www.sociologyfornerds.com/2012/06/call-to-sociology-teachers-people-learn.html

I hope you can figure out how to get through the problem of people not turning in their work until the last minute.

paxsims.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/some-saturday-afternoon-thoughts-on-technology-enhanced-role-play/

And there was a piece in the Gazette about it recently: www.gazette.net/article/20120613/NEWS/706139579/1042/rockville-private-school-gives-the-ipad-a-classroom-trial&template=gazette

We can talk about this too, but I wanted to be sure I shared this with you before I forgot again!

I’m probably going to pitch one attached to JCDL2013.

There were a few people in the room who are part of both camps. But not many.

I might add that Chad Rutkowski is supposed to be in attendance, and he’s one of the folks behind “Ulysses Seen,” the graphic novel adaptation of Ulysses.

Some more examples to throw into the ring:
HTML5, doing crazy things with how we move through “pages” and arrange information: eephusleague.com/magazine/

E-lit, with its history of making web design choices that emphasize affect and narrative (sometimes at the cost of credibility and legibility, but sometimes at the gain of powerful emotional impact)

Dynamic webcomics such as Homestuck (mspaintadventures.com/), which does a bunch of non-traditionally-comic stuff such as transmedia (e.g. music albums, analog book meta-remediations of the born-digital comic) and interactive gameplay. A very slow start reading-wise, but it does really pay off (it’s even on my Ph.D. exams list!)

If we did end up talking about the practical side of making “weird monographs” like the ones people are suggesting, I’d be interested in creating a list of actual small tools people would like to see–things you could install on WordPress, Omeka, or Drupal that would make your next piece closer to the tools it sounds like this session would imagine. I’ve been thinking about developing plugins like this for my dissertation, and I’d love to help other people realize some of their publication needs.

In my case, having each student responsible for blogging about one of the tools and one of the readings over the course of the semester ended up leading to a nice rhythm. That, along with having everyone post one comment on any of the 4-5 posts that came up a week seemed to go well.

Along with this, I have enjoyed assigning previous student’s blog posts to future students which might be fun to throw in the mix for conversation.

“Aliens to Armoires: Philosophical Carpentry”
www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/2012/05/29/aliens-to-armoires-philosophical-carpentry/

One of my favorite exercises when starting a workshop about how to use digitized materials in teaching or research is to hand out copies of this or that library item, whatever content it is that is going to start our discussion, and then ask the group to describe what we’re looking at. Inevitably it’s a business card from 1850 or a 1930s photo which they figure out based on the clothing–but, inevitably, no one in the group describes the thing in her hand as an 8 1/2 x 11 inch piece of 20 lb white paper with an image printed on it. As a culture, we just skip that mediation step. So, it makes a great opening to stop and talk about the actual artifact–a piece of paper, a computer screen, whatever the thing in the room with us actually is–before we get to its representational content that’s our actual interest.

For those who haven’t seen it, take a look at Trevor’s recent post on the Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation Blog: “All Digital Objects are Born Digital Objects” at blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/05/all-digital-objects-are-born-digital-objects/. As I mentioned to Trevor when I read it, In libraries and museums I’d love to see us cataloging the surrogates we create–photograph, microfiche, digital scan, whatever–as if they are objects in their own right. By not doing that we perpetuate the idea that mediation is invisible and/or transparent and/or inconsequential when we all know much better the moment we stop to think about it. For scholarly DH projects I’d hope it was a given that we’d factor in the mediation, but sometimes its even less present than it was on a repository site.

So yes, there’s an important conversation to have here re. mediation, and thanks to Trevor for initiating it. I guess, for me, all culture and all cultural artifacts are mediated, whether or not they’re digital, so I just want to make sure we learn from the accumulated wisdom about non-digital objects as well.

Susan
@footnotesrising

One last thing that comes to mind, and is evident in our faculty, is that material culture crosses over from humanities into social and even natural sciences (esp. anthropology and archaeology), so we should consider the breadth of the impact of those disciplines when considering objects as well.

I am very interested in talking with you about your Asia-related public scholars proposal. By way of background, I am working on a digital project involving an eleventh century Japanese text (Buddhist didactic tales) that will include text encoding and GIS elements, amongst others. Though there are some in Asia-related disciplines that are interested in digital humanities — and we can compare notes on what currently exists out there and who is or might be interested in this — my very strong sense is that digital humanities, at least in North American colleges and universities, is mostly focused on American and European data sets. I’d very much like this to change. So, I’ll leave it at that for now and will certainly attend your session if it flies. I am, by the way, also interested in contemporary East Asia.

Best,

Bill

To answer Roger’s question, one of the ways I developed an audience for my students’ blog posts last year was to tweet about those that I was reading. Since the course was an Intro to DH, it turned out a number of people in my Twitter network were interested to read my students’ work. And I went out of my way to invite those people whose essays we were reading to come and leave comments.

I think cross-campus commenting is an interesting idea, but I wonder how easy it would be to leave germane comments if the students weren’t sharing reading. It would be hard enough to be really engaged without the context of the classroom, but without sharing readings, I think it would be almost impossible.

Another way to plug in to an audience would be to try to get students’ parents/families involved in reading their work. But that wouldn’t spread across the class very well.

Hmm…let’s knock our heads on this for a while.

I’d certainly be interested in talking through undergraduate digital humanities courses/projects.

If that sounds scary, it’s worth remembering that it’s us, the scholars, who decide what forms of review we’ll accept as binding. And it need not always remain the university press published monograph.

Partially, but I was thinking more along the lines of when people new to DH or THATCamp hear things over and over again that the veterans know well, but aren’t obvious to newcomers, like any number of acronyms or places/centers. I want people to be able to tweet, e.g., “What is this ‘Myth’ place that people keep talking about? #THATCamp #jargon”, and have people reply with twitter-sized answers. Kind of like a short, on-demand, tweeted footnote to the current conversation.

Perhaps what you’re seeing here, Patrick, is a need for a community resource, along the lines of Lisa Spiro’s / Project Bamboo’s DiRT? I know that my colleague Roger Whitson has been trying to get his feet wet with topic modeling recently, but has had trouble finding even a good, basic definition that he could use in a workshop.

I think this is a great idea for a session. Unfortunately I’m not going to make it to THATCamp this year, but I’ll be following along from a distance, so be sure to tweet any links to session docs or the like. One other project that is in the process of developing mechanisms for Open Peer Review and that has some experience in this area is the History Working Papers Project (www.historyworkingpapers.org/) that’s being led by Tim Hitchcock (@timhitchcock) and Jason Kelley (@Jason_M_Kelly).