Funded by a grant from the NEH, the purpose of this meeting was respond to the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure Commission’s call for digital humanities centers to become key nodes of cyberinfrastructure in the United States. The summit was especially concerned with assessing the value of and the desire for greater collaboration and communication among the centers; among the funders; and between both groups. The NEH and the summit steering committee invited participants from a representative group and range of 17 digital humanities centers, as well as 14 key funders of the field, including NEH, Mellon, NSF, IMLS, ACLS, the Getty, and the Luce, Macarthur, and Sloan Foundations, plus two representatives from Google.
The summit consisted of opening plenary talks by John Unsworth and Vint Cerf of Google. These were followed the next day by morning plenary and breakout sessions devoted to finding common ground and afternoon plenary and breakout sessions devoted to discussing where we wanted to go from there.
The summit was documented in a comprehensive Wiki, which included a detailed report on the summit, including a list of participants, a copy of the agenda, reports from the breakout groups, and John Unsworth’s plenary talk. It also contained a link to a new website with a taxonomic listing of all the digital humanities centers to foster disciplinary innovation and transformation in the humanities. which was eventually named centerNet.