As a professional association for the digital humanities, ACH performs an important advocacy role. We develop and share position papers on issues of importance to our members, partner with other organizations to advocate for key positions, and support initiatives (such as 4Humanities) that help track and intervene in the central political debates that affect our work.
Recent advocacy activities include:
- Publishing ACH Guidelines for Assessment of Digital Scholarship in Tenure and Promotion
- Releasing a Statement in the Aftermath of the 2016 Election
- Lobbying the US Senate Appropriations Committee to increase funding for humanities research and innovation
- Endorsing DORA: the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
- Endorsing OSTP policy/FASTR in support of open access to federally-funded research in the US
- Joining amicus briefs describing the importance of fair use access to the HathiTrust corpus
- Encouraging the National Endowment for the Humanities and SSHRC to require data management plans in digital humanities grant applications
- Participating in protests against SOPA/ PIPA
- Sponsoring the 4Humanities collective, a group developing a platform for advocacy of the humanities, drawing on the technologies, new-media expertise, and ideas of the international digital humanities community.
We welcome your input and participation in ACH’s advocacy efforts. Contact Lisa Spiro, primary liaison for advocacy initiatives, at advocacy at ach.org.