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Hello, THATCampers! In the spirit of one session/one tool THATCamp production, this document is the outcome of a discussion about how to prep data and choose a visualization tool for humanists who don’t have direct access to high-level database and programming skills.

We welcome your comments, suggestions and feedback. Hopefully, you’ll find this step-by-step planning document useful as a hand-out to communicate with colleagues and/or students who are just getting started in the research process for projects that include data visualization. Additionally, there is a list of visualization tools collected in the Google Doc that this session’s attendees produced.

Thanks to all of the session attendees for lively discussion and great contributions!

Steps to take for managing data to make visualization easier:

1. Start with the argument you’re making and how that argument could look on paper
   1. Start thinking about the visualization before you start taking notes
   2. Find visualization tools to match your paper mockup
   3. Determine feasibility of collecting data for that visualization tool/type of visualization
      1. This will depend on your skill level and comfort with technology.
   4. Understand the limitations of the visualization tool (e.g. single date required when data is often in date ranges)
2. Consider end result
   1. Data exploration? Out of the box software is best used for exploring data
   2. Data presentation in argument form? Building an argument in graphic form will probably require (but check with @tjowens about facets in Recollection)
   3. There will be a $0, $1,000, $10,000, $50,000, $100,000 and $1,000,000 version of this. First make the one that costs nothing and think about how you would scale up if it turned out to be particularly interesting.
      1. If you compromise and go a low-cost version, don’t forget the idealized version you wanted in the first place.
3. Find the least complex tool you need for the job of data collection
   1. Excel is a useful tool, but data with a lot of repetition is ideally expressed in a relational database.
      1. Excel can auto-complete entries, but auto-complete can also create inaccurate data
4. Start with small data sets, and iterate often
   1. Simplify data w/ data dictionary
   2. Use visualization as data remediation

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Cross-posted from lac2011.thatcamp.org/06/04/joint-session-thatcamps-lac-and-prime

Collaboration

Recent notices from funding agencies have been clear – they want to fund digital humanities work and they want to fund collaborations between R1 and Liberal Arts Colleges. Given this, we’d like to devote this session to talking about how we can best foster, propose, and run such collaboration.

This might include topics such as identifying collaborators, expertise (pedagogical, technical, disciplinary) sharing, ways to source “cycles” and to establish test beds, infrastructure, data set sharing, maximizing the opportunities of undergraduate research and pedagogy, and more!

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There’s so many of us that we won’t all fit in one restaurant, but we have three suggestions for where to repair starting at 5:30 or so. We also hear that a few people might drop by from the American Association of University Publishers meeting . . . that should be interesting!

• AULD SHEBEEN

  Great Irish pub with fish and chips and the like. Catch a ride over with someone as they’re leaving or Twitter your need for a ride.

• THE WELL OR BOXWOOD AT THE MASON INN

  If you don’t have a car or can’t catch a ride, this might be your best bet. Terrific bar and bar food at “The Well,” plus a higher-end restaurant called Boxwood.

• BOLLYWOOD BISTRO

  Good Indian restaurant just across from the Auld Shebeen.

I’ve made this map publicly editable (since you wouldn’t let me for the schedule), so feel free to add suggestions.

View THATCamp Restaurants in a larger map

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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.

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At various times over the last year, there have been conversations about holding a THATCamp that was aimed at parents and kids. I know that we aren’t all parents, but for those of us who are, I’d be interested in having a session where we tease out what a THATCamp Junior would look like, whether it would be one event or joint local events, and how we can go about making it something real.

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Very brief notes from my session on using Omeka.

Omeka is best suited for collections-based sites, where individual pieces, ie items, are described with Dublin Core metadata.

General categories of most Omeka sites: archiving, exhibiting, collecting, teaching.
See examples sites in the Showcase wiki (many highly customized sites): omeka.org/codex/View_Sites_Powered_by_Omeka

Do I need the downloadable version that I host or the Omeka.net hosted version?

• Comparison chart Org vs Net
• Downloadable: Omeka.org/download. Good idea to visit Documentation’s preparing to install, helps you find what you need ahead of time, suggestions for hosting.
• Hosted: Sign up for a free account, to test out Omeka basic funcationality and admin UI, or start building a site.

As with any site, you will want to set goals for the site, outline content—and know exactly what will be available on the site, and know your audience.

Try these Site Planning Tips to help you think about Omeka as a system and what it can do for you. There are many links to the documentation from this page that explain items, item types, collections, exhibits, and simple web pages.

Omeka’s core application is an archiving system, with an item as a building block, and it is extended through plugins. Front-facing design is controlled by a theme.

Start with our fantastic documentation: omeka.org/codex; when you have questions, post to forums: omeka.org/forums.

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A lot of discussion around the digital humanities seems focused on research and changing practices within the academy.  That’s perfectly appropriate, but I’d also like to hear what THATcampers think about ways technology can enable greater engagement between humanists and the public. What’s the state of the art now?  Who’s work needs to be highlighted?

Public media are venturing into the digital realm, but should we be encouraging 2.0+ versions of Ken Burns to popularize humanities subjects? Could public programming in the humanities learn from examples like this innovative science film festival (which partnered with Vimeo to include online video shorts). Museums, libraries, and other cultural institutions have been experimenting, but can they learn and adapt faster?

Journalists are being urged to “show their work” and make the process of reporting a public activity. Are there ways to make the practices and products of humanities research interesting to non-academics? Could scholars use social media and low-cost broadcast technology to reach people outside classrooms, whether they are casual browsers or serious autodidacts? If people will pay for The Great Courses, wouldn’t they also enjoy a live conversation with a gifted teacher via Ustream?

I’d like to see a general discussion of these questions, but I’m sure people would also want to focus on action. What are the tools and practices we can use immediately? Rather than waiting for institutions to reform, what steps can individuals take right now to increase the public visibility and “relevance” of the humanities?

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I see that over at THATCamp-LAC, someone has proposed a session on “Technology in a Writing Center,” asking “What are some tools and best practices that could be helpful to student writers? How can technology help us beter understand the needs of students in writing pedagogy?” I’m the Assistant Director of the Writing Center at Emory University, and I’m certainly interested in yanking about thesebtopics, but I’ve also got a specific project using data mining for assessment that i’d like to work on hacking.

After every conference at the Emory Writing Center, the tutor writes a reflective paragraph about the session (e.g., “John Doe came in with an essay on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for Prof. Smith’s Comp Lit 390 class. The assignment was to … The student argued … The problem he is having is … I suggested that he … He seemed confused at first, but then he seemed to understand what I meant & decided he would …”). I get a compilation of approximately 100 such reports each week, which I use for various sorts of administrative tasks (e.g., realizing theree are lots of conferences where students are having similar issues & reminding tutors that we have a resource they might consider using in their next such conference). We’ve been producing reports like these for more than 10 years and using them as assessment tools to gauge how we’re performing as a center.

I look at these reports and see a massive, rich body of data about writing at my university for the last 10-plus years. But there’s so much of it and I’m flooded with it on a week-to-week basis. So I’m starting to put together a project to mine this data to allow for a more distant reading of what it can tell us about larger trends. I believe this data set presents some interesting, specific problems different from this found in, say, the Civil War newspapers that Robert Nelson wrote about in the New York Times last week. For one thing, there are some privacy issues with the Writing Center reports (like specific student names). For another, I’m not so much interested in trying to fit this data into some sort of already existing historical framework as I am in trying to find out what (unexpected?) things they tell us about the sorts of issues students have with writing, how writing has been taught, how these factors have changed over time if they have. I don’t even have a really clear list of just what factors I would need to tag as I encode theses reports.

Does this project sound similar in any ways to projects you have going on? Hw have you handled those projects? I think lots of writing centers gather data in similar ways to what we do at Emory, and my sense is that few of us really know what to do with this data now that all the new DH tools have come along.

I’ve got a small team of grad students I’m paying to work for me this summer. Some of their time will be spent tutoring, but some of their time will be devoted to helping me with this project. I’m looking for help figuring out how to use them most effectively and to get the most out of these next two months working with this data.

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I attended the google maps talk at the bootcamp this afternoon.  As usual, the presenter (Mano Marks, Google Senior Geo Developer Advocate) mentioned several new tools, including Fusion Tables.  That got me roaming around Google labs.  “Wow, that looks cool.”  “Oh, I’ll have to check that out.”

Now, maybe I’ll get around to exploring the Google Prediction API, or doing something interesting with with the Yahoo Answers API, or I’ll finally hack something with version 2.0 of the Wulfram Alpha API.  But in the spirit of hack, I wonder if it would be possible to do this with a group?

Here’s the idea: Bunch of people get in a room (coders, of course, but not exclusively — “what do we do with this thing?” is as important as any other part of this exercise).  And together, we pick an API we don’t know and fool around with it for the session.  We might even build something!  At the very least, I bet we’d find out whether we’d like to devote serious time to an API.  And I bet we’d get there faster than doing it alone.

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I’ve become very interested in the potential for using mobile devices as  collection tools for primary data.  As an ethnographer, I’m especially interested in the ways a mobile app could be developed to enable research participants to collect data (audio, video, still images, etc) that would normally require the presence of a researcher.  An app could also help automate much of the workflow to convert primary data into formats that are analyzable by social science researchers (an archival step could also be easily added to this workflow for long-term preservation).   Furthermore, it could be used to facilitate greater participation by research subjects within the the research process and greater reflexivity between participants and researchers.

There are one or two mobile products out there for this type of research, but these continue to require (in my opinion) a great deal of training to use effectively, and may not be sufficiently flexible for all  methodologies.

I am therefore at the point where I have an idea for the kind of app that I (and hopefully others) would like to have, but I have essentially no experience in what it takes to develop one.   My proposal then, is if there are other people interested in this type of project, we could talk through what the requirements would be and what it would take to get started.

