BootCamp

We are planning an amazing roster of training workshops at THATCamp CHNM this year on Friday, June 3, before the unconference begins on the weekend. Our BootCamp is organized into three tracks: the Brass Tacks Track for beginners, the Hack Track for intermediate to advanced coders, and the Map Track, which is actually not a track but a single long workshop: “Simple and Powerful Tools from Google for Geographic Data Visualization.” The “Map Track” workshop is free and open to everyone (not just THATCampers), and it will be appropriate for all skill levels. Here’s the list, with further details to come. See also the schedule.

BRASS TACKS TRACK

9-10:15: Intro to CMSes: WordPress, Drupal, Omeka
Room 163
Instructors: Patrick Murray-John & Raf Alvarado
Prerequisites: None
Difficulty: Easy
Room capacity: 100
Description: This presentation will provide an overview of the content management system (CMS) as a software genre suitable for a variety of use cases in the digital humanities, from the traditional thematic research collection to hybrid scenarios involving crowd sourcing and data meshing. Beginning with a general discussion of the rationale behind CMSes in the first place, we place WordPress, Omeka, and Drupal in a comparative space wherein the strengths of each can be aligned with specific requirements and constraints. In each case, we present examples of work by peer scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

9-10:15: Intro to ReCollection
Room 162
Instructor: Trevor Owens
Prerequisites: E-mail at least two days prior so that we can create a ReCollection account for you.
Difficulty: Easy
Room capacity: 35
Description: You will leave this hands-on workshop with everything you need to start using Recollection. Briefly, Recollection is a free, Library-of-Congress-sponsored platform that empowers historians, librarians, archivists and curators to create and customize dynamic interfaces to collections of digital content. Starting from an example spreadsheet, you will use Recollection to generate distinct interactive visual interfaces (including maps, timelines, and sophisticated faceted navigation), which you can copy-paste to embed in any webpage. This workshop does not require any particular technical proficiency. Participants will leave the workshop ready to use Recollection to help understand and provide access to digital collections of cultural heritage materials.

10:30-11:45: Intro to Omeka
Room 163
Instructor: Sheila Brennan
Prerequisites: None (optional: sign up beforehand for a free basic Omeka.net account)
Difficulty: Easy
Room capacity: 100
Description: This session will introduce participants to Omeka, a web publishing system used by libraries, archives, museums, and universities for building and sharing digital collections and creating web exhibits. We will begin by viewing a variety of sites built in Omeka to illustrate its flexibility. We will then tour the administrative backend, choose and configure a design theme, and build a small digital archive using Dublin Core metatdata to describe items. We will build a simple exhibit with those items and explore Omeka’s enhanced functionality through its plugins. Finally, we will discuss the differences between the hosted version of Omeka and the server-side version of Omeka and reasons for using both. This is a tutorial, but we will not be installing Omeka during this session. You may work in your own installation, sign up for a free Omeka.net account, or use one of our demonstration sites.

12:00-1:00: LIVE RECORDING OF DIGITAL CAMPUS
Room 163

1:00-2:00: LUNCH
Room 163

2-3:30: Intro to project planning and management
Room 162
Instructor: Tom Scheinfeldt
Prerequisites: None
Difficulty: You have no idea.
Room capacity: 35
Description: This session will consider both the practical, day-to-day work and intangible aspects of managing digital projects in the humanities. Pragmatic lessons will include picking a project, building partnerships and engaging stakeholders, attracting funding, budgeting and staffing, setting milestones and meeting deliverables, managing staff, publicity and marketing, user support, sustainability, and the range of tools available to support this work. The session will also consider several intangible, but no less important, aspects of project management, including communication, decision making, and leadership.

2-3:30: Using wikis as courseware and exhibition development tools
Room 92
Instructor: Kimon Keramidas
Prerequisites: None (optional: sign up beforehand for a Wikidot account)
Difficulty: Easy
Room capacity: 20
Description: Wikis continue to be powerful tools that provide a platform for online collaboration, the ability to quickly create complex web sites, and introduce people to the structures and languages of digital content. The workshop will introduce some of the practical and conceptual approaches to using wikis via examples of courses and exhibition development sites that use the Wikidot.com hosting service (a free/relatively inexpensive hosting wiki service). After review of these sites and some introduction to basic functionality participants will be able to experiment on a practice site. The end of the workshop will be a discussion of some of the more powerful automated functionality that Wikidot provides (watching, CSS, templating, modules, blogging, Twitter integration) and how to implement them in a site.

