Here’s my post-THATCamp reflection.  Hope everyone keeps sharing here and on twitter.

I’ve posted ALL the tweets (I think) from #thatcamp arranged by session at adellef.co/318 . Sadly, my brain gave out, so a number of tweets are unaffiliated with their proper session. Your Comments could help, though!

I’ve temporarily made my blog open to all comments (I usually have to approve every one so as to prevent certain enlargement advertisers from using my site inappropriately).  This means you’ll see your comments pop up automatically, at least until later this week when the SPAM gets really bad.

Thanks in advance for your assistance, kind thatcamp’ers!

I’ve done some blogging while at THATCamp and since I’ve come home.

• Notes on day one
• Notes on day two
• A summary for my place of work (ZSR Library @ Wake Forest University)
• A reflection post on my own blog

Great unconference you guys! You’ve given me a lot to think about and I already have some ideas about things I want to try to do in response both at my place of work and in my own scholarship. Thanks all!

Did you thrill to the weekend of TCSE tweets that just passed you by? Did you wish you could have been a part of the action? Did you salivate when we posted a sneak preview of our shirts and name tags?

Did you want your own?

Well, now’s your chance. For the low, low price of $10, we will ship you your own TCSE shirt anywhere within the continental US. Yes, that’s right, you’ll get a beautiful, chocolate-brown shirt delivered to your door via the USPS for only $10. And need we say that these shirts normally cost $18, even without the amazing logo? And that’s without shipping!

So if you’d like a shirt, please make a donation in the amount of $10 (or more, if you’d like!) using the button at the right. Make sure you put your address in using the “special instructions” box:

And yes, if you ask nicely, we’ll even throw in a customized name tag! At the moment, we have shirts in the following sizes:

Unisex

• XS
• S
• M
• L

Women’s

• M (please note that women’s medium shirts are anvil rather than American Apparel)
• 2XL

The numbers in each size are limited, so don’t delay! Get your TCSE on TODAY!

I wanted to thank everyone for their participating in the Introduction to Programming with Python and the follow-up session on Django during THATCamps’s BootCamp!

As mentioned during the session I am linking a few resources that can be helpful for aspiring Python Programmers as well as a few other resources referenced.  I hope everyone finds them useful.

Great Python Resources

• The Zen of Python – What is the sound of One loop Iterating?
• Python For Non-Programmers – A great meta-list of tutorials and lessons on Python for the non-programmer.
• Google’s Python Classes – Some good screen-casts teaching python from the beginning.
• Official Python Documentation – Great documentation is a core value in the python community and few better examples than the official documentation.
• Django Documentation -  The framework use in the second session is also well documented.

Other Resources

• Cool URI’s Don’t Change – Stable and persistent URIs are a vital part of creating durable scholarly works and the foundation of linked data.  Every digital scholar can benefit from reading this article.
• O’Reilly on The Importance of Unit Testing – Always important to create a sustainable and extensible application, unit tests can be particularly vital in scholarly projects because of their long lifecycle.

Code From Sessions

Here are the hacky pages of code I was displaying during our session discussion.  I don’t see an ability to upload files here so I’m linking them as Google docs.

• Python: Assignments
• Python: Statements
• Python: Functions

Hi all, intrepid THATCamp Coordinator Amanda French here, signing on from the Center for History and New Media to ask you to fill out our THATCamp evaluation survey. It’s brief, and we’d love to hear from you. I must say I’m particularly keen to see what comes up in the “favorite session” fields, though those, like most in the survey, are not required.

Here’s the evaluation: surveymonkey.com/s/thatcampeval

Meanwhile, I have to give all of you a big fat “Strongly agree” on the Likert scale to the imagined survey items stating: “THATCamp Southeast provided a most interesting weekend Twitter stream” and “THATCamp Southeast participants came up with some fascinating session ideas and wrote some terrific blog posts.”

I’ll collect the series of posts I’ll be making this week about my THATCamp SE experiences here.  Expect updates.

I’d like to add a special thank you to our hosts, expression of admiration verging on jealousy for the beauty and functionality of the Emory Library space and its awesome guest wireless connection, and thanks to all who participated in conversations with me (or near me so I could eavesdrop.)  I learned a lot.  Best wishes to all – Phoebe Acheson, @classicslib

• THATCamp SE 1: Timelines Assignment (on BootCamp)
• THATCamp SE 2: Online Collections (on BootCamp)
• THATCamp SE 3: Google Earth (on BootCamp)
• THATCamp SE 4: Making Digital Collections Work for the Scholar
• THATCamp SE 5: Open Access, Kindles, Crowdsourcing
• THATCamp SE 6: Libraries and Scholars

Check out my post on “Why I Love THATCamp”! I don’t allow comments on my homepage, but I’d love to hear what you think here!

Group-edited notes here. And here’s one attempt to summarize. Please comment, amend, and contribute your own summaries!

Group edited notes here.

The DH & Assessment session Saturday afternoon started with the usual mini-rants about our regional accreditor and reductionist assessment and turned into an “oh, wow, here’s a tool for this” discussion. The core of the discussion revolved around the open-source <emma> assessment tool built for the University of Georgia’s first-year composition class. (Links: <emma> front-end, which will be frustrating because it’s just the sign-in for UGA students, and the website of the Calliope Initiative, the non-profit continuing development and the business end for other institutions.)

At the lunchtime Dork Shorts, Robin Wharton had demonstrated the gist of <emma>: students submit papers in Open Document Format. Then instructors and peers can comment on specific passages and code their comments by area of the comment (e.g., thesis development might be coded as green, something else as yellow, etc.). Students’ revisions are linked to their original documents, they declare when a revision is the final document, etc. So far, this looks like a useful, user-friendly way to comment on student work.

In the afternoon session, it became clear that <emma> was also being used for institutional assessment–it has the ability to look at the comments and the comment categories, a sample can be drawn for assessment by a set of readers, with disagreement on basic judgments by two readers kicked to a third reader or other moderation process, etc. And the system has the capacity to allow conclusions such as shifts in comment categories (i.e., student skill development) across a course or a longer span of time. In other words, institution-level judgments based on the day-to-day evaluative culture within composition instruction.

Those at the session had the obvious questions about the system (expensive? it was developed by one person in the English department who taught himself programming, along with two graduate students) and then we started talking about what would be necessary to develop parallel systems for performances (e.g., faculty-juried music performances at the end of the semester). So we gabbed a bit about Pear Note, Transana, and some other options. And then we discovered that as ODF documents, the base documents students submit can include media. Hmmn…

Bottom line for me: Huge thanks to Rob Balthazor and his team at UGA for showing how digital humanities can put assessment on a much less shaky footing.

Here’s my funny poster & paper, as well as a summary of tweets from my phenomenally fabulous session: adellef.co/270

Game session notes (editable version). Static below:

Here ya go, folks!

Also, breakout session for generating blog post topics relating to these messes at 2:30 in RM756.

The document from the breakout session.

Notes from this session (not group-edited) are on Google Docs at bit.ly/fo4daF.

Notes from the session are below in the comments OR on Google Docs at bit.ly/eZrbqH

I am struggling with the problem space around how best to provide digital images for teaching and research across a large campus and multiple disciplines.  How to get one’s head around issues of

• usability (discover and presentation)
• ingest/cataloging,
• preservation, and
• rights management

I love the cool “technology ecosystem” graphic that shows Omeka falling at a crossroads of Web Content Management, Collections Management, and Archival Digital Collections Systems, and would like to know more about how this might work with more academic focused products, like ARTstor SharedShelf or Luna Insight .

One a similar but different note, the draft ACRL/IRIG Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education says a visually literate student…

• identifies a variety of image sources, materials, and types
• conducts effective image searches
• situates an image in its cultural, social, and historical contexts
• evaluates the effectiveness and reliability of images as visual communications
• uses technology effectively to work with images
• produces images for a range of projects and scholarly uses
• understands many of the ethical, legal, social, and economic issues surrounding images and visual media

Are we ourselves visually literate?  Are the DH tools and projects that we are creating promoting these skills in our users?

As a metadata librarian, I’m always interested in learning new ways to not only attract new digital repository content but to increase efficiency in adding descriptive metadata to that content.  Collaborations between digital repository librarians and digital humanities scholars can support both of these aims as well as provide benefits for scholars.  By storing the products of digital humanities projects (ex., digitized primary sources, born-digital media) in the repository, librarians can make this content accessible to broader audiences and can tap into scholars’ subject domain expertise to provide valuable descriptive metadata at little cost to cash-strapped libraries.  In return, scholars get free, permanent storage for the digital assets that support their projects and guidance from librarians on digital project planning and using standards and best practices to manage their metadata.

Often, the metadata that scholars care about extends beyond the bibliographic metadata traditionally collected in library catalogs and digital library collections.  To attract scholars to digital humanities collaborations, libraries need to be able to store and make accessible this domain-specific metadata.  As we move towards storing and publishing metadata in RDF, we will soon have the flexibility to accomodate these new metadata demands.