Cheers,

Andrew

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Context: What if we stopped using the terms “diversity” and “accessibility” and started using the term “inclusion” instead? Or what if we started using “inclusion” in addition to the other terms? One reason would be strategic, creating alliance among groups that might otherwise remain disparate. Another reason would be to move our conversations from discussions of abstract qualities (Is your field diverse? Are your resources accessible?) to discussions of concrete actions (What are you doing to include people? And what are you doing to exclude people?)

Environment Scan: I’m not the only one thinking about the importance of inclusion:

• In January of this year, THATCamp SoCal featured a session titled “Towards an Open Digital Humanities” (Some notes from that session are online as a Google Doc)
• The theme for the 2011 Digital Humanities conference is “Big Tent Digital Humanities“
• And for THATCamp CHNM 2011 this weekend, a number of Campers are interested in addressing topics that I would argue are about the issue of inclusion:
  • James Neal would like us to have “an honest and open discussion regarding diversity in the digital humanities“
  • Chad Black is concerned with “ethics, power, advocacy, technique“
  • Cory Bohon suggests a talk about and a workshop addressing accessibility for people with disabilities
  • Sheila Brennan asks us to consider how documentation–or the lack thereof–affects the core audiences for our projects
  • Christina Jenkins turns our attention to the primary and secondary school environment
  • Undergraduate research and the digital humanities is the concern of both Tonya Howe and Sarah Werner
  • There are probably more session proposals that I’ve overlooked. (Please feel free to suggest more connections in the comments below.)

Clearly, it seems to me, there’s something in the water. . .

Proposal: I propose that we approach these issues in two ways.

• First, let’s yack about what the barriers to inclusion are so that we understand more fully what’s at issue. Several of the sessions already proposed are exactly the kind of yacking I’m thinking about.
• Second, let’s hack away at those barriers. And I use the term “hack” to mean “a good workaround” or “a good-enough solution.” Sometimes a “hack” will involve the use of technology, but sometimes it will not. A given hack could be put together during THATCampCHNM 2011 or it could be planned as an ongoing task/project with a life beyond this unconference.

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Ewan Munro]

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I was asked to provide references to the essays and books I mentioned in my talk.  Here they are:

Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. 2nd ed. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. MIT Press, 2002.

Manovich, Lev. “Database as Symbolic Form.” Convergence 1999.

Nelson, T. Computer Lib: Dream Machines. Microsoft Press, 1987.

Ramsey, Stephen. “In Praise of Pattern.” TEXT Technology 14.2 (2005).

Shirky, Clay. “Ontology Is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags.” Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet 2005. Web. 9 Feb 2010.

(Sorry for the inconsistent formatting …)

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Links

• wordpress.org/extend/themes/
• codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
• codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development#Child_Themes
• codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Templates
• codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development#Template_Files_List
• codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop
• codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Template_Tags
• codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/Anatomy_of_a_Template_Tag
• codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags

Practice sites

• amandafrench.net/chastity
• amandafrench.net/temperance
• amandafrench.net/charity
• amandafrench.net/humility
• amandafrench.net/patience
• amandafrench.net/kindness
• amandafrench.net/diligence

Tasks

1) Create a child theme for the TwentyTen theme (style.css file only).
2) Create an author.php template page for your child theme.
3) Add the user’s e-mail address to the author_meta
4) Add the template tag that adds the author’s profile website to the author page.

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cc-licensed photo "Love of My Life" by Amanda *Bake It Pretty"

In the spirit of Dan’s grab-bag of ideas, here are three things I’m thinking about:

1. Engagement Analytics
As teachers, instructional technologists, and project managers, many of us have been involved in the creation of new, open-source spaces for teaching and learning. As those spaces become increasingly networked and increasingly open to student content, enabling a student-as-producer paradigm, they offer students multiple ways to connect to their classmates,to their educational institutions, and to the wider public. They open up new possibilities, in short, for students to become more engaged with their own learning experiences.

“Engagement” is a great term — I love using it to describe my central pedagogical goals — but what does it mean in practice? And, at a time when educational institutions are preoccupied with assessment, how do we measure it? What kinds of data should we be looking at as we strive to show our administrations and our funding agencies that, say, an open-source platform can foster more (or different) student engagement than a siloed, proprietary system like Blackboard? What kinds of measurements from social network analysis can be used in an educational paradigm? And, most importantly, how can we create analytics that are aligned with an ethical perspective that respects student privacy and autonomy, and that refuses the dystopian paradigm of the CMS-as-panopticon?

2. The Future of RSS
Is RSS dead? Dying? Or  have reports of its death been exaggerated? And what can we do about it? Are there ways we can build support and development for RSS into our digital projects to help build a sustainable ecosystem around it to help it thrive? To what extent should we be concerned about the future of RSS and to what extent do we have a responsibility (or ability) to keep it alive?

3. Baby Photos!
Yes, baby photos. Like many other DHers, I have a small child at home. This child has loving grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends who want a steady supply of baby photos. But I don’t want to use proprietary systems and services like Flickr, Picassa, Kodak, Shutterfly, Tumblr, etc., to share photos because I have ethical, privacy, and sustainability concerns about such systems.

Instead, I want to build an open-source solution that has the following characteristics:

1. Can be password-protected (I want a private site) but can be easily accessed by relatives who are not at all technically literate;

2. Offers ways to easily download and print photos;

3. Allows for easy batch-uploading of photos;

4. Allows metadata to be applied to batches of photos;

5. Allows movies to be embedded on pages;

6. Allows email notification of new posts on the password-protected site.

The closest I’ve come to such as system is a password-protected WordPress blog with the NextGen Gallery plugin for photo management and Subscribe2 for email notifications. I’ve been unsatisfied with NextGen, however (though I haven’t used its most recent versions — maybe it has improved), because the batch uploading and tagging capabilities seem clunky.

So, I’m curious to hear about what systems others use for baby photos. And, if the perfect system does not exist, I’d like to sit down with someone to spec out a better one.

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As a board member for the Ohio Humanities Council, I’m often reminded that conversation is integral and crucial to the humanities; yet many would not consider how to use technology to foster conversation a humanities initiative.

Inspired by the UMWBlogs and other university WordPress multisite platforms, a colleague and I embarked on a mission to create a blogging or digital commons platform at our university. The university had not upgraded to a content management system and so faculty and students had the option to either create their own web pages on their university accounts or to go outside the university to Facebook, WordPress and other social media/blogging platforms. The university uses a central IT model that encourages new online resources to be approved and supported by the Computing and Technology Services (CATS) and often by Communications and Marketing and/or the Center for Teaching and Learning. These partners gradually warmed to the idea of university blogs or a digital commons and we launched into what has become a two and a half year process of discussions, trials, and beta tests. In the past year, the university decided to adopt Drupal as the CMS for the university’s web presence. We became aware of Drupal’s Digital Commons platform as we were discussing the CMS last summer and we have tentatively adopted it for a collaboration oriented social media platform and WordPress as a resource for courses that may be expanded to replace the individual html web pages. My goal was to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations by making the research, learning, and creativity within the university visible both to ourselves and to potential partners outside the university—the new CMS may go along way to heighten the visibility of university research and resources and the digital commons (soon to branded with a new name) will provide space for formal and informal groups within the university. It will also replace faculty and staff listservs. Blogs/Learning will provide a public facing, collaborative, constructivist platform for courses outside Desire2Learn. Blogs/Community may eventually knit together the formerly isolated and somewhat random individual and project sites around the university. The university libraries also participate in the Ohio Link digital repository initiative with our WSU CORE. Each approach has it limits and some worry that this is just too much.

Questions: Where in all of this does collaboration with those outside the university take place?  How do these resources related to the widespread use of Facebook by individuals and university offices? We have also looked at OpenScholar and we find there is often something new to check out before we attain final approval on any one strategy; what is the value of the long dialog, initiated by humanities faculty but now encompassing many offices and constituencies within the university?

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The iPad is now old news, but we’re still not seeing many DH and academic types take advantage of some of the “magic” that Apple is selling. Whether you’re in to the mysticism surrounding tablets and mobile devices or not, these tools present new development opportunities and challenges that can change how we think about playing with ideas. I’d love to be part of a session getting into the process of building with these new environments and experiences in mind.

Ethan just posted his Mixed Bag of Crazy Ideas and he included one great session idea about Building Games for DH. I’ve spoken to a lot of folks in DH who seem interested in the why and what of games, but we never seem to get around to the how. I think there’s value in linking with the talk of building games to include playful apps and “books” that use ideas from games to expand our conception of how ideas can be conveyed. The iPad and other mobile and tablet platforms have become fascinating spaces for resurrecting niche market games and experimental texts that link back to the tradition of electronic literature, and developing games and game-like experiences in any of these environments is

I teach in the Simulation Design and Entertainment program at the University of Baltimore, and there are a number of free tools that offer an accesssible way to get started with game creation. Here are just a few I think are worth talking about:

• Inform 7
• GameMaker
• Corona SDK
• Game Salad

…some of which translate immediately to the mobile platform. The new toolsets in Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 also offer exciting options for building cross platform. Many of these offer opportunities to play with proof of concepts and to think about new modes of scholarship and pedagogy…and yes, maybe even build something magical.

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In typical fashion, I can’t contain myself to one idea.  So, here (very briefly, because this is sooper dooper late), are some things that I’d love to talk with people about.

Archaeology & DH: Two Great Tastes That Should Taste Great Together (so why the hell don’t they)?

