Continue reading »]]>

We’ll start by walking through some of the thinking habits and techniques in hacking the xkcd titles GreaseMonkey script. Greasemonkey is a Firefox plugin, so grab a copy if you don’t have one.

Also grab the GreaseMonkey addon

And the xkcd titles userscript

If you aren’t familiar with XKCD, you should be.

My go-to reference for javascript is Mozilla Developer Network

FireBug is a very useful tool for inspecting a web page, and will likely be helpful in your hacking adventures.

A basic text editor will also be helpful. TextMate is popular and good. kedit or gedit on Linux similar. I s’pose Notepad is the Windows equivalent. If you’ve done XML work in the past, you might have <oXygen/>, which also has a pretty darn good javascript editor.

Other suggestions? Please leave in the comments.

After we’ve spent a little while walking through hacking the xkcd userscript, we’ll turn it loose for everyone to do their own hacking on this slightly more interesting userscript, which modifies the THATCamp Campers page in a couple of ways.

Continue reading »]]>

This idea actually has two different orientations to it, one yack-oriented and one hack-oriented.

Yack Oriented: Yack the Hack:

Mark wants “to hack the way we yack“. I want to yack the way we hack.

In the #alt-ac trajectory that lots of us have followed, I suspect that there’s an idea of a “humanities coder / humanities hacker” starting to come together. That’s certainly how I’m thinking of myself now, and that gets me wondering what the heck that means.

I’d like to get a bunch of people who write and/or hack code in the DH context together to think about whether there’s anything to the qualifier “humanities” in “humanities coder”, or if I’m just imagining things. I’m thinking of questions like:

• To what extent do humanities coders read or write or comment code in ways particular to DH?
• Are there best practices in coding in general that are different in a DH context?
• How — or should — coders modify their problem-solving strategies for DH?
• What lessons can people who came to coding from the humanities, and people who came to the humanities from coding, learn from each other?
• Where should a code-curious humanist or a humanities-curious coder start?
• What do non-coding humanists and coders working on a project need to know about the worldviews, epistemology, and practices of the other? (Answer #1: coders should know that humanists ask questions about “epistemology”, and put the word in quotation marks)

There’s going to be a great mix of coders, humanists, and crit-code folks all together at THATCamp, Might be a fun times to do a yacky session.

UPDATE: See also Julie Meloni’s post “Everyone’s a Coder Now” from her talk at 4Cs

Hack Oriented: Thinking like a Hacker

Last year I did an “Intro to Hacking” session, and there’s been some interest in trying it out again. Similar to the ideas above, an alternate version would be to aim to a hands-hacking session. The idea would be to start with a working, simple piece of javascript (just ‘cuz there’s nothing more than the browser needed to run and to hack javascript), spend a little time demonstrating some habits of thinking that help to figure out how to hack it, then everyone work on their own hacks of the code to do different things.

Will be curious to see if my fellow campers find something interesting there.