4-5:30: Free play and practice time

HACK TRACK

9-10:15: Intro to HTML5 and CSS3
Room 161
Instructor: Jeremy Boggs
Prerequisites: HTML, CSS
Difficulty: Intermediate
Room capacity: 30
Description: In this session, Jeremy will provide a hands-on introduction to HTML5 and CSS3. We’ll get acquainted with all the new tags, attributes, and methods provided by HTML5, and we’ll discuss new techniques afforded by CSS3 to make your design work easier and more flexible. As with anything involving web development, we’ll cover browser support and issues as well. You’ll get more out of the session if you have experience hand-coding HTML and CSS, so bring your own laptop with your favorite text editor, and some content to markup and style. (If you don’t have content, we’ll make some up!)

10:30-11:45: Finding and modifying WordPress themes
Room 162
Instructor: Amanda French
Prerequisites: HTML, CSS, preferably some experience working with WordPress. Come with a text editor and an FTP client installed.
Difficulty: Intermediate
Room capacity: 30
Description: In this workshop, I’ll go over how to find and make simple changes to the CSS and PHP files of WordPress themes. I’ll also teach you how to develop “Child Themes” of your own, similar to those we provide on the WordPress Multiuser installation at thatcamp.org. We’ll even get into template tags and template files so that you can customize the heck out of one or more of the 1,361 themes currently available for WordPress installations. Be sure to have a text editor and an FTP client on your laptop, and know how to use them.

10:30-11:45: Intro to jQuery
Room 161
Instructor: Jeremy Boggs
Prerequisites: HTML, CSS
Difficulty: Intermediate
Room capacity: 30
Description: In this session, Jeremy will provide a hands-on introduction to the jQuery JavaScript library. We’ll start by reviewing some basics of JavaScript coding, then dig into some jQuery goodness. As with the HTML/CSS workshop, you’ll get more out of this session if you have your own toolkit, so bring a laptop with a text editor.

12:00-1:00: LIVE RECORDING OF DIGITAL CAMPUS
Room 163

1:00-2:00: LUNCH
Room 163

2-3:30: Working with the Zotero API
Room 161
Instructor: Faolan Cheslack-Postava
Prerequisites: Knowledge of PHP, general knowledge of Zotero
Difficulty: Advanced
Room capacity: 30
Description: In this session participants will be introduced to the Zotero web API. There will be an introduction to the standards and formats the API uses and how these are used to create, modify, and organize items in a Zotero library, and how to access the API with different permissions. We’ll then introduce a PHP library to automate much of the API interaction and put it to use.

4-5:30: Free play and practice time
Room 161

MAP TRACK

Room 163
Note: this workshop is free and open to the public as well as to registered THATCampers. Please register separately, even if you are registered for THATCamp.

2-5:30: Simple and Powerful Tools from Google for Geographic Data Visualization
Instructor: Mano Marks, Google Senior Geo Developer Advocate
Prerequisites: Basic computer literacy (spreadsheets, etc.)
Difficulty: Easy to Advanced
Room capacity: 100
Description: Ever wanted to make a map and didn’t know how? This hands-on workshop will introduce you to the basics of creating simple, powerful map visualizations. It’ll have something for everyone. Know about spreadsheets? Upload a spreadsheet to Google Fusion Tables and get started making a map. Know about GIS data? Upload a shapefile to Fusion Tables, or open it in Google Earth, and get started customizing your presentation. Know about programming? Build powerful interactive maps using your JavaScript, PHP, Python, Java, or other programming skills and store you data in Google’s infrastructure. Just want to know what Google has? Come for the first hour or so and learn about our new tools. Bring your laptop, bring some data, and be ready to get started. Data types you might bring: Spreadsheets (Excel, CSV, Open Document Spreadsheets, Google Spreadsheets) with addresses or coordinates, shapefiles with geometries, KML files. If you don’t have data, don’t worry: we’ll point you to some data to start with.