Preparing librarians to work with this new data structure is one major obstacle we’ll have to overcome, but I’m interested in having a conversation about what skills will be valuable to librarian-scholar collaborations as we enter the semantic age?  How do we start incorporating ontology into our project designs? (Is ontology even on humanities scholars’ radar? It certainly isn’t much more that a blip yet in the library world)  How do humanities scholars currently map their knowledge domains?  Are there any shared data models or standards in the digital humanities that would help guide development of new best practices?  What roles should librarians play in helping scholars apply ontology to digital projects?  (And should librarians even play a role in this?  Do we even have the chops to become knowledge management consultants?) What tools would be helpful in facilitating these collaborations?  Are there existing tools we could build on?

I share cartera’s “big digital pile” view in that I have little sense of how scholars use our digital resources and what more they want out of them beyond simple search and discovery.  I don’t have any strong opinions or answers yet to this big pile of questions–I’m hoping to gauge interest and experience within both library and humanities communities so I can learn how to better frame the issue.

I called today and was told I could park at the Inn (around 8 AM) Friday, come in, confirm my reservation and get a parking pass, take the shuttle and then “check-in” later.

This may be useful to others. Hope all have safe travels and see you tomorrow!

G

I find that I am fascinated by the visual representation of information, along the lines of Stanford’s Republic of Letters (republicofletters.stanford.edu/).  I would be interested in a discussion of what specific explorations and findings have arisen from such projects.  How have these quantitative displays led to new thoughts on qualitative aspects of the material?  Do some methods produce better results than others?  How are we seeing this play out across the landscape of digital humanities, and to what innovative avenues of research are these discoveries leading?

THATCamp is almost here, and BootCamp starts tomorrow. We know that you’re all coming to work, learn, and get your hands dirty working on your projects. But a THATCamp isn’t all just blood, sweat, and tears: that’s why we’re happy to announce our meetups for the weekend.

On Friday night, we’ll be congregating at Manuel’s Tavern in the Atlanta’s Poncey-Highlands neighborhood, only a short drive from Emory. Come for a bite and a drink, whether you’re just arriving prior to the Camp or if you’ve been programming all day at BootCamp. The address is 602 N Highland Avenue Northeast, Atlanta, GA 30307-1433. We’ll start arriving around 6pm. It’s a “seat yourself” kind of place, so look for us in the big room to the left when you come in the front door.

By Saturday night, we’ll have fed our brains but need something for our stomachs. Accordingly, we’ll head to Taqueria del Sol in Decatur Square, again a short drive. This is a casual place, and we’re not going to call ahead and tell them 100 hungry THATCampers are on their way. Instead, we’ll just invite people to come in groups. It’s a casual dining place, so stand in line, make conversation, and enjoy some killer tacos. We’re told they sell margaritas and a range of tequilas as well. The address is 359 West Ponce De Leon Avenue, Decatur, GA 30030-2442. If for some reason you don’t want tacos, there are lots of other amazing options only a short walk away from Taqueria del Sol.

See you soon!

There’s no question that communicating your ideas is important. But how much can be accomplished via a simple CMS with a default template? What do people working in the humanities need to know about programming? What languages are most useful and why? And what technologies do we all need to keep our eyes on to keep ourselves ahead of the curve?

There are several proposals hovering around the issue of how to better leverage digital collections within the humanities, and I want to give a thumbs-up to them all. I work with a gigantic pile of stuff at the Digital Library of Georgia (as a Digital Projects Archivist), but have little sense of how (if at all) it is used beyond the independent researcher or curious citizen.

Some questions as gestures towards a proposal(s):

1. What do humanities scholars want/need from digital collections to be of use in the classroom? Here I am thinking about navigating live through the DLG, or any online collection, for real time feedback (would be great to team up with other librarians). Which formats are most compelling…and for which disciplines? What would you like to be able to do with the stuff in our collections that you currently can’t (thinking about types of reuse, linking out, integrating into social media sites, editing, etc…). Is there anything we (any digital collection) could be doing to make our sites and our stuff more compelling to you?

2. Open Access publishing: gigantic sea creature of the deep wrapping its tentacles around the tenure process. We could kick around impacts of the Open Access movement on the ‘impact factor’ in tenure, but…does that really sound like fun? Bringing it back to the classroom, is there any interest in, or experience with, using publishing platforms for student work? At the Univ. of Georgia, we’ve recently launched our first online, open access, peer reviewed journal using Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project: the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement. I’d be interested in discussing this platform (or others) with the curious, how it might be used by scholars looking for publishing options in this era of tight budgets, and/or how it might be deployed in a classroom.

3. Worst Digital metaphors/analogies lighting round. 5 minutes to compile examples of the most heinous, ideologically confused, confounding metaphors deployed to understand our relationship to the digital. “Series of tubes,” anyone? Maybe even a prize?

Bring your sketches of web design ideas you have and we can learn together about how to apply best practices to your design.

In addition to my own experience-based knowledge as a full-time web developer, we’ll also rely on other un-conference participants’ experiential knowledge and on themes from 2 EXCELLENT meta books about web design:

• Designing with the Mind in Mind: Simple Guide to Understanding User Interface Design Rules by Jeff Johnson
• Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click? by Susan M. Weinschenk

As my drupal 7 theming proposal was a bit too specific, I’m taking Brian’s advice and proposing this session, instead.

I think this idea changed mid-typing, but here goes.

My session question is how we can involve target groups (faculty, students, researchers, K-12 teachers, general public) in the development and use of digital collections at libraries, universities, and other institutions.  These types of collections are great opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to expand their view of humanities by incorporating digitization, social media, and other technology into their studies.  K-12 teachers and students can also benefit.

My library has a digital collections site that includes material from our library, the medical library, and UAB archives.  We are also working with the departments of communication studies, theatre, art (time-based media), and the ethnographic filmmaking program on housing their students’ moving image projects on our site.  Along with hosting the material comes publicizing it and promoting use.  Promoting the use of collections is easier when you can provide specific examples of how the material applies to faculty research, majors, and specific courses.

What are best practices for incorporating social tools into DH projects so that faculty, students, researchers, and other targeted groups are involved in the development and use of these projects.  I know there are DH projects that are developed as part of specific courses, but I’m thinking more about how institutional projects can benefit from student, faculty, public input throughout development to increase use of the final project.

As a DH newbie, I don’t have any theoretical background information on this topic, but I’m sure campers from a variety of backgrounds and experience levels can contribute.

Ann Cunningham (Education), David Phillips (Humanities), and Lauren Pressley (Library Science and Instructional Design)

FRAMING THE QUESTIONS:
At Wake Forest, we’re getting ready to launch an experiment in creating an online digital library and archive that captures the essence of what’s happening out in the community. What are politicians saying? What are community groups doing? What are our local artists and performers into? What is happening in our broader creative community? What’s going on in different segments of our community, and how can our students access the events, meet the people, and document what they find in a digital format that is readily accessible through a web-based archive? What would such an archive look like, and how would it organize knowledge in ways that encourage creative thinking about knowledge and culture, while helping us to reshape our conceptions of how to order this knowledge? What if the actual recording in innovative formats and new ways of ordering helped us to envision knowledge and culture in new ways?

Secondly, what are the emerging technologies in library science and digital media studies that are useful in refining this vision. In providing our students with the tools to appropriately and creatively organize their material, students will need to think critically about relevant metadata and how to approach findability in this web-based format for storing video and audio multimedia archives? Just as importantly, how can the content be kept robust, but skillfully edited and packaged in ways that make it easily accessible to viewers, and what skills from documentary film making and editing can be incorporated into the process of creating content?

Stepping back a step from the production of material for this  library and its use as a resource, we are finding as we explore these questions that one of the keys to getting good results is to think about designing instructional sequences that scaffold inquiry, reflection, and expression. These instructional sequences could be courses or as large in scope as a full program of study. Sequenced and intentional integration of learning experiences with digital tools and many opportunities to express knowledge in digital formats can generate products for assessing student growth over time and provide a vehicle for them to develop their questions and support a reflective approach to web-based expression. These engaging and inspiring student products will be published and disseminated through the online digital library. This approach to instructional design facilitates inter disciplinary collaboration but not without challenges. Where are models of interdisciplinary collaborations on courses? On programs?

Finally, what role does the humanities play in shaping the nature of our investigations? What are the pressing questions to be asked, and how can humanistic pursuits be best depicted? What are the most effective ways to record and preserve our personal narratives, human interest stories, oral histories, and examples of our cultural, socio-economic, and regional diversity? How can the humanities inform the process of collecting information that keeps it personalized and that resists the tendency to generalize?

