Some results from the Bloomsday hack session, where we discussed small digital Joycean projects we might take on that day and continue working on over the following weeks:

We decided to create a dataset that could be used in Gephi to make something both informative and pretty: a log of the social interactions among characters that could be turned into a social network visualization. Chad Rutkowski read through the Wandering Rocks episode and logged a list of character interactions, which I then turned into a dataset and manipulated in Gephi to produce (click image for larger version):

Character nodes are weighted by the number of edges touching them (i.e. by how many interactions with other people a given character has), so unsurprisingly for anyone who’s read Ulysses, Father Conmee appears as one of the most connected characters in the episode.

Our next step will be to answer some questions about types of character interactions and include these answers in our dataset:

• Do we want to log the direction of an interaction to cover cases where, for example, and conversation is one-sided? (Yes, but this means creating two edges for every dialogue: Bloom > Molly as well as Molly > Bloom).
• What counts as an interaction? (Telegrams, letters, overheard shouts in the street?)
• How do we handle time? (Is Bloom > Molly recorded only one time in our Ulysses datatset, or every time they interact? If the latter, how do we decide when an interaction counts as ended?) If we can find a satisfactory and non-insanity causing way of coding this, we could create a time-lapse visualization of interactions in the novel, perhaps with some sort of cumulative or heatmapping feature.
• How to handle different types of interactions? We discussed assigning different numbered weights to interaction edges so that its easy to see the degree of interaction taking place (was a character imagining a conversation with Bloom, or actually talking to him?), but there’s some difficulty in deciding what types of interaction are deeper than others in order to place these on a spectrum and make visual apprehension easier.

Ben Schmidt also did some neat and quick work with the Circe episode, running a script to gather character names by grabbing the all-caps words in that section and mapping interactions stepwise by linking the names that appears next after a given character in the text.

We’ll continue working on this project as we have time, so if you’re interested in helping out, send us a tweet! The work involved is pretty easy: identifying a section of the novel you wish to attack, then making a list of the characters who interact and ID’ing the type of interaction according to a scheme we’re using.

Cross-posted from LiteratureGeek.com.

I had the good fortune to attend THATCamp CHNM last week and it was awesome!!!

After a day long English language nerd field trip, I arrived at THATCamp CHNM. The workshops offered were wonderful and I’m super confident about my Omeka and newly acquired Viewshare skills.

More…

I thoroughly enjoyed my first THATCamp. I was a bit nervous, since I am from the LIS rather than the AH community, I do not have mad coding skills, and I assumed I would be on the older side. Well, I would now recommend a THATCamp to anyone. I felt like I was part of a community that had a common interest in learning and sharing. Even the workshops were not “teacher to student”, but peer to peer. There was no pressure at THATCamp to be an expert, all contributions were valued and respected, and you could just observe if you wanted to, but there was no barrier to participation either. At other conferences the formal sessions are usually sparsely attended because the real networking is happening in the hallways and bars, whereas at THATCamp the hallways were deserted during sessions, and the session rooms were buzzing. I participated in conversations about linked data, digital humanities project support, the role of libraries, and comics (about which I knew nothing). I took workshops on WordPress plugins, hybrid mobile design, and ViewShare. I ate far too many of the delectable Panera pastries I have been deliberately avoiding at home. I played a decoding game with the mysterious AgentQueue. I walked away with new friends, some great teaching ides for my digital libraries class, a bunch of new people to follow on Twitter, a t-shirt, many session Google Docs for further exploration, and a determination to turn my friends on to THATCamp New England and CHNM next year. Thanks to all the hard working folk who put this together, and to the sponsors.

Some workshop instructors have provided slides or notes from their sessions, and these have been posted on the workshops page under “Resources” for each workshop.

x-post Knitting Clio

Hi folks,

I’m back from a busy four days at THATCamp CHNM (aka THATCamp Prime). I’ll start by discussing the fascinating presentation by Pamela Wright, Chief Digital Access Strategist at the National Archives and Records Administration about the Citizen Archivist Dashboard, online projects created with the recently-released 1940 census data, and other exciting digital projects from “our nation’s attic.” I thought Sharon Leon‘s choice to use an interview format was excellent and made for a much more dynamic and engaging forum than a straight-up presentation. The Citizen Archivist Dashboard grew out of the Open Government Platform initiated by President Obama. The goal of Citizen Archivist is to make NARA’s documents more accessible while also serving as a forum for engaging the public in the intellectual work that makes accessibility happen. Pam realized that simply opening the archive’s data to the public without any guidelines would be like dumping out a load of raw cake batter: it might be yummy for the most dedicated enthusiasts (e.g. “Lincoln Lady”) but most people would like to have a “cupcake” — i.e. a specific task or subject on which to work (e.g. the Titanic is the featured “cupcake” right now).

So far, Citizen Archivist has been wildly popular: within two weeks of going live, the archive received 1,000 page transcriptions (by contrast it took Sharon several years to reach the same number of transcribed pages for the Papers of the War Department). The 1940 census received 20 million hits the morning it went live.  Pam hoped that one of the hackers at THATCamp or elsewhere would design a “pocket archivist” app that would allow users to upload images while they are doing research at NARA. She also asked for suggestions for other topics and projects to add to the initiative.

Another way that NARA engaged the public was in the redesign of its website. They received 4 choices from the designer and then let the public vote on which one they liked best. Voters overwhelmingly chose the simplest design (which many at NARA found too minimalist). This is something to keep in mind as my colleagues and I set out to redesign our department website.  Perhaps we should survey our students to see what they want from a website?

Please fill out at least the two required fields (which THATCamp you went to and how it was) in the THATCamp evaluation. Thanks for coming, and hope to see you next year, or at another THATCamp near you.

If there are notes from your session living in something like Google Docs, please post the link to it here in the comments. To ensure its preservation, you can also share it with info@thatcamp.org, add it to the the THATCamp Zotero bibliography. Thanks!

Special thanks to Aram Zucker-Scharff for setting up the overarching THATCamp Google Docs folder. I definitely need to make sure that it gets used more.

UPDATE: If you have trouble finding the Google Docs, go to docs.google.com/file/d/0B5gCrWfqDPTcaHZoY3dpek5fME0/edit?pli=1 where you can download (but not edit online) all the session notes from THATCamp CHNM 2012.

JPG2000 holds the promise of lower storage costs for large collections of scanned documents. It can also minimize the bandwidth requirements for display the image details.

One limitation is that most web browsers do not support this format and thus would require a viewer.  Omeka does a good job of creating thumbnails from JPG2000 images, but you would still want to view the image at the full resolution.

Any suggestions on a good JPG2000 viewer / plugin that is able to handle multiple pages documents.

There has been some move in research to not just publish papers with the final results but to also release the raw data sets and even software for other researchers to verify the results and further discovery. There are even some futuristic claims that the data sets will be viewed as the ultimate results of research and the actual paper will be a secondary product.

Like to discuss what peoples experiences have been with Institutional Repositories. Has it been to showcase work, preserve for the future or to play an active role in furthering discovery?

If you have created or maintained an IR, what issues did you face, how well accept was the IR by the researchers. Does data set sharing play a role.

So my proposal is late-breaking, but here ’tis: I’m currently moving to a new institution where I will help start a new DH center. I’d like to think collaboratively—well, about how that happens. I want to get at this question, however, not by talking about getting grants or picking a pithy acronym for the center’s name. Instead, I’d like to jump off Stephen Ramsay’s recent post, Centers are People, and think about how one begins building the kinds of communities where “a bunch of people…[are] committed to the bold and revolutionary project of talking to one another about their common interests.” I’d especially like to think about how to draw in those people on campus who are interested in DH but don’t yet know it: that history professor with a personal archive she’d love to make public, that librarian crafting the library’s ebook strategy, or that computer science undergrad with an odd side interest in Renaissance poetry. Topics might include:

1.) organizing and effectively promoting DH events to the wider college or university
2.) creating and fostering hacker-friendly spaces on campus
3.) building on-campus partnerships between departments, libraries, &c. &c.
4.) seeding DH incursions into the curriculum

This topic may well tie into hmprescott’s “More Disruptive Pedagogy: Thoughts on Teaching an Un-course” proposal or Kimon Keramidas’s “Of courses, curriculum, networks, and unconferences”.

I was struck by this terrific post on TEI by Lee Bessette at Inside Higher Ed:

Epiphany: TEI is Scholarship
www.insidehighered.com/blogs/college-ready-writing/epiphany-tei-scholarship

and especially her realization that “The text that the person on the other side of the computer screen eventually will read and interact with will be entirely mediated by the decisions I make as an encoder.”

