[Dahut-pm] Digital Humanities

[James Smith]

Patience works sometimes.

In August of '04, I sent this list an e-mail about putting together a  
proposal for a position here at the University:

 > The position I am proposing would act as a facilitator, helping
 > faculty understand the creative commons that is the bedrock of OSS
 > and how to leverage OSS for their own projects.  This position would
 > also investigate building a low-cost, high-availability, and
 > low-maintenance platform for producing applications that are parts of
 > faculty projects.

Well, after three years, I'm moving to a new position that was  
created this year as a result of that seed.  The move is effective 1  
Nov.

The job description is a bit long, but it boils down to managing  
faculty projects, trying to find parts of projects that can be  
released as F/OSS, engineering production/test environments, creating/ 
running workshops and tutorials for faculty, attending appropriate  
conferences, and networking with other universities.  There are about  
40 faculty interested in this.  It helps that the (U.S.) National  
Endowment for the Humanities is pushing open source now in the  
digital humanities.

As a result, I'll be jumping back into the F/OSS world.  I can't  
promise a lot of Perl/mod_perl stuff (though I have some projects I  
want to do there -- including breaking out parts of the Gestinanna  
project that I had to shelve a couple years ago), but I hope to be  
much more active.  I might even make it to OSCon again.
--
James Smith <JGSmith at TAMU.Edu>
Texas A&M University, College of Liberal Arts
Digital Humanities Lead Developer (as of 1 Nov)