Humanities Machine – A New Zealand Digital Humanities Portal

For those of you who follow my blog but aren’t on Twitter, a quick note that New Zealand now has a digital humanities portal. Humanities Machine is presented in partnership with the University of Canterbury’s Humanities Computing Unit, and has been put live slightly earlier than expected because of the recent earthquake. I view this very much as ‘Version 1.0′ and hope  it can be developed further, perhaps even being completely remodeled and extended as part of an antipodean One Week One Tool kind of program. Of course, when the time comes it may well be best to go back to the drawing board and develop requirements for a completely new and fully-featured VRE, sitting on BeSTGRID-like infrastructure (with a parallel publishing platform perhaps available elsewhere), but Humanities Machine provides us with a quick win and what I think is a much-needed overview of New Zealand’s digital assets. I hope you find it useful.