I’ve been interested by this aspect of markup for a long time–SGML, XML, TEI, whatever you like–but hear less and less discussion of it, or of any newly creative uses of markup to explore the texture of textual interpretation. (There is no category for “markup” or “TEI” in this blog.) Instead, it seems like people (especially those of us at THATCamp as opposed to those attending Digital Humanities 2012 in Germany; or maybe its just the DH folks I follow on Twitter) find TEI to be too complicated, too rigid, too much work, too concerned with standards, etc. etc. Or maybe it’s just pro forma now, a complicated but routinized task associated with putting up full-text primary document collections that usually have a literary focus?

Disruption seems to be one emerging theme of the conference. So, since I still care about markup, and am about to ramp up work again on an interpretive markup project (see http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-programme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-692.html ). I wonder if anyone else is interested in talking about thinking about markup (TEI or otherwise) as blatant interpretation, and what we could do with that? Following from Mills Kelly I’m thinking TEI as obsfuscation, TEI rigged with some sort of randomness generator, TEI as performance art… or even, hey, just the XSLT, in psychedelic colors and comic sans font?

Susan
@footnotesrising

I propose a session to talk about teaching with iPads, or any other flavor of tablet. (Android, Kindle, etc. All are welcome!)

If you’re using tablets as a teaching tool, come talk about what has worked (and what hasn’t). What are your favorite apps to use in class, and why are they worth my money? How do you use tablets to enable students to collaborate on projects and assignments? We can talk methods and strategies and, of course, do some show and tell.

My not-so-secret motivation: my school recently purchased several classrooms sets of iPads, so I’ll be working with teachers to integrate them into lessons and I’d love to explore ways to get beyond using them as a mobile Google search device.

The idea for this session stems from my experiences and challenges teaching a graduate public history course on the theory and practice of digital history.  The first challenge I face has to do with coverage: what are the most important things that students should know to get a reasonable introduction to the field?  The second challenge regards levels of experience: some students have little or no experience with anything beyond word processing and using an online catalog; others are far more advanced in their skill level (the last time I taught the course I had a student with an undergraduate degree in computer science. Talk about a humbling experience). The third challenge is keeping up with the field and making sure that the course stays fresh and up to date.

So, what I’d like to discuss is — would the un-conference model, in which students decide on at least some of the themes and topics of the course, work for a graduate level course?

Technology is democracy. It can give everyone a voice or a vote. Sometimes this democracy works out well (kickstarter, etc). Sometimes not so much (@sweden, made some news recently). The Walter Art Musem in Baltimore tried crowdsourcing an exhibition that was pretty well received, but the Pittsburgh Symphony’s attempt to find a member on YouTube was nixed.

I am interested in a few questions relating to the democratizing force of technology in museums. First, should curators give up their authority, or have it take a lesser role in concert with visitor knowledge (I believe one of Mills Kelly’s students found an error in the Star Spangled Banner exhibit)? Is curatorial authority still needed? Secondly, is there a limit to the voice of the public? Should comments be moderated in historically sensitive areas (slavery, World War II, etc.). Do comments need to turn into conversation to be truly useful?And finally, what do you do if no one really cares? In a 2004 visitor survey conducted by the Smithsonian, the average age of the visitors was 37 years, only 30% of visitors were younger than 27. The museums subreddit has 25 subscribers with seven posts in two years. Are museums still culturally relevant, and will they be in 20 years?

We are being increasingly encouraged to “gamify” the classroom. Educators such as Cathy N. Davidson (Now You See It) (@cathyndavidson) and Jane McGonigal (Reality is Broken) have suggested that games can help engage students in deeper ways than traditional learning methods.

I’d like to discuss how we can best implement Role Playing Games, or RPGs, in higher education. RPGs are well suited to the classroom because of their structure, which encourages students to identify with their characters and game objectives. Some excellent pedagogical examples include Reacting to the Past at Barnard, a series of elaborate historical games where students roleplay real historical characters with the possibility of changing historical events through mastery of historical and cultural knowledge (for more information, see my blog post here), and the Practomime project, where Latin students have to thoroughly assimilate into the ancient Roman world to save the world.

The following questions may be helpful in guiding discussion: how we can use digital tools to enhance role playing learning efforts (course websites, wikis as “codexes”, social media for team building/knowledge sharing)? Further, how, and should, these role-playing become digital in form? Most successful classroom RPGs have been “fleshspace” based, where gameplayers meet in person. How can we use the digital to enhance the “fleshspace” experience, and to augment or transform it?

@plbogen and @m_steph_m and I have been tweeting about learning command line stuff. We would like to have a shell tutorial! I asked for links to help, and here’s what I got:

• bit.ly/8MydsF: http://linuxcommand.org
• bit.ly/k0IlR: FREEENGINEER.ORG
• bit.ly/MEKoYD: Bash Guide for Beginners
• bit.ly/yU4AKH: The Command Line Crash Course

Who can GIVE a shell tutorial?

Who wants to TAKE a shell tutorial?

N.B. If no one can (or is willing to) give a shell tutorial, I would be happy to have a working session choosing one of the docs linked above and working our way through it as a collaborative group of beginners!

Comments?

I would like to have a session to discuss building a better workflow for Twitter archiving. What tools do we need, and what do we need to create in order to make this easier? Can we build something this weekend?

The MLA has released a github repository analyzing tweets from MLA12 — are there ways that we can fork this repository for more general use? Is there potential to use github as a shared platform for creating a larger corpus of twitter archives? Related to these tools, what kind of loose coordination do we need? A lot of Twitter archiving already takes place and is decentralized, so what is a lightweight way to integrate some of these efforts?

But I am nevertheless using it to give you wi-fi logon instructions:

Network: Mason (not MASON-SECURE)

Open a browser and click Guest Access on the page that loads. Enter the username and password on the back of your badge. Make sure to keep the page open.

Other notes: the stickers we gave you are for voting on Saturday morning, so keep them around. For those of you who know what Dork Shorts are (I haven’t gotten around to explaining them yet, but they’re 2-minute lightning talks), we’re going to do them in the scheduling session on Saturday morning while the schedule gets made.

Following up on the proposal by William Deal and perhaps combinable with it. Stockton is considering setting up its own digital press/imprint.  I’m interested in brainstorming/hacking a set of features/services that scholars producing digital materials not directly connected to their home institutions ought to expect from the publishers of their digital work. In traditional print publications, scholars were rarely expected to have input on the production side, but born digital projects often must specify the form that the final project will take as part of the development process. If production/coding/design expertise must be built into the project team from the outset, does that imply that the publishing site must also be agreed upon before the work is started? Or is the role of digital publisher merely editing/peer review/quality control? Or even further, are we reaching a point where the coding/design of sites is becoming sufficiently standardized that a form of “production handoff” similar to print is coming soon? (Unlikely, I think) As part of this session, I would propose generating a census of effective digital scholarly publications with information on the “publishers” and when and how they became involved in the project. My suspicion is that they are overwhelming published at digital centers by people directly associated with those centers. If that is the case, will the expansion of digital publications come from an increase in the number of digital centers, an increase in the affiliation of outside scholars with current digital centers, or some other institutions assuming the role that digital centers currently handle?

What are the bars to comprehension of text?  Which can be surmounted?  Different question– which ought to be surmounted?

My partners and I have created an iPad app-based platform that we think gives readers a window in to daunting literary texts, presenting various supplements to their reading in a staged and staggered fashion that allows the reader to overcome personal bars to comprehension at their discretion, without the insistent and invasive attack on the text mounted by footnotes.  We create high quality graphic adaptations of the text (that is, we make comic books) layered with an easy to access reader’s guide that provides greater elucidation of the text in a conversational style that sounds like the smartest guy/gal in the bar.  The reader’s guide text is further hyperlinked out to various web resources for obtaining more information, at the reader’s discretion.  Layered beneath the reader’s guide is a discussion area where reader’s can ask specific questions, advance theories, and, of course, argue.

We have started with adaptations of three difficult literary works– James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and a mash up of the Iliad, combining Homer with Shakespeare and various pieces of archeological scholarship.  The platform was used in a classroom environment for the first time last month, but we have received a number of comments from users that makes us think our little experiment might be working.

I’d like to discuss ways that visuals and self-directed learning resources can be used as an aid to comprehension, and where the line gets crossed in which the resource replaces the thing it was supposed to be supplementing.

