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In my Dork Short I presented my observation that there’s been a great push to get digital materials up and online, and not necessarily a lot of thought as to what happens to those collections/portals afterwards. This has resulted in what I call “digital graveyards,” a term I’ve since loosely defined as:

“A site or portal, designed as an information resource, usually but not necessarily providing access to digitized archival materials, on which no future development is planned.”

I say “loosely defined” because this definition may include sites that would not be considered “graveyards” (or may not even be broad enough!).  As I think about the issue, especially its definition, I come up with more questions surrounding it. For instance, can a website ever be considered final in the same way a published book is? My inclination is no, if I come across a site that looks like it’s outdated, I automatically have the tendency to discount the information it provides. I don’t necessarily feel the same way about a book, but I do react to the information a book provides based on it’s publication date; I attempt to place the book in a contextual history, so to speak. If I’m writing a literature review, I may mention the book in a narrative time frame that explains its reflections on the topic on which my thesis relates to, but I would then continue on to list more recent analysis of my topic, concluding with discussion of the most recently published items. Perhaps the way I respond to an outdated site is based on not understanding the context in which it was created.

Which brings up an additional question: can such resources be compared to books? As an information professional, I try to describe materials in the most objective manner possible, observing faith to the original and leaving analysis to the researchers using the materials.  But description doesn’t happen in a vacuum; much like a publication, it happens in a time and a place. Archivists continually struggle to maintain objectivism while providing contextual information they feel is necessary for a researcher to understand a collection. Any description of archival materials, no matter how standardized and data-ized it may be reflects the current thought of the time and place it was created, much the same way a published book is expected to.

Books are often revised. Finding aids, the main descriptive tool used by archivists, often need to be revised. Why would we not expect the environment of digital collections or websites to need to change as well?

This leads me back to my question of what really could be defined as a digital graveyard. Is it akin to a finding aid that never gets revised? Are the circumstances of the publication of the digital site obvious enough to researchers that they can evaluate it within the context it was created? And of course there’s always the bigger question of who is responsible for making sure such a site stays published online, let alone updated.

As I process these questions, I’m interested in what you would define as a “digital graveyard.” Is it a project that existed, but today is not online? Am I being too broad or too narrow in my definition, which is based on my own observations as a librarian/archivist and not a digital humanities person? And most importantly, do you have examples of projects you would consider digital graveyards?

Although this post has been mainly focused on me trying to define the term “digital graveyard,” my goal is to eventually be able to identify the common factors that relegate a project ultimately to being unsustainable. This may be a difficult venture- no one likes to talk about unsuccessful projects. But I strongly believe that the evolution of successful projects is based on learning what went wrong in the past, and I don’t feel there is a better forum for that takes into account not only the data providers (librarians and archivists) viewpoint but also that of those that use such materials.

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On the practical level, I’m interested in using scripts as a way to tailor the applications that we use to interpret the (sometimes huge) amounts of data that we have. And though it’s impossible to learn any programming language in a single 1-2 hour session, I think it would be helpful for those of us who have had to deal with repetitive, but labor-intensive processes to know of all of the alternatives.

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I would be interested in discussing ways in which digital technologies can increase access, improve the depth and breadth of learning, or promote critical engagement in public cultural institutions (museums, libraries, parks), etc.. Also, I wonder who is left behind, e.g. what “kind of learners”/what forms of learning do current technologies  privilege? How can we accommodate active learning for people of different knowledge bases, needs, and literacies?

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I’d be interested in hearing from THAT camp folks about how new media might work as part of the core of humanities assignments in college classes. I’ve worked as an instructor in video, audio, and digital image production, and completed an MFA in which digital media was at the core of 90% of our assignments. However, I’ve noticed that among my colleagues in the humanities straightforward research papers, essays, and written exams are still de rigueur, with few exceptions.

Many scholars of digital media and the new generation—Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, John Palfrey—suggest that the PC has heralded a second “Gutenberg age” of sorts. The ability to produce a short documentary, a podcast, a game, a web exhibit, or a slideshow is now within grasp. Many “digital natives” are able to quickly pick up skills with digital media, having a high familiarity with technology and media exposure. And new technologies and techniques will only become more popular and important with time.

At the same time more humanities classrooms are assigning works of digital media as part of the “required reