How to get money, money, money for wild and crazy times!!

Okay, not really.  But I do think this topic is particularly important right now.

This was my original proposal:
I’d like to talk about the role of faculty, IT, and administrators in collaborating to shape institutional strategic plans and planning in general for academic computing and the digital humanities.  I’ve spent nearly 18 months now involved in various strategic and practical planning committees at UMW regarding digital resources and goals for the humanities and social sciences.  Making sure that resources are allocated to the digital humanities requires broad commitments within administrative and strategic planning.  [Not as sexy or fun as WPMU or Omeka plug-ins, but sadly, just as important….]  I’d like to share my own experiences in the area and hear from others about theirs.

And today I would simply add that as UMW is closing in on a first draft of its strategic plan, I’m even more convinced that the college/university-wide planning process is something with which digital humanists need to be engaged.  In this time of dwindling economic resources, however, we also need to be, pardon the pun, strategic about it.  I think we need to figure out when we need to explain concepts, tools, the very notion of what digital humanities is and its place in the curriculum (something even THATCampers seem to be debating), when we need to do full-on DH evangelizing, and when we need to back off from our evangelizing in order to ease fears and/or recognize budgetary realities.  In any case, who else has had to make the case for Digital Humanities or academic technology as part of these processes?

5 Responses to “How to get money, money, money for wild and crazy times!!”

  1. epistemographer Says:
    June 10th, 2009 at 2:11 pm

    Add libraries/archives/museums into the discussion, and I’m *so* all over this topic. As Director of Digital Strategy and Scholarship at my institution, this is more or less what I spend most of my time thinking about.

  2. Jmcclurken Says:
    June 10th, 2009 at 2:16 pm

    Yes, of course; I didn’t mean to be exclusionary. I suspect the planning process and funding models differ somewhat from the university/college model, but there’s still a great deal of overlap for those of us making the case for digital humanities.

  3. Musebrarian Says:
    June 10th, 2009 at 5:14 pm

    I’d second @spistemographer’s comments. Jeffery, I don’t think this needs to be divorced from discussions about university/college strategic planning since academic libraries, archives and museums face similar challenges about how they fit into larger campus-wide strategies.

  4. Jeffrey McClurken Says:
    June 10th, 2009 at 6:42 pm

    @Musebrarian and @epistemographer — Sounds great! Any other brave souls willing to talk about strategic planning at a tech conference? What are the issues we should be talking about in this session?

  5. Eric Johnson Says:
    June 17th, 2009 at 5:48 pm

    I’m sure you’d like to hear from other academics more than another library/museum type, Jeff, but I can say we, too, are interested in this topic. Specifically, I’d love to get everybody’s thoughts on the most effective ways to talk to admins about the value of these kinds of undertakings. I get a lot of feeling that they think all this technology stuff is important, but they often have no idea how to integrate the idea into their constructs of how the institution works, how it fits the mission, and so on.