–Chad

It seems to me that most DH-ers are suspicious of — if not completely hostile to — traditional academic publishing structures and requirements. So am I. Unlike some of you, I no longer have to worry about postponing the real projects I want to do in favor of the monograph that will get me through the tenure and promotion process. But even this bastion of what counts for credible, peer-reviewed, and in other ways vetted scholarship is showing significant signs of decay. Given my position and interests, I think I have a responsibility to hasten the fall of the academic monograph — or at least promote alternatives that count for as much as a book in the T&P system. But how to do this? How can I convince my doubting colleagues that peer-review can be something other than two or three senior manuscript reviewers? Or that a well-written, well-argued, often read and cited blog posting has real impact outside of the closed world of peer-reviewed journals, and that reflection on such a post by others in one’s field has significant scholarly impact? Or that collaborative work is a good thing?

Anyway, if you’ve read this far, you know the drill. I am proposing a session — a workshop really — in which we brainstorm the many possible ways of publishing and peer-reviewing academic work that accounts for the digital, the blogged, the tweeted, the whatever-many-forms-that-scholarship-might-take. This has many resonances with the sessions already proposed that seek a common ground between journalism and academic writing. I assume, too, that there are many multiple viable models for writing and publishing and peer-review. The session I am proposing would consider as many of these as possible, and discuss what works, what doesn’t, and maybe stuff we haven’t even tried.

I’ve notice a disparaging trend at both the ACM/IEEE-CS JCDL conference and at THATCamps. Digital Libraries researchers from Computer Science have never heard of THATCamp and don’t really interact with the people who attend. Conversely people at THATCamp don’t tend to think of the ACM/IEEE-CS community when they think about what is going on in digital libraries, digital archives, and digital humanities.

In fact the 2012 JCDL conference just ended at GWU the day before THATCamp V started at GMU. Here were two groups of people with similar concerns, interests, and goals across town and unaware of each other.

This session is to discuss why there is fragmentation between the more LIS DL people at THATCamp/ALA/etc and the more CS DL at JCDL/TPDL/etc and try and discuss ways to bridge the gap and bring both groups closer together.

What is the experience of reading? How can we leverage DH-inflected pedagogy to help students situate their own processes of reading, writing, and learning? In such a tendrillate approach to textual analysis, what tools can help students navigate through a cycle of experience and reflection that underscores the materiality of reading experience?

In this session, my hope is that we can explore the intersection of learning, experience, and DH to begin to sketch what a digital environmental humanities pedagogy might look like.

I began building an assignment during DHSI that asks students to use close reading of a passage as an entry to larger analytical and written projects (zipped Prezi available here through the course’s webpage), but it’s just a first stab at a much larger issue–how can DH pedagogical approaches help us to ground student scholarship in first-hand experience with primary materials? Encoding text, annotating sentences, parsing paragraphs for word frequency–all of these are valuable approaches, which, if used carefully, can bring our students to textual analysis as a fundamental building block of humanities scholarship.

Attention to the labour of reading and the experience of the text can only enrich the connections scholars can make by looking at these narrower street views in the context of an ever-evolving map of the world.

So much emphasis in the Digital Humanities is on the written and the computational– it’s easy to forget that one of the major revolutions of the internet, especially once we got past dial-up, is the ease with which users are able to produce, manipulate, and share images.

For those of us who are deeply visual thinkers, however, this is a very important development.

I would like to propose a session discussing technologies of social image sharing like Tumblr and Pinterest. I think that tools like these have a lot of potential to draw in visual thinkers, encouraging them to learn, aggregate, and create in ways that our more textual social tools– blogs and Twitter, for example– might not.

I’d love to see people’s examples of Tumblr, Pinterest, and other similar tools in the classroom as part of a social pedagogical approach, as well as good examples of these tools being used for outreach and sharing by libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations.

There are, of course, deep and fundamental issues with these sites– they are not specifically designed for this context. There are issues with metadata, deepness of data, and attribution, among other things. I’d like to see a discussion of what a perfect image sharing site for these types of use-cases might look like: more sorting? More thought given to citation? Greater opportunities for discussion and description?

Is this a tool that digital humanists should be working on? Should we be building a better social image sharing tool? Can something like this be built off of any existing open frameworks? Is this something that educators and cultural institutions would embrace, or would they tend to stay with the less-than-perfect commercial vendors because that’s where the people are?

As I blogged a few months ago, it has become increasingly clear that digital humanities has a kindred spirit in digital journalism—perhaps a stronger potential relationship than humanities computing and computer science. We have discovered the same needs in terms of tools and infrastructure, and find ourselves engaging the public with similar genres of online writing and communication.

Just some of the products of digital journalism we could discuss or adopt at THATCamp: the 20 open source Knight Apps, which include DocumentCloud; what’s coming out of Mozilla OpenNews; and the developer challenges and tool reviews from Duke’s Reporters’ Lab.

Had a couple of thoughts for session ideas that will hopefully line up well with people’s interests:

First, I would like to talk to folks about how they are building digital work into pedagogy at a course level (I guess this kind of goes along with Mark’s post on blogging but encompasses more than just blogging) and also at a curricular level. I think we can all benefit from learning how to create assignments that fit the concepts, tools, and strategies of digital humanities into courses in a way that does not overwhelm students and professors but are also challenging and provoking.  I would also like to expand those ideas out of the classroom and talk about the development of digital methodologies within broader curriucula, which involves consensus and where real change occurs only after advocacy, collaboration, and sometimes compromise. I’d love to share our experiences at the BGC in both courses and curricula, where we have made big steps relatively quickly due to a number of factors including size, administrative, support, and resources, but am eager to hear from others at other institutions who are influencing curricular shifts and establishing stability for digital programs (seems like what Ethan is talking about as well). I think it is particularly important to talk about strategies at both the course and curricular level because accessible and enticing projects along with collected and pointed advocacy together can convince digital stragglers or technologically resistant people at institutions to consider  digital practice in their work,

A second thing I would like to talk about is establishing regional coalitions to organize and focus digital work in geographic areas. At DH 2011 I got together with people from Columbia, Fordham, and the NYPL and we decided that it would be beneficial for our institutions to share information and knowledge and work collaboratively on projects rather than all recreate the wheel over and over again on different digital projects. Our group has expanded out to over forty members from more than a dozen institutions and met a number of times, but we are looking to organize more concretely and takes some steps forward to really get organized. These kind of regional organization have the potential to provide valuable hubs for knowledge, practice, and even funds, but there are obstacles and questions about organizing in this manner. I’d like to have a conversation with people who have either created such explicit connections (have things like this happend in DC? NC? Cal? etc.) and discuss ways in which we can make those initiatives more fruitful and collaboration more easily achievable. Also, if you are from the NY area let me know as we are always looking for willing collaborators.

Lastly, I’d like to propose a session for people interested in running their own THATCamps attended by both past and future organizers. We had a successful THATCamp Museums NYC last month and I am eager to share our experiences with interested parties. Amanda, would of course love to have you at this.

Frankly I could propose many separate sessions on THATCamp, to wit:

• A session where we sit around and work on editing the Proceedings of THATCamp (due out August 1; most of the editing currently booked for July)
• A session where we write a guide for those new to THATCamp
• A session where we write a guide for people coming to THATCamp who consider themselves tech beginners (though this Profhacker post is a good start, as is this one)
• A session for those who’ve organized or who might want to organize a THATCamp (see Kimon’s suggestion that we get together and share experiences
• A session where we talk about our upcoming revamping of the THATCamp website, to be spearheaded by Boone — we’ve thought of lots of stuff already, but we take requests. Under advisement.

But let’s do only one or at most two of the above. Stick your stickers next to the one you most want …

Saturday is Bloomsday! It strikes me that we might put our DH nerdiness to more direct Joycean use than simply deciding which Ulysses t-shirts to wear. I propose using this post space to discuss possible small-scale, collaborative Joyce-celebratory projects we might undertake during free time throughout the weekend (not a session necessarily, but a backchannel collaboration). These could be performative (e.g. recording readings of favorite passages? maybe a choral reading? making a small game?) or investigative…

One possibility: I’ve been playing around with the free visualization tool Gephi recently; we might create a simple dataset representing one-to-one character interactions in Ulysses or part of Ulysses–who interacts with whom? How many degrees of separation does the most removed character have from Bloom?–and drop it into Gephi to create a pretty and useful visualization. This would require

1) People signing up to list all the character interactions for a given section in Ulysses (if we only have a few people, we could just divvy up pages in a single rich episode like Circe or Wandering Rocks). For ease of collaboration, it probably makes sense to use the Project Gutenberg e-text (unless the rumored new digital edition drops in time for us to use!).

2) Defining what an “interaction” in Ulysses entails (dialogue? glimpsing someone? thinking about someone?). Or are there other factors we might want to model with a visualization?