Everyone in DH is talking about “the big tent” as a metaphor for constructing the boundaries of DH (who is in, who is out – who is a digital humanist, and who is not).  In the meantime (and to continue the metaphor), archaeologists (specifically anthropological archaeologists) are so far away from the “tent” that they don’t even know it exists.  Why is this?  You would think that archaeology and DH would be natural (and very happy) bedfellows.  Many of the disciplines that self identify as being part of DH (history, classics, etc.) articulate very nicely with archaeology (and have done so for many years).  On top of that, archaeology has long been invested in a wide variety of digital practices (since as early as 1954).  So, what is the problem?  As someone who has a foot in both of these worlds (and who things and writes about these questions a lot), I think there are a few fruitful things to talk about:

• Why is there a separation between archaeology and DH?
• What can DH learn/gain from archaeology (there is quite a bit, actually). This is probably the most important point here.
• For the DH’ers, how can you work with archaeology and archeologists (lets call this the “The DH Handbook of Archaeology and Archaeologists”)?

Building Games for DH

I do a lot with games.  I would love to talk to people about the nitty gritty process of designing and building games – tools, project management, platforms, project lifecycle, etc, etc, etc.  I’ve got to be honest, I’m not so keen on talking about game design (from a theoretical perspective).  I want to help people out when they get to the point where they have resources and a concept – but they don’t know how to actually build a game.  Where to start, what to use, how to take a choice for development environment or platform, how to plan, etc, etc, etc.

Launching (and sustain) a DH Initiative/Center/Research Group/SiG

There are a lot of people self organizing into groups (formal or informal) at institutions in order to collaborate, connect, and GTD.  Being the Associate Director of MATRIX: The Center for the Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online and Director of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative at Michigan State University, I’ve got some experience in this domain – and would love to talk with people who are thinking about launching something at their institution, and give them some thoughts from my perspective (what worked, what didn’t, what I’ve had to do, etc, etc, etc).  Likewise, I would love to talk with others who’ve successfully launched something at their institution.

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Late and short.  That’s where I am for this year’s THATCamp.  You can take that in all of the many ways that it was intended.

So, I have two sessions to propose for consideration:

1) Next-Generation Crowdsourcing: Over the last couple of years we’ve seen a number of successful projects that solicit the contributions of the user community in significant ways.  Transcribe Bentham, is perhaps the most widely known, but there are a host of other, including CHNM’s Papers of the War Department project.  Some of these efforts also involve the design and creation of tools to allow others to embark upon crowdsourcing (T-Pen, Scripto, etc).  Now might be a good time to pause and explore the ways that we might move forward in meaningful ways: What new elements of our work can we open up to the public?  What are the major barriers, technological and social, to doing so? How do we strike a balance between atomized contributions in a gaming interface, and  large-scale content-driving contributions?  What is the next generation of digital humanities crowdsourcing?

2) The Future of Digital Public History: Beyond the Exhibit: After almost of 15 years of online public history exhibits, it’s time to think about new ways to share history content with the public.  The one-way transmission of the traditional exhibit goes against everything we know about what works in teaching and learning history.  If it doesn’t work in our classrooms, why would it work in our cultural heritage institutions?  Can we come up with some guide-posts about the kinds of engagement that can most meaningfully happen in a digital environment?  What have you seen that really works to share both content and the process of doing history?  Come brainstorm about the innovative ways that we might use digital tools and environments to engage the large public with our collections, their stories, and all of the questions those collections and stories raise for us as historians.

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Open-Omni is my term for all things “OPEN” such as open-source, open-access, open-scholarship, open-courseware, open-research, etc. etc. For a while I had been collecting the various sites and topics that they supported. I’m not sure that this needs to be a session per se of THATCamp, but I wonder if there is any meta-collection out there? I have used Personal Brain for my collection platform in the past and will make sure that I up load the file to the new Web Brain Site and make it viewable for all.

I know there are many related discussions about policy, organization resistance to adoption, etc. etc. At the moment, I’m just Curious George about how many more centers of activity are out there using an Open Model for process, tools, software, sharing content or knowledge, and so on.

BTW I anecdotally I found most organization sites were either in New Zealand or UK and Europe.

Thoughts? Comments?

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Going beyond the semantics of play and game, I’d like to propose a session discussing how play can be utilized to further the aims of cultural heritage programs. At MSU, the Campus Archaeology Program was created to mitigate and protect the historic and prehistoric archaeological resources of the campus. During the MSU Cultural Heritage Informatics field school this summer, students are being asked to create mobile and locative applications which will use Campus Archaeology Program for its content. The aim is to create applications which are both useful to archaeologists, and engaging to the broader public. Instead of focusing on a balance between education and fun, the focus is on creating applications which fall under both categories. By creating games which use real cultural and historical data, the hope is to engage and interact with the campus and wider community in a new way. This includes the use of applications like SCVNGR, FourSquare, Look Back Maps, and others, as well as designing new ones which will find new ways to connect people to the past.

Using this type of program as a starting point for some topics for discussion, there are a number of questions that would be interesting to address in this type of session including:

• How games can be used to support alternative interpretations of the past and culture, while also revealing the bias in some mainstream conceptions
• How can we construct games that are fun, that maintain their educational and outreach goals
• Can meaningful games aid in dispelling inappropriate, biased or incorrect perceptions of cultural heritage, such as archaeology’s connections with games like Tomb Raider which focus more heavily on looting than actually archaeology
• How do we connect modern people with a historic past that is no longer present using locative applications (thinking here specifically using Mark Sample’s concept of Haunt and how this can be further expanded to archaeological resources)

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This session is happening! Sunday, 11:00 am – 12:15 pm, Room 92. If you’re interested, please (please please please) read and comment on the Googledocs draft session structure!!!

There are a number of ongoing projects that center around structuring, storing, sharing and visualizing data within the humanities, ranging from well-known tools such as Zotero to brand new tools stemming from recent grants that are still being prototyped. These efforts create lots of opportunities, and sharing data between these tools and initiatives benefits the whole DH community. However, designing for and implementing data structures that support this kind of sharing adds a different kind of complexity.

The question is, then, how do think about structuring, organizing, and sharing our data going forward so that our structures are both flexible enough to hook into when we build new tools but structured enough that the data sets would talk to each other? How do we tie together different kinds of data sets (for example, but not limited to: GIS, citation management, prosopography, timeline and event tracking, etc.) in a way that works across several disciplines? How do we structure the data so it integrates well with visualization tools? What are the benefits, costs, and challenges of an undertaking of this kind?

If we break it down even further, we can ask more granular questions about the data we collect when we do research. What kinds of data sets do you have? What kinds of data show up in those sets? What kinds of relationships do you want to analyze between those different kinds of data? How do these questions change (or stay the same) across disciplines?

While it’s not easy to answer questions of this scope in a single session, THATCamp’s unconference format seems like the ideal place to start!

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Writing the history of minorities and diasporic populations is a tricky business. Sources that could be used for this purpose are never where we think they are, most are not even in “memory institutions” (such as museums, archives and libraries), and what is accessible might not even be reliable, authentic, or evidential.

People live history. Historians write about it. Archivists/curators/librarians preserve it. And all distill it through personal experiences, value systems, world views, knowledge, availability of sources, socio-economical backgrounds, political affiliations, cultural influences and so on….

When it comes to the history of minority populations, can any of us really say we can know it and represent it decently? Gone are the days when the Historian wrote “definitive” and “authoritative” works by actually using a mere fraction of what was out there due to various constraints (difficult or primitive technology and transportation, geographical constraints, accessibility etc.).

Now that technology has solved or made easier most of the above, we need ways that will let people, historians, archivists and any interested party add their knowledge and make sense out of history. We need technologies that will permit and enable a seamless, dialectic communication among data and people. We need the possibility for user-generated material to be incorporated in the historical record. Many new technologies (such as linked data) could offer solutions for seamless applications, but we have still a long way to go.

So I guess the reason I am here, at THATCamp is to hear, listen, and learn of what is out there, what can be done, and what can be envisioned for sense-making in history.

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recently mpow has hired a canada research chair in digital humanities. obviously i’m dying to partner on oh-so-many projects, but before that, i’d love to hear from everyone at THATCamp about what they are looking for in terms of library support for their research – or does the library not even cross your mind?

i know some of you come from institutions where the library is a natural partner for your work, but for those of you where that is not the case – what could the library do to entice you? what kind of support are you looking for? and what form does that support take?

ultimately i want to know what the library could do to rock your socks!

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Hi all,

Just a couple of updates. Note well that we’ve shifted the times a bit for the morning workshops tomorrow — we’ve shortened the sessions a bit, because we felt that at an hour forty-five they were a bit long. Shortening them also gives us more time for livestream of Digital Campus, which is now taking place at noon (not 1pm as previously announced). The only change in workshop start times, however, is that workshops which were to start at 11am will now start at 10:30am — all other start times remain the same. See chnm2011.thatcamp.org/schedule and chnm2011.thatcamp.org/bootcamp for the correct times. Do also check to make sure that you’ve got all necessary software, data, accounts and expertise for the workshops you want to attend. Space in particular workshops is first-come first-served.

We’re also meeting informally for drinks at the Mason Inn this evening (Thursday) starting at 6pm. Hope to see you there.

Finally, we’ve learned that there’s a high school graduation taking place at GMU at 2:30pm on Sunday, which will snarl traffic a bit starting at 1:30, so if you’re driving, be sure to take that into account.

See you soon!

Amanda

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Some of the things I’ve been thinking about recently that might make for a session or a side-hacking:

1) Amazon Web Services for Poets. Father-of-blogging-among-other-things Dave Winer has started a tutorial called EC2 for Poets, showing non-techies how to run their own virtual server on AWS. CHNM has started to use these cloud services, from storage to high-performance computing needs (like MapReduce), but I suspect all of us should know more about AWS and its possible uses (and drawbacks).

2) Digital Humanities Registry. It’s 2011 and it’s still hard to find the blogs/twitter usernames/etc of our community. There are some scattered Twitter lists and Day of DH lists and combined feeds, but some merging of OPML files would be helpful; we’ve thought about doing this at prior THATCamps but never followed through.

