Workshops

All workshops take place on Friday, June 15; see the schedule.
Only registered THATCampers may come to workshops.

Web Publishing for Humanists with Omeka

Instructor: Sharon Leon
Time: 9:30am-11:00am
Room: Nguyen Engineering 1107
Requirements:

  1. A laptop
  2. Sample materials (several images, pdfs, and audiovisual files would be great)
  3. A free Omeka.net Basic account – sign up at www.omeka.net/signup

In this hands-on workshop for beginners, we will concentrate on the ways that humanities scholars and cultural heritage professionals can use Omeka (omeka.org) to build of collections-based websites. Omeka is a free and open source web publishing platform that offers a flexible way for users without a lot of technical expertise to publish digital collections and to embed those collection materials in a range of contextual data. During our time together, we will cover:

  • the basic structure of an Omeka repository
  • configuring and choosing a theme for an Omeka site
  • adding items to an Omeka repository (Dublin Core Metadata, file upload, etc.)
  • creating and using Collections to group materials
  • extending the basic Omeka functionality with plugins
  • creating many items quickly
  • using controlled vocabularies with metadata fields
  • creating relationships among items and collections
  • using Exhibit Building to create exhibits
  • collecting materials and stories from visitors
  • integrating Omeka with Zotero, Wikipedia, and other social networking sites

Building Omeka Themes

Instructor: Mike Tedeschi
Time: 11:00am-12:30am
Room: Nguyen Engineering 1107
Requirements:

  1. A laptop ready for coding, with a good text or code editor installed
  2. Beginner Omeka knowledge
  3. Knowledge of HTML, CSS, and preferably some PHP/MySQL
  4. A local webserver with Omeka installed (WAMP for Windows and MAMP for Mac are good options)
  5. A site concept or design that you want to build during the workshop (if you have content in the system before the workshop, even better)

Resources: Workshop Outline

Omeka is a powerful platform out of the box, but eventually you’ll want your Omeka site to look and feel a certain way to fit your project or organization. Through this workshop, attendees will learn about developing for the Omeka platform, creating custom themes, and how to implement them. We’ll also show how to use CSS3 media queries to build responsive Omeka sites that look great on any device (desktop, smartphones, and tablets), as well as integrate external libraries and frameworks to make our Omeka themes even more robust. By the end of this session, you’ll have a good foundation understanding of theming for Omeka and the beginning of your own custom theme. You’ll also learn more about front-end development and some current web design techniques.

Building Omeka Plugins

Instructor: Patrick Murray-John
Time: 1:30pm-3:00pm
Room: Nguyen Engineering 1107
Requirements:

  1. A laptop
  2. Some experience with PHP, especially but not necessarily Object-Oriented PHP
  3. UPDATED: Copies of the files for Omeka Training In-A-Box, version 0.2. We’ll be using the example plugins in PluginIntro/example-plugins, so please install those on your installation.
  4. Your own instance of Omeka installed either on your laptop (e.g., with WAMP or MAMP) or on a server

In this workshop, we’ll cover the basic Omeka plugin structure and common techniques for creating plugins to accomplish various kinds of tasks. This includes an introduction to the Model-View-Controller pattern, and how it is implemented in Omeka, as well as an introduction to Omeka’s hooks and filters systems.

Topics covered include creating a model for new kinds of content, understanding how Zend/Omeka connects URLs to controllers and views, and using best practices in Omeka’s code to make your life easier. The primary audience is people with some experience with PHP, especially Object-Oriented PHP, but the session will also be helpful to people who are beginners to coding in PHP and are curious about typical structures and paradigms for hacking on an Omeka installation.

We’ll be looking at Omeka code and going through activities that involve installing and manipulating example plugins, so you should come with an instance of Omeka installed either on your laptop or on a server.

Digital Humanities Data Mining with Weka

Instructor: Huzefa Rangwala
Time: 9:30am-11:00am
Room: Nguyen Engineering 1109
Requirements:

  1. A laptop ready for coding (e.g., a good text editor)
  2. The Weka software — download from www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/
  3. Basic knowledge in probability and statistics
  4. A data set to be analyzed

Resources: Further reading and workshop resources

Weka is a powerful platform that allows users to implement data mining algorithms, quickly and
we will start with a gentle introduction to data mining. We will define data mining tasks, along with its application towards the rich datasets available from the digital humanities. We will then proceed
with a hands-on tutorial on how to use WEKA to build interesting predictive or exploratory models.