3) Creating a basic spreadsheet with two columns: whenever an interaction happens, create a row with Person A on column 1 and Person B in column 2. Unless we decide on doing a one-way directed sort of interaction–e.g. Bloom thinks about Molly doesn’t mean Molly thinks about Bloom at the same time–it doesn’t matter which person in a pair of interacting characters goes in which column. We might also consider adding a “weight” column that keys different weight numbers to “degree of interaction” (e.g. degree of 1 indicates thinking about someone, 2 indicates glimpsing but not being seen, 3 indicates dialogue). I can post a link to a Google Spreadsheet with example rows if people are interested; you might also check out the Gephi sample datasets looking at character interactions in Les Miserables and the Marvel comic universe.

Interested? Or have any other Joycean ideas?

If you have a discrete set of sources that you think could make an interesting digital archive, but you’re not going to be executing the project with the financial support and institutional imprimatur of a library, archive, or university, how do you get started? How do you get copyright? How do you fund your labor (or maybe just some of it)? How do you find collaborators, and maybe fund their labor as well? How do you choose the kind of CMS that’s right for the project? How do you help your project gain visibility after it goes live? How do you plan for long-term sustainability moving forward?

As a soon-to-be-finished PhD in a humanities field, with several ideas for small-scale archiving projects but no sure source of continuing institutional support, I’m wondering if there are enough people with the same needs to constitute a session.

The session could be of interest to people who find themselves in the same position as myself, people who’ve independently created specialized archives of this kind, people who’ve worked with Kickstarter (successfully or un-!), or people who just know a lot about digital archiving, copyright, or grant-writing.

Issues of copyright are, of course, crucial here (for example, I’d love to do a full-text, searchable archive of Sassy magazine—but without the prestige & cash of an institution backing me up, I’m not sure I could secure that copyright), but I’m also interested in questions of labor and compensation. Is there any way to work on this kind of a project while, if not getting paid a ton, at least receiving some compensation for the time spent scanning and formatting?

I’m very interested in talking about using Kickstarter as a source of funding for this kind of a project. Trevor Owens wrote a blog post last year pointing out that many DH projects have found funding this way, and linking to some examples. What kinds of projects end up getting funded? How have they framed their projects to appeal to the public? What kinds of outcomes do they promise? What do their budgets include? What swag do they offer their funders?

If people know about ways of getting small-scale non-Kickstarter grant funding for this kind of a project, that’d also be great to add to the discussion.

As a product of this session, I suggest we could produce a GoogleDoc outlining best practices for getting small digital humanities projects funded on Kickstarter.

Having recently retooled my DevonThink setup yet again, I’m finding that I’m still dissatisfied. My regular everyday worktools include:

• DevonThink, really, pretty much I use it as a better finder
• Omnifocus for task management
• Mellel for wordprocessing
• Bookends for citations
• Scrivener for writing
• My blog is on WordPress
• Google Apps for collaboration

I’m happy to talk about what I love and hate about each of these, for example, I love Bookends’ integration with Mellel and hate how clunky it is. I love almost everything aout WordPress except actually composing posts. I want DevonThink and Omnifocus to TALK to each other. And more… I’d love for other folks to talk about how they do their workflows.  And to tell me why using Oxygen is such an uphill battle? In addition, I just upgraded my OSX to Lion and am curious if anyone has found awesome things that Lion can do that they want to share.

P.S. Other things I’d love to talk about include Islandora, teaching oneself to code, learning to work with the command-line after being a GUI person forever, and and and… they go on. Okay, calling this post “one more” might have been misleading…

A few weeks ago, I finished rereading Mary Talbot and Bryan Talbot’s graphic novel Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes. The work combines memoir with a serious examination of not only James Joyce’s daughter Lucia but also of the very act of literary biographical scholarship itself. I grew up on lessons learned in comic books, from Larry Gonick’s epic Cartoon History of the Universe (among other indispensable guides and histories) to Scott McCloud’s metaworks.

Taking the graphic novel as a scholarly text and transforming it into digital can make things even more interesting. The digital editions of graphic novels, including the CD version (with animations, billed as “interactive literature”) of Cartoon History of the Universe and the many layers of Art Spiegelman’s Meta Maus, add another dimension to the form. Comic books evolving online are already texts of study for the digitally-minded humanities, but can they also offer inspiration for rethinking our own forms of communication?

Often, the comic form is still associated with simplicity or beginners. Series of graphic scholarship spawn titles like McLuhan for Beginners that suggest comics are only a tool for transitioning to the “real” monographs. But of course, McLuhan himself used experimental forms in his scholarship–The Medium is the Massage has more more in common with graphic novels than it does with his text-heavier volumes.

These forms offer a starting point for experimenting with public, accessible scholarship that launches away from the confines of the traditional monograph. I propose a session for THATCamp brainstorming ideas for future forms of scholarship inspired by these types of experiments and comic books.

This session is becoming a THATCamp tradition so, while I’ll propose it, I am doing so merely as the representative of a movement.

University libraries have always been a hub of activity for scholars working on projects. Increasingly those projects are digital and libraries are looking for ways to support that work. Whether you are a librarian or a scholar, this session is a good way to share problems, solutions and dreams.

This conversation can take several paths; what tools are needed in libraries? what skills do librarians need? what kinds of opportunities exist for graduate students in terms of both training and career options?

I’m keeping this short on purpose so others can expand it in the comments section.

I’m working on a project to bring more scholars on Asia into social media and public discourse with the Association of Asian Studies. I’d like to start a discussion about what it takes for historians, anthropologists, political scientists — all kinds of scholars, really — to begin writing and communicating for mass consumption. I’m looking for ideas, good examples of what works and what doesn’t, and a deeper discussion about the role of scholars’ work in how the broader public thinks about the world.

A bit about me — I’m a journalist who keeps one foot in academia and one in mass media. I’ve co-edited a book about everyday lives in China with stories by journalists and scholars, and edited an online magazine published at UCLA that also helped get scholars writing for broader audiences. This is my first time at THATCamp and I’m really looking forward to the weekend.

(You can read more about the project, called Asia Beat, in a short proposal we wrote for the Knight News Challenge and more about me on my website.)

Now that digitization is part of almost every cultural heritage institution’s workflow, how are we doing?  I’m still seeing real tensions and unresolved arguments over metadata (how minimal can we get without making our work undiscoverable?), process, staffing, interfaces, preservation and discovery. (This can also be an opportunity to talk about the problems with Google Books’ digitization model and its omissions.)  And funding, of course:  plain vanilla digitization projects are less fundable than they used to be.  And when is 3D scanning going to be cheap enough for mass digitization of museum objects?  Let’s discuss where we are and where we’re going in terms of digitization and providing digital access to collections of all sorts.

Just a reminder that if you’re getting in for THATCamp today, you can come to the Rosenzweig Forum at 4pm. Pamela Wright, Chief Digital Access Strategist at the National Archives and Records Administration, will be speaking with Dr. Sharon Leon at the 2012 Roy Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities about the Citizen Archivist Dashboard, online projects created with the recently-released 1940 census data, and other exciting digital projects from “our nation’s attic.”

This event is Thursday, June 14 at 4:00pm in Johnson Center Meeting Room A. See Travel for a campus map.

One thing I’ve noticed in all the many THATCamps I’ve been to over the past three years (I should really count sometime, but at least a dozen) is that there’s less “less yack, more hack” than there used to be. The default session at a THATCamp, in fact, is a discussion. As I often say, though, I’m a humanist, so for me, a good discussion *is* a good, productive outcome. And the “yack” you get at traditional non-un-conferences is so often bad yack, the “sage on the stage” kind of yack, whereas at THATCamp we actually get to talk to one another, which frankly I love. My other hoary THATCamp chestnut is “an unconference is to a conference what a seminar is to a lecture,” and if I didn’t love seminars I’d never have earned my PhD.

Nevertheless, I do sometimes wonder how we could bring back the emphasis on productivity, and I have an idea about that that we could try out here. I’ve scheduled in a half-hour demonstration (aka “demo”) session on Sunday for people to show off what they’ve built in the hackathon, but here’s the idea: we make that longer, say an hour at least, and open it up to anyone who’s produced something, anything, this weekend — including a blog post, a web site, a wiki, a bibliography, what have you. Could also be open to people who’ve expanded on existing resources (added a bunch of entries to the DiRT wiki or the Digital Humanities Glossary, for instance). I’m basically thinking of it as another round of Dork Shorts (2-minute lightning talks), but limited to things done this weekend at THATCamp. I came up with a cutesy name for it: “The Submit Bit.” As in, the bit where people submit what they did this week for public admiration. If it works, we could include it in the THATCamp documentation as a way to increase the emphasis on productivity.