3) What Can We Learn from Journalism? I’m increasingly of the mind that journalists (at least forward-thinking journalists) are about 3-5 years ahead of the humanities in dealing with changes brought about by digital media and technology (mainly because necessity is the mother of invention—their business is tanking), from information-gathering techniques to new business models to new genres to data mining.

4) New to Me. C’mon, show me a website, service, or tool I’ve never seen before but should know about. Different than dork shorts in that it can’t be a site/service/tool that’s yours. Surprise me with something that is oddly applicable to the humanities, to be emulated or used.

5) New Peer Review Models. If double-blind peer review is broken, what are some possible replacements?

6) THATCamp Sustainability. As I like to say, THATCamp is a movement, like the Olympics. It could use a less corrupted model than the Olympics, but still a sustainable one. A model that doesn’t rely on selling TV rights. For instance, would it be OK to move to a pay-ahead-of-time (but still modestly) system so that each camp is properly funded?

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I am interested in exploring the various ways that we discuss curation in the digital humanities, as well as models of best practice in digital humanities curation. What are great examples?

With its origins in the 14th Century, specifically in the practice of rural priests or “curates,” the word originally emphasized the caring for and attending to the souls of a parish. By the 15th century, curate became associated with legal guardianship, usually over minors. Only with the enlightenment, in the middle of the 17th century, did the word come to be associated with objects, specifically those of a museum or gallery.

More recently, with the emergence of the digital era, the definition of curate has widened, at least as suggested in a 2009 New York Times article.  It is being used by “designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners,” as a sort of code for taste.  According to NYTimes writer Alex Williams, stores “curate” their merchandise or nightclubs “curate” an evening’s entertainment, and websites “curate” their content. “Curate,” Williams wrote, “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting.”

Curate means many things in museums and cultural institutions outside the digital realm, from building collections, to caring for those collections, to interpreting them. It stands between the work of librarians, archivists, and scholars as its own category of activity, but is in fact more multidisciplinary than peer fields. It demands subject expertise but is not subservient to it. It demands methodological expertise but is not subservient to it. It demands the rigorous of metadata practice but is not subservient to it. Digital curation has added a new dimensionality to the mix, which is technical knowledge, but even here technological knowledge is key but not a requirement.

Curation as a concept has gained new life in the digital humanities world, and is discussed clearly in the Digital Humanities Manifesto.  One popular version of this (emerging from technology communities) suggested five basic approaches to content creation: aggregation, distillation, elevation, mashup, or chronology. I found that oversimplified, without an appreciation for the humanities, but it was provocative nonetheless. Even if one adopted something, what examples might we point to as brilliant guides for digital humanists.

So, I am curious how we digital humanists understand our roles as curators. One of the best definitions from the Digital Curation Centre in the UK, proposes a definition of curation that emphasizes archival practice. Another case study about digital curation from the Library of Congress also emphasizes archival practice as the home of curation.

Both beg a larger question that I want to pose. What is the role of interpretation and research in the process of digital curation? How is digital curation an act of scholarship?  And, why not emphasize the interpretive aspects more? Surely a curator–whether digital or otherwise is more than a guardian of real or virtual objects? Aren’t we making interpretive choices?  Are their models of digital curation to which we would point colleagues and students?

Those are just some of the questions that I’m interested in finding some answers to. And, of course, I am also interested in asking the right questions, which I am perhaps not doing yet.  Broadly, this question is driven by something I am currently writing about humanities curation and content curation.

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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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It has been nearly a year since the crew from One Week | One Tool launched Anthologize. Ten months and thousands of downloads later, most of that crew is back at CHNM for THATCamp. We’d like to get together with Anthologize users, fans, and critics to share the progress we’ve made and brainstorm plans for the future of the software and the community. We’re looking for use cases, feature requests, bug reports, and big and little ideas. Join us!

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Lots of great themes are already emerging from the pre-conference posts; allow me to add a couple thoughts about mobile, which is one of the things that I’ll be interested in discussing and learning more about.

My digital humanities research explores how one can curate a city through mobile devices. Over the past several months, this culminated in the release of Cleveland Historical (clevelandhistorical.org) with a recent news story about the project here . Our work at the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities has taken this challenge of curation into multiple educational, institutional, and digital environments over the years: from simple websites (such as that on the Cleveland Cultural Gardens) to street-level history kiosks to an extensive (700+) collection of oral histories. Our work is all crowdsourced through community-based processes, emphasizing scads of project partners sharing similar goals. Our number of partners exceeds 1000 individuals and organizations, for example.

We built Cleveland Historical using Omeka as a CMS. It includes iOS, Android, basic mobile stylesheets, and a web presence. It includes multiple layers of interpretive materials and stories that are geolocated, tours, and social media integration. We are currently making the tour features richer, integrating QR codes (easy), and building a version for regional museums (that has a different navigation strategy.)  Lots of other cool features could easily be developed, including content added directly from mobile devices and new interfaces.

We designed the project to be extensible and scalable beyond Cleveland.

In fact, Cleveland Historical is the first instance of a broader project we’re calling Mobile Historical, which is essentially a mobile publishing platform that sits atop a lightly customized Omeka installation. We will soon open a second instance of what we are terming Mobile Historical in collaboration with initiative partner Larry Cebula at Eastern Washington University. We are exploring collaborations with several other partners to help us work out the technological kinks associated with extending the platform to multiple cities/institutions. We are seeking to make the cost of each new instance ridiculously cheap (seeking only to recover costs associated with labor, maintenance, and sustainability of the mobile client.) Toward this end, we have begun moving toward connecting with Omeka.net in conjunction with our lovely friends a CHNM, hopefully making it available as part of the Omeka.net ecosystem early next year. Also, as we do this, we’ll also be developing an open-source version, which is further down the line (time-wise.) But, first things first–extending the project to a couple other sites.

Interestingly, the most critical part of our work is not the digital, but the humanities. How do we create interpretive stories for mobile, in conjunction with multiple communities as works of scholarship, teaching, and public engagement? Curating cities and collections happens collaboratively. Our larger work seeks to create a vehicle for scholars, GLAMs, and communities themselves to take charge of cultural interpretation by giving them both tools AND an intellectual community of best practices and approaches. Building this community and these best practices are well underway in different mobile settings. Even so, extending, building, and sustaining dialogues mobile interpretation is as critical to what we’re about as is the technology.

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I would like to propose a roundtable web accessibility discussion and workshop that would help accelerate the adoption of accessible design strategies in the Digital Humanities.

Over the past two years at the University of South Carolina Upstate, George Williams and I have been working in conjunction with Tina Herzberg on BrailleSC.org. Through our research, we’ve developed two Omeka plugins and one WordPress plugin that allows an administrator to quickly and easily add accessibility features to their sites powered by these content management systems.

Just over a month ago, this project led to the creation of AccessibleFutures.org — a site designed to be a one-stop shop for sharing tools, plugins, documentation, and other resources for developers and website administrators looking to make their websites more accessible. This website will host open source code and tools for making the web, and computing in general, more accessible to everyone.

What I’m proposing is a brief talk about accessibility in general, followed by an overview of the plugins that we’ve created. Finally, I would like to propose a 30-minute rapid coding session where developers with Omeka or WordPress, PHP, HTML, and CSS skills could work together to tweak our existing plugins or build new accessibility plugins that will be released on AccessibleFutures.org. Authorship credit would be given to developers on our site as well. Unfinished plugins can also be submitted to AccessibleFutures.org for completion later by another plugin author, or the original author can complete it at a later time and submit it to us.

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Museums, universities, archives, and libraries are all slowly waking up to the need to “have some sort of presence online,” to engage with the public on the internet, at least in the abstract.

Social media is key to such efforts for two reasons: one, it’s something most people understand to be important. Even the most tech-backward administrator would have to admit that there can be no down side to your institution having more fans on Facebook.

But it’s also key to creating and maintaining a significant community of users, which is essential to the success of any new media project. Whether they’re contributing crowdsourced data, downloading your app, or simply hits on your new online exhibit or finding aid, you need users to be successful in a new media project.

Unfortunately, the way we have run these institutions for centuries is not conducive to using these social media to their fullest. We know that the most successful users are fast-paced, engaged and engaging, transparent, fun, and produce a rich flow of content on a regular basis.

Not only does this does not sound like most museums’ or libraries’ online presence, but these things are often made far more difficult by the very structure of these institutions. The silos of departmentalism can slow down or even stop this flow of information. One example that comes to mind how uncommon it apparently is for museum curators to have access to the CMS for online exhibits.

But new media projects are good PR, they engage more people, they’re sexy to the press, and they can create new revenue streams. All of this, I would argue, can be leveraged. If success in new media requires the sort of openness and radical trust that departmental silos inhibit, is that an opportunity to try to rethink the whole nature of how we organize our museums, libraries, etc?

I don’t really know the answer to these questions, and I don’t even know if it’s necessarily a good idea, to be honest. But in my limited experience, I do feel like there’s an opportunity there. What I’d like to propose is a session where people discuss the pros and cons of such a radical proposal, and maybe even do a little strategizing.

• Can we reprogram the backend of cultural institutions to make them more engaging?
• Are there workarounds that can create an environment where interdepartmental communication and cooperation happens at the speed of modern communication?
• Are new media projects important enough to the powers that be that they represent a significant opportunity to get people to rethink these structures?
• What would a cultural institution without departments look like? What kind of structure could hybridize departments or provide strong incentive to work more closely?

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Let’s face it.  No one creates a Digital Humanities project all on his or her own.  And personally, I like it that way.  DH is at its best when people from different backgrounds come together to solve problems, share research, create new knowledge, and improve teaching.  This exciting mix, however, leads to a particular set of challenges.  How do we keep inter-disciplinary, inter-generational teams working together in a reasonably harmonious fashion while also meeting the deadlines set by funding institutions?