Interesting Things You Can Do with git

Instructor: Matt Burton
Time: 11:00am-12:30pm
Room: Nguyen Engineering 1109
Requirements:

  1. A laptop
  2. Knowledge of HTML / CSS
  3. Experience working at the command line

Git, which stands for Git, is a powerful tool for tracking revisions in code. As a distributed version control system (DVCS) Git enables managing collaboration across space and time amongst teams of programmers. While Git is primarily used by programmers, it is becoming more than simply a system for managing code. Git can also be used as a system for managing data, hosting textual archives, or (using GitHub) publishing HTML to the web. In this workshop I will be introducing the basic principles of Git, but beyond of focusing on how Git is used for managing code, I would like to explore some of the non-code uses of Git. Participants will learn about how to publish static websites, blogs, using Git and GitHub as a platform for collaborative web publishing.

Digital Humanities and Mobile Devices

Instructor: Mike Tedeschi
Time: 1:30pm-3:00pm
Room: Nguyen Engineering 1109
Requirements:

  1. None

We live in the mobile era. With over 100 million smartphone users in the U.S. alone, mobile phones and tablets are becoming an integral part of our daily lives — they also present an exciting new way to engage with the humanities. Through this session, attendees will receive a crash course on mobile devices, design considerations and restraints when creating a mobile project, and look at some great examples of applications created for educational and historical institutions. We will also open the floor to discussion about your projects or ideas. Our goals: to build more interest and discuss possibilities for mobile applications.

Unlocking WordPress

Instructor: Aram Zucker-Scharff
Time: 9:30am-11:00am
Room: Research Hall 402
Requirements:

  1. A laptop
  2. Some (but not much) previous WordPress experience.
  3. (Optional) a local server on your laptop. – If you do not have one, there’s a great profhacker post on how to set one up. If you still have trouble, I will supply one./li>
  4. A WordPress problem you want to solve.

In this workshop we’ll be getting elbows deep in WordPress’s intermediate to advanced functionality by building plugins. We’ll take a look at plugin development basics and then dive right in to creating plugins. Through this session, attendees will learn about WordPress actions and filters, building dashboard menus, meta boxes, proper jQuery calls, Open Graph and SEO integration, custom excerpts, attachment meta data, and other functions. The goal: to have a plugin at the end of the session and solve some of the attendees WordPress issues along the way.

Introduction to ViewShare

Instructor: Trevor Owens
Time: 11:00am-12:30am
Room: Research Hall 402
Requirements:

  1. A laptop with a current version of Chrome or Firefox
  2. A ViewShare account — sign up ASAP at viewshare.org/registration/register
  3. If you like, bring sample spreadsheet data to try out

Resources:

You will leave this hands-on workshop with everything you need to start using Viewshare. Briefly, Viewshare is a free, Library-of-Congress-sponsored platform that empowers historians, librarians, archivists and curators to create and customize dynamic interfaces to collections of digital content. Starting from an example spreadsheet, you will use Viewshare to generate distinct interactive visual interfaces (including maps, timelines, and sophisticated faceted navigation), which you can copy-paste to embed in any webpage. This workshop does not require any particular technical proficiency. Participants will leave the workshop ready to use Viewshare to help understand and provide access to digital collections of cultural heritage materials.

Advanced Wikipedia

Instructors: Katie Filbert and Jarek Tuszynski
Time: 1:30pm-3:00pm
Room: Research Hall 402
Requirements:

  1. A laptop

Disruptive Pedagogy

Instructor: Mills Kelly
Time: 11:00am-12:30pm
Room: Nguyen Engineering 1103
Requirements:

  1. None

Resources: Disruptive Pedagogy (.zip of Keynote presentation)

Introduction to RSS Aggregation and Curation

Instructors: Joan Fragaszy-Troyano, Sasha Hoffman, Jeri Wieringa
Time: 1:30pm-3:00pm
Room: Nguyen Engineering 1103
Requirements:

  1. A laptop
  2. A Google Reader account
  3. WordPress.com OR a Tumblr account OR an account on a self-hosted WordPress installation

Do you want an easier way to survey your field in order to identify and redistribute the most important information? In this workshop the editors of Digital Humanities Now will introduce tools to help you manage your reading list or set up your own publication. You will leave this hands-on workshop able to aggregate RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, use some method for filtering large streams of information, and republish selected items through either WordPress or Tumblr. After practicing aggregating and filtering all together, we will break into small groups based on publication method: WordPress.com and Tumblr users; those with self-hosted WordPress installations; and those producing multi-editor publications using WordPress.

Project Management and Planning

Instructor: Tom Scheinfeldt
Time: 1:30pm-3:00pm
Room: Nguyen Engineering 1101
Requirements:

  1. None

Resources: Google Doc of notes from the 2011 version of the workshop

This session will consider both the practical, day-to-day work and the intangible aspects of managing digital projects in the humanities. Pragmatic lessons will include picking a project, building partnerships and engaging stakeholders, attracting funding, budgeting and staffing, setting milestones and meeting deliverables, managing staff, publicity and marketing, user support, sustainability, and the range of tools available to support this work. The session will also consider several intangible, but no less important, aspects of project management, including communication, decision making, and leadership.