Game session notes (editable version). Static below:
Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken — game definition:
- Goal
- Rules
- Feedback
- Voluntary entry
Archive for category Session Ideas
Game session notes
Mar 5
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 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?
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.
