Last week I attended the DHSoCal meeting hosted by UCSD with Sarah Lozier and Steve Anderson. The meeting was a gathering of over 30 faculty, graduate students, librarians, and alt-acs from universities and colleges across southern California. Perhaps the major takeaway was that people working in the digital humanities across Southern California are enthusiastic about increased opportunities for formal and informal collaboration and coordination across campuses!

Here are just a few key points from various large group conversations and smaller discussions throughout the day:

1. Cast a wide net. DHSoCal participants are working on a broad spectrum of issues, from archiving early modern literature to critically analyzing contemporary data visualizations, that might seem to have little in common at first glance. The digital humanities is a useful term in that it brings these disparate individuals together, even as it is also problematic because it potentially collapses differences. In light of critiques of the digital humanities by groups like Postcolonial Digital Humanities, the question of how to make the digital humanities more inclusive came up repeatedly, especially with regards to those working in languages other than English. There was also interest in expanding the boundaries of DHSoCal to include digital humanities scholars and practitioners in Mexico and throughout the Southwest.

2. Meet in person. While participants in this group regularly use Google Hangouts to coordinate and plan, all of those present expressed interest in having in-person get-togethers at least twice a year. One of the best parts of the meeting was the extended period for mingling and small group discussion where spontaneous convergences between individuals could occur.

3. Pool resources. There was a lot of discussion about how we might support one another and use one another’s expertise across campuses. This is absolutely vital, because there is so much to learn in the digital humanities and many of us agree that it is not necessary or even possible for any one person to be deeply knowledgeable about all things DH. Many participants were interested in using the DHSoCal website and the Twitter hashtag #DHSoCal as online spaces for connecting and sharing ideas. Furthermore, there was talk about potentially pooling resources to work towards SoCal based multi-campus DH grants.

4. Learn together. A major focus of the day was on how to bring digital humanities methods and theories into the undergraduate classroom and also how to teach ourselves what we need to do in order to use digital humanities tools in our teaching and research. In order to work on increasing opportunities for collaboration and learning, DHSoCal members plan to organize a THATCamp in San Diego next Fall. I so look forward to it!