents people from traveling, in the broader sense of the word; traveling geographically, traveling intellectually, traveling culturally, and traveling socially. Fear and cynicism, class based prejudice, the fear of leaving ones comfort zone of pyrrhic successes.  And these limits on traveling are not unique to traveling; one could apply them equally to any sphere of achievement or at least, the fear of achievement. Achievements based on a love of life are always the greatest successes, and if one doesn’t love life, one can never be truly successful (well, at least not a success that is true to oneself).