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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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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.