To help answer (or at least start talking about) this question, I would like to propose a session on Project Management.  Some of us at THATCamp have served as official project managers, many more have been been unofficial managers, and almost everyone leaves a THATCamp with at least one idea for a new DH project they want to implement at their home institution.  I realize that there is a BootCamp already in the works on this topic.  But I think it could also work as a session with people of differing levels of experience with DH projects all pooling their knowledge.  So here are some questions we could discuss:

• What do people wish they had known before starting a DH project?
• For those contemplating their first DH project, are there pitfalls that can be easily avoided?
• What parts of a DH project end up taking the most time/using the most resources?
• How can projects scale up from a pilot project (often with only two or three people) to something longer term?

There is, of course, a large body of literature on Project Management, typically aimed at corporate managers and software development teams.  I wonder how useful those concepts would be in Higher Education.  If they are helpful, is there a way to make them more palatable to academics and alt-acs?

These are just some preliminary thoughts.  I look forward to discussing them (and so much more) come the weekend.

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In reading the session proposals over the past week, and following the twitter/blog/conference conversations of the past year, it strikes me at the extent to which DH finds itself simultaneously outside and inside the hierarchies and institutional cultures of the academy. The pressing need for advocacy, the exclusionary hierarchy that #alt-acs struggle against, questions of privilege, accessibility, and diversity, the insecurities over what “counts” for tenure, the constant search for external funding (for both validation and practical needs), etc. speak to the extent to which DH is patterned  by the institutional culture of the university-in-crisis. I don’t think we or need or want a singular response to these challenges from a DH perspective. But, I do think that being conscious of the context in which DH continues to develop is important, less those institutional/cultural factors exert an overdetermining influence on teaching, public engagement, and research. All that to say that I have no specific session proposal on this front, but I’m looking forward to the conversations proposed by wdeal, Jennifer Bengston, Jeff McClurken, Roger Whitson, stewartvarner, George Williams, and James Neal. That’s quite a list of sessions that treat in one way or another ethics, power and advocacy in the practice of DH. As a Latin American Historian, I’d also add that from a global perspective the digital turn has as much potential to increase the gulf between scholarly communities as it does to bridge it, and thus makes open access an affirmative necessity.

On the more hacking front, and following on Patrick Murray-John’s offer for a session on humanities coding/hacking, I’d love a session that shares modules/libraries most useful to humanists exploring text analysis and text mining. I devoted myself to learning Python as a first language, and there are many mature libraries big and small (nltk, pattern, clustering, orange, levenshtein, tf-idf, etc.) that offer relatively easy access to complicated analysis. I’d love to have a session where people share their experiences with such code packages to solve real-world humanities text mining problems and data visualizations.

Looking forward to this weekend!

-Chad

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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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As Kimon pointed out, a lot of us DH-ers are “alternate academics”: we’re trained as academics and are still in the orbit of the academy, but we’re not in conventional tenure-track roles. Our hires were accompanied by fanfare about hybridity and new models of scholarship — and we care passionately about our jobs and our new profession.

However, it also seems clear to me that certain #alt-ac problems need some direct attention. I’m thinking specifically here about the issue of our scholarly research. The substance of this research looks different for all of us, and it may also look quite different from the work that earned us our degrees: perhaps it’s collaborative work, or technical work, or design work.

Whatever this scholarship looks like, it’s important: important if we’re really planning to challenge conventional models of scholarly production, important if we want to be conversant with our traditional academic colleagues, and important to us personally.

But we need certain resources in order to accomplish this research alongside the rest of our work. Chiefly time, but also money to attend conferences, library privileges, funds to purchase research equipment. My experience suggests that employers are not averse to providing us with these resources, but do need specific guidance about what we need.

In the spirit of hacking rather than yacking, I’d like to use this session to build a list of reasonable, specific guidelines to provide employers about what an #alt-ac needs in order to be, truly, a hybrid academic with an active research agenda.

A few links and sources of inspiration:

• This is inspired partly by the Off the Tracks workshop at the University of Maryland, which produced some wonderful work, including a Collaborators’ Bill of Rights
• As many of you may know, Bethany Nowviskie is the editor of #alt-ac: Alternate Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars, a collection forthcoming from MediaCommons
• And here’s “Where Credit is Due,” Bethany’s recent talk at the NINES institute about preconditions for evaluating collaborative scholarship.

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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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Here’s a session idea that complements the one proposed by Tim Carmody on the “hardware turn,” with maybe more of a digital preservation and access slant.  It’s inspired in part by talks with my colleague Bruce Ambacher and in part by Doug Reside and Matt Kirschenbaum’s ongoing efforts at MITH to collect obsolete hardware, cables, and other parts in the service of cultural heritage data recovery. The idea revolves around regional or institutional “rescue and repair” shops that could function as non-profit, academic counterparts to commercial ventures such as Mueller Media Conversions in NYC, whose clients include (among others) the National Archives in Washington DC.  The shop(s) would help historians/humanists/curators/archivists/teachers/scholars rescue data from legacy storage media, such as 3 1/2 or 5 1/4 floppy disks, and transfer it to newer media.  The discussion could easily be expanded–and I hope it would!–to include retro-computing labs, such as the Archeological Media Lab at U of Colorado directed by Lori Emerson, or its counterpart at MITH, with the aim of identifying where the two types of projects overlap with and differ from one another (and how they might be combined).  We could also think about how to source or scavenge the necessary hardware (e.g., campus surplus stores, donations, or places like Goodwill Computer Works in Austin or WeirdStuff in Silicon Valley) and student curricula (e.g., teaching students how to create disk images of the bitstreams on obsolete storage media in the context of videogame and elit studies).  Any thoughts on what else we might cover?

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I want to open up a discussion and maybe put together a working group focused on what I want to pre-emptively call “the hardware turn” in digital humanities. (I say, let’s start calling it that, and we can just will the thing into existence after the fact. If it doesn’t exist already.)

What’s the hardware turn? Well, sometime after humanities scholars realized that they had spent so much time talking about “texts” that they could start talking about “books” again (and practices and performances and design and…), digital humanists realized that they had spent so much time thinking and writing code and markup and software and building databases and making everything powerfully cross-platform, etc. —

— that a chunk of them could start and NEEDED to start working on and with hardware again. Thinking about hardware. Hacking hardware. Using completely different hardware from desktop computers. Maybe making their own hardware.

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Despite the current state of unrest and uncertainty surrounding tenure and promotion, there still remains much to be desired about traditional faculty appointments and the status and perks that they provide: more regular opportunities to teach, travel and research funds, writing sabbaticals, improved benefits, etc.  Nevertheless, many of us attending THATCamp are in positions at our respective institutions that are involved in many arenas close to traditional faculty and are involved in programmatic or institutional endeavors that can have a great impact on the course of study for students and research for faculty. In a great blog post, Bethany Nowviskie talks about the challenges, but also value, of this #alt-ac  lifestyle and the possibilities it holds for post-doctoral humanitsts who either outside looking in on faculty positions or have chose to eschew those positions completely. Some people like this #alt-ac position and look at that as a long-term home, some see it as a stepping stone to a faculty position, while others may hope to find a hybrid solution that allows them to keep a foot in both worlds.

But, as Bethany pointed out, “Keeping our talents within (or around) the academy is often more psychologically difficult than examining the color of our parachutes and gliding off to fabulous private-sector careers. Class divisions among faculty and staff in the academy are profound, and the suspicion and (worse) condescension with which “failed academics” are sometimes met can be disheartening.” This session would open a discussion about the challenges that arise from entering into and embracing #alt-ac and hopefully provide people with roadmaps, strategies, and resources to this relatively uncharted territory.  I would encourage people from all walks of academic life to attend including those people who have found comfort in those #alt-ac positions, those who are looking at #alt-ac as a step on the way to a faculty position, those who have faculty positions and deal regularly with #alt-ac colleagues, and those who may be #alt-ac and not even know it.

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For this session I want to discuss to two main points: how to hack grad school to make it easier through tech, and how to deal with the anti-tech institution.

The first is how we grad students can use technology to make our lives easier such as using an SVN to help with writing a dissertation or TRAC to keep tabs on collaborative projects. Technology is also going to be important in networking, so a discussion of the best networking tools and how to use social media appropriately as a grad student can also be a topic.

Second, as an up and coming generation of more tech savvy students, we need to know how to interact with less than tech literat,e and even anti-tech, faculty. How do we convince committees that tech-based dissertation topics in the humanities are valid? Can we convince them? Is it better to hide our inner geek until we become professors? Should we digivangelize? I’d like to discuss possible strategies for digitally inclined grads in a discipline that believes itself to be analog.

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According to Urban Dictionary (most credible source EVER!), the phrase “speak truth to power” means:

A phrase coined by the Quakers during in the mid-1950s. It was a call for the United States to stand firm against fascism and other forms of totalitarianism; it is a phrase that seems to unnerve political right, with reason.

or

A vacuous phrase used by some on the political Left, especially the denizens of the Democratic Underground website. Ostensibly, it means to verbally confront or challenge conservative politicians and conservative ideals using the overwhelmingly logical and moral arguments of liberalism. Doing so would, naturally of course, devastate the target individual, leaving them a stuttering, stammering bowl of defeated jelly. That or cause them to experience an epiphany that would have such a profound, worldview-changing effect that they would immediately go out and buy a Che t-shirt and start reading Noam Chomsky. Unfortunately, the individuals who would use this phrase have little or no understanding of either liberalism or conservatism, and the “truth” that they speak consists mainly of epithets and talking points, memorized by rote, which they learned from other, equally vapid liberals. As such “speak truth to power” joins other feel-good but ultimately meaningless gems from Leftist history such as “right on”, “up against the wall”. “question everything” and the ever-popular “fuck you, pig”.

