Anonymous's Bio Analysis
Ece Turnator This scholar's information appears on the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) website. Her name came up in a search of google, and further searching led me to this site. It contains a limited digital bio as well as "recent" content she has posted on the site. While this site appears to be one that might be good for finding people with interest in digital humanities, her "recent" posts are from 2014. There is no information as to when any of the information has been most recently updated, and there is little style or personality shown. This is a formal yet brief bio created for those active on the HASTAC community. It would be nice if there were at least a link to a full vita so one could gain more information about this particular scholar.
Stewart Varner This scholar does not include any narrative of any kind. This is his resume/vita. One can attempt to figure out his interests based on what he has done, but here is no direct statement as to what his current research interests are. We can see his focus with each of his degrees, but that is all.
Laura R. Braunstein This scholar has the typical "university directory" entry. There is a very brief third-person paragraph at the bottom which mentions interests both professional and personal, but again, very limited information about her. There is no link to a more complete resume/vita or website.
Josh Honn While not an official bio, this is more of an interview with Josh where he talks about his work in the Digital Humanities. in many ways, although not an official bio page, gives information about his specific interests and projects.
http://dhcommons.org/fields/library-and-information-science
On this first page there are 10 collaborators in the field of Library and Information Science. Each of the collaborators lists some if not all of the following: a photo, their title, affiliation, academic field, expertise, collaboration ability (whether they are or are not currently available), tool expertise, website, collaboration type, and collaboration details. These bios are short and tend not to elaborate. The few that link to a personal website allow one to learn more about the collaborator, as there are not the constraints they appear to have on the dhcommons website. Two of the collaborators included links to another website which provided access to their respective resumes. One thing to note is on the collaborator's bios, there name is not included in any meaningful way. The first information available is their title.
Chelcie Juliet Rowell is another of the collaborators that included a link to their personal website. This includes an embedded resume that is up to date and a link to her blog. Unfortunately, her blog does not appear to be kept up to date.
A digital bio has tremendous potential to connect people with similar interests and skills, and to assist those who's projects are needed people with certain skills to connect. While uniformity tends to stifle the ability to showcase creativity, a "directory" of people that is uniform can make for ease of searching and locating people with certain skill sets or who have done projects similar. The ability to link from that bio to a site where the individuals can showcase their projects, creativity and skills would seem an excellent solution. It would be helpful to have a single source where one can search for persons interested in the digital humanities to make matching interests easy, but maintaining such a database/site is not without its difficulties. A primary difficulty would be a means to keep the profiles updated.