Established in 2007, centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action that benefits the digital humanities and allied fields in general, and has special resources in the domain of cyberinfrastructure to offer humanities centers in particular. This initiative recognizes a strong connection that follows from CHCI’s commitment to innovative research and from centerNet’s linkage of new technologies with work in the humanities. Under the terms of the agreement, the two organizations that represent interdisciplinary humanities centers and digital humanities centers will partner to explore matters of mutual interest, including:

Digital Disciplines: how digital practices might or might not become disciplinary in themselves and/or reshape humanities disciplines.

Digital Publics: how digital scholarship engages groups of scholars within universities and colleges, between universities and colleges, and with publics beyond academia.

Questions about Digital Disciplines that will guide our initiative include:

What is the idea of the digital? What is the utility of the notion of “digital humanities”?

What is the relation between digital practices and disciplinary expertise?

How should digital practices be incorporated into the disciplinary structures of the 21st-century university?

To what extent should digital techniques and methods be granted autonomous disciplinary status in the coming university?

To what extent should we think of their impact as distributed in existing (or emergent) disciplines, i.e., disciplines otherwise constituted.

Alternatively, how are digital practices affecting research practices in the humanities and the arts? How are “traditional” disciplines and fields challenged to renew themselves?

How are newer disciplines and fields shaped and enabled? How have the relations between disciplines been transformed?

In relation to Digital Publics, there is a second set of questions:

How can digital technologies facilitate a broader engagement with a wide range of publics?

What are the implications for universities and colleges of the “democratization of knowledge” presented by the new digital media?

How do new-media artistic practices as well as new work in the humanities deploying digital technologies affect the question of what counts as knowledge and what counts as public?

And finally, the largest question: what sort of humanities will be accessible to the next generation?

The two affiliated organizations will pursue these questions with a five-year plan to support a number ofactivities:

Organizing shared events at our respective conferences

Developing proposals to funding agencies to support research and initiatives across centers from both organizations

Developing opportunities for joint inquiry into questions across the humanities, arts, and digital Technologies

Engaging discussions about how structures of the academy and disciplines are adapting appropriately to digital culture and technologies

Developing training in digital practice across centers as a way to build capacity.

The affiliation of CHCI and centerNet was developed at a series of three meetings sponsored by the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI) in 2008-9. The SCI provides opportunities for leaders in scholarly disciplines, academic libraries, advanced technologies, and higher education administration to study, develop, and implement creative and innovative strategies to advance scholarly communication in the context of the ongoing digital revolution. Generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SCI events are hosted annually by the University of Virginia Library.

The recently updated CHCI website now includes mechanisms for distributing announcements, news, and opportunities via social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter, and the ability to email this information to colleagues, friends, and lists. In our continuing efforts to utilize the web more effectively for the benefit of our members, we have also established a page on Wikipedia, and a Facebook group is in process. We hope that our use of these increasingly important internet-based tools will help to raise the visibility of CHCI members and the opportunities and programs they offer. We will announce the new Facebook page in January 2010. Please be in touch with us for more information.

Mr. Leach is a 15-term Republican congressman from Iowa. He served as Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services (1995-2001), as a senior member of the House Committee on International Relations, and as Chairman of the Committee’s Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs (2001-2006). Since 2007, he has taught at Princeton University and served as the interim director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

In 2004 Leach co-founded, along with Rep. David Price (D-NC), the bipartisan Congressional Humanities Caucus to increase awareness of the importance of the humanities in public life. He received the 2005 Sidney R. Yates Award for Distinguished Public Service to the Humanities from the National Humanities Alliance in recognition of his work as a champion for the humanities.

The Washington Post has published a detailed article on the appointment. President Obama also recently appointed David S. Ferriero as Archivist of the United States. The other major humanities-related leadership post in the US Federal Government, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, is Anne-Imelda M. Radice, who was appointed in 2005.

CHCI Members: we are seeking photographs for the rotating image display on our homepage, which changes on each page refresh. If you have a photograph of your facility, a recent program, your fellows, or any other images representative of your organization, please send them along. Images should be able to survive cropping to the size of the image on our homepage, and must be accompanied by a brief caption. Please do not send large, hi-resolution files, as the image will be formatted for web display. Please send your image(s) as email attachments to chci@duke.edu.

CHCI continues to grow steadily, and our membership, as of November 2009, is the largest in the organization’s history, with 168 current members. Among many other positive effects, our increasingly international membership will mean that our Annual Meetings will also continue to grow, both in scale and diversity. Between September and November, 2009, we have been honored to welcome the following new members, most of which reflect our growing internationalization:

Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, University of Florida
Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria
Humanities Foundation, Boston University
Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanjing University, China
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Binghamton University
Minerva Center, Tel Aviv University, Tel aviv, Israel (in development)
Portland Center for Public Humanities, Portland State University
Research Centre for Human Values, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Research Institute for the Humanities, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Transforming Cultures Research Centre, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Profiles of each of these new members can be found by searching or browsing our newly improved member directory. A warm welcome to all of our new and returning members!