I’m continually fascinated by ways digital media can expand who gets to be a historian, who gets to be an archaeologist. Crowdsourcing expands our readership, too.Open peer review projects allow the potential readership for a volume to have a dialogue with the authors while the project unrolls.

My Futurefunder campaign adds a new facet to this. I’m trying to crowdfund direct tax-deductible donations to a fund that would support undergraduate students as they work on various digital history and humanities projects around the department. The Dean of the Faculty of Arts will match funds if we reach the halfway mark ($2500); the fund is currently only about $800 shy of that point!

I needed to do this. I kept finding that I was pulling funds from various nooks and crannies to send students to THATCamps, to help them get to DHSI, to set up laboratories for exploring data mining, to publish and work with me on projects. I found I was spending weeks a year writing research grants that, when boiled down to their essence, were all about finding funds to train students. This, it seems to me, is a very appropriate idea to take directly to the public, rather than the Tri-council agencies. I was very excited to be interviewed by the Globe and Mail about the project (the story appeared this past Saturday), and the fund has really picked up steam. I would be happy to chat with folks who are interested in this campaign (this experiment!). I would be extremely happy to chat with folks about the amazing work the undergraduates around here do, in digital history.

One last push folks, one last push!