So my 15-year-old son and his friends attended a science camp this past summer. Their running joke was that they’d decided they could get away with nearly anything if they cried “For Science!” as they did the deed. I’m going to try it with one of my guilty pleasures–the digital knit and crochet community Ravelry.

Proposing a Ravelry session–for THATCamp!

I love this site. I refer to it every time that I think about beginning another knitting project. I look for patterns, yarn suggestions, and photos of other knitter’s projects. The site’s founders have done a brilliant job of identifying the different points during a project where one might want to consult a community of users. How might this site be used as a model for digital humanities projects or digital humanities support? What does the success of this site suggest about how we might construct digital support structures for our own communities? What other websites out there might we use as models for our work? Share your guilty pleasure, and let’s see if we can find some models for our DH work.

And, heck, bring your knitting or crochet projects along. You know you want to.

The question I would like to mull over with you is how can we use social networking and data gathering techniques to determine what are the practical virtues of a discipline? I am curious about this because of the resurgence of virtue ethics as an alternative to rule-based and consequence-based systems of ethics that we all have received almost by default from the 18th and 19th centuries. The virtues are those things at which we desire to be excellent and help us fulfill our chosen purpose. Developing a virtue ethics approach gives us a new way of solving ethical dilemmas based on fulfillment of purpose rather than adhering to rules or trying to predict outcomes. Introspection can reveal one’s own chosen virtues, but finding out a group’s virtues takes a great deal more cleverness and inventiveness, and if you are willing I would love to borrow yours for a while.