Ashley

At THATCamp I gave out 7 sets of handmade cards. Haven’t gotten feedback yet. Look below and you’ll see that the blog is CC BY, and that’s my approach on the game, too. Make your own deck, or several, play with friends, mess around, make it commercially. As long as I’m credited, I’m happy.

Here is a shared Google Docs THATCamp collection

For those who are making cards and see the end of blank cards, I ran out of cards (long story short: I thought I had put another pack of blank index cards in my luggage). I’ll go out and get more tonight for blanks. And you can use blank pieces of paper of the approximately-right size.

Google doc from the session

bit.ly/jTLlDs

Too often “diversity” in the context of higher education is limited to conversations about race/ethnicity and gender and inclusion. You’ll regularly find organizations that proclaim their “diversity” because they have people of all shapes and sizes… who share pretty much the same politics and worldview. But is that true “diversity”?

This is something that has been part of an ongoing conversation on my campus (Baruch College), which has regularly been proclaimed “the most diverse college in the United States.” But what does that really, truly mean, and how does the discomfort it can provoke add value to the academy? Could it suggest an investigation that needs to go beyond efforts towards inclusion and really force us all to regularize the critical examination of our own wide-ranging prejudices?

Just a half-baked thought…

The interesting question to me is how much text mining let’s us find microtrending we might otherwise miss within boilerplate.

1) This is the other gradgrind game. I am creating the starter sets this morning (Saturday). Please see me to grab one!

2) Additional challenge: Always have in your hand at least one more card in the Passion/Life/Sanity categories than Status/Achievement categories. (A graduating hand has, at minimum, 7 Status and Achievement cards and 8 Passion, Life, and Sanity cards, if you include the starter set.)

I’m also interested in thinking broadly about building a framework for easy geolocative data. How can we make it easy for people with geolocative stuff to get it onto the web or into an app that can be used in a broad strokes for exhibits / haunts / or anything like that?

And now that I’m writing for Nieman Lab, which takes digital journalism as its main topic, I’m continually amazed at how many smart ideas you can borrow from all the different corners of journalism — new media journalism, data-driven journalism, even sports and technology coverage.

They all have to build tools on the fly. What’s more, journalists always think about what they’re building in terms of what they’re presenting. And with all the talk about digital building versus digital presentation in digital humanities, it’s useful to have something to point to where that dichotomy really just isn’t one.

I also vote for a DH registry. Would be great for students just hearing about this and wanting to get involved.

In other words, a THATCamp memory bank.

…Seriously, though, and in the spirit of the Digital History of the Digital Humanities concept, what about an open repository for A/V?

Encourage as many people as possible to record things on their cameras, camcorders, phones, and then have a central hosting cite where people can upload and download files as they like. I’d definitely use it, if it got a good amount of video on it.

A year from now, we could host the first THATCamp Prime Film Festival.

(Not to mention, think about the coolness of a repository of shared video footage that also hosted people’s edited films made from it– raw material and constructed memory together… a great way to have an in-depth history.)

As I mentioned in the blog post I linked to in the above post, I went to an SI round table on interdepartmental cooperation and new media. When a straw poll was taken of the room– and keep in mind that these are the people interested enough in interdepartmental cooperation and new media projects to attend a session on it– almost none said that they allowed their curators– their primary content creators– access to the CMS’s for online exhibits.

Is it any wonder that curators, more than most other groups, seem to fear crowdsourcing and folksonomy and other techniques that harness the wisdom of their user/visitors?

People know they need to have a social media and online presence. They know they want to have mobile apps. But many of the people whose hands are really at the rudders in cultural institutions– the senior administrators and the like, often only understand that they need to do so because it’s “the new thing.” Or because it represents new potential revenue streams.

I’m not trying to issue a manifesto against departments. But I do wonder, seeing as departmental siloing is a problem that many people have discussed with me at many institutions, if we might not want to gauge whether or not this commitment to new media is lip service or real… and see if we might use that as an opportunity to hack the org chart a bit.

What if junior staff were required to be interdepartmental, sharing time between, say, education and web content development? Or curation and collections management?

That’s a more radical thought, but yes– we need to find ways to keep departmental siloing from getting in the way of our institutions’ missions, and their ability to communicate with the outside world.