All of these questions are at the heart of our initiative to create a digital humanities library and archive of Winston-Salem, Piedmont-Triad, and North Carolina culture, the arts, and social issues. We think, based on our initial discussions, that a better understanding of process is key to the pursuit of answers to these questions, and to clarifying our goals in creating a digital library.

Jumping on the back of Tracy Powell’s session idea of Teaching (with) Technology, I am interested in discussing how and what to teach to students who are very unfamiliar with technology. I am an English instructor at an open enrollment community college and I have students of all ages and technological abilities. I’m convinced that appropriately applied technology can benefit even the most technologically uninitiated students, but I would like to swap stories and ideas on what appropriately applied technology means.

I am actively working with born digital records in a special collections archives right now, and one of the issues I continue with is how best to provide online access for researchers to view born digital records.  Although we receive digital images,  I am more focused on databases, textual documents like e-mail and items created in word processing software like Microsoft Word.

I am interested in a session about Digital Humanities and special collections libraries. Archives can play a central role in the DH because they are stuffed to the ceilings with the raw materials for a staggering range of DH projects but . . . special collections repository haven’t been to keep up with the “insatiable” user demand for digitized materials. So I want to hear ideas (and even complaints) from my fellow THATCampers about what they want from archives or wish they had. How do DH-ers want to access and use data and digital materials from special collections? What types of devices do you want to use these materials on in the classroom, in your own research or – heaven forbid – just for fun?

Helpathon/Writathon

How is writing for the web different than writing for print? Prevailing wisdom says that web-readers scan until they find the specific information they seek.

My question is: how can we engage people on the web and offer meaningful, substantive, responsible, yet accessible encounters with humanities scholarship? And how can we take full advantage of the possibilities that the web now affords? Here are some issues we might explore:

• How do we best anticipate and satisfy [goal-oriented] search queries?
• How do we take people in new and unanticipated directions?
• How do we help readers to “unlearn” what they think they know about a subject and be open to new perspectives? (See NATURE article by Dan Kahan, “Fixing the Communications Failure,” Vol 463, 21 January, 2010.)
• How do we manage comments sections?
• What are reasonable lengths for copy on the web? And frequency of updating text on a home page?
• How should first paragraphs be written to optimize search engine results, grab and orient the reader, and get them to the heart of the matter? [We could give ourselves a writing exercise here, each bringing a fairly complex topic that needs to be introduced in 200 words or less.]
• How would you think through the designing of an interactive piece or game with the goal of teaching a new concept? [Again, we could each bring an example and try to write a script for it– a game that teaches/tests how to identify a certain type of pottery… or an interactive puzzle based on manuscript fragments…]
• How can we offer differentiated levels of content so that novices and more sophisticated readers both have something to learn?
• If there is time, I’m also interested in the merits/drawbacks and practical aspects of producing video content for the web.

I have a demo site from a project at work (Bible Odyssey) that can illustrate some of these questions.

As digital media scholars interested in accessible theory, how do we start to shift academic expectations of disciplinary and peer reviewed material as we try to reach broader audiences? Do we as scholars have a responsibility to engage debates of net neutrality, the digital divide, and open source products for the good of our communities? Specifically should we also think about the type of advocacy needed to shift tenure policies so that University see digital scholarship and pedagogy as important elements of our work as a scholars? I am also interested in thinking about accessibility along the axis of disability and supporting students who may have different needs related to digital technologies employed in the classroom.

We’re just a few days away from the best little THATCamp in the Southeast! We hope you’re as excited as we are. We wanted to draw your attention to the newly updated logistics page, which has new and improved information about getting to Emory, parking, and more. Notice also the link to the Emory mobile apps, which works for iOS and Blackberry devices and which will help you find your way around campus, if need be.

I checked today with the Emory Inn and here are the options for transportation to/from the airport: a cab costs anywhere from $40-55 one way.  There is a shuttle that you can reserve  for $30 one way or 50$ round trip.  Atlanta Superior Shuttle 770-457-4794  I plan on taking that to the airport on Sunday.  See you soon!

Recently I’ve been interested in the idea of “Trace Ethnography,” as developed by David Ribes and R.S. Geiger (a pdf of their article is available here). In a nutshell, Trace Ethnography describes a method for studying the actions of an online community “by combining a fine grained analysis of the various ‘traces’ that are automatically recorded by the [community's] software alongside an ethnographically-derived understanding of the tools, techniques, practices, and procedures that generate such traces.” Trace ethnography provides an elegant name for the hybrid archival/ethnographic methods that have been used by both Joseph Reagle and myself to study WIkipedia. In addition, I have been trying to extend the idea to develop “trace pedagogy,” which would inform techniques for using wikis and related technology in the composition classroom.

In this session, I would like to begin a conversation about the best tools and techniques for reading and interpreting the traces left by users of a wiki community, or other online community. The archive of traces left by such communities can be large and diverse, making them both extremely informative and quite difficult to navigate. A discussion of how to select cases, how to read traces, and what sorts of tools might make it easier to derive both quantitative and qualitative information from trace archives might help both novice and experienced researchers engage with these techniques.

I would like to offer THATCamp-ers a guided tour of “The Future Belongs to the Discontented: The Life and Legacy of Robert W. Woodruff,” an exhibition in the Schatten Gallery of the Woodruff Library. Robert W. Woodruff was Atlanta’s most successful businessman and most generous philanthropist; he was the longtime head of The Coca-Cola Company. Let me know if y’all are interested.

More information about the exhibit here: web.library.emory.edu/libraries/schatten-gallery

I’m the librarian for the Communication department at GSU. For the last several months I’ve been working on a book about the open-source citation manager Zotero. I’m wondering whether there would be interest in a discussion session about teaching and collaborative applications for Zotero. I’ll bring some sample classroom assignments and collaborative projects that teaching faculty and librarians have shared with me, like the New Orleans Research Collaborative (about which several Emory campers know more than I do), and talk a little about GSU Library’s plans for using Zotero group libraries.

I can start with a demo for those who haven’t used Zotero before. Other discussion points could include advantages and disadvantages of Zotero’s nature as an open-source application, best practices for teaching and supporting Zotero in libraries and in the classroom.

I am interested in a session focused on discussing some of the issues involved in teaching with and about technology. I work as a librarian in a theological library in which we offer both hour-long workshops and a credit-bearing course titled “Technology for Ministry.” The students in that course are primarily masters’ level students in divinity who are interested in both practical and theological considerations for the use of technology in their work. We discuss not only how to use particular tools, but also hope to engage in a broader discussion that begins by examining the purposes for which tools are being considered. In the course, students develop projects based on their own contexts and interests, and examine the tools we consider during the semester with an eye to those projects. In the workshops, although we don’t have time for same kind of reflection, we do try to bring the question of purpose into the discussion where appropriate. We use a few criteria for selecting the tools we use for both workshops and in the class, but I would like to engage in a broader discussion about how each of us selects which tools to teach and how we discuss their uses. Here are a few questions to begin:
• What criteria do you use for selecting a tool to assign as part of a class assignment?
• How do you choose the tools you use in your own classroom presentations?
• How do you account for students’ differing levels of comfort and experience with a particular tool when choosing if and how to teach with it (perhaps particularly when this is not the focus of the assignment or the session)?
• How do you help students consider the biases of a particular tool or form of communication, and its appropriateness for a particular context?
• How do you discuss the limits of technology, and/or the places where a new or popular option may not be the best option for a student’s intended purpose?

I want to second Brian Croxall’s “show and tell” proposal and suggest another way it might be productively framed. There’s been a lot of discussion (sometimes outright debate) in the wake of the 2011 MLA Convention about the necessity of coding, programming, building, or doing technical stuff vis-à-vis the digital humanities. In a blog post that followed up his own comments at the convention, Stephen Ramsay claims that

DH-ers insist — again and again — that this process of creation yields insights that are difficult to acquire otherwise. […] People who mark up texts say it, as do those who build software, hack social networks, create visualizations, and pursue the dozens of other forms of haptic engagement that bring DH-ers to the same table. Building is, for us, a new kind of hermeneutic. (original emphasis, “On Building”)

Such “building” does not have to require arcane or specialized knowledge. (Suspicions that it does have likely generated much of the anxious backlash about DH as an exclusive and computational domain.) It does not have to take place at an institute for digital scholarship or be funded by a major grant. It can happen with the parts one finds virtually lying around. This session invites participants to “show and tell” about their favorite apps, APIs, websites, digital resources, wooden blocks, whatever with which to “build.” Its goal would not necessarily be to create an electronic tool shed, of which there are already some wonderful examples (e.g. Alan Liu’s Toy Chest wiki). Rather, its goal would be “haptic engagement” itself, giving every participant inspiration and some practical strategies for a building project of their own, whether in designing an interpretive machine, a personal/professional hack, and/or a pedagogy. Such a session would also allow participants to apply and customize the lessons from their particular BootCamp tracks.