I know not everyone’s staying through Sunday, but folks could send me a link to their thing (via email or a comment on this post) and I could show it for them. We could rejigger the Sunday schedule so that there’s one 90-minute slot for breakout sessions in the morning from 10-11:30 and then an hour for demos in front of all THATCamp from 11:30-12:30 before we wrap up. Or do a 10-11 breakout ssessions and then The Submit Bit from 11-12 and wrap up early around 12:15.

What do you think?

This is really a selfish proposal: I want to take advantage of Jack Doughtery being at THATCamp by having a conversation in which we rigorously analyze and critique the experience of conducting open peer reviews. Jack, with Kristen Nawrotzki, co-edited Writing History in the Digital Age, a volume of essays that was open peer-reviewed and that will be published by Univeristy of Michigan Press. I’ve guest-edited an issue of Shakespeare Quarterly on Shakespeare and Performance that went through an open peer review and, as an Associate Editor of SQ, have been involved with our earlier open peer review of an issue on Shakespeare and New Media and am currently involved with a soon-to-be-announced open-peer-reviewed issue. As far as I know, Jack and I are among the very very few people to have edited open peer review projects in the humanities (we are all, of course, indebted to Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolesence, and maybe if the session happens and we tweet loudly enough, she’ll be able to be part of the conversation too).

I’d like to take a hard look at the actual practice of open peer review. What worked well and what didn’t? What changes would we make to the model we used? Is it sustainable, or under what conditions might it be sustainable? I’ve written about my experience, but I would benefit from a conversations with others about the nitty-gritty details and the larger questions about the value and use of open peer review in the humanities.

For some analysis that’s already out there, I recommend Jack et al’s recent post “Conclusions: What We Learned from Writing History in the Digital Age.” There’s also a cluster of essays at the Postmedieval Forum on “The State(s) of peer review.”

As a THATCamp newbie, rather than propose a session I would like to discuss with other participants some questions and issues related to content produced online by international networks of scholars and practitioners. I have some experience in this area as an academic involved in various Africa-related digital projects, including the Africa Past and Present podcast (see my recent journal article here), the Overcoming Apartheid web curriculum, and the Football Scholars Forum. Generally, I am interested in knowledge production and circulation; costs and accessibility; and the challenges posed by “digital imperialism.” A bit more specifically, how can technology generate and enhance international scholarly collaborations in the humanities and social sciences? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using Skype, Zotero, WordPress and other tools to create and disseminate knowledge in and about the Global South? What are the principles and/or models more likely to bring about long-term sustainable access to information resources in mutually beneficial ways across the digital divide?

Some brief final THATCamp CHNM reminders:

• There’s lots of information on chnm2012.thatcamp.org — most of your questions (we hope) will be answered there.
• If you are new to THATCamp and don’t know what’s expected of you, here it is: 1) show up, 2) bring a laptop, and 3) propose a session by the end of the day on Friday 6/15. Read our page about proposing sessions for guidance with that.
• Traffic will probably be very bad on Friday morning. Leave extra time if you’re driving to GMU, and plan on parking in the Shenandoah Parking Deck — see our Travel page for more travel information and advice.
• If you haven’t already signed up separately for workshops on Friday, please do so at chnm2012.thatcamp.org/workshops. Note that there are new workshop descriptions for “Unlocking WordPress” and for “Interesting Things You Can Do with git.”
• This year, we’re going to have Dork Shorts during the initial scheduling session on Saturday. I’ll write more about that on the blog, but just quickly, for those who don’t know, Dork Shorts are 2-minute “lightning talks” in which you show off your latest best project. There’ll be a signup whiteboard available Saturday morning.

More: dress is casual (as in t-shirts and shorts), there will *not* be fireworks (officially), there *will* be free breakfast all three days and free lunch on Friday and Saturday, and people of all levels of technology skill are utterly welcome. Any questions? Email me at info@thatcamp.org.

Can’t wait!

In typical fashion, I can’t contain myself to one topic.  So, here are a couple of ideas.  Also, be sure to check out the Just Playing Around session that Brian Croxall and I co-proposed

I proposed this first session last year, and there was a fair amount of interest in it….so, I’m offering it up again

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.

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”)?

One of the great things about an unconference is that we can make them what we want them to be. It’s true that the theme of a THATCamp is an emphasis on the combination of The Humanities And Technology, something that is conflated–too often, perhaps, and on occasion incorrectly–with the digital humanities.

Over the last several years, I’ve had the opportunity to hear a lot of origin stories from those working in DH. And one of the things I’ve learned from these tales is that people often get their start down this path through screwing around in their spare time. It’s what Steve Ramsay has called the screwmeneutical imperative. For myself, I more or less stumbled down the rabbit hole when I read Franco Moretti’s Graphs Maps Trees while finishing my dissertation and decided that I should start making maps. It’s not what my dissertation needed at that moment, but it was a doorway into thinking differently about everything I’d done prior to that point. Fast-forward five years, and I’m a full-fledged digital humanities tactician.

DH, as well as other combinatorial excursions into the humanities and technology, in other words, come from just playing around. For this reason, Ethan Watrall and I would like to propose a session dedicated to play. Specifically, we’re thinking games – non-digital games (card, board, miniature, etc). We’re each going to bring one or two with us, but we’d like to invite you to bring one along.

A few ground rules:

• Given the length of sessions, the games you bring need to be able to be taught and played in less than 60 minutes. Less than 30 minutes is perhaps ideal. So, this means no crazy 8-hour sessions of Twilight Imperium, 3rd edition.
• We’re primarily interested in designer (ish) games (some info on what a designer board game is). This means no Monopoly, Risk, Clue, etc. We wouldn’t have time anyway.
• If you bring a game, you’ll need to be prepared to teach it.
• Bragging rights must be CC-licensed.

What do you think? What will you bring to play? To start things off, here is what we will bring:

Brian: Incan Gold, Carcassonne, Small World Underground (for after parties, only)
Ethan: at least Munchkin (the original card game)

Scholarly disciplines usually have a consensually recognizable array of tools they use to study the primary materials of that discipline. Most often in the humanities it’s simply books and other documents, along with something to write with, although of course the digital humanities are bringing exciting new computational tools to bear on more traditional material.

In this session I want to sketch out a package of existing tools—and better yet, come up with an original, ultimate tool—that videogame studies scholars can use as they research individual games, specific platforms, entire genres, and various playing contexts. The field of film studies provides an instructive example of the kind of tool(kit) I’m describing. There’s the Cinemetrics database, Stephen Mamber’s use of thumbnail databases and timelines, the Film Study app, and a host of other ways to analyze, study, and make sense of cinema using digital tools.

In a similar fashion, let’s think of tools for studying videogames that go beyond screenshots and video capture. Imagine we’ve been awarded a grant of $50,000. What would we build? What would the ultimate digital tool for studying videogames look like? What would it do? What new modes of knowing might it enable? What new modes of knowing do we want to enable?

UPDATE: The collaborative notes for this session are online.

Pac-Man photograph courtesy of Flickr user joyrex / Creative Commons Licensed

There’s been a lot of good, honest, appropriate posts about folks new to DH getting involved. Some responses have been focused on emphasizing the ‘friendliness’ of DH, but I have to say that to someone new to the area I don’t think that’s very convincing.

Latest example I know if is @madwomanlaugh‘s “A Glossary of Digital Humanities“.

So, I propose gathering people around a twitter hashtag two-fer: #thatcamp #jargon. Let’s get some folks who are willing to commit to following that pair of tags, and respond to questions directed at them asking questions.

A “hashtag” is something that happened in Twitter as a way to filter content. Similar to tags you are familiar with from Flickr or blogs, a hashtag is just a term preceded by a “#” hash or pound sign to signal that it is meant as one of those kinds of tags. It’s a way to include the same idea into the limited text of a Tweet. You just type along, and precede your tags with a #

So, who’s willing to join me in following the pair of hashtags, #thatcamp #jargon, and respond to questions about terms or ideas that seem confounding to people attenting THATCamp, and offer them various responses in an effort to give an introduction?

It runs the risk of too much information — if a lot of people respond to a tweeted question like

What is TEI? #thatcamp #jargon

The asker could be overwhelmed with responses. Hopefully, better that than exclusion based on knowledge not shared?

There will be gaps, and it’s an imperfect approach, but I think it might be helpful.

And yep! This is a twitter-centric approach to the issue. That’s because Twitter really is the most accessible broadcast mechanism we have, and clients offer the tools to help us focus on that pair of tags (e.g., a column in TweetDeck).

Any terms / ideas / technologies there unfamiliar? Please, join Twitter, and tweet a question about it including the hashtags #thatcamp #jargon !

