[Kathleen Fitzpatrick]

Hello, colleagues! At the end of the DH2024 session, “Humanities Infrastructures for Teaching, Researching, Publishing, and Building Community,” we raised the possibility of continuing our discussion on the Commons. I am starting this discussion thread in order to kick us off, but please feel free to start new threads of conversation as well!

I am particularly interested in talking more about how DH projects might better learn from and adopt the practices of open source developer communities in order to help our projects become more collective not just in their adoption but also in their processes of building and maintenance. I’d love to hear any thoughts — ideas, advice, arguments about approach, cautionary tales…

[Giovanni Salucci]

Dear Kathleen, if you could propose a specific topic or question instead of making such broad requests, the discussion  could start more effectively; DH is a very broad field, it would be helpful to understand which types of projects are of interest to you.

However, to contribute to your main discussion, I believe that rather than focusing solely on open source software, more emphasis should be placed on the adoption of open standards. This would ensure that what is created has a longer lifespan than what is generally the case today. For example, in academic publishing, even though there are open source platforms, it is the widespread use of international standards (XML JATS, metadata, DOI, etc.) that promotes interoperability and the exchange of information.

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