As a grad student interested in how museums make their exhibits palatable to diverse publics, I’d like to put together a session on public history and digital access. Some of you might be familiar with the Smithsonian’s planned American Enterprise exhibition, which will solicit ideas for content on its blog: americanenterprise.si.edu/

I’m curious about some of the implications of this venture. In his book Consuming History, Jerome de Groot seems to suggest that technology (broadly defined) will improve access to public history (also broadly defined)–even to the point of “democratizing” public history. The Smithsonian’s approach certainly marks a shift away from older forms of exhibit construction, but what are the implications for curating, displaying, and experiencing exhibits and other forms of public history?

Perhaps using this cases as a starting point, I’d like to propose a session that examines what digital access and democratization mean in the context of public history. Are these approaches significant departures from old ways of thinking about public history, or are there continuities and complications? I’d like to cast a pretty wide net here–I can certainly see these questions being applicable to archives and libraries, as well.

-Sarah

I would be interested to share experiences relating to subject guide development.  My questions include:

Do undergraduate/graduate students find these digital presentations useful? Faculty? How do they use these guides? At what stage(s) in their research is the guide helpful? Do people in local communities use subject guides provided by the local public library?

Maybe LibGuides / subject guides are as much a tool for the librarian as they are for the student, i.e. note-taking, a way of self-education around an academic discipline? I’ve heard that hard-copy reference materials are more for the benefit of the librarians than for the students — is this really true?! If so, maybe web-based subject guides have similar use.

In terms of reference, I would think it’s important to tailor information to one’s user base, but the subject guide exercise also feels somewhat like re-inventing the wheel. Surely other institutions have excellent guides that my students could make use of.

I’m aware that institutions have internal guides for their subject guides, i.e. best practices, uniformity of look-and-feel, usability, etc.

Has anyone effectively used analytics to facilitate development? i.e. which links do users click into,  how much time do users spend on a page, etc.

Here’s a summary of the software that you’ll need to install on your laptops if you’re participating in the Programming Track at BootCamp.

For the “Introduction to Programming, using Python,” you’ll need to download and install Python from www.python.org/download/releases/2.7.1/. Make sure you choose the version that matches your computer. Current Macs (i.e., those that don’tuse PowerPC chips) should use the last link. If you’re on Windows, you’ll need to know if you’re using a 32- or 64-bit processor. Documentation about Python can be found at docs.python.org/.

For the second session, “Introduction to the Django Framework, Using Python,” you’ll need to download and install Django. Please note that you must install Python before installing Django. Documentation about Django can be found at docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/.

Installing Django On a Mac
Download Django from www.djangoproject.com/download/. Once it’s downloaded, you’ll need to work through your command line interface, which you’ll find in Applications > Utilities > Terminal. Once in the terminal, you will need to go to the directory where you’ve saved the Django download. I’d saved the file to the desktop, so I typed “cd desktop.” I then had to type the following (w/o quotation marks): “tar xzvf Django-1.2.5.tar.gz”. This extracted the files for Django. I then entered the Django directory by typing “cd Django-1.2.5″. And then I ran the install by typing “sudo python setup.py install”. I had to authorize the sudo process, and then I was set.

Installing Django on a PC
The easiest way to install Django is to download Python’s setuptools from pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools. Once that set of tools has been installed, access your command line. You should then be able to simply type “easy_install django” and it should download and install the package.

Please let Brian know if you’re having trouble getting things installed. We could perhaps makes some screenshots if necessary.

Here’s a summary of the software that you’ll need to install on your laptops if you’re participating in the Digital Humanities Project Track at BootCamp.

For “Visualizing Time and Space with Simile Widgets and Google,” you will need a Google account (like a Gmail address) so you can use Google Docs. If you don’t already have access to Docs, please sign up before our session starts. Second, you’ll need a text and/or HTML editor. Most computers have one already installed: Notepad is on Windows and TextEdit is on Macs. If you want something with a little more oomph behind it, you could look at the tools at these recommended tools: simile.mit.edu/wiki/Exhibit/Tools. If you have a tool like Dreamweaver installed, that will work nicely as well.

For “Intro to Encoding Texts,” you will need to download and install <oXygen/> XML Editor. Please note that there is a 30-day free trial for the software, so you don’t need to pay anything.

For “Intro to GIS,” you will need to download and install Google Earth.

In summary, you’ll need

• a Google account and access to Google Docs
• a text editor
• <oXygen/> XML Editor
• Google Earth

I would like to propose a combination of general discussion and helpathon to address the needs and concerns of the providers and users of digital library collections; I think this could be combined with Andy Keck’s and Katie McCormack’s Session proposals and probably others.  I am on the advisory board of an open –access digital library, the Digital Library of the Caribbean (www.dloc.com), which is a grant-funded partnership of libraries in Florida and the Caribbean(for brief description see below).* I am participating in this Unconference  in part to learn ways to improve and otherwise help dLOC, but I am hoping that some of the issues that challenge this digital library are pertinent to other digital projects and would  therefore be of interest to other people in the humanities who use or work on digital collections. Below I have listed some questions concerning digital collections (as examples) and would like to hear what other questions and experiences people have in regard to digital library collections.

Examples of Technical Questions:

• What type of tools and technologies do you find necessary and/or helpful when using a digital library? (e.g. particular search functions, bookshelves, the ability to make and save comments on materials as well as to share materials through Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• What types of pedagogical guides or editorial information would you find helpful?

(dLOC, for instance, has workshops and posts teaching guides for various materials in addition to hosting a contest for teaching guides to specific material in the collection)

• How do you organize content from multiple digital collections?

Examples of Digital Scholarship Questions:

• How do we encourage/invite scholars to conduct their scholarly work with and through digital collections like dLOC? Instead of simply using materials in dLOC, what new forms of scholarship can we foster and how do we do so?

•  Whereas projects like the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture are working primarily with newer media forms (scalar.usc.edu/anvc/?page_id=2), how do we support and encourage more traditional scholarly research to take full advantage of digital collections as source and operational resources?

Examples of Questions concerning publicizing collections and building relationships with users:

• How can a library advertise its collection so that scholars know that it exists?
• How might a library develop relationships with users of the collection to ensure that it is identifying useful texts for the field?
• Could the library foster relationships among users to develop further editorial and pedagogical materials?

Examples of Questions involving Open Access and National Patrimony Collections:

dLOC sees itself as a partnership working to preserve and make available (free of cost) content from Caribbean libraries, archives, and NGOs.  However, some scholars and some librarians consider  making digital copies of Caribbean content available through open access venues a loss—especially if those venues have their servers in the U.S.

Are there good answers for such questions as:

Why should a Caribbean National Library make rare novels and magazines available to people all over the world for free? Aren’t they (and their nation) losing income from researchers who would otherwise have to travel to the country and pay for copying, etc.?

Aren’t they also losing revenue they might gain through for-profit databases, such as Ebsco and Alexander Street Press? (dLOC’s agreements over content are all non-exclusive, so everything digitized for dLOC can also be sold to databases.)

Is it important that digital collections from the Caribbean and other regions in the Postcolony host their own servers and control their own software for digital projects?

*Each dLOC partner determines which materials it will digitize, retaining an electronic copy for itself and giving one to be housed on the dLOC server, where it will be maintained by  the University of Florida Digital Library Collections’ (UFDC.com), which functions as a technical hub for the project.  dLOC has two objectives: to preserve fragile materials, often housed in only one or two national libraries or archives in the Caribbean, and to make them available as widely as possible to citizens and scholars. Founded in 2004, with five partners, the project now has over  15  including the Archives Nationale d’Haïti and three other libraries in Haiti; the Caribbean Community Secretariat (CARICOM); the National Library of Jamaica; La Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo (FUNGLODE); Universidad de Oriente, Venezuela; the University of the Virgin Islands; Florida International University; University of Central Florida; the University of Florida, the University of the Netherlands Antilles, the Biblioteca National Aruba, and the Belize National Library Service and information System, and the Caribbean Region, International Resource Network.

The Religion in North Carolina Digital Collection is currently making use of an LSTA planning grant to identify and secure permission for digitizing the publications of religious bodies in North Carolina. While focused on the digitization effort, I’ve very interested in having conversations around advanced search and visualization tools that can help scholars, researchers, and genealogists mine this corpus of materials. Or in other words, once we have this digital collection created through digitization, what do we do with it? how do we present it?

I’ll bring one example of a visualization that very quickly tells an important story about one North Carolina congregation.

Last summer I was fortunate enough to attend the NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship at the University of Virginia’s Scholars Lab. Throughout the proceedings, I found myself watching my friend Jo Guldi madly switching between a number of different applications on her MacBook Pro. I wasn’t familiar with most of the tools she was using, and her work pattern for taking notes was so different from my own that I asked her abouit. Consequently, Jo, Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, and myself sat down over lunch one day and started showing each other our personal favorite tools. (Note the absence of rimshot here, please.)

