The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO) and centerNet are very pleased to announce that with effect from 1 January 2012 centerNet is to become a fully fledged ‘Constituent Organisation’ within the ADHO umbrella. The formal agreements were finalised at meetings held in conjunction with the international Digital Humanities 2011 conference, held at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

centerNet will join three current Constituent Organisations in ADHO. These are the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the Association for Literary and Lingistic Computing (ALLC), and the Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l’Étude des Médias Interactifs (SDH-SEMI).

The agreement reached by ADHO and centerNet followed 18 months of discussions, led by Neil Fraistat and Kay Walter for centernet and Harold Short and John Unsworth on behalf of ADHO. The key challenge arose from the membership basis of the various associations. ACH, ALLC and SDH-SEMI are individual-member associations; individuals become members by subscribing to ADHO’s print journal LLC (at which time they indicate which association they wish to join). centerNet, in contrast, is an association of institutions. In order to preserve the ‘subscription’ principle, centerNet has agreed that from 1 January 2012 centres wishing to join centerNet will do so on the basis of an institutional subscription to LLC.

As a constituent organisation within ADHO, centerNet will play a full role in ADHO activities, will have equal representation on the ADHO Steering Committee, and will be fully integrated into the revenue sharing process carried out each year to disburse the profits received from OUP in respect of LLC. The revenue sharing will include an annual subvention to support a centerNet publication venue.

The intellectual focus of the discussions and the agreement has been the shared aim of promoting digital scholarship in the humanities world-wide. It is intended and expected that centerNet will be participant and beneficiary across the range of ADHO activities, which will in turn be broadened and enhanced by centerNet participation. Not least of centerNet’s benefits will be the stable financial basis that it will gain from ADHO membership.

At a local level, individual ADHO members are already very involved in existing centres, and will continue to support their development and the creation of new centres where none yet exist. The centres, for their part, will continue to provide a focus of scholarly support for existing individual members, but will also seek actively to draw new scholars into the field, encouraging them to take up individual membership within an ADHO association.

The admission of centerNet to ADHO is expected, therefore, to provide significant mutual benefit both to the centres in centerNet and to the individual scholars and their associations, and can be seen as a very exciting step forward with huge potential for the continued growth of the digital humanities internationally.

ADHO was established in 2005 with the aim of providing a co-ordinated framework to promote and support digital research and teaching across arts and humanities disciplines worldwide. Current activities include an annual conference, which will next take place at the University of Hamburg, Germany in July 2012, a number of publication venues, and support for young scholars and a variety of projects and training events. The publication venues include: the print journal LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, published by OUP; two refereed online journals: Digital Humanties Quarterly, and Digital Studies/le champ numérique; and two monograph series: Digital Scholarship in the Arts and Humanities, published by Ashgate, and Topics in the Digital Humanities, published by Illinois University Press.

centerNet is an international network of digital humanities centers formed for cooperative and collaborative action to benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. Since its inception in April 2007, centerNet has added over 250 members from about 120 centers in over 20 countries. Regional centerNet affiliates have been established in Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, and the U.K. and Ireland, each with a steering committee. In 2009, centerNet became a founding member of CHAIN: the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks (with DARIAH, CLARIN, Project Bamboo, and ADHO). In 2010, centerNet formally affiliated with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), the Digital Library Federation, and 4Humanities, in each case to pursue an ambitious agenda of initiatives on matters of mutual interest.

http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/2011/08/centernet-to-join-adho/