DHTech at DH2023

DHTech will be present at the DH2023 conference with two events on the conference schedule and one informal meetup! On Monday, July 10, we have a full-day workshop, “How can you trust your code?”. We will discuss questions related to trustworthiness of code developed for Digital Humanities projects. We will explore questions such as: how do we know that our code has bugs (or is bug-free)? And what do we do if we suspect that the code we are using has bugs? What are the implications of this situation when using tools developed by other people? How can we trust them to develop code that produces accurate results? What can we do about all of this? We’ll discuss in small groups and collect discussion notes for consolidation into a white paper. Join us if this is something you are interested in! If you won’t be at the conference but are interested in helping with the white paper afterwards, join the #dh2023 channel on Slack for updates!

DHTech will also host the panel [“Research Software Engineer Careers and Project Involvement in DH.”]({{ site.baseurl }}/dh2023-panel) The panel will discuss the problem of missing career path opportunities for people doing technical work in DH. The lack of stable career prospects in DH often results in highly qualified people leaving the field for a more stable career leading to a lack in code maintenance and quality. Without permanent positions for research software engineers, how can the DH community ensure code quality and sustainability beyond the limited and often temporary funding of DH projects? How do career structures have to change to accommodate people doing coding work? Each panelist will give a 5 to 10 minutes introduction introducing themselves and their career path. Afterwards, we will then invite the audience to participate in a discussion with the panelists. And because we love white papers, we aim to write up the discussion after the conference as a white paper.

Besides the above two opportunities to connect with your fellow DHTech members, we also hope to organize an informal get-together over coffee on one of the conference days. We will send out more details as we get closer to the conference, so stay tuned!