(Well, OK, then…)

Seeking out slightly more credible sources for the origin of the phrase leads one to a Quaker pamphlet from the 1950s. As a “trained” political scientist, I think of Aaron Wildavsky’s book and, more recently, a book by Manning Marable. Across these sources, I believe the phrase is about questioning reasoning of “the state;” it’s about bringing information (maybe evidence?) to the table with those who are in formal positions of power who may not want to “hear” it.

I suspect other THATCamp attendees find themselves in positions like those that I find myself in where I have opportunities to “speak truth to power.” I get coded as “the technology guy” and “volunteered” onto any/all task forces and/or committees (let’s call them task committees) that have any connection at all to technology. Often, those task committees are led by someone with formal decision-making authority who may or may not *really* want to hear what you say.

We all know the perils of committee work, but there are obvious advocacy opportunities presented by this work as well. So, I’m proposing a session where we share advocacy strategies. We might discuss our “tactics” within the realm of formal committee work, but even outside of it. There, the overlap with Mark Sample’s ideas around “tactical collaboration” are obvious, so perhaps we can convince Mark to grace us with his presence (and his ideas) as part of the session.

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Being new to the digital humanities world, I stumbled around quite a bit in search of an appropriate maiden project. To put it lightly, I hit a few roadblocks. It was frustrating, but it got me thinking. I mean, REALLY thinking. Thinking hard about philosophical things. Things that make my brain hurt… but in a good way. I love an ethical dilemma.

Some background information is probably in order here, and I think a little information about my personal circumstance will help to illustrate my concerns.  I’m coming at this from an anthropological perspective. A particular area within anthropology in which there are lingering hard feelings among interested parties is bioarchaeology and mortuary archaeology, particularly in places with a history of European colonization. Bioarchaeology (the study of human skeletal remains from archaeological sites, which is what I do) is very interesting and important to some people…and pretty offensive to others. I am currently working on a dissertation that is, in a way, mine to do what I want with. But it is not really mine, because it is not about me as much as it is about the community of people whose remains I measured and qualified and analyzed and theorized about. Chances are, my dissertation will do nothing but gather dust on the MSU library shelf for all of eternity. The only way it will have an impact will be if I literally throw it at something. But what if I decided to try to do more with it? How would any public (especially digitally public) representation of my work and its subject affect living communities/interested parties? Do I have a right to make any kind of statement at all about a community that I am not a part of? If I do, where does this right come from? If I don’t, why don’t I, as a human and a scholar (and a humanistic scholar) have such rights? How will increased digitization and increasingly open access affect how we view our scholarly rights and responsibilities to the public? What am I even talking about?

I think many scholars from many disciplines deal with similar, although not identical, issues.  We are, after all, digital HUMANISTS. We deal with people. Living, breathing people with interests, feelings, needs, and wants. In this modern age, tech savvy is power. As people with knowledge of and access to digital tools to create and disseminate packages of information, we have power over our audiences in a very real sense. I think that intentions are typically good, but even good intentions can lead to dangerous circumstances if perception/reception of our projects differs from our expectations. I can easily envision circumstances in which communities feel that they have been misrepresented and (even worse) powerless to respond, unless digital access and knowledge come to be viewed as a right rather than a privilege.

I hope this is not perceived as some kind of paranoid warning of an impending, colonialist DH empire. I actually don’t think that is going to happen because, in theory, there will be checks and balances. Perhaps what I have very ungracefully tried to introduce here is an idea for a general conversation about DH conduct and ethics. Not as it applies to copyrights and licenses (which are important in their own right), but as it applies to the individuals and communities of people whom we create “knowledge” about. I guess what I am getting at is the ethics of access/dissemination/representation. Who gets to control it? I believe that knowledge is good and it should be shared whenever it can be. But how do we do it? Or, more specifically, how do we do it properly? I am inclined to think that the only way to do this right is to make sure that as many scholars (“scholars” interpreted broadly) as possible have equal access to digital training and tools. But I suspect that is only one piece of the puzzle. Wrapped up in all of this “access to tools and knowledge” stuff is the issue of diversity in DH, which has been introduced in a previous blog post, and I think that my concerns might be seen as an extension of that issue.  I am anxious to see if others see these issues as a cause for concern and, if so, start to come up with some suitable approaches to dealing with them.

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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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Some reminders and information as we approach THATCamp CHNM:

• Campers have been proposing and commenting on some rather astonishingly awesome sessions — "The Politics of Data," "Building a Better Backchannel," an independent "UnPress" for academic publishing, paper prototyping "nifty visual interfaces," and diversity and accessibility in digital humanities, just for example. Check them out for yourself and add your comments at chnm2011.thatcamp.org. Propose your own session idea before Saturday, 6/4 by logging in at chnm2011.thatcamp.org/wp-login.php and clicking Posts –> Add New. See thatcamp.org/proposals for guidance. While you're logged in, you might update your profile so that we can learn about you on the Campers page at chnm2011.thatcamp.org/campers.
• There's a new workshop being offered on Friday, 6/3: Using Wikis as Courseware and Exhibition Development Tools, generously offered by Kimon Keramidas. Do be sure to read the workshop descriptions at chnm2011.thatcamp.org/bootcamp carefully: some workshop instructors ask that participants come with certain skills, software, or accounts. Workshop seating will be first come, first served.
• Make your reservations at the Residence Inn Fair Lakes by May 30th in order to receive the conference rate of $85. All travel information is at chnm2011.thatcamp.org/travel — we've added a map and further details about busses, shuttles, and parking.
• Sadly (very sadly), we can guarantee neither ovens nor refrigerators to participants in the Sunday afternoon bakeoff. However, you may bring your baked goods at any time and we will find a cool, dry, out-of-the-way spot for them until Sunday afternoon; certain kindly, self-disciplined CHNM employees might be convinced to give said goods safe fridge room at home till Sunday. The bakeoff judging will be crowdsourced, and we'll make up some rules and procedures for it eventually. Probably Sunday morning. (It's really THATCamps Virginia and Great Lakes who are to blame for this.)

See also chnm2011.thatcamp.org/05/13/thatcamp-chnm-details/ and as always, write me at info@thatcamp.org with any questions. See you next week!

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How does the availability, writing style, and level of completeness of documentation influence our willingness to use a digital tool or to engage in a project? More important, how does it effect the core audiences for our projects?

I use the term “documentation” to refer to any set of instructional writing or media (printed and/or online instructions, user guides, podcasts, screencasts, slideshows/screenshots, et al) produced to support the use of a digital tool, process, or project.

Documentation is challenging, because it is time consuming and requires the creators of a project to share processes and details that often have become naturalized. When working closely with a project, writing clear instructions for users with different intentions, levels of technical knowledge, and commitments to digging through pages to find answers is hard. Even though it is hard, and sometimes we don’t enjoy doing it, providing good documentation is akin to creating an accessible website.

Documentation, similar to code, is a specific type of writing that often is not recognized as scholarly or substantive work. How can we elevate this type of writing to something that can be quantified or “count” for project participants who work in different professional positions?

I would like to spend some time discussing what makes good documentation and exploring the following questions:

• How much time do you spend using any type of documentation?
• How much time have you spent writing or contributing to any documentation/codex?
• If you write it, will they read it?
• Have you ever asked for user feedback about a project’s codex or user guides?
• Have you ever stopped using a tool or a project because there was not sufficient documentation to assist you?
• How does the authorial voice adopted by documentation writers influence how someone uses it? Does this matter?
• Should documentation contain multiple voices, or at least provide the opportunity for many users participate in its creation?
• Are there common elements you find lacking in most codexes?

Perhaps throughout this session, we can collaborate on a document listing suggestions/recommendations for DH project documentation.

______

Thanks everyone for a great session: docs.google.com/document/d/1jjJL75EboctzXbH0wd5sD899xRdT5TDGhx_E9U2wyj4/edit?hl=en_US

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Yesterday, Mark Sample lead an interesting conversation on Twitter with @kfitz, @eymand, and @JenHoward on the possibility of setting up a “digital-based indie academic press.”

Today, he elaborated:

I was riffing on these ideas yesterday on Twitter, asking, for example, what’s to stop a handful of of scholars from starting their own academic press? It would publish epub books and, when backwards compatibility is required, print-on-demand books. Or what about, I wondered, using Amazon Kindle Singles as a model for academic publishing. Imagine stand-alone journal articles, without the clunky apparatus of the journal surrounding it. If you’re insistent that any new publishing venture be backed by an imprimatur more substantial than my “handful of scholars,” then how about a digital humanities center creating its own publishing unit?

So, I’m thinking…why don’t we do this? I’d like to use the THATCamp spirit (hacking before yacking, collaboration, digital forms of communication) to try to imagine what a digital indie academic press (or UnPress) would look like. Would it feature articles? Online conferences? Hacking sessions? Multimodal presentations? Could we institute peer-to-peer review? When would we publish?

There are lots of productive questions and conversations that could come out of a session like this. But, ideally, I’d like to leave the session with the beginnings of a plan for some kind of indie press associated (in some way) with THATCamp.

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The issue I’d like to discuss is how to streamline the creation of a web presence for our scholarly publications. Since for tenure purposes we still have to publish print books, some scholars are thinking about ways to extend their books to the web (e.g. environmental historians Richard White and Karl Jacoby). This is often a costly and time-consuming endeavor, but can yield great rewards as a way to share data, explore areas that didn’t fit in the book, or even engage stakeholders in the research.

At what stage in a project should we create a site? What tools are available–or could be built–to facilitate companion sites? How can print and digital forms compliment each other and increase exposure of and interest in humanities scholarship?

Links to check out:
Richard White has posted visualizations relating to his new book, Railroaded, through Stanford’s Spatial History Lab.  Note that some of these visualizations include links to download the complete data sets he used.

Karl Jacoby’s companion website for Shadows at Dawn includes a large number of primary source materials cited in the book as well as links to media coverage and lesson plans.