I found this exchange incredibly exciting and useful, not to mention very much in the spirit of ProfHacker, which I’ve had the great pleasure to write for since 2009. As much as you think you know about the tools of the trade, there’s always more out there. And maybe, just maybe, the things that your friends are using could help you get your writing / reading / compiling / programming done all that much more quickly.

What I’d like to propose for a session, then, is a show and tell. You get 3 minutes—at most—to show us your favorite application. You tell us what’s so great about it, how you use it in your work, and why you couldn’t live without it. We all get exposed to something new and get the chance to imagine how our own work could shift if we were to shake things up and try a new approach. If we have enough time (but how could we? people will be all over this session like butter on grits), you could get a shot to share a second favorite application with us. But seriously: don’t count on it.

It will work best if you can show us your application through the projector (we’ll have connections), but all platforms and applications are allowed. That means you can wax poetic about your favorite Android app. The best Chrome MAME. Or the best media player that you’ve found for Debian. Whatever you’d like. Heck, I suppose it could even be something analog! But you only get 3 minutes to share the love. Afterward, we’ll have a handful of new applications to try out (provided your pitch was good enough) and we’ll know who to talk to to find out more.

Does this sound appealing to anyone else?

My proposal, along with Phoebe Acheson, is to take a look at how e-readers like Kindle change (or do not change) the writing classroom. We are currently performing a study in an English Lit classroom where we have replaced the students’ print texts with Kindles (kind of like the Folger’s switch!). A few questions we have been discussing:

• How does mediating text using this particular device change reading, comprehension, in-class discussion, and writing?
• What kinds of pedagogical applications may there be for e-readers in the classroom?
• What should libraries be thinking about in providing access to electronic texts using these devices (there is a lot of talk about “on demand” collection development).

I think this discussion could be related to Brian Campbell’s “What are the spiritual impacts of technology” session idea. Is there something lost or gained in the use of the e-reader in the writing classroom and in the library?

I am also interested in the neurological and spiritual impacts of technology. There was lots of buzz in the past year about Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, or at least his Atlantic article, “Is Google Making us Stupid?”. As a religion scholar, I am also interested in recent conversations about whether Google is also making us “spiritually stupid,” making us too distracted to participate in corporate rituals or private meditation. My dissertation focuses on contemporary hermits who live alone and spend much of their time in contemplative prayer, but most are also online quite a lot. So, I am interested what all of us can learn from them about setting boundaries and developing discipline with how we engage technology. I would enjoy discussing with others how you deal with this yourself, and also how this fits into your teaching. As I use more and more technology in my courses, I want to be intentional about helping students develop healthy habits.

I currently teach environmental ethics. As I work to engage with technology more directly in the classroom, I also feel responsible for interrogating the social and environmental impacts of our classroom technologies and personal gadgets. These connect us to all sorts of global problems, including pollution, toxic waste, and child labor. I would be interested in sharing ideas about how to raise these critical ethical questions.

Here’s what I’m trying. I have assigned my students this semester to watch Annie Leonard’s “Story of Electronics,” to listen to a Fresh Air podcast featuring the Jim Puckett of the Basel Action Network, and to read a short article, “High Tech Wasteland.”

Another way I approach this is by having my students consider how our learning depends on all sorts of technologies and infrastructures that connect us to the broader world. They contribute to a blog that investigates aspects of life on campus we take for granted, so, for example they trace the source of our power, water, and food. They track where our waste flows, including e-waste, recycling, food waste, construction waste, etc. All this helps us remember the ways we are always engaged with a world beyond the classroom, even when we feel isolated in a physical or virtual academic bubble.

As a librarian/archivist, I’d be interested in a discussion of how libraries/archives can collaborate and communicate with humanities scholars to create digital content from collections in support of scholarly research needs. I am also interested in how to better work together as content is digitized to create dynamic/interactive sites to showcase the intersection of scholarship, curriculum, and digital collections. Is it just material that needs to be identified? Do we need to/how do we work together to design training, digitization centers, effective communication strategies to support and enhance such work.

In some ways, those questions/ideas touch on my other interest as I teach “Digital History” to graduate students – what kind of campus collaborations & facilities need to be in place to engage faculty and students with an interest in technology but little to no experience/background with broader theories, possibilities, and the hands on work of digital humanities?

That title makes it sound like I know what I’m talking about.  I don’t.  But I’ve recently read or heard several presentations invoking the need for information organizing software that links sources and ideas in a more web-like, hyper-linked style.  We have EndNote and Zotero, but these don’t help us organize ideas or the connections between sources.  It seems like the research process usually involves making the non-linear linear.  Part of DH is to change the end product to something more non-linear, but it might also help to learn about anything that helps us organize our (non-linear) webs of thoughts and sources.

Does this make sense?  This is more something I’d like to have, rather than something I know exists.

Lately, quite a few people have been asking some version of the question, “What is the relationship between digital pedagogy and DH?”  The most recent example that comes to mind is Alex Reid’s post “The Digital Humanities Divide.”  There Reid notes that, even though some rhetoric and composition specialists have been studying how writing and writing pedagogy have evolved in the wake of digital technology since the PC arrived on the scene nearly 30 years ago, one isn’t likely to find computers and composition studies in DH journals or at DH conferences.  In addition, although the panel, “Where’s the Pedagogy in Digital Pedagogy?,” that a couple of my colleagues organized for the MLA this year was included in lists of the conference’s DH sessions, I think a number of people might argue that digital pedagogy isn’t *really* DH at all.  I’ve certainly seen at least one or two grant descriptions that specifically exclude “primarily pedagogical” applications from the kinds of projects that might be eligible for funding.  This last may be due more to a perception that there are separate sources of funding for pedagogical projects, rather than a perception that DPed is not DH, but it has contributed to my own uncertainty regarding how the two are related.

From the way some of the other proposals are shaping up, I think we might use some of our time at THATCamp SE to reframe productively this discussion by considering the question, “Can we put DH into our DPed?”  I know that a number of us are pushing the boundaries of assignment design in order to engage students in what Bruno Latour might call “compositionism,” and what I tend to think of as doing things *with* objects of study or creating our own new objects of study, alongside the more traditional (at least in the lit classroom) activity of writing *about* literature.  In my own classes, I’ve had my students use Media Wiki to create a collaborative repository of community knowledge.  I’ve also worked closely with a couple of colleagues to design an assignment where students used a digital learning platform that I helped build to create digital critical editions of short texts.  Some of my other colleagues have given their students assignments that involved creating aesthetic or useful objects, both real and digital, and writing about them.  Might we argue that DPed is related to, even if it doesn’t exactly fall under the umbrella of DH because it involves students in using digital technologies to build things?

I don’t know, but I think the question could lead to a useful, not to mention exciting, exchange of ideas.  The many questions we could ask and discuss include the following: Should digital humanists be concerned with ensuring the resources they create are accessible to the average student at Small State U as well as fortunate scholars working at elite institutions?  What pedagogical and ethical issues do we confront when we think about involving students in the work that goes on at DH centers and on DH projects?  As Roger has asked, what place, if any, should building have in a classroom centered around humanistic inquiry?  Finally, and this is my own particular hobby-horse, to what extent should intellectual property controls be relaxed to accommodate innovative educational uses of pre-existing work?  In addition to Roger’s proposed session, I also think this topic complements and might be folded into or combined with the sessions that Pete, Miriam, and Michael have proposed.

How can digital humanities help us reimagine the dissertation? As a mid-program graduate student, I’m standing at the beginning of my dissertation project and I’m interested in hacking the dissertation.

I’ve been thinking about this from a few angles. First, digital sources provide one new way of rethinking the dissertation. Digital archives and collections that offer full text searching provide new ways to do dissertation research, especially in the current climate where graduate research funding may be difficult to find. Second, the actual dissertation itself can be rethought. For example, how could digital sources for a dissertation be archived online to provide a sort of source book for the research project? What would a “digital dissertation” look like? Lastly, how can digital technology improve the process of writing a dissertation? The dissertation is a young scholars first major project, what sort of technologies are out there that every dissertating graduate student ought to try to help them stay organized and get the thing written?

I would love to see something come out of this discussion that could serve as a guide or toolbox for graduate students wanting to hack their dissertations. There are a lot of great reviews and ideas about writing dissertations with digital technologies (for example, Tonya Roth’s blog “Hacking the Dissertation Process” ) but its very scattered and tough to track down and synthesize. We need a more systematic approach to rethinking a digital dissertation.

As part of my job, I speak to a lot of grad students about what tech projects they’d like to see happen. Increasingly, students are describing something like this: “I work with a text that I know better than anyone else. I’d like the ability to add video, text, and audio annotation to the text — like a multimedia annotated edition.”

The technology to make this happen does exist. A recent Chronicle article describes something similar, and this company is working on “books” that are perhaps even more advanced than my students are imagining.

