An AMICAL cohort

Our AMICAL Workshop Grant will allow us to cover participation costs for up to 15 visiting participants from AMICAL institutions. Although this event will include participants from outside of the consortium, we will take advantage of members’ participation as a group to:

• Grow AMICAL’s DH community: Since digital scholarship requires the collaborative efforts among different stakeholders inside and between institutions. We hope to attract a variety of people engaged in, or planning to launch, digital projects in our international liberal arts environments.
• Advance AMICAL’s digital initiatives programs: We’ll be showcasing AMICAL-funded DH projects and setting aside time for consulting sessions during the lunch time hour for those with digital projects at the “idea” or “early planning” stage, to help with planning and increasing chances for getting AMICAL funding.
• Raise visibility for AMICAL’s programs: Through AMICAL’s online fora before and after the event, and AMICAL-cohort meeting during the event, we’ll be connecting members with each other to exchange ideas/support/opportunities for collaboration. Not all AMICAL members can attend the event, but those who do or follow along online can work towards such initiatives in their home institutions.
• Encourage cross-consortial collaborations: Three AMICAL institutions are located within a few kilometers of each other in Beirut, Lebanon. Two previous digital events have taken place in Beirut and Cairo. We hope other AMICAL participants from underrepresented institutions will consider attending and can connect with other, like-minded participants to explore future avenues for digital scholarship.
• Taking initial steps towards AMICAL communities of practices. Learning about and embarking upon digital initiatives require time, energy and resources. Our hope is that the experience of this event will be carried over into future AMICAL annual meetings and events towards the gradual building of communities of digital practice. We will dedicate one of the lightning talks or posters to the idea of faculty learning communities, one of which ran at AUB. One of the luncheons will be reserved for the AMICAL cohort to meet and brainstorm.

Like the digital humanities themselves, DHI-B is designed as a meeting place, between faculty, librarians, students and technologists. It features hands-on workshops, poster presentations, lightning talks, and lectures, conceived with a collegial spirit of collaboration in mind. These workshops aim to introduce you to some of the ways that research and teaching are changing in the humanities. Many of those workshops have been suggested by the community themselves. They will be taught by MA and PhD students, librarians, instructors and professors.