August 18, 2017 / by /

DH2017 Pre-Conference Workshop Outcomes

AUGUST 7, 2017 — MONTREAL — On 7 August 2017, the Digital Innovation Group together with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science hosted a pre-conference workshop at the Digital Humanities Conference 2017 in Montréal. The workshop called “Let’s Develop an Infrastructure for Historical Research Tools” focused on collaboration and integration of digital humanities software and tools. The participants were software developers, scholars with programming skills, and project managers from a variety of institutions.

The workshop started out with eight short presentations that introduced several tools developed by the participants, followed by a lively debate about collaboration practices and possibilities. Among the discussed topics were software documentation practices, prototype testing, and code versioning practices. Overall, the participants agreed that the establishment of a digital humanities software development community would be useful to foster collaboration and provide support.

Concrete outcomes of the workshop are a shared GitHub organization called DHTech (that can be found here( , which contains a repository for gathering a list of available software and tools. Furthermore, the organization will contain information regarding community guidelines about topics such as documentation practices, licensing, etc. In addition, a Slack channel has been created for DHTech members to communicate updates of tools, ask questions, or get support by other members. Anyone interested in digital humanities software development is welcome to join DHTech. To get invited, please use this Google form.