The problem is, as far as I can tell, creating these multimedia ebooks requires comfort with XML. Much as I’d like for every grad student to possess this knowledge, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

So in this session, I’d love to hear ideas for ways to create multimedia ebooks that might be accessible to the tech-curious grad student who is nonetheless not prepared to invest the time in learning XML. Perhaps these techniques already exist, or perhaps we need to build them ourselves.

Some notes:

• Adobe InDesign is (purportedly) one way to create multimedia epubs, but my experience with it suggests that learning to create epubs in InDesign is little easier than learning XML
• The Anthologize plugin for WordPress seems to offer intriguing possibilities. WP is a CMS that many students are already comfortable using, and they’re comfortable embedding video in posts. Perhaps Anthologize could be extended to handle video and audio.
• I asked a question on this topic over at DH Answers and got some really good responses.
• I found the Wikipedia article on epub helpful in understanding the standard

Course management systems put educators and their students within electronic reach of each other, but are rarely enjoyable to use. Systemically applied platforms like ULearn (formerly Web CT) and Blackboard seem clunky and outdated. The open-source Sakai Project provides interesting options, but must be customized by the institution and sometimes loses pedagogical effectiveness in that standardization. Textbook publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s, Pearson/Longman, and Cengage all develop more usable tools tailored to individual disciplines, but those tools are often bound to the use of a particular textbook and cannot remain open for student use indefinitely.

Currently, I am researching alternatives to current course management systems. I want to learn about and help build a pedagogical landscape that jumps the fence of institutional and commercial boundaries and involves dynamic research capabilities and collaborative components. I have been teaching with a digital course space for three years, but I want to grow past it. At THAT Camp I would like gather data on what the best digital teaching environment might look like if it could harness other applications on the web, while still offering a few uniquely useful and adaptable tools within its framework.

Philosophically, this discussion might veer into evaluating the dissolution of boundaries around learning institutions. As we contemplate the impact of new digital systems, we might wonder how much teaching and learning can or should happen on the open web — outside of a log-in screen or behind the digital fence of a school. I would love to hear discussion. Functionally though,  I would like to learn about what things are currently missing from course management systems so that, collectively, we can imagine a new one(s). Even more specifically, I want to discuss how new uses of social media tools and re-imagined assessment methods can augment an online course landscape.

Anastasia Salter’s guest post on ProfHacker talks about “gamifying” a course by adding various plug-ins to existing packages (e.g., CubePoints to BuddyPress). Does adding intangible rewards (points and badges) make it a game? Here’s the “yes” perspective from one student:

I think if anything the points system has forced me to participate in class more than I normally would… I don’t respond only to get points, but I actually enjoy responding to what I read. I like giving my point of view and hearing others.

Since Salter’s course is Social Media and Games, I have a suspicion that many of her students are self-selected to look positively on points as a way of “gamifying” a class. All the more power to her if she can get such easy buy-in! I’m a little concerned about the possibility some readers might look at a simple game mechanism (points) and think that’s gamification. If you could make something fun by adding points, taking the SAT would be a barrel of laughs.

Jane McGonigal argues for a different definition of a game: a system with a goal, a set of rules, and feedback that users enter into voluntarily. Yes, points are feedback, but that’s not the only structure one can create.

This morning, the students in my undergraduate history of education class confronted an almost completely-dark room except three spots. I asked them to turn in their clearance forms, said that they were committed to the mission, and that while they always had the choice to use Option 6, I hoped they wouldn’t. Then I explained the mission: saving the world from a horrible unwinding of time that had to be fixed when top physicists in this secret organization had pinpointed the trouble (or at least a point of leverage in the past). I told them they had to make education a universally recognized right in the United States by 1900 (and the window open to them was roughly between 1850 and 1900). They could use the organization’s temporal vortex manipulator (i.e., time machine), but they could only take themselves and natural fibers (so no fancy technology), and headquarters could only be guaranteed to be stable for about two months. So they had to lay plans that could be completed with two months of “operations” in the past. They had to be shrewd. They had to brainstorm what to propose for Operation Nudge.

You may recognize that this is a setup for a standard counterfactual discussion in a history class. Except it’s anything but standard as a setup–my students had to solve the puzzle or see the world ripped apart by this temporal anomaly. It was completely hokey, but I stayed in character through the whole exercise, and my (wonderful) class got down to work in short order and tried to figure out in groups what their best targets were. No points. No big win (okay, they voted on which team’s project they wanted to see attempted, but they didn’t know I’d do that). Does it count as a game?

Well, I’ve been pondering this little bit for a little while. Feel free to comment, critique, rebuild…

This session idea was inspired by a few things coming out of the recent “Rise of the Digital Humanities” MLA 2011, and two related discussions/provocations.

1. The first is by Alan Liu (“Where’s the Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”). Liu argues that “[h]ow the digital humanities advance, channel, or resist the great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporatist, and globalist flows of information-cum-capital, for instance, is a question rarely heard in the digital humanities associations, conferences, journals, and projects with which I am familiar.”
2. The second is an interesting provocation by fellow THATCamper and Brittain Fellow Andy Famiglietti (“What Does it Mean to do the Humanities?”) in which he poses a question about the model of teaching values: “as much as I like this definition [humanities teach important artistic, cultural, and critical values], I don’t always sleep comfortably with it. It seems to imply that, without the organized study of the humanities, cultures would lapse into collections of mechanistic drones, unable to consider questions of truth or beauty. This simply isn’t true. I’ve seen the inside of technical cultures, geek enclaves and hacker freeholds and they are full of wonder and poetry. Algorithms for decrypting DVDs transformed into epic poems. Romantic jokes about the Fibonacci sequence. Furthermore, again, ask any anthropologist and cultural value is what they do. What’s our niche?”

I think that Famiglietti’s question can open a fruitful discussion for how digital applications can transform or redefine what the humanities do. If, as Bruno Latour recently argued in “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’,” critique “ran out of steam” because “it was predicated on the discovery of a true world of realities lying behind a veil of appearances,” what can the emphasis on building and creating in the digital humanities do to address the issues Liu presents above (474-5)? Or, alternatively, do the digital humanities need to identify with something essentially “humanistic” or have something to do with “cultural criticism” in order to be worthy of the name? If not, what’s the niche of the digital humanities? What do digital humanists do?

Reference
Latour, Bruno. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’.” New Literary History. 41 (2010): 471-90.

One of the things that is most exciting about THATCamps is the unconference format. If you’ve ever wanted to go to a conference without papers or presentations, then TCSE will knock your socks off. But if we’re going to have a conference without those ordinary conference trappings, we all have to pull our own weight. That means we all have two duties:

1. Write a session proposal. What we’ll talk about at THATCamp depends on what you propose. Writing out your session proposals in advance is crucial, because we’ll decide which sessions to hold in the first hour of THATCamp on Saturday. So let’s hear your ideas!

   Remember, do not prepare a paper or presentation. Instead, we’re looking for some ideas of what you’d like to work on and talk about at TCSE. In some ways, this isn’t that hard since you already told us your ideas in your application. You can feel free to post those ideas to share with the whole group or to expand. Or you could go in a completely different direction, based on where your focus has been recently. If you need a model, see these early proposals by Sherman and Adelle, as well as this great overview of THATCamp session genres that includes links to many other session proposals. Remember, everyone who goes to a THATCamp proposes a session.

2. Read and comment on others’ proposals. Since a THATCamp runs on love (as well as the occasional donation), you’ll want to be aware of what your fellow Campers plan to discuss. Read their session proposals to see what might interest you at THATCamp. If there’s a session that particularly intrigues you, start a discussion on the website. See, for example, the comments that Sherman’s post has already provoked. You can easily find all the session proposals here, and you can also subscribe to the site’s RSS feed so new posts come to you.

If you need help with doing any of this, send an e-mail to thatcamp.southeast [ut] gmail.com, and we’ll be glad to be of service.

The sooner you publish your session proposals and start discussing them online, the better prepared we will all be. And we might just start building a learning community in advance, which is what THATCamp is all about.

(It’s worth acknowledging this post’s indebtedness to Lincoln Mullen’s similar call to arms for THATCamp New England.)

It’s absolutely true that a THATCamp runs on love. This is one of the reasons why there is no registration fee for a THATCamp. We want to make sure that money isn’t a barrier to graduate students, librarians, faculty, or anyone else from attending. After all, we know as well as you do that money is tight.

But it’s also true that a THATCamp runs on coffee. And pastries. And sandwiches and monkeys. It’s for this reason that we’ll pass the hat (literally) at our THATCamp. We’ll be accepting cash donations and checks made out to “Emory Library” as tax-deductible contributions toward the Camp. As you’ve no doubt seen on our About page, we are suggesting $25 donations per Camper.

Of course, we know that not everyone carries cash in this brave new world of ours. For that reason, we’ve harnessed the power of the Internet! You can now click on the button to the right to make a donation (via credit card, if you’d like) to THATCamp Southeast! And then we can feed the monkeys. Thanks!