For the past two years I’ve been managing WordPressMU on my campus for various purposes, including faculty portfolios and event-related blogs.  I’d like to chat with other technologist THATCampers who are using WordPress.org at their universities, with the aim of creating a list of recommended plug-ins and/or best practices for higher-ed (perhaps we could even create a wish-list of plugins that we’d like to see in development and pass that on to the THATCamp hackers).  I’m especially interested in discussing how universities are using WordPress for uses other than blogs (i.e. portfolios, event-planning, CMS, etc).

I am very excited about attending ThatCamp, but I must admit I am feeling waaaay out of my league. I know enough about computers to get through life, but aside from that I am lost. Any suggestions on how to approach this ThatCamp? After reading some of the participants bios I think that maybe I should just prepare myself to feel really, really overwhelmed. Oy. Should I be scared?? Should I bring my kazoo for acoustic night? Should I drink profusely? Any and all advice/sympathy is greatly appreciated.

Does the public care about how scholarship is produced in your discipline and should they? In my own field, for example, the public has a voracious appetite for history but very rarely does this public pick up a history journal or academic monograph rather than military history or a presidential biography. This session would cover the forms available for scholars to present their ongoing research online and the stakes in doing so. My own feeling is that the UP monograph will remain key to promotion in research institutions, so perhaps developing engaging and scholarly forms to present ‘how the sausage is made’ can present another route to better engage with the public or our students.

One obvious form is the scholarly blog. Dan Cohen has come up with The Blessay:  “a manifestation of the convergence of journalism and scholarship in mid-length forms online.” Tim Carmody has pointed to an audience: para-academic, post-collegiate white-collar workers and artists, with occasional breakthroughs either all the way to a ‘high academic’ or to a ‘mass culture’ audience.” I like best Chad Black’s post, “Eighty Square Blocks of Data”. I think this example blends scholarly musings and presentation of material in a way that could draw in a diverse audience.

Are there other forms? Are we limited to the text and uploaded media that we can put on a blog or are there ways of plugging in our audiences to databases or digital repositories such as slavebiographies.org or slavevoyages.org ? How does one cultivate an audience? How do we think strategically about putting our thoughts and materials out there in a way that won’t haunt us when we shop a manuscript and the publisher realizes much of the content is already online and freely available? How do we start to make the sausage publicly and in a way that engages new audiences? Should we be trying to get people to watch us make sausuage, or is the process inherently undesirable to be viewed? Finally, I think this session could build on last year’s “What can we learn from journalism” session where we discussed producing short-form arguments with new media.

Hello, fellow campers! I’m new to this game — this will be my first THATCamp — so I don’t think I want to propose a session. But I would like to ask for help. Consider this an informal request that can be addressed via comments here, in between-sessions conversations at the camp, or on Twitter.

Next spring I will be teaching a class called . . . well, I haven’t settled on a title yet, but for now let’s call it Digital Reading and Research. It will be an upper-divisional course, but also a kind of trial run for a general education course. (That is, if the course goes well my institution might consider creating a version of it for freshmen, possibly to be required of all freshmen.) The key purposes of the course will be:

• to introduce students to the history of digital texts and digital humanities;
• to situate these technologies within the larger history of humanistic scholarship;
• to outline the controversies currently surrounding these developments, from techno-utopians (Kevin Kelly) to moderate skeptics (Nick Carr, Jaron Lanier);
• to give students hands-on experience with some of the most useful tools available, from Google Scholar to Zotero to CommentPress to . . . whatever.

My current plan is for roughly half the course to cover the first three points and half to cover practice with the tools. So fellow campers, give me your best suggestions for how to organize this course, what texts to assign, what assignments to give — anything you got that might be helpful to someone teaching it for the first time. I would be much obliged to you!

I’ve got a pedagogical problem and I want you to help me.

I’m sick of student blogging.

This confession probably sounds strange coming from me, a vocal advocate for using blogs in the classroom, and for public writing more generally. But after two dozen blogs for two dozen classes, I’m looking for ways to reinvigorate my blogging assignments.

Some background: a key component of almost every one of my classes is the collaborative class blog. The pedagogical advantages of blogging are many: it’s a public space that requires students to consider questions of accountability and audience; students begin to see themselves as participating in an ongoing conversation about culture; and participation jump-starts class discussion so that I already have an idea of what’s on my students’ minds before I even enter the classroom.

My blogging guidelines typically look something like this:

Each student will contribute to the weekly class blog, posting an approximately 200-300 word response to the week’s readings. There are a number of ways to approach these open-ended posts: consider the reading in relation to its historical or theoretical context; write about an aspect of the day’s reading that you don’t understand, or something that jars you; formulate an insightful question or two about the reading and then attempt to answer your own questions; or respond to another student’s post, building upon it, disagreeing with it, or re-thinking it.

I’ve tweaked the blogging assignment over the years, in particular experimenting with the overall structure of the blog, the rhythm of postings, and my use of roles.

I’ve tried two overall structures:

• A hub-and-spoke model, in which every student sets up his or her own blog, and I aggregate their postings on the main class blog.
• A centralized class blog, in which all the students have accounts on the same blog, and their posts and comments all show up in the same place.

I’ve experimented with different rhythms:

• The free-for-all model, in which students simply must post 10 (or some other number) of blog posts by the end of the semester.
• The checkpoint model, in which students must post a specified number of posts by particular checkpoints spread throughout the semester.
• The weekly model, in which all students (or, if using roles, a subset of students) must post every week.

Finally, I’ve increasingly relied on assigned roles, so that not every student is posting at the same time, and furthermore, so that each group of students has a specific task for that week. For example, most recently I divided a class of 25 students into four groups, rotating week-to-week from one role to the next:

• First Readers: These students are responsible for posting initial questions and insights about the day’s material to the class blog the day before class meets.
• Respondents: Students in this group build upon, disagree with, or clarify the first readers’ posts by the next class meeting.
• Searchers: Students in this group find and share at least one relevant online resource. In addition to linking to the resource, the searchers provide a short evaluation of the resource, highlighting what makes it worthwhile, unusual, or, if appropriate, problematic.
• The fourth group has the week off in terms of blogging.

I have thought a lot about student blogging. I’m fully committed to this form of student work.

And yet.

I’m tired of reading blog posts week after week, tired of evaluating blog posts week after week, tired of commenting on blog posts week after week. I don’t want off this merry-go-round, but I do want to reignite my sense of discovery and excitement about student blogging. And I want you to help me.

I propose a session in which we design a new model of student blogging—or at least, new to me. Maybe it incorporates elements of the structure, rhythm, and roles that I’ve used before, maybe it doesn’t. I’d like to learn from other teachers who’ve had success with student blogging, and from students too, about their experiences with blogging. My goal for this THATCamp session is that by the end we’d have a fully developed assignment, module, or course component, which any of us could plunk down into a syllabus and be ready to use when classes begin in the fall.

Let’s have students blog, and make it worth their while and ours too.

UPDATE: The collaborative notes for this session are online.

Circle of Life photograph courtesy of Flickr user phdstudent / Creative Commons Licensed

I have a big, squishy, ill-formed, hazy thought about a thing, so where better to start my first-ever session proposal for my first-ever THAT Camp?

For many of us working in early periods, the further back we go the more gaps there are in the record, be that literary, historical, cultural, scientific, or what-have-you. I’m fascinated by those gaps and what can be found by tracking them and their surroundings. I sat in recently on a presentation by some undergraduates who were trying to map the social networks around Inigo Jones and his Jacobean masques. One of their frustrations (amidst some great success) was that it was impossible to tell exactly the nature of some of the relationships they had found. To me, though, that gap in knowledge seems like an exciting point to start from as we are working out the shapes and uses of digital tools in representing knowledge.

We can hypothesize about the ur-Hamlet from references that surround it, though the text is lost. We strongly suspect there was a Love’s Labors Won because of cultural materials that gesture toward it. So what else is hiding in the gaps back there? And how can new methods of representing the relationships between texts (since I’m a text person), between events, between people expose both the gaps and the context that surrounds them?

I’m thinking about gaps most particularly in two mapping contexts:

• First, figuring out how early modern dramatic texts relate to each other—there’s so much allusion and reference happening between 1585 and 1630 and I really want a better way to think about how the plays reach out to each other and what might come into focus (both presence and absence) if we could visualize those relationships.
• Second, can we use the conventions of geo-spatial mapping to think about generic cataloging? My primary example is revenge tragedy, which seems especially self-aware of its tendencies toward specific features. How might we begin to map out what the genre looks like and what kinds of gaps might exist in that map? Could a more representational approach to genre help avoid the anachronism that often occludes an understanding of how the texts position themselves?

