Abstract: The past several years have seen a renewed and vigorous push to connect across the world with researchers working on digital projects in cultural research, the arts and the heritage sector. The desire to connect comes from all sides of the cultural and academic stack, and from all regions of the planet. I begin my talk with a survey of past efforts to build cross-regional networks, leading to our experiences on the inaugural year of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities (GO::DH). The bulk of the talk will focus on just one question: How can we build and sustain a digital humanities global network? Any answer to this question must be preliminary, and mine is no exception. Any answer must also be able to address at least six domains of difference: finance, institutional structures, culture, language, technology and politics. By breaking down the larger problem into its constituent domains, I hope to convince you that a peculiar global network can and should become our future.
Bio: Alex Gil is Digital Scholarship Coordinator for the Humanities and History Division of the Columbia University Libraries. He serves as a consultant to faculty, students and the library on the impact of technology on research, pedagogy and scholarly communications. Current projects include the re-skilling of academic librarians, an open repository of syllabi for curricular research, an aggregator for digital humanities projects worldwide and other initiatives at the intersection of technology and the humanities. He is currently vice-chair of global-outlook::digital-humanities (GO::DH) and the organizer of the THATCamp Caribe series.