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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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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]