The start of a digital humanities project comes with many considerations, but what you might not think about are the legal complications that could arise later. In this session, we’ll work together to build a best practices document to serve as a guideline for scholars engaging in collaborative digital humanities work. Ideally, the document will ensure that deadlines, deliverables, and funds are clearly communicated, and that contract terms are transparent and mutually-acceptable. It will also address questions like: Who owns which aspects of the project? What kind of contract should be used, and what are the legal ramifications of collaborative work? With your help, we’ll make a document that solves problems.

I’d like to propose an informal discussion having to do with a few of the projects I have been working on for the last couple of years surrounding the re-contextualization of cultural heritage artifacts. These are usually small experiments, but have grown to be “projects.”

1) Curatorial Poetry is a stream of decontextualized “descriptive” texts pulled from museum collection meta-data. These snippets of information, separated from their full object records and image representations, provide the possibility of a different entry point to the object.

2) Curatorial Poetry Derivatives — Encoded Catalog & Robot Readable Design Museum – These “iterations” continue the conversation around re-contextualizing information, with the hopes of creating a new understanding through the use of new audiences and entry-points into a knowledge-base.

3) Object Phone – Object Phone was an attempt to give our objects “voices.” The end result is a phone number that you can call or text to receive information about any object in our collection. It opens up the concept up an audio-tour, raises questions about accessibility and most importantly gives our objects their own voice!

4) Moment’s Notice – Moment’s Notice is an “experiment in correspondence.” This is a personal project of mine that I have just started. In a nutshell, people sign up, I send them a roll of 35mm film, they return it, I process it and scan it and make a permanent archive website. This project is about correspondence. It’s also about the dying art of analog photography. It’s about the avalanche of imagery posted to the internet every single second of our lives. It’s about slowing your brain down, and it’s about breathing. I’m curious about selection, and curation, and building a long lasting archive of images that communicate something cerebral–something that lives outside the current framework.

In the discussion, I would like to present these projects ( quickly ) and then discuss how and why I can to do them. I’d like to talk about how we as artists and sometimes employees are motivated to explore concepts like these, and how we can carve out time in our busy lives to make them come to life. I’d like to talk about how technology plays a role but is not necessarily the centerpiece of the conversation.

-micah