I really enjoyed seeing and talking about the DH community! I think it is extremely powerful and helps others to create amazing projects and give others support that they might not have. At Gettysburg the 2016 cohort, the 2017 cohort, the working group and other members of the college are all there for me as I am completing my project. These recourses and people are easy to seek out. I think it is a bit more difficult, but my no means impossible to have a bigger community of practice. This can be credited to conferences like PaLA, the Slack Page and Twitter.
Now that I am a digital fellow I feel as though I am part of a larger community that is much bigger than Gettysburg. I think this is evident by that fact that we are able to ask questions on twitter and follow other important people in the digital world. At the conference I did not get the chance to talk with many people. Lauren and I both spoke to Laurie Allen and asked her a few questions. Other than that, I did not speak to many people face to face. I did on the other hand follow several people on twitter. This was made possible because of #dssf17 and #crdpala2017. I am now able to follow people that are active in the community, learn from them on twitter and ask them questions through the web if needed. I think having a hashtag is really helpful when trying to build a community.
I have been very active on twitter since our twitter session. I followed all the people that RC suggested to follow. I have also used #dssf17 and #dh a lot. I also try to tweet to the creators of the digital platforms that we are using. I think maintaining a community of practice takes work, but once that community is established, the people are there to help. I am going to try to be more active on Slack the next few weeks, I think Slack is very helpful if I wanted a quick detailed response.
I think it was very evident at PaLA that people are there to help each other. The conversations we had and the questions that were asked made this very clear. For example, some people wanted to learn how to make a digital fellowship so they listened closely to RC and Sarah speech. I think this community has to be present because people face many difficulties in the DH world. We need to be there to help each other succeed.
Glad you had a good opportunity at the PaLA conference to speak to others and see what this community (albeit a small slice of it) looks like. Twitter’s pretty great for development of CoP, although it can get pretty distracting as well.