One Week, One Tool

"A digital humanities barnraising."

It is striking how the project is presented. This much labor, measured out in terms of this much time, produces this product. The meting out of time for product, the neat measuredness of each, is here pointed up as the essence of the project. It almost doesn't matter what the tool is. The workshop wasn't designed to solve any particular problem. It was set up to construct one unit of "product" in one unit of time.

This is by and large the opposite of digital humanities labor, which is interstitial, ongoing, and in significant part custodial (to take my own example: time spent blocking spammers at Arcade). This is of course why the language of "one week, one tool" is appealing.

One week, one book. One week, one conference. Are we feeling productive yet?