Collaboration

• Projects involve scholars at all levels -- senior & junior faculty, staff, postdocs, grads, & undergrads
• Team members are categorized as "core personnel," "contributors," or "technical advisors," regardless of academic rank
• Led by faculty coordinators, teamwork is consensus-driven, and involves tasking by subtopic instead of rank
• Quarterly meetings of all researchers connected with SHL permit crosspollination between projects
• Periodic seminars for undergrad researchers prepare them for full participation in teams, as well as foster crossdisciplinary inquiry and dialogue
• Collaboration between SHL projects and with SCIL, Media-X, and WGLN, thanks to shared workspaces in the new Wallenberg Hall.
• SHL staff consult on all projects and promote collaboration between teams, between disciplines, between schools of the university, between academic and administrative units, and between Stanford, other universities, public institutions and the community

Technology

• Driven by research agendas from within the humanities disciplines, all projects embrace non-traditional (to the humanities) outputs, linking cutting-edge humanities research to technological innovation
• Even where the primary outputs are only partly digital (as in the case of films, exhibits, etc.), they are achieved by means of the most effective new IT tools
• The SHL Directors help teams both to execute their ideas and to imagine possibilities (as humanists are often constrained by their own limited familiarity with new technologies); such consultations begin in the proposal development phase of projects
• Teams develop infrastructure tools with the help of the Technology Director, which are then shared with other teams
• Once such tools are fully developed and tested, they are to be shared via open source software to other institutions and the world at large
• SHL is dedicated to technical applications that are platform-independent and compliant with ADA, web-accessibility, and usability standards

Matchmaking

Partnerships are critical to our mission, both for individual projects and for SHL as a whole. SHL assumes an active role in building such partnerships.

With other universities:

• University of California-Berkeley
• University of California-Los Angeles
• Kenyon College
• The Ohio State University
• Bryn Mawr College
• European College of the Liberal Arts
• Istituto Universitario di Lingue Moderne, Milan
• London School of Economics
• Universita' degli Studi di Milano
• San Francisco State University
• Southern Illinois State University

With other units at Stanford:

• Cantor Center for the Visual Arts
• Information Technology Systems & Services
• Stanford University Libraries

With community organizations:

• San Francisco Chinese Opera Company

With major cultural institutions:

• Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
• Fondazione Mondadori, Milan
• The Wolfsonian (FIU), Miami Beach

Standards and Evaluation

Implementation of project and laboratory goals is evaluated on an ongoing basis, with a mechanism for evaluating outcomes planned for September 2004.

Evaluating individual projects:

• quarterly progress reports for each team, covering infrastructure and content separately. Emphasis on understanding obstacles; lessons learned; benefit to individuals involved; & gradual shifting of goals
• annual reports from student participants
• Student evaluations through Registrar for courses related to projects
• annual renewal process, with interdisciplinary selection committee representing campus, community, and industry
• close oversight by SHL staff, as part of consultation & mentorship responsibilities

Evaluating SHL interim effectiveness:

• careful analysis of website log statistics, including by page, referrer, and domain
• statistics documenting increasing university & community interest (in the form of phone & email inquiries, undergrad volunteerism, attendance at SHL events, enrollment in SHL courses, application for funds, etc)
• external advisory board