(I’m kind of sad that you edited out the strikethroughs, though, I kind of liked the feeling that you were writing all institutional names under erasure…)

And I think Amanda’s right, too–there are benefits to students beyond teaching research skills in getting them to engage with questions of digital literacy and advocacy. All research is moving towards use of the digital, and that’s got to be something that undergraduates learn how to navigate.

It’s not enough for the marketing team to do all the Facebook and Twitter updates. In my opinion and experience, museumgoers want to engage with content and content producers, but it can be hard to get those content producers to participate in online communities and related efforts. I think we’ll see a shift as younger curators, museum educators, etc., come up–but until then, what can the institution itself (or a group of committed people within it) do to make robust social media a reality?

I’m all for talking more about strategery in that regard.

I’ve struggled with the questions you ask about the role of undergraduates in research as well, and I’ve tried a variety of levels of projects with my own students. [See the syllabi and project links at dh2010.umwblogs.org and digitalhistory.umwblogs.org.]

There’s clearly a great deal of interest at this year’s THATCamp for a conversation along these lines.

I guess I’d also say that teaching people how to do research in the digital age IS digital humanities — the way we taught the class, it was very much informed by a history of how online research got to be the way it is, the history, the economics, the privacy issues, all that.

And I don’t think departments will ever go away. It might be, as Trevor says, more about acting as if there are no departments.

imho the is how to leverage the networks we are creating to make cool things happen in our own local contexts. That means saying look the Chronicle of higher edu says this is good, when you are really talking about someone from @profhacker or similarly leveraging someone you know at an institution with a fancy name to get the thing you want to do done, or into the process of being done.

I think part of this is being able to talk about things we love, things that are public services, things that we want to do to change the world as *cringe* business cases.

We can talk about what a cultural institution would look like without departments. Or, we could well talk about what it would mean if we all just started acting like our cultural institutions had no departments.

Public media organizations around the country are exploring the very types of visualization projects you describe.

But I also feel the need to point out that rubrics of “literacy” tend to be very culturally normative, and have the danger of being used to exclude certain groups.

Not that we shouldn’t discuss what our expectations should be, what we should want to get out of students, etc. But how can we formulate rubrics of computer literacy in a way that comes closer to teaching methods of critical engagement, maybe, than reinforcing the privilege of advantaged students?

(This is sort of a side-issue to the main conversation, of course, but always something worth keeping in mind when we make prescriptive standards… Who are we putting at a disadvantage? What privileges are we undergirding? Etc…)

As Miriam puts it, alt-ac people are hired to do hybrid work, and the sponsoring organization is normally not an academic department. What we could add to the conversation, then, is to make it clear to the parties involved (the sponsoring organization and the alt-ac person) what each might expect from the relationship. For example, a person who has been a scholar might reasonably expect that she would have some professional support for attending conferences that she chose for herself. The sponsoring organization might reasonably expect that the alt-ac person work from 8:30-5:00pm every day, 12 months a year. But the other party might not know about the other’s expectation in either case. If we prepare a list of things that recent scholars and that organizations like libraries, NGOs, foundations, and the like expect, it could help people better define the terms as they are beginning their work.

The score: Miriam 89 – Brian 3.

HASTAC Scholars did a online forum on Critical Code Studies back in January. I hosted the Code Critique spin off. There were some great conversations in the main thread (and some cool code bits in the Critique section.

www.hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/critical-code-studies

www.hastac.org/forums/hastac-scholars-discussions/code-critiques

I’d be particularly excited to see a primer for employers about navigating the institutional barriers which define positions as “staff” or “faculty” with separate hiring processes. In many universities, the “staff” job classification itself stands in for “can’t be a PI on grants, can’t apply for university travel funding or research leave, must list oneself as ‘independent scholar’.” One element of this document, I’d hope, would explais to employers (hiring managers and their superiors, up to the dean and provost level) not only the practical details of how to support alt-ac employees, but why to do so when they’ve been getting by for years without giving such support to (e.g.) Ph.D. librarians.

Another possible element of this document might be about how staff-classified hiring managers can build bridges to department chairs before the job description is written, so that there’s already a mechanism in place for generating a research-faculty appointment when someone’s hired.