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This is a totally half baked idea but it keeps popping up in my little head and maybe you all can help me deal.  I’m basically thinking about the challenge of applying my humanities-trained mind to data driven projects.

The challenge isn’t that I am skeptical of quantitative stuff  but that I know how easy it is to make mistakes with it if you don’t know what you’re doing or get easily confused by big numbers (I am guilty of both).  I also know how easy it is to be dazzled by big numbers and beautiful visualizations (no offense Hans Rosling).

I started thinking about this while reading the first of the New York Times stories about digital humanities.  Patricia Cohen wrote:

Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.

The idea of a “data turn” in the humanities has been tossed around but it is not as if data are somehow a-political or outside of ideology, right?  In this session I want to hear people’s ideas about strategies for approaching Big Data.  On the one hand, the idea of being able to search for patterns across vast sets of historical and cultural data is very exciting.  On the other hand, I can’t unread Foucault (or Marx for that matter).  I know all of this data exists in a context but I don’t know how to keep that in perspective when I’m dealing with Big Data.

Anyway, this is just a thought on the table.  I would love it if someone wants to pick it up and build an actually coherent session proposal out of it.

Stewart

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CONTEXT: Many (most?) of you will remember the “One Week | One Tool” event hosted in 2010 by CHNM (and funded by the NEH) that resulted in Anthologize. The event was described on their site as “a unique summer institute, one that aim[ed] to teach participants how to build an open source digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week.” The resulting tool, Anthologize–on which development continues–is designed to “[u]se the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.”

For more information about Anthologize, check out Julie Meloni’s ProfHacker post on the experience as well Tom Scheinfeldt’s “Lessons from One Week | One Tool”:

• “Part I, Project Management”
• “Part 2, Use”
• “Part 3, Serendipity”

PROPOSAL: Inspired, in part, by the locally-hosted “Random Hacks of Kindness” 2011 events taking place on the same weekend as THATCampCHNM and THATCampLAC, I am proposing “One Session | One Solution.” Can we learn from the much blogged experience of those who created Anthologize to attempt something similar on a smaller scale: a high-speed hackathon taking place during an unconference? Building a tool from scratch is probably beyond the scope of one THATCamp session (or one THATCamp, for that matter). However, a smaller solution to a well-defined problem has a good chance of being found if a group of talented, motivated campers combine forces and hack something together. Even if the result is a technical plan, rather than a finished product, the days (or weeks, or months) after the face-to-face unconference could be spent collaborating on making that plan a reality.

Interested? Please leave a suggestion as to what problem (related to higher ed or the digital humanities–both broadly defined) might be productively addressed by such a session. You don’t have to have a solution already in mind, though if you do you should feel free to sketch it out here. Since the start of THATCamp is more than a week away, we have a pretty good amount of time to brainstorm possibilities and reach some consensus before we all meet face-to-face.

Thanks!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by dullhunk]

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This session proposal overlaps with Patrick’s idea for a humanities coding session, but it’s different enough that I thought it might warrant its own session. Whereas Patrick would like to draw together people who write or hack code in a digital humanities context, I’d like to bring together people who are interested in the critical reading of code as a media object.

Critical code studies is an emerging field related to software studies and platform studies, but it’s more closely attuned to the code itself of a program rather than the program’s interface and usability (as in software studies) or its underlying hardware (as in platform studies). (NOTE: I’ve ridiculously mischaracterized software studies and platform studies here. In fact, according to Nick Montfort’s original formulation of platform studies, code is an integral component of the overall platform, meaning critical code studies is actually a subset of platform studies.)

Critical code studies might look at the algorithms of a program, the programmer’s inline comments to the code, or the way code is hacked and transmitted. It borrows many of the tools of literary and historical scholarship, but infuses them with what Katherine Hayles describes as “media-specific analysis.” Mark Marino has a good introduction to critical code studies, and I’d humbly recommend my own look at the code of SimCity as another example of critical code studies.

My interest in code studies is pedagogical as much as it is methodological. Code is not just for coders. I believe that as digital humanists, we need to teach everyday people, and in particular, nonprogramming undergraduate students, what Michael Mateas calls procedural literacy. This session, then, would serve as an introduction to critical code studies, and I’d stress that no programming experience is necessary. If you know how to read, you can begin reading code. And if you know how to read critically, you can begin reading code critically.

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At THATCamp Southeast in March, a session on gaming at one point turned to the idea of creating a game based on grad school. The general tone of the brainstorming was dominated by morbid humor, but no one had the energy or inclination to start creating a game right then and there.

Well, it’s almost three months later, and I’ve followed up on the session by thinking about different possible games, and I will bring sets to playtest two ideas at THATCamp CHNM. This doesn’t really belong in sessions but rather in hallways (or late at night, in bars), so this is proposed as an “unsession” (how’s that for an extension of “unconference”?). One game structure is in the morbid-humor vein of the March discussion at Emory, with relatively short-play dice mechanics. The other is more positive in tone (I hope!), and a multiple-round card game. Both require creativity.

If you want me to make a set just for you, just comment below and tell me what you want to playtest. Two caveats: 1) these are going to be very crude (using index cards and the like); 2) if I make a set just for you, you hereby agree to test the game with at least five other THATCampers over the weekend.

One last note: the games will be CC-BY, and in at least one game the reason for that will be evident within two minutes of the setup.

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I’m a high school teacher. I attended THATCamp Prime for the first time last year, and left thinking a lot about how little I know about linked data or Omeka or the ethics of iPad hacking. In fact, I’m teaching a research and writing course and just learned about Zotero about five minutes ago. This is troubling because 1) I teach the kids you’ll see in your classrooms next year, and 2) the conversations that educators have around K-12/learning/tech generally do not involve these ideas.

I’m interested in having a conversation about what K-12 (but primarily high school) teachers should know about how to move a “digital humanist” mindset into their practice, and how to begin to engage our students around these ideas. What does a mini-digitalhumanist look like? What is s/he thinking about in high school? Is there, truly, a way of thinking digitally that seems to be native to the ways that college students now approach research/etc?

Am thinking about what the outcome of this conversation might look like, other than an hour of idea-sharing ..

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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.

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We put stuff on maps. We can put stuff on historic maps. We can put things on timelines. What do we want to do next? There are a ton of cool visualization things going on, many of which use simple javascript libraries. Which of these are useful for cultural heritage collections? Further, what kinds of ways of visualizing are useful for what kinds of objects and collections?

In part, I think this is about a bit of a translation between the very active world of data visualization into a context where we think about various digital incarnations of cultural heritage objects. So, visualizations as interfaces for discovery of individual things as well as visualization in the more general sense of seeing the big picture. I would be interested in setting up a bit of mind meld to think through some of this. Specifically, what kinds of data do we have and what are some new ways we can create web based interfaces and visualizations to interact with and understand that data?

Here is a suggestion for how we could go about this:

1. (20 min) of swap and shareVery quickly look at a bunch of examples in these three categories: (For starters we can start listing things we want to talk about in the comments on this post)

• a) sites with cool visual interfaces to cultural heritage collections./li>
• b) examples of sets of items, individual objects, and other stuff that we want to interface with./li>
• c) fun visualization widgets and interfaces that have nothing to do with the humanities but that we might mine for ideas or ideally just use.

2. (30 min) Small groups sketch out one page wireframesI would then like to break into small groups and match make some of the As Bs and Cs. Take some of these cool ideas, pick a specific kind of collections and have each of the smaller groups create a one page small paper prototype or simple wireframe of what this cool interface would look like with a particular kind of digital collection or digital object.

3. (10 min) Rapid report outWe would then take 2 minutes each to report out the pitches for these interfaces. (Could video these on someone’s phone and post to youtube?) We then post pics and one paragraph descriptions of what this interface could do for a specific kind of collection or kind of object.

I have included some initial examples of stuff we might talk a bout in part one. If your interested in this please add more ideas in the comments.

A) Example interfaces:

• Mappy timey stuff like historypin: www.historypin.com/
• Historical data on maps: acl.arts.usyd.edu.au/harlem/
• Change over time in editions of a text: benfry.com/traces/
• Railroad owner thing: nexthistory.org/shaping-the-west.html
• BYU Corpus Stuff: corpus.byu.edu/

B) Fun Data set/item examples

• menus menus.nypl.org/
• pictures loc.gov/pictures
• quilts www.quiltindex.org/msumuseumcollection.php
• sheet music data.gov.au/dataset/south-australian-sheet-music-state-library-of-south-australia/
• convict transportation records data.gov.au/dataset/british-convict-transportation-registers/

C) Open Visualization Libs

• Timeplot: www.simile-widgets.org/timeplot/
• InfoViz thejit.org/demos/
• TufteGraph xaviershay.github.com/tufte-graph/
• milkchart code.google.com/p/milkchart/
• VIDI www.dataviz.org/

So what do you think? What things should we add to the list? Who want’s to be in on this?

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It’s come to be expected at digital humanities-oriented conferences that there will be a vibrant backchannel—commentary, questions, dissent, and amplification, usually taking place in real-time (but not always real-place) on Twitter. Even scholarly conferences that are not strictly digital, such as the Modern Language Association, have begun to have ongoing and serious discussions on the conference backchannel.

Derek Bruff has written extensively on encouraging conference backchannels and dealing with distraction and incivility on backchannels, and I want to take his ideas even further in this session, asking how can we build—literally build from the ground up—a better backchannel?

That’s right, I want to hack the way we yack.

The Better Backchannel might be a software solution built on top of Twitter, but I don’t want to assume that Twitter is the best or even default platform for the Better Backchannel. Perhaps the Better Backchannel is a disparate set of existing tools, assembled in a new way. Or maybe the Better Backchannel is not a tool at all, but a set of practices.

