On March 2, sponsored by CENIC and Internet2, UDHIG’s Faculty Director, Willeke Wendrich, chaired an International Forum in Digital Humanities, Digital Libraries and Virtual Museums: videoconferencing and beyond.

The four-hour marathon (beginning 5am in the Visualization portal!), included fifteen venues: Cairo, Paris, Bologna, Amsterdam, Umeaa (Sweden), Oxford, Cambridge, Washington, D.C., Fargo, Boston, Baltimore, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Stanford, all connected via video-conferencing tools that utilize broadband networks.

There were four moderators, one for each hour of the program. Each section had several brief presentations and time for questions and discussion. Per section approximately five venues were “active”, while the other participants were “listening” locations and used Skype’s chat tool to signal moderators that they wished to pose a question or respond to the presentation. The moderator could then queue requests, and enable direct live Question and Answer sessions between the various locations. Some presentations included Powerpoint slides, so we utilized two cameras to capture the presenter and the presentation.

All agreed that the sessions were very productive. Some of the points discussed were:
“The last mile”: even if a campus has “thick pipe internet”, this feature is not (at present) available at every desk. How useful is “thick pipe” internet under these circumstances, and how can this be improved.

Development of middleware: the great technological development of Internet2, includes the development of middle ware. The technologists are at a loss as to what type of middle ware would be useful for the humanities. We have potentially a huge resource of programmers who are willing to develop this for us, but we need to formulate what it is we would need.

Thirdly: many humanities projects are focused on outreach, they try to reach a large non-academic audience. How would “thick pipe” internet, which is not widely available, fit in this.

Expert technical support from Jimmy Suo (ATS) and Lisa Snyder (ETC) during UCLA’s portal broadcast, was especially helpful. Ed Johansen worked diligently to organize and coordinate the various venues, while Weiping Mandrawa tested all venues. We include here links to