All of the great posts so far are making me quite excited for the weekend’s sessions. I am really looking forward to conversations about multimodal scholarship and adding lab sections to non-science courses, but I hope we will also have time to talk about the role of programmers and developers in digital scholarship projects. I am all for a pedagogy of critical making and am always working to burnish my own skills at building scholarly projects, but I also recognize the value of partnering with others who might have far more advanced skills when it comes to actually coding and designing projects.
That said, I think a number if the threads so far have reminded us that LACs (and others, to be sure), have significant constraints that often make it difficult to have a seasoned digital scholarship developer available on campus. So how cam we address thus? Working with sympathetic and capable IT pros is a start. Continual learning on our own will help a bit. We could always look for grants that would fund small amounts of support. But is there anything more systematic we can do? Can we share developers across institutions? What might that look like? Would the hassle of networked development be worth the benefit of working with ever-more experienced developers?