Applications for BootCamp are now open. Please remember to rank your choices for the tracks. As mentioned previously, we’ll largely be admitting people on a first-come, first-served basis.

One of the things that’s been most exciting to us while planning THATCamp Southeast has been our BootCamp. Early on we decided that we wanted to hold BootCamp on a different day than the rest of the Camp so that people got both hands-on training in digital skills and got the opportunity to experience the unconference excitement of THATCamp. (In this, we’re following the lead of our good friends at THATCamp Virginia.)

Working out the schedule has taken a while, but we’re pleased to announce it here. We will have three tracks at BootCamp SE: a Digital Humanities Project track, in which participants will learn digital skills by beginning a real DH project; an Introduction to Programming track, in which Campers will learn some of the basics of programming using the Python programming language and the Django framework; and a Pedagogy track, in which participants will consider the use of digital technologies in conjunction with their teaching. The Digital Humanities track will last all day. The Programming and Pedagogy tracks will follow different schedules in the morning but convene in the afternoon. (Yes, we’re aware that this means that these two tracks are in some ways only half tracks. So it goes.)

Unfortunately, the number of BootCampers that we can accommodate in each track is limited. We plan to accept Campers on a first-come, first-served basis via a webform that we’ll post at noon EST on Friday, February 18. This of course means that we won’t be able to guarantee that you’ll get your first choice of tracks–or even (unfortunately) that you’ll get in. We will make exceptions for those who have been awarded BootCamp fellowships and for those traveling long distances.

We know that we may have more people interested in attending BootCamp than we will be able to accommodate. However, we will be opening the afternoon sessions of the Programming and Pedagogy tracks to everyone. In other words, even if there isn’t room for you in the regular tracks at BootCamp, you should feel free to attend the “Intro to CMSes” and “Creating a Web Presence” sessions.

In case you haven’t already been planning to do so, you’ll certainly want to bring a laptop with you. Laptops are required for the Digital Humanities Project and Programming tracks, and you will have to install some free software ahead of time.

Digital Humanities Project Track (30 people, laptops required)

Session Descriptions

Visualizing Time and Space with Simile Widgets and Google: In this session, you’ll learn to build dynamic, interactive geospatial timelines using some simple tools: basic HTML, Google Docs, and the Simile Widgets. No previous coding experience is necessary!

The Civil War Papers Project: Learn about digital scholarship by encoding, geolocating, and then presenting a page from a Civil War-era letter or diary on a site you create together. Participants will be credited on the website.

1. Intro to Encoding Texts: Encoding texts allows you to do amazing things by making them accessible and searchable. You will learn how to mark up text using the TEI encoding scheme.
2. Intro to GIS: Maps can reveal spatial and temporal relationships that transform your scholarship. In this workshop you’ll learn how to use Google Earth to tie artifacts to their associated locations.
3. Presenting Research on the Web: You’ll learn how to put all your work together by presenting text, maps, and images on one interactive website.

Programming Track (15 people, laptops required)

Session Descriptions

Introduction to Programming I, using Python: In this session, you’ll learn the basics of programming using Python. Using the interactive shell or a simple text editor you will move from the very simple “hello world” script up through simple parsing and manipulation of XML files.

Introduction to the Django Framework using Python:In this session, you will learn the basics of using the Django Framework to rapidly develop simple web applications. The session will cover the basic design of Models, rapid access to the application through the Administration Module and creation of various views for a simple Poetry Portal.

Introduction to Content Management Systems: What are the advantages and disadvantages to different content management systems? Is there something that one can do and the others can’t? What tasks are particular CMSes designed for? You’ll learn about the ins and outs of WordPress, Drupal, and Omeka.

Creating a Web Presence for Yourself or Your Projects: You know you’re supposed to take control of your online presence, but how? This workshop will cover basics like professionalizing your Facebook profile, using RSS feeds, and why anyone would bother with Twitter. We’ll also touch on creating your own professional-looking website.

Pedagogy Track (16 people)

Session Descriptions

Teaching with the Cloud: In this session, you’ll learn about collaboration and presentation work tools that live online “in the cloud” and their use in teaching. We’ll cover include PBWorks, Blogger, and GoogleDocs.

Visualizing Course Content: There are many tools you can use to build a visual component to course content. This session includes hands-on learning with Google Gadgets, Prezi, and Simile-powered timelines.

Engaging Students through Digital Storytelling: Discover how Digital Storytelling can be used to engage students differently. We’ll discuss key elements of a successful digital story and explore using Camtasia and iMovie to create digital stories.

Introduction to Content Management Systems: What are the advantages and disadvantages to different content management systems? Is there something that one can do and the others can’t? What tasks are particular CMSes designed for? You’ll learn about the ins and outs of WordPress, Drupal, and Omeka.

Creating a Web Presence for Yourself or Your Projects: You know you’re supposed to take control of your online presence, but how? This workshop will cover basics like professionalizing your Facebook profile, using RSS feeds, and why anyone would bother with Twitter. We’ll also touch on creating your own professional-looking website.

We’ve recently heard that we could have been a bit more clear about who exactly is organizing TCSE. Who are these people behind the veil of secrecy that is thatcamp.southeast [at] gmail [dut] com? In the interest of transparency, then, we’ve decided to come clean. You can read all about the chief shenanigan-ers on our updated About page.

Believe it or not, we’ve been discovering that an unconference takes a lot of organizing. We mention this as a sort of mea culpa to acknowledge that we have not been as fast as getting information out to our Campers as we would like to be. So look for a flurry of posts in the next few days with as many details as we can get out to you.

First things first: the schedule for BootCamp and THATCamp Southeast!

BootCamp

Friday, March 4
8:30-9:00 breakfast
9:00-1:00 Sessions 1 and 2
1:00-2:00 Lunch
2:00-5:00 Sessions 3 and 4

THATCamp

Saturday, March 5
8:30-9:30 breakfast, session organizing
9:30-10:15 Welcome, Logistics, etc.
10:30-11:45 Session 1
12:00-1:00 Lunch/dork shorts
1:00-2:15 Session 2 
2:30-3:45 Session 3
4:00-5:15 Session 4

Sunday, March 6
8:30-9:00 Breakfast
9:15-10:30 Session 5
10:45-12:00 Session 6
12:15-12:30 Goodbyes

Look for more details very shortly.

I have a reservation at Emory Inn for the nights of 3-5 March. Please contact me if you would like to share.
Best wishes,

Leah

Learn how to create a design (almost) from scratch for your Drupal 7 web site using base themes, grids, CSS, accessibility tips, and a tiny bit of PHP. If this session is chosen, the most important thing you can bring is a sketch of your user-friendly web design idea.

We’re pleased to announce that we have all but finished the scheduling for BootCamp SE. Barring any unforeseen difficulties, we plan to offer the following sessions on Friday, 4 March:

• Intro to Content Management Systems (CMS): WP, Drupal, Omeka
• Intro to Programming I with Python
• Intro to Programming II, using Python with Django
• Intro to Text Encoding
• Intro to GIS
• Building a Collection (and its Metadata!) in Omeka
• Creating a Web Presence for Yourself or Your Projects
• Visualizing Time and Space with Simile Widgets and Google

Early next week we will provide the schedule of the sessions as well as full descriptions.

Would anyone like to share a room and gas cost from the Columbia, SC area? I am willing to drive my car.

Have a reservation at the Inn for Friday and Saturday.

Gypsye

I guess I’m the first THATCamp SE camper who’s posting. First, the room-share offer. I have a room Friday and Saturday at the Emory Inn with two beds, and I’ll be happy to share it with a male non-smoker with a strong preference for someone who’s willing to trade some quick-and-dirty Ruby or other DUP (damned useful programming) tutorial for the room-share. (As in, I want to learn for a specific project and have some structured [procedural] programming in my head but no OOP or current-language skills. You teach me a bit, you get a place to crash. Contact me by email.)

Now, for the random thoughts on sessions:

• This hasn’t interested many at other THATCamps, but I’m going to float it in case it sparks conversation: DH perspectives on humanities assessment. Right now, higher-ed is facing enormous pressure on “outcomes,” by which many of us fear reductionist assessment. The Lumina Foundation got people interested in liberal-arts and higher ed policy together to create its Degree Qualifications description, which is far more friendly to liberal arts than other possibilities. But there are two reasons to look for humanities “native” assessment research: 1) there will STILL be national political pressures to demonstrate what students learn, and 2) regional accreditors (including SACS) are looking for assessments, and a lot of faculty at schools in the Southeast will be pressured towards the reductionist assessments they hate unless they have alternative tools.
• The Skill Set: What set of skills are likely employers of DH students/graduates going to reward (and hire people for!)? For example, a university library department head told me in the last year that she expects ALL new university librarians will need some familiarity with programming, quasi-programming (WordPress theme hacking?), or something to climb the learning curves as university library software systems evolve. We shouldn’t gear what we do as students, faculty, and professionals entirely to the job market, but especially if someone’s spending money and time on a graduate degree, thinking about this would be appropriate.
• Games, gamification, game development for the humanities. Instructional design issues, development kits, CubePoints, ChoreWars, etc. (Gain experience points in the session if you protect session attendees from the Ice Boss.)

