The first DARIAH Beyond Europe workshop, held at Stanford in mid-September, was for me a reintroduction to both DARIAH (the European digital humanities infrastructure organization) and Stanford’s digital humanities scene. I’d had the opportunity to engage with DARIAH in its early days, through my involvement with the ill-fated US cyberinfrastructure initiative Project Bamboo (and the short-lived CHAIN: Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks); and again later, in 2014, when looking for an organizational home for the now-defunct DiRT tool directory (which has been incorporated into TAPoR).
The biggest question for me, coming out of that workshop, was how, specifically, we should get engaged with DARIAH. If we reach out to their working groups, would they be welcoming to interest from somewhat random Americans? Is it useful to anyone to add Stanford-internal courses to their course registry? Do they actually want feedback on the materials in #DARIAHTeach?
At the time, I wrote a blog post about being a “cowboy” and taking the next steps after the workshop, and creating a mailing list on the spot for people who want to try to use DARIAH resources in their research and/or teaching. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to make time to engage with DARIAH, even as I acclimate to this new job, and plan for my digital humanities course next quarter (called “Digital Humanities Across Borders”, which will focus on non-English textual DH). One of the major projects I’ve been working on since I started at Stanford has been Prof. Kathryn Starkey’s “Global Medieval Sourcebook”, which will soon be relaunching. As such, it feels felicitous that the first DARIAH working group that responded to my inquiries was Mediaevalist’s Sources (MESO). Emiliano Degl’Innocenti, the National Coordinator of DARIAH Italy and co-lead of this working group, happened to be attending DigitalHERITAGE 2018 in San Francisco, and I met up with him at a coffee break (where I told him I’d be the one wearing a Glagolitic manuscript) to learn more about the working group, and what we might be able to do together. I wrote it up for the DARIAH Beyond Europe blog; see there for details.