A few months back, Shane Landrum, a doctoral student in American History at Brandeis University, tweeted about proposing a session on "crowdsourced archives and transcription projects" for the 2012 AHA Annual Conference. He suggested a brainstorming session via Google Docs. I was more than happy to jump in. The brainstorming demonstrated there was enough critical mass to make the proposal, and this week Shane made good on his word and submitted it to the AHA as an "experimental session."
T-PEN is one of the representative projects. We're not sure if this session will eventually be accepted, but the process itself demonstrated the general value of crowdsourcing as a way to generate ideas, build momentum and to make individual projects aware of the larger landscape in digital humanities. Hopefully, I will be presenting at the AHA in Chicago next January. In the meantime, Shane has posted an account of developing the session and what the proposal looks like. I'm honored that T-PEN is sharing space in a proposal with such stellar projects and such creative scholars!
