Caveat Lector

Coming together to summarize discussions: Two common and two uncommon themes from the previous discussion.

Table 1. Common themes: making social connections, engaging with primary(/secondary) materials. Uncommon themes: reconceptualization of projects, recreating past methodologies (understanding how scholars used to understand and engage with materials).

Table 2. Common themes: Aggregating and organizing materials, user participation and involvement of the user in the scholarly process (user as agent: scholars, educators, public, etc). Uncommon themes: text hygiene (involving users in process of making sure that texts grow more accurate, more useful, richer over time), “confess stupidity” (be open to discovering dead ends, what’s not working, getting corrective feedback), infrastructure development.

Table 3. Common themes: Discovery, interaction with other scholars. Uncommon themes: archiving, personal enrichment.

Table 4. Common themes: Creativity, presenting scholarship. Uncommon themes: serendipity, “smashing” (of preconceived notions, critique, deconstruction)

Table 5. Common themes: Foraging (gathering materials), sense-making. Uncommon themes: non-Roman scripts, is Bamboo too-text-based? what about artists and multimedia and performance?, “political activism” (politics of access, IP/copyright, outreach to non-academic audiences, why aren’t humanists at the table in policy discussions?)

Table 6. Common themes: Delivering (including via blogs, branding, etc), connecting. Uncommon themes: simplifying vs. enriching; building (tools), integrating research and practice

Table 7. Common themes: Mindfulness, intense intellectual engagement (with colleagues, students). Uncommon themes: Fieldwork (generation of knowledge or data), ethos (making sense of what we do in light of the new digital world, finding common ground). Concern over constitutive, generative force of what humanities scholars do.

Table 8. Common themes: individual self-interest (scholars are both competitive and collaborative, and Bamboo has to accommodate that), creating new knowledge in tangible and validatable form. Uncommon themes: individual stances on IP (all is free vs. somebody’s paying vs. public-domain vs. fair-use advocacy; disagreement on priorities), money (funding priorities; everybody wants more, but disagreement on what they want more of)

Table 9. Common themes: define authorship/scholarship (field-specific and cross-discipline), intellectual networking (informal and formal). Uncommon themes: discovering unimagined resources (serendipity), writing as a research practice in and of itself.

Table 10. Common themes: discovery (of resources), dissemination. Uncommon themes: tools (e.g. Zotero), communities of practice (how they have trouble forming even when they’re wanted).