NDSA:Digital Stewardship Now!

Return to NDSA:Outreach Working Group Home

The NDSA Outreach group proposes to create either a "National Digital Stewardship Alliance Now" or a "Digital Stewardship Now" to highlight the activities of NDSA members and/or the digital stewardship community at large. This tool would be based on the existing "Digital Humanities Now" tool developed at the Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

From the Digital Humanities Now website: "Digital Humanities Now showcases the scholarship and news of interest to the digital humanities community through a process of aggregation, discovery, curation, and review. Digital Humanities Now also is an experiment in ways to identify, evaluate, and distribute scholarship on the open web through a weekly publication and the quarterly of Digital Humanities."

In addition to providing a one-stop information shop for interested users, the NDSA Now site would provide a centralized location for the harvesting of content to support the NDSA Press Office concept currently under development.

Digital Humanities Now is largely automated. It is created by ingesting the Twitter feeds of hundreds of scholars followed by @dhnow (a list of scholars taken from a digital humanities Twitter list), processing these feeds through Twittertim.es to generate a more narrow feed of common interest and debate, and reformatting that feed on http://digitalhumanitiesnow.org/, in part to allow for further (non-Twitter) discussions. Items are reviewed by human editors prior to final publication.

Dan Cohen of the George Mason Center for History and New Media made dhnow using Wordpress and the algorithm and has offered assistance in setting it up.

As of January 18, 2013 the latest version of the platform is preparing for its alpha release. We will work with Joan Fragaszy Troyano once the alpha is out to work on our own instance.

What should we name it? Should it be "Digital Stewardship Now" or "NDSA Now"?

The idea of a "Digital Stewardship Now" was an early NDSA proposal as part of the Ideascale activity.