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.)
#1 by Lee Skallerup Bessette on February 9, 2011 - 2:02 pm
How about a dictionary explaining what you just said in your first paragraph (says the DH newbie). I’d like some basic coding (what is it, what can it do, why we should be doing it), some stuff on digital copyright (so I can stay legal), and, hey, why not assessment! I’m a small, instructor voice in the big pond of the tenured and admins, so what do I know?
And man, why is is ALWAYS SACS? I mean, is it just because it’s Atlanta, or is SACS just that bad?
#2 by Sherman Dorn on February 9, 2011 - 2:20 pm
Lee, if you’re asking about my offer of trading a bit of tutoring for rooming, Ruby is one of the — well, not exactly programming language but what’s called a framework to help write program code. Unlike some other DHers, I don’t believe you need to write computer code to be a digital humanist. OOP = object-oriented programming, which I know almost nothing about. Procedural programming =a line-by-line set of instructions for the computer. (Do this, then do that, then until your left foot is blue do this other thing. Object-oriented code allows you tell a computer that there’s a button on the screen (or define “button” as the location on the screen with the image we recognize as a button), to watch the button, and if someone rolls a mouse pointer over it and clicks, do something as a result.)
And SACS is our Evil Overlord. Or at least Evil Overbureaucrat.
#3 by David Morgen on February 10, 2011 - 1:21 pm
I’m the Assistant Director of the Writing Center at Emory, and we do tons of assessment, which we use internally in lots of ways, but I have lately been thinking that there should be a whole bunch of useful DH approaches to this assessment activity. I would be very much interested in talking about DH approaches to assessment.
#4 by Sherman Dorn on February 10, 2011 - 2:00 pm
Minor correction: Ruby is a language, I’ve been told. Ruby on Rails is a framework. And I’m sure once I get the nomenclature correct, everything will change…
#5 by Robin Wharton on February 16, 2011 - 12:00 pm
I would also be interested in discussing and thinking about DH approaches to both writing assessment and writing pedagogy, and I’m pretty sure a number of my Georgia Tech colleagues who plan to be in attendance would be as well.
In addition, my research includes critical legal studies involving copyright and the regulatory framework that structures communication and cultural production. So I would love to participate in a discussion of copyright, intellectual property, and how they affect or might be affected by digital humanities work.
#6 by afamiglietti on February 17, 2011 - 11:13 pm
Just a +1 to both the ideas being discussed here. Robin knows I can never resist shooting my mouth off about intellectual property 🙂
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#7 by Moira on February 23, 2011 - 9:15 pm
Options 1 & 3 interest me very much; maybe even as a combined topic…how to assess learning using games.
#8 by Brian Croxall on February 28, 2011 - 8:34 pm
I’m very interested in concepts related to gamification, despite what Ian Bogost might think of me for it. I would love to have a session thinking about how we could gamify assignments, tests, and other such things. Unfortunately, I’m not teaching in my current position, but I hope that that will change in the Fall, if not beforehand.
I’d like to press more on what sort of perspectives you’re seeing DH as being able to bring to assessment. Do you mean just what sorts of assessment we should be doing in courses that have a DH component? Or do you mean how DH methodologies could be applied to understanding/visualizing/whatever-ing the assessments we already have in place. (And does anyone really want to see a Wordle of my teacher evaluations?)
#9 by David Morgen on March 1, 2011 - 7:59 am
I’m also not teaching in my current position, but hoping to get back into classroom in the fall, and have similar interests w.r.t. gamification.
What I meant bat assessment, Brian, was the latter: how to apply DH methodologies to assessments we already have in place. I’m the Asst. Dir of the Writing Center. We do lots & lots of assessment and have data stretching back for years, but we don’t do anything with it at all. I’d like to explore how to analyze, visualize, & communicate the results of all this data using DH systems. I also think DH tools shold open up new ways of dong assessment that would allow us to get at questions that previously went largely ignored. At a conference I attended a couple of weeks ago, the keynote speaker described what occurs in a writing center session as a “black box” that simply couldn’t be assessed. I’d like to take that as a challenge.
#10 by Brian Croxall on March 1, 2011 - 8:24 pm
At the risk of splitting hairs, David, I don’t know if visualizing the data that you’ve got is really so much a DH thing rather than just making the data more accessible/comprehensible. But since most of us humanities-trained people haven’t had any training in such stuff until DH came along, it’s probably fair to conflate the two.
I wonder if you’ve been playing around with Google Fusion Tables?
#11 by David Morgen on March 1, 2011 - 8:56 pm
It’s not just visualizing data. It’s taking a bunch of text that is not especially usable in its current form, converting it into usable data, & then using it to say something about the way students have been taught to write over the last 5-10 years. Or at least, that’s what I hope I can pull off. (This is a separate problem from the one I talked to you about before, dispaying current reports for tutors–I’m wondering about some sort of text mining performed on the years of historical reports we have in the archives. I think that is actually DH, not simply about presentation.)
#12 by Brian Croxall on March 1, 2011 - 9:02 pm
Gotcha. Insofar as we consider the study of writing and composition to be in the humanities (and I think we should, even though it’s maligned), then this would certainly be a site that should be considered DH.