We just wanted to remind everyone that our special rate on hotel rooms is set to expire tomorrow, February 10. We’ve been hearing chatter on Twitter and elsewhere that people would like a forum to find roommates for TCSE (given that whole price-of-the-hotel-rooms-going-up-on-10-February thing). Since we’ve added all the Campers to the site, you can now log in and begin posting content, including calls for roommates. If you’re new to WordPress, just look for “Posts” on the left-hand column, click “Add new,” write your post, and then click the big blue “publish” button on the right.

Of course, you don’t need to use the website for organizing roommates, but it’s there for you if you’d like–this is your THATCamp, after all. Twitter works too, of course; but don’t forget the #thatcamp hashtag!

There are big things afoot here in the land of THATCamp Southeast planning, including the recent announcement of campers. Today brings news about the two THATCamp Southeast hotels.

We have reserved a limited number of rooms at a conference rate of $76.00 plus tax/night for single/double occupancy at the Emory Inn (not the Conference Center; scroll down to read about the Inn). Accepted campers will need to make hotel reservations no later than 10 February to guarantee they will get the conference rate. Additionally, we have secured a courtesy room rate of $139.00 plus tax/night for single/double occupancy at the Emory Conference Center.

You can make reservations at either hotel by calling (800) 933-6679 and mentioning that you are with “THATCamp.” Be sure to specify which property you want to reserve a room at.

Both properties are at 1615 Clifton Road, Atlanta, GA 30329.

We fully encourage Campers to connect with each other via this space or Twitter to find potential roommates to save on costs!

Make sure you watch the Location and Logistics page for more updates!

We just wanted to mention again that there was some snow in Atlanta recently. It shut down the city for five days, and threw us planners off our game as far letting people hear back from us by January 15. We’re pleased to report that we have now gone through over half of the applications and will be getting to the others in short order. You have our promise that we’ll let you hear from us as soon as possible about being accepted.

Thanks for your patience!

In case you haven’t heard, the South is struggling with its most feared enemy: frozen water. As such, while the applications to THATCamp Southeast have in fact closed, we the organizers have yet to be able to meet to discuss the applications. We are hoping that someone finds some salt and gets the roads in Atlanta open before the end of the week. If so, we’ll do our best to reach our original goal of notifying select attendees by Friday, 15 January. If we don’t, know that it’s not because we don’t love you; it’s because nature doesn’t.

We here at TCSE HQ are big fans of Twitter. Perhaps you’re following us already? But just like THATCamps are for anyone with interests in the humanities and technology (that’s why we’re hosting a BootCamp, after all!) we’re not going to limit ourselves to one social media network. That’s why we’ve created a new Facebook page for the Camp. We hope that this makes it easier for you to share THATCamp with your friends and colleagues without resorting to our incredible THATCamp SE poster (PDF).

And while you’re admiring the charmingly hand-hewn nature of our Wall, may we invite you to please “Like” us as well? We’re out to become the most-Liked THATCamp on Facebook! (We’ll admit this is not a terribly lofty summit to climb at the moment, but there you have it.)

Start spreading the news: THATCamp SE applications are now open! To help you get the word out, here’s the hot-off-the-presses THATCamp SE poster (PDF), which we hope you’ll plaster all over the Southeast.

Please forward this poster widely to listservs, academic departments, and anyone else you think might be interested. But if you do, will you drop us a line at thatcamp.southeast@gmail.com to let us know where you’ve sent it? We’d like to avoid spamming people.

Here’s our suggestion for an email to accompany the poster as you pass it on. But of course you should feel free to use your own words.

Dear XXXXXX,

THATCamp Southeast (southeast2011.thatcamp.org/) is a free “unconference” for anyone working at the intersection of the humanities and technology. It will be held at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 4-6, 2011.

We’re currently accepting applications from students, faculty, librarians, technologists, museum professionals, archivists, and anyone else who is interested in the digital (and the) humanities. We’d appreciate it if you’d pass this message on, and post the attached flyer if you can.

Because THATCamp is an “unconference,” our participants will determine the ground we cover. Depending on your interests, we may hold sessions on issues in digital scholarship, pedagogy, curation, software demos, or training sessions. In other words, you won’t present formal talks, papers, or panels. Instead, you’ll share your ideas for potential THATCamp sessions prior to the Camp. At the start of the event, we’ll collectively agree on which conversations will take place.

Our event also includes a one-day “BootCamp”: a series of hands-on workshops to help get digital novices up to speed. So don’t be intimidated if you’re new to digital humanities!

The brief application is available at southeast2011.thatcamp.org/apply-to-attend. The deadline is January 9, 2011.

Please email thatcamp.southeast@gmail.com with any questions, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (twitter.com/THATCamp_SE). We look forward to hearing from you!

All best,
XXXXXXX

The moment that you’ve been waiting for has arrived: THATCamp Southeast is now accepting applications! We’ll be taking them until 9 January, but that’s no reason to wait to apply. We plan to accept around 75 Campers and will let them know of their acceptance around 15 January.

In the coming weeks, we plan to add more information about travel and accommodations. We will also be distributing marketing materials that you can share with colleagues and students. (If you’ve got a flair for design, please feel free to create your own and share them with us!)

For now, just make sure that you keep an eye on this space and on our Twitter account for the latest information.

We’re pleased to announce that THATCamp Southeast will include a BootCamp. A BootCamp is series of educational, hands-on sessions to introduce Campers to various digital skills related to research and teaching in the humanities.

Our BootCamp will take place on Friday, March 4, the day before the full THATCamp begins. This schedule (borrowed from our friends at THATCamp VA) will allow “analog” humanists, librarians, and museum professionals to learn alongside passionate and expert technologists and still participate fully in Saturday’s and Sunday’s THATCamp. And yes, you should feel free to consider this a THATCamp Southeast pre-party.

Campers should mark on their applications if they are interested in participating in the BootCamp. Tuition is free, but a handful of fellowships will be available — through the generosity of the Mellon Foundation, the Kress Foundation, and the Council on Library and Information Resources — to defray travel costs for qualified applicants.

At present we are still refining ideas for sessions. Possible sessions include the following:

• Creating a Web Presence for Yourself and/or Your Projects
• Text Encoding Fundamentals
• Digitization Fundamentals
• Introduction to Python
• Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities
• Intro to CMSes: WordPress, Drupal, Omeka
• Transcribing and Describing Primary Sources

However, this is your BootCamp. What would you like to learn? Please send us suggestions via the comments, Twitter, or email at thatcamp.southeast@gmail.com. If you need help brainstorming ideas, see this range of topics that can be taught as BootCamp curriculum.

When we announced THATCamp Southeast at the end of August, the dates of the Camp were not yet firm. We’re pleased to say that the Camp will take place on 5-6 March 2011.

Of course, you want to know how you (and your librarian, museum, graduate student, technologist, and faculty friends) can attend THATCamp Southeast. For that, you will need to apply. We are working on the backend at the moment, but can now confirm that we will be opening up for applications on 1 December. We will accept applications until 9 January and hope to notify selected attendees by 15 January.

But don’t think that there won’t be anything happening here until 1 December. Keep your eye on this spot (and our Twitter stream) for still more exciting news!

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us. In the past few months, the THATCamp SE planners have been ironing out details and working on our new website. While we plan to iron one or two last wrinkles out of the website design, we’d like to thank Regional THATCamp coordinator Amanda French and CHNM’s Jeremy Boggs for their work on “THATCamp-in-a-box,” which is providing the backbone for organizing the event. It’s great to know that the crowdsourcing starts well before the THATCamp itself does.

And speaking of crowdsourcing, we put the call out to our Google Group (you’re a member, right?) for assistance with a logo. The result was our awesome new THATCamp Southeast image designed by Chrisitan Steinmetz, the Creative Manager at Georgia State University’s Library. We’re very grateful for his wonderful work.

We’re delighted to announce THATCamp Southeast!

What: A regional THATCamp, AKA an unconference focusing on the intersection of technology and the humanities.
When: THATCamp Southeast is tentatively scheduled for 5-6 March 2011
Where: Atlanta, Georgia (in Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library and Emory Center for Interactive Teaching)
Who: organizers include digital humanities folks, librarians, and more from Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State
Who’s coming: YOU as well as 75 faculty, librarians, arts and museum workers, graduate students, technologists, and more!

We’re still in the early planning stages but you can join the conversation about THATCamp Southeast at our Google Group. For more updates, you can should watch this space and follow @thatcamp_SE on Twitter.

More soon!