Доклад пройдет в Zoom на английском языке.

Аннотация доклада “Directories as Utopian Infrastructure”

What do directories give us? What do they take away? This talk reflects on the demand for directories from all corners of digital humanities: scholars new to the field who wish to understand the landscape, centers that want to document and publicize the work of their members, technical developers who want to make their tools more findable. For most digital humanities organizations and programs — whether it is a center at a single institution, or an international consortium — there comes a time when someone proposes the creation of a directory. These suggestions are made with positive, hopeful intentions, but the initial labor cost for directories are considerable, and the ongoing work to keep it up-to-date is substantial and not meaningfully automatable. Drawing on examples of current and past directories, including many failed efforts over more than a decade, this talk will argue that directories themselves are doomed to fail without an ongoing infusion of paid and motivated labor. Nonetheless, the process of failure can be an effective if cruel teacher to prepare people for future initiatives with little or no connection to directories. The talk will connect this theme of failure and learning to current initiatives underway through the Association for Computers and the Humanities, with the goal of incentivizing a shift in goals from creating unsustainable projects to cultivating learning and skill-development.