A Short History of the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture

Abstract

The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture occupies a theoretical and productive position that is somewhat different in terms of research centers. Our work centers on the pragmatics of research and scholarly production in the digital age. We place ourselves across many domains of research, but we perform infrastructurally as much as productively in support of that research. Throughout the years we have written software, archived materials, published non-print academic and artistic works, and generally pursued our agenda of promoting the digital discourse and culture throughout the academy. Centrally though, we provide the infrastructural base for research and teaching by providing free access to useful web resources. By that we mean that we that the resources that we provide freely on the internet are used by millions of people each year. Beyond that, these resources are well cited, the Center is cited in over 500 research publications from textbooks, to encyclopedia, to research papers. The Center is a part of the center of a cloud of scholarship, and in that cloud, we are have become the crucible through which scholars can pursue their own goals within their own communities. Our success, then, is not the success f just the people who work at the center, but the successes of the communities it serves, their growth, and their inventiveness in the digital arena.