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Yesterday, Dan Cohen tweeted a comment about all the places where THATCamps are springing up, causing me to once again look over the list of past and upcoming THATCamps–almost 50 in total.  It really has become a world-wide phenomenon.

All of which caused me to tweet:

Given the global nature of #THATCamp, it’d be cool to design a project to which each thatcamp can contribute a piece over time.

To which @thatcamp replied:

@ericdmj You are SO right. So much is possible. Could be a #THATCamp proposal, even, such a project.

So, being a good follower of instruction, this I now do.

That said, I have no firm suggestions.  But to start the gears turning: what hacking/programming-focused project could we do that would allow asynchronous contributions over long spans of time by people who are, more than likely, only dedicating a single session at any given THATCamp thereto?

An hour here, an hour there, here in Paris, there in Canberra, there in New England. . . . What could we build across time and space?

Any and all thoughts welcome!

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Reading through the proposals, I realize that my interests in DH intersect three related areas: research, teaching, and advocacy.

Issues of advocacy and research have been raised here (for instance, Katy Meyers, jbecker) in terms of how to deal with faculty who are suspicious of–or outright hostile to–colleagues working in the digital humanities. As the newly-minted digital humanities faculty liaison for our humanities center, I need to advocate for those engaged in digital humanities-related research. One issue we are already confronting is how to deal with tenure and promotion criteria for digital humanities work. In my experience, faculty wary of digital humanities scholarship are often attached to two long-held assumptions abut the nature of humanities scholarship: 1) that it is or should be the work of one brilliant author laboring alone, and 2) that this work, to be considered significant scholarship, must be peer-reviewed in traditional ways (university press or journal manuscript reviewers). For some, digital humanities seems to be about collaborative work thrown up on the Web without any apparent vetting. So, what systems of review could be established that would recognize collaborative work and how might that work be peer-reviewed? These questions are also closely related to Roger Whitson’s UnPress proposal and Cassie Good’s ideas about Web sites created in support of traditional print publications.

My other interest is in the use of digital humanities technologies in teaching and student research. Like sarah.werner, jeffrey mcclurken, and others, I want my students to participate in the creation of knowledge through the manipulation and presentation of data. Some of this might be formal work, such as the Omeka research project idea of thowe, or more informal dialogue both in the classroom (Mark Sample’s better backchannel might be very useful here) and outside. Learning outside the formal classroom is of special interest to me: I want learning and thinking about course content to continue beyond the classroom context. So, where might I/we start to implement these ideas in teaching undergraduates? What skills do students need? When does learning to use technology run headlong into the requirement to teach specific content? Could a course project be crowdsourced to the students in the class? I expect students to be able to use a word processing program — can I expect them to be able to build a basic Web site? Or does this just take precious time away from teaching content? (I’d like to think the use of digital tools enhances the content and its comprehension, but maybe I’m wrong.)

And now, I ask myself, is there a specific proposal embedded in my verbiage? Looks like I might be proposing two sessions:

1) a session in which those interested in DH and research/advocacy issues describe and discuss their experiences with how their DH projects have been received by colleagues, how various institutions incorporate (or not) specific tenure and promotion guidelines related to DH projects, and other related areas of concern.

2) a session in which those interested in DH and teaching describe and discuss what they’ve tried with students, what they might want to try, what has worked with students and what hasn’t, and why.

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Universities and liberal arts colleges seem to be increasingly interested in fostering the undergraduate research experience. For disciplines in the humanities, this has often posed a problem: if the sciences have built into their workflows researchers with different levels of expertise and if they conceive of research projects as providing, in part, training for higher level research for novice workers, there is no equivalent standard practice for the humanities.

How might digital humanities be able to change that practice of humanities research, and, perhaps, to improve on the sciences model of research? Can DH provide undergraduates with the opportunity to conduct independent research without using them only to provide grunt labor? This query raises a whole host of other questions: what qualifies as research and what as grunt work? Does grunt work provide as equally valuable experience as much lauded research? Should the output of such DH undergrad research be something that will serve the uses of other scholars? Or can it be an end in and of itself? Does the research part of the equation happen in humanistic inquiry or in developing digital skills?

