The Digital Medievalist Project: A Community of Practice for Image, Text, Sound, and Technology Research
Creators: name: O'Donnell, Daniel
name: Baker, Peter
name: Cummings, James
name: Foys, Martin
name: McGillivray, Murray
name: ROSSELLI DEL TURCO, Roberto
name: Solopova, Elizabeth
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2004
Subjects: subject: Community of Practice
subject: Digital humanities
subject: Medieval studies
subject: Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada)

description: This is a redacted version of the original grant application for the Digital Medievalist project (signatures and CVs removed). A version of the original text with all material is available on request.
description: This application is to fund the networking activities of the Digital Medievalist Project, an international network of over 200 medieval scholars and students whose research and teaching projects use Image, Text, Sound, and Technology (ITST). The project is hosted at the University of Lethbridge and moderated by an international executive of seven medievalists with significant ITST experience.

The Digital Medievalist Project was established in 2003 in order to improve the networking ability of medievalist ITST researchers. Recent ITST projects show great technical accomplishment due in part to training initiatives by agencies such as SSHRC. Developing consistent and predictable implementations of international technical standards is the next major challenge facing the field, however. Although well-developed international standards and languages exist for most aspects of contemporary ITST research, projects vary greatly in both the rigour with which they follow the published standards and the specific approach they take to their interpretation. This problem is significant because it prevents humanities computing projects from easily exchanging and reusing complex data, and because the duplication of effort it implies can represent a significant drain on such projects' usually small budgets. Evidence suggests that this problem is not caused by the lack of technical expertise among researchers. Rather, it is caused by the lack of an easy and effective means of discovering and sharing how others are doing the same thing—in other words, of networking.

The Digital Medievalist addresses this problem using the Community of Practice networking model. Communities of Practice are self-organising disciplinary networks whose members are bound together by a common interest in improving their knowledge and skill in the practice of a given area of expertise. Research has demonstrated that this networking model is particularly successful in fields that require practitioners to master intellectually challenging, rapidly changing, and highly abstract or codified systems or processes. In such fields Communities of Practice become nodes for the exchange and interpretation of information; repositories of ‘living’ knowledge that formal systems cannot capture; centers for competence and identity.

In practical terms, the Digital Medievalist Project encourages this networking through four main types of activities. Using a central Community of Practice portal designed and hosted at the University of Lethbridge, the project operates a moderated mailing list, refereed on-line journal, and wiki-based collaborative knowledgebase. The project also sponsors sessions on ITST research at the major disciplinary conferences (Kalamazoo 2004-; Leeds 2006-) and participates in activities at significant Humanities computing events, including SSHRC-funded ITST workshops, and meetings of major ITST organisations.

By sponsoring these networking activities, the Digital Medievalist Project helps medievalists refine their ability to apply digital multimedia technologies in three main ways:





It encourages the collaborative development and dissemination of discipline-specific best practice.




It provides a network through which ITST researchers can collaborate to improve their technological skills, follow new technological developments, and discover other researchers tackling similar problems in their own work.




It eases entry into ITST research for novice researchers by encouraging collaboration with more experienced researchers in a discipline-specific setting.



The project is rapidly becoming acknowledged as the principal networking agent in the discipline: several collaborative research projects have already had their start through the networking activities of the project (e.g. Foys, Karkov, and O'Donnell 2004-; O'Donnell, Porter, and Rosselli del Turco 2004-; Foys and Westrem 2004-), and, beginning in 2006, the project will play a major role in coordinating IT conference sessions at major disciplinary conferences. The project was a prize winner at the recent 2004 Digital Resources in the Humanities conference in Sheffield