To begin, I see four broad questions to consider (there are more of course, and I hope you add them in the comments below):

• What are the limitations of existing backchannels?
• What do we want the Better Backchannel to do that existing backchannels don’t do or do badly?
• What existing tools support these features, or can be hacked to support these features?
• And how can we put the Better Backchannel into operation?

In the ideal world, we answer these questions in the session and actually build the thing on-the-spot. That’s not going to happen, of course (the building, that is), but we may end up with a blueprint that some sort of future One Week | One Tool team might act on. And in the meantime, we might learn something that will enrich our current use of backchannels.

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screen shot from the presentation

Several weeks ago, McMaster University Librarian Jeff Trzeciak caused a disturbance in the force by some of his comments during a presentation at Penn State University. There was an fervent response across the academic and library-focused blogosphere, and the discussions spiraling out from this incident are still being actively pursued.

The point of contention that has been taken up, especially in the library community, comes from one slide in his presentation that states – “New Hires in the library will be unlikely to be librarians, likely to come out of IT, likely to hold PhD’s and be shared with other units,” among other things. Approaching this from the perspective of digital humanities, lauding the multi-skilled, scholar-technologist in an alt-ac professional track, this seems to be far from inflammatory. In fact, this seems like something the DH community could really get behind with a resounding “we’ve been saying/doing this for years.”

Aside from the many productive (and many other unproductive) responses to his claim, Mr. Trzeciak responded in a blog post of his own, and offered context with an additional point that deserves further exploration. He states,

One of the big issues not addressed directly in the video but was raised earlier in the day was the need to transform library science education. My comments in the video are directed at what I perceive to be a need to change how we train librarians. The world has changed dramatically and will continue to change even more dramatically. Library science education must keep pace.

Again, reading this from a DH point of view, there might be a sense of agreement that LIS education and other related fields need generous adaptation to accurately prepare information professionals for the next library.

In light of all this, I propose a Readathon session to try to unpack some of the major issues surrounding this talk, and the subsequent firestorm of responses to it. How and where does the DH community fit in here? Is the future of (academic) librarianship tied directly to digital humanities-based skills? What is the relationship between (academic) libraries and digital humanities? What of hiring practices in public and special libraries? How must library school be hacked to account for the rapid evolution of a profession that seems to be always playing catchup?

John Dupuis has compiled a comprehensive reading list on “McMastergate” including the public Google Doc I started to encourage and open discussion.

UPDATE: Almost immediately after I published this, Library Journal published this piece, a follow-up to a recent symposium they sponsored on The Future of Academic Librarianship. My response to this piece is here.

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Teacher-scholars unite! I’ve been testing some possible applications of Omeka archives and Zotero as collaborative tools organizing the development of literary research methodologies classes, and I’d like to take the wonderful opportunity of THATcamp to begin developing the structure and content of project I see as The Next Step. I’d like your help to discuss, plan, and/or block out a template for a full-class, full-term student project that works toward researching, annotating, and encoding a small number (perhaps just one per term?) of thematically-selected texts in our shamefully neglected special collections room. Ideally, this project would therefore include study of the texts themselves, research about their material and digital existences (using the ESTC, Google Books, and something like Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker)  a basic practical/theoretical framework for DH, collaboratively writing a useful and accessible overview and producing an XML version of the text. Each term or year, students and faculty would work together to select, create, and grow the entries according to a broader thematic logic that can expand over time, based on the strengths of the collections. I’d like to use this template as a basis for a grant application that would allow the project to grow and, ultimately, link faculty, students, and resources at area institutions.

I think this would be a viable model for an advanced undergraduate seminar, and it has the benefit of drawing together a variety of practical and theoretical facets of the digital humanities. Some questions to consider include how we can best design the arc of the class? What specific parts of the project would have as their goal which practical or conceptual outcomes? What are the technological hurdles to be 1.) aware of, 2.) avoided, or 3.) embraced? What should the Omeka site look like/allow, in order to help the project grow over time? How might faculty help students approach the text encoding portion of the project? What are the most useful introductory text-based sources providing a theoretical framework for such a practical project? And what might steps after The Next Step look like?

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I read with interest James Neal’s post entitled “An honest and open discussion regarding diversity in the digital humanities?” I believe that discussion would be a welcome addition to the unconference schedule. Along these lines, I’d like to help organize a session about disability and accessibility, either as part of James’ session or in addition to it. Having talked about this topic with many people in the DH community over the last couple of years, I’m confident that we can start making some easy-to-use tools that will improve accessibility for endusers and simplify for creators the task(s) of making accessible resources.

Furthermore, my collaborators and I are currently gathering information about issues of disability, accessibility, and digital humanities resources. As part of that effort, we invite you to complete this survey. (It should take less than 5 minutes.) We will use the information we gather to inform our future project plans, and I can also share the results at the upcoming THATCamp. As a survey participant you may remain anonymous, or you may share your name, affiliation, and contact information at the bottom of the form.

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Don’t talk to me about citations, what I love about Zotero is that I can write a translator that will extract useful structured data (and perhaps images or snapshots) from any old collection database and add it to my own research library. Match that EndNote! It’s Zotero’s capacity as a research manager that really excites me.

A few years ago I wrote a Zotero translator for the National Archives of Australia’s RecordSearch database. It’s been through several versions and can now do some pretty neat stuff. For example, using it and the Zotero add-on for Omeka, I was quickly able to create this mini-exhibition of some of my favourite letters in the Archives. With the arrival of the web API I can imagine even more exciting possibilities — NAA files have unique barcodes, so… barcodes, smart phones, metadata, digital images, Zotero, join the dots!

More generally, writing the translator really set me on a different path because it got me thinking about new ways of extracting, sharing and re-using collection data. With the web API and translators for archives and museums databases, for example, Zotero could become a platform for ‘routine’ crowdsourcing. Enriched metadata created and shared by researchers as part of their own projects could be harvested back into descriptive systems. Users of archives could create their own parallel finding aids alongside the institutional systems.

But there are some problems. The rigidity of the item types system is frustrating, and there really needs to be some way of creating semantic relations both between Zotero items and between an item and some external entity (it’s been talked about for a while).

I’d like a discussion about the future of Zotero that didn’t get too hung up on citations. A discussion that explores Zotero’s capacity to share, not just references, but research, that sketches some of the apps we might build and the collaborations we might create.

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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?

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THATCamp CHNM at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is exactly three weeks away! We’ve got 154 people attending, so this should be one of our liveliest camps yet. Here’s some requests, plus more information below:

• We’re looking for volunteers to teach a couple more workshops — write info@thatcamp.org if you’d be willing to teach something.
• We’re ordering t-shirts on May 17: please log in to your profile at chnm2011.thatcamp.org/wp-login.php and indicate your t-shirt size (now with women’s t-shirts, hooray!)
• If you haven’t yet reserved a hotel room, be advised that the Mason Inn is now full. We’ve obtained a block of rooms at the Residence Inn Marriott for a reduced rate of $85 (which includes breakfast and Internet). Call 1-800-331-3131 before May 31 and mention THATCamp to get the conference rate. It’s a little further away from campus, but is right on a CUE bus line, and we’ll also be using Twitter and the blog to arrange carpools.
• Finally, it’s time to start proposing and discussing sessions! See thatcamp.org/proposals for advice on unconference session proposals. Log in at chnm2011.thatcamp.org/wp-login.php and go to Post –> Add new to post your session proposal to the blog, and come back often to read and comment on others’ proposals. On Saturday morning we’ll all work together to create the schedule from these and other suggestions.

What to bring, what to wear

Bring a laptop, tablet computer, and/or a smartphone. Dress is very casual, so t-shirts and flipflops are fine.

Workshops

Friday, June 3rd will be devoted to tech training workshops in a series we call “BootCamp.” Be sure to visit chnm2011.thatcamp.org/bootcamp to see prerequisites for and descriptions of the workshops. Note especially that we’ve added a workshop to the schedule: Trevor Owens will teach “Intro to ReCollection,” a Linked Open Data platform for creating beautiful and informative visualizations from digital collections.

Schedule and social activities

We’ll begin on Friday, June 3rd, with breakfast and registration from 8:30am to 9:00am. We’ll also provide lunch that day, and while you eat, you can watch us record an episode of the Digital Campus. Workshops will run till 5:30pm. For those who are interested, we’re arranging a meetup on Friday at 6:00pm at The Auld Shebeen, an Irish pub in downtown Fairfax; the bar of the Mason Inn is also a good place to meet up. On Saturday, June 4th, we’ll again have breakfast & registration from 8:30 to 9:00, and we’ll again provide lunch, ending by 5:30pm in time for drinks and dinner at the Mason Inn or wherever you choose. Sunday, June 5th will also begin with breakfast at 8:30, but we’ll wrap up in time for lunch (on your own this time) to allow campers to catch their flights home. Sunday at 1pm we’re also having a THATCAMP BAKEOFF; bring baked goods of any kind, and our esteemed panel of judges (yet to be determined) will determine a winner, who will receive free copies of the TechSmith software Camtasia Studio and SnagIt.

More questions? Write info@thatcamp.org. Don’t forget to follow the #thatcamp hashtag on Twitter, too.

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All year has been THATCamp time, seems like, but we’re now talking about that THATCamp, which will take place

June 3-5, 2011
Center for History and New Media, Fairfax, VA

We’ve instituted some changes this year:

• THATCamp will be larger: we’re planning on having about 125 people who do all kinds of work related to the humanities and technology;
• THATCamp will be truly open to all: instead of having an application process, we’ll be accepting all registrations up to 125 people until April 22;
• THATCamp will have a BootCamp: the unconference will happen as usual on the weekend over a day and a half, but the Friday beforehand will be devoted to a series of workshops dedicated to improving technical skills; and
• THATCamp is planning on at least two virtual sessions in which we get to talk to campers at THATCamp Liberal Arts Colleges and to Jon Voss about the outcome of his Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit.

Needless to say, we’re psyched. See you there.