This session is in many ways similar to the one proposed by Tonya Howe, Archives, Encoding, and Students, Oh My!”. Indeed, the sort of work I do with students in rare book collections is much like what Tonya is doing with her students. (And I wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that both of us work with books printed before the nineteenth century.) But I’d like to expand the question beyond the logistics of one approach to teaching students and to think about the ways in which DH can be a valuable and multi-valent approach to undergraduate research.

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Building off something that crossed my mind some time ago, it seems to me that “the history of humanities computing” is ripe for an online presentation–one that (naturally) uses all the best practices for the gathering and presentation of history in the digital environment.  It’s got everything we need: a finite start date in the not too distant past, but a long and varied enough history to be interesting, many players who are still available (which is to say: oral history), electronically–  and traditionally-published professional literature to mine, professional organizations, illustrative project examples.

Several folks have undertaken projects related to this, but so far it doesn’t seem that there’s a one-stop shop to provide a real context for people seeking to better understand the history of the field and a sense of the specific projects that have emerged from and contributed to it.

Ideally, this session would attract the éminences grises of the digital humanities who can provide their own experiences with and read on the history of the field, the young’uns who have questions about what’s come before, folks interested in clever ways to present historical information (text, video, oral history, etc.) online, historians of the (digital) humanities, information managers who can help organize all this mountain of pertinent information, and anybody else who feels they have a dog in this hunt.  Help us:

• Figure out who to talk to about the history of the digital humanities (both players and scholars)
• Figure out what to talk to them about
• Think about best practices for archiving and presenting oral (and other) history online
• Find examples of good work to inspire us
• Develop visualizations: timelines, thematic treatments, “family trees” of projects and scholars

I fully admit to being a context hound–I love to see how planets relate to one another within a solar system and solar systems within galaxies.  In many ways I lack a context for my own specific work in the field and an understanding of how it fits in with others’.  And part of this, too, is a response to the broader notion that newer practitioners of the digital humanities–which in many ways is all of us–are unaware of their (our?) place in the history of humanities computing.  They/we too often lack a sense of the bigger picture.  So maybe we can create a living, breathing, go-to resource to help answer that very need.

What else might such a project enable, or do, or present?

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Recently I and a number of my colleagues were discussing the possibility of a curriculum and center based around addressing and supporting undergraduate students’ interactions with academic technologies (defined broadly).  [Note that we used the term “digital fluency” to describe the skills, attitudes, and understandings we thought students needed in an information-rich, multimedia, often-changing, electronic landscape though “digital literacy” and “information literacy” get at many of the same ideas.]

One of the critiques that arose was the notion that these concepts are already in place, that they were already being added to most higher ed and K-12 curriculum, that students already understood how to use digital tools; in other words, that the digital literacy of students, if not accomplished, was well on its way.

So, I’d like to propose a session in which we would create a list of the skills, approaches, the fluencies that we think students should have by the time they complete their formal education.

Then, let’s discuss whether or not we think students’ digital literacy is truly being achieved.  If so, why and how?  And if not, then let’s come up with concrete steps we can take to address these issues.  How can we effect some of those changes?  In the interests of not just yacking, we could split into 2-4 groups each with a specific plan of action to work on.  [Off the top of my head I see outlines of white papers for education departments, blueprints for a Digital Fluency Center (Center for Digital Learning?), sketches of a humanities (or more more broadly based) curriculum, grant proposal ideas, etc.]

Anyone interested in being part of this session?

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University of Maryland, College of Information Science, Maryland’s iSchool where I am pursuing my MLS has recently created a concentration in the MLS program called Information and Diverse Populations in which I am actively engaged. ischool.umd.edu/content/information-and-diverse-populations

What are the ways in which we can have an honest and open discussion regarding diversity in the digital humanities? How do we move beyond paying mere lip service to the concept of diversity in DH and actually include, promote, and engender a more diverse group of DHers?

This tweet from Mark Sample has stuck with me since March of 2011. Perhaps it serves as a basis to begin the discussion?