Hello all,

First, let me just put it out there that this is my first THATCamp, first unconference, and first post to this blog.  I’m a PhD Candidate working on a diss that will hopefully have some awesome digital aspects.  I’m looking at Baltimore merchants from about 1790-1830 and I want to do several things with my data.  First, I’d like to map the relative locations of merchants in Baltimore (I have pretty specific info from city directories) over time.  Second, I’d like to map their Atlantic networks, which will connect to Europe, the Caribbean, and South America.  Third (and this one is only a small possibility) I’d like to map the flow of goods by volume, similar to these maps.  What I’d like to achieve in this session is a set of ideas about which applications or methods would be best suited for what I want to do, and, to see if it’s realistic for me to tackle this much digital work for what will be a mostly traditional dissertation committee.

Help a grad student out! (that should be a category)

Just thought I’d share a few factoids about the people who are coming to THATCamp CHNM 2012. Executive summary: our THATCamp has a slightly higher proportion of women (41%) than THATCamps overall (35%), a much lower proportion of people who’ve never been to a THATCamp (49%) than THATCamps overall (80%), and a somewhat higher proportion of academics at all ranks (though I do think the numbers from the text string fields are iffy). See for yourself:

THATCAMP CHNM

Gender (N=146)
Women: 60 (41%)
Men: 86 (59%)
(numbers taken from folks’ selection of a t-shirt size)

Newb vs. non-newb (N=142)
Has never been to a THATCamp: 70 (49%)
Has been to a THATCamp once before: 26 (18%)
Has been to more than one THATCamp: 46 (33%)

Title (N=158)
Some kind of professor (*Prof*): 28 (18%)
Some kind of grad student (*Grad*” or *Doctoral* or *PhD*): 32 (20%)
Some kind of librarian (*Libr*): 7 (5%)
Other: 91 (58%)
(text strings always a bit sketchy to count, of course)

Organization (N=158)
From a university or college (*Univ* or *College*): 79 (50%)
Other: 79 (50%)
From GMU and/or CHNM (*Mason* or *GMU* or *Center for History* or *CHNM*): 31 (20%)
(same caveat about counting text strings; there’s probably quite a few more people who’re affiliated with higher ed)

We’ve got the same data for some (between 20% and 60%, depending on the field) of the 3200+ users on thatcamp.org, so we can put it in a larger context.

ALL THATCAMPS

Gender (N=1847)
Women: 642 (35%)
Men: 1205 (65%)

Newb vs. non-newb (N=624)
Has never been to a THATCamp: 501 (80%)
Has been to a THATCamp once before: 64 (10%)
Has been to more than one THATCamp: 59 (10%)

Title (N=1469)
Some kind of professor (*Prof*): 317 (22%)
Some kind of grad student (*Grad*” or *Doctoral* or *PhD*: 368 (25%)
Some kind of librarian (*Libr*): 161 (11%)
Other: 623 (42%)

Organization (N=1321)
From a university or college (*Univ* or *College*): 517 (39%)
Other: 804 (61%)
(same caveat about the higher ed contingent likely being larger: some people probably put the name of their research institute or unit instead of the name of their university or college)

Shoulda asked “awesomeness quotient.” I bet we’d have scored pretty high relative to other THATCamps there.

A few weeks ago, I set up this registry of alternative academics, which gives a glimpse into the wide variety of paths taken by people with advanced graduate training in the humanities. Later this summer, I’ll be launching a formal, confidential survey that will help identify perceived gaps in career preparation, and by extension, opportunities for rethinking graduate methods courses (more info here and here).

How about a session to discuss the project? We could talk about broad-brush issues related to the #altac conversation, as well as particularities about the database and survey. I’d especially like to brainstorm participation strategies to ensure that the survey generates as much useful data as possible from a wide range of respondents.

This is a process I’m involved with this summer and I’d love to get with others who have been through this process or those interested in the process and philosophy of such sites. I’d like to feel that I’m completely up to date on all the ways to accomplish this.

So Patrick and I have been conspiring a bit to have a sort of hackathon at THATCamp, and you’ll see that there’s time and space reserved for it on the schedule — basically all weekend in CHNM itself on the fourth floor of Research Hall, in the same space the CHNM developers use every day — long tables and lots and lots of whiteboards — plus the lounge area — sofas, soft chairs, and coffee tables. Everyone’s also welcome to use this as a co-working space to code whatever they like, whether for the hackathon or no (and there’s a WII with MarioKart, which you’re also welcome to use).

On Friday at 9:30am, Patrick will introduce one or more datasets for the hackathon, but you can also just work on whatever you like. We’ll be having a lightning round demo (3 minutes apiece) on Sunday from 12:00-12:30, and everyone who participates in the demo will get a small prize for participating. There won’t be any official judging; any competition among the participants will be strictly subtextual. Even beginner folks who want to use this as a practice session to mess around with Omeka or ViewShare or Weka are welcome to participate.

You are all encouraged to build things either individually or in groups, for example by having a coder and a designer team up to put together an awesome new visualization on some data.

To recap the chief features of the Hackathon:

Who?
Anyone.

Where?
CHNM, 4th floor of Research Hall.

When?
Intro at 9:30am by Patrick, coding all weekend, demos from 12:00-12:30 on Sunday.

What?
We’ll suggest a couple of datasets for you to work with, but you can also build something all on your own.

This last year, I moved all my course sites to static sites generated with hyde, a python site generator inspired by ruby’s jekyll. Together with Twitter’s bootstrap framework, one can make a pretty attractive and functional site, publishable through a simple git or hg push. Even better, if we can figure out what to do with pdfs that need to be password protected, one could move the course site to github, making them totally forkable. So, a session on static site generators could make for some fun hacking.

On the conversation front, and piggy-backing on some of the ideas in Trevor’s proposal, I’m interested in the way that digital work and objects of study can open new paths to understanding the long ago past. In many ways, the period we find ourselves in has close analogues to issues early modernists deal with frequently: 1. dispersed networks of power; 2. virtual presences; 3. spectrums of identity; 4. imprecise orthography; 5. textual protocols and mediations; 6. revolutionary transformation of communications infrastructure; etc. How do the two periods, broadly considered, open new ways of understanding each other?

We’ve had an unusually high number of cancellations for THATCamp — 30 out of 178 registrations — so the wait list is currently at 0. That means that if you register now, you still have a shot at getting in. We are at full capacity now, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

At past THATCamps, I’ve had the most fun when I’ve ditched the official sessions (as “official” as THATCamp sessions can be) to do some organized messing around. Last year, it took the form of sitting down with a couple of my One Week | One Tool buddies and hacking away at Anthologize for a few hours.

So, in the spirit of goofing off semi-aimlessly, maybe we could:

• Pick a free software project with a public bug tracker (Omeka? WordPress? Anthologize? etc) and submit some patches/pull requests.
• If there are folks who have wanted to get started contributing to free software projects but haven’t had the right setup, I could help them set up dev environments, and maybe we could talk a bit about the culture of open source development.
• We could pick some small project and roll our own One Afternoon | One Tool

The spirit here is that I work alone most of the time, so it would be fun to do some co-working with smart and cool people. Also, messing around is inherently the bomb.

Using GIT
I “get” GIT–I see the utility–I see the logic–I see why it’s great. But I’d love some discussion on how to start using it, what are some preferred GIT clients, and what the best-GIT-practices are. If this conversation could be combined with a western-twanged series of puns on the word “git,” that would be ideal.

Digital Scholarly Editions
This is my main DH interest at the moment. I would love to talk about:

• Issues of encoding
• What software platforms people are using (Islandora, Omeka, by-hand?)
• Excellent, and execrable, examples of digital scholarly editions
• Issues of copyright (i.e. “Do ALL digital editions have to be out of copyright???”)
• What kinds of scholarly apparatus do digital editions facilitate that were harder or impossible in paper editions?
• Multi-media digital editions

Working without institutional infrastructure
AKA, when you’re more alt than ac
For the many of us who are still on the hunt for the permanent position, how do we think about the issues of our digital work differently? For example, in a workshop I was once in, someone said: “This is what you’ll need to tell your design team…” What about when we ARE our team? What are the dangers of developing digital tools, editions, creations of any kind on resources provided by a university where you are only a temporary employee? How do we access resources? How do our grant applications differ? How do we access the support systems we need to make our work…work?

Hey all,

I really want to go to Busboys and Poets on Friday night for post-THATCamp hangs. Who wants to come with? I know this competes with Amanda French’s awesome acoustic jam session, but maybe there will be enough people for both?

From the site:

About Busboys and Poets

Busboys and Poets is a community gathering place. First established in 2005, Busboys and Poets was created by owner Anas “Andy” Shallal, an Iraqi-American artist, activist and restaurateur. After opening the flagship location at 14th and V Streets, NW (Washington, DC), the neighboring residents and the progressive community embraced Busboys, especially activists opposed to the Iraq War. Busboys and Poets is now located in four distinctive neighborhoods in the Washington Metropolitan area and is a community resource for artists, activists, writers, thinkers and dreamers.

Why the name?

The name Busboys and Poets refers to American poet Langston Hughes, who worked as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel in the 1920s, prior to gaining recognition as a poet.

Edit: Feel free to keep editing this google doc. Feel free to continue this discussion on twitter via #thingyness

Studying digital media is one of the big themes in definitions of the digital humanities, but I get the sense that a lot of folks in the area aren’t particularly well versed in work on objects, digital or otherwise. In particular, some of the work on materiality and mediality that goes on in New Media Studies. Aside from that it sees like there is just a ton of work out there in a range of fields that ends up focusing on the properties of objects, how those objects fit together and the way that people interact with them. Off the top of my head I am thinking about everything from nuroscience, to material culture, to archaeology, environmental history, to actor network theory.

I suggest that we take a session at THATCamp to pull together an annotated bibliography, a must read list if you will, of works on thingyness that folks interested in the digital humanities but who also want to study digital things can look at . I’ve pulled together a starter list of works from some different fields that I think fit here. I have also included what about these works makes them candidates for this conversation and list.

Please feel free to start this session now by contributing additional subjects and works that you think are must reads in the comments. Or, try and do some synthesizing.

New Media Studies: Some great studies on the materiality and mediality of various new media objects:

• Galloway, A. R. (2006). Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization:  TCP/IP and DNS define some of the key properties of the internet, we can and should analyze the material properties these protocols as humanists.
• Kirschenbaum, M. G. (2008). Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination: Great stuff on hard drives and the matarality of digital objects. Turns out that the digital is far less ephemeral than we thought it was and that there are some really exciting potential modes for analysis when we start thinking like computer forensics folks.
• Manovich, L. (2002). The Language of New Media: Much of digital media involves the interaction of a database and an algorithm. Here is what happens when we put those properties center stage in our discussion of new media.

Platform Studies: Focusing on the interplay between the digital and the material and how they converge as platforms that constrain and shape what we create on those platforms

• Montfort, N., & Bogost, I. (2009). Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System: Great study of how the Atari shaped and was shaped by expressive ideals.

Actor Network Theory: Consideration of the relationships between people and things.

• Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory: Wherein Knives have innate knifiy-ness that makes them good for cutting.

Distributed Cognition:  Help’s us understand the extent to which the things we use are a part of thinking and being.

• Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild: The go to example for how a complicated system, like a ship, acts as a single cognitive unit made up of sub units.
• Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as Action: A great book growing out of the vygotskyan tradition of thinking of actors as situated in an environment with tools.

Neuroscience: Sure, some FMRI researchers think they can answer all of lifes questions, but you have to admit they have found out some amazing stuff.

• Damasio, A. R. (1995). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain: Mind body problem turns out to really be a non-problem.
• Dehaene, S. (2010). Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read: You will love neurological recycling, turns out that our biologically evolved capabilities for facial recognition get recycled in the development of writing systems. The suggestion here is that cultural tools evolve in a interplay between how we recycle various biologically evolved capabilities.

Embodyment: Our bodies are things too, much of our understanding of the world is grounded in how we use our bodies as tools for thought and action

• Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic Books: You have ten fingers we use base ten number systems. For Lakoff things this is not a coincidence.
• Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension: Wherein we learn that almost every kind of cognitive act, even things like object rotation, can be externalized in our use of tools and that humans are hardwired as cyborg tool users.

Object Oriented Philosophy: We can even think about putting objects center stage as the basis of an ontology.

• Harman, G. (2011) The Quadruple Object: A full blown object oriented Philosophy.

Media Studies:  Old media changed how we think about things too.

• Kittler, F. (1999). Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. (G. Winthrop-Young & M. Wutz, Trans.) Stanford University Press: Turns out that when the Gramaphone appeared it may have changed how people think about memory and the mind. This thing where new media change us is not so much a property of these media as it may be a property of media in general.

So what should we add? Think in terms of texts and in terms of areas of interest. Oh, and feel free to take a stab at how you think about tying these things together.

You might have heard of Linked Open Data, but not sure what it is or why it matters. Lets get people together who are curious about it and want to connect the technologies with the concepts!

THATCamp is two weeks away! (Whoa, how did that happen.) What you need to know now:

1) We’ll be kicking off THATCamp with the Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities on Thursday at 4pm. This year, Sharon Leon will be interviewing Pamela Wright, Chief Digital Strategist at the National Archives and Records Administration, about the Citizen Archivist Dashboard, online projects created with the recently-released 1940 census data, and other cool digital projects from “our nation’s attic.” Feel free to join us for that on Thursday 6/14 at 4pm in Johnson Center Meeting Room A.

2) We’ve scheduled a whole mess of workshops for Friday, June 15. Sign up for workshops you want to go to with the form at docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGRvZmtYY0NZYmNkM2VTVXBSdTlodXc6MQ#gid=0 . Most workshops require a laptop, not a tablet.

3) Since so many THATCampers are also musicians (that DIY ethos), I’m biting the bullet and throwing an acoustic jam session on Friday evening out on the patio of the Mason Inn. Bring your guitar, mandolin, ukulele, or what you will for a musical interlude on Friday evening. If we enjoy it, we might even do it again on Saturday night. If you don’t want to haul your guitar you can borrow mine.

4) Bill Cowan has made us all look bad by posting a session idea already on annotating videos in the classroom. It’s never too early to post a session idea — if you don’t know how it works, read all about it.

Feel free to use the blog for coordinating travel with one another, or of course you can Twitter your needs with the hashtag #thatcamp. If you’ve got any questions about anything, write me at info@thatcamp.org. Can’t wait to see you all.

I am proposing a session to discuss using segmented and annotated video in the classroom. Through a NEH Office of Digital Humanities grant, I have built an Omeka plugin that takes the output of the Annotator’s Workbench (AWB), a digital video segmentation and annotation tool developed at Indiana University, and creates Omeka items from each segment and annotation in the AWB file. I created this plugin to allow instructors to more effectively and easily use annotated video in class. There are multiple ways that the AWB and Omeka can be used in the classroom with video. One way is that the instructor, say in a film studies class, can take scenes from a movie and provide annotation to the scenes for her students to review. Another use would be to give a movie to the students and ask them to provide annotations of certain scenes. In addition, with the AWB, the instructor can then comment on those annotations and return the comments to the student. Yet another approach would be to place the annotations of the students and/or the instructor in Omeka as items and create a web site. With the existing Scripto plugin, you could then collect comments from the other students in the class on the annotation of each other or on the instructor’s annotations through mediawiki, the open source wiki that Scripto uses.

This tool set also has potential for community based projects. Students or other members of a given community could collect audio and video interviews and use this tool set to segment and annotate to provide additional context, transcription and even translation for the interviews. By loading these annotations into Omeka, you have the opportunity to review, edit, and see how the material looks online. The material could be used in an exhibit built in Omeka or moved to a final production site.

I see a great deal of potential for video in the classroom and community based projects but the instructor or leaders of the project need a tool set to help them work more easily with video segmentation and annotation. I am hoping that the plugin I have developed will do this and I am interested in discussion the use of video, specifically video segmentation and annotation in the classroom.

We’ve hit our space limit of 150 people — actually, technically, there are 151 people listed on the Campers page, but I don’t count myself. We’ll keep registration open, but folks who register will be added to a wait list and approved in the order they registered as space opens up through cancellations. We do also guarantee space for journalists and sponsors.

Don’t forget to make your hotel reservations at the Mason Inn by May 15, as well — more info, and the link, on the Travel page.

Register now for THATCamp CHNM 2012, June 15-17 at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. We’ll be accepting the first 150 registrations and reserving 50 slots for first-timers who’ve never been to any THATCamp before. We’ll add more information as we go about workshops, social activities, special events, proposing sessions, who’s coming, sponsors, and so on . . . watch this space.

It turns out that there’s a big Virginia Democratic convention at GMU happening the weekend we were planning to have THATCamp CHNM, which meant that all the hotel rooms were booked. We’ve therefore changed the date to June 15-17. Save that date, if you will. Registration will still open February 15.

The fifth annual THATCamp at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media will be held June 1-3, 2012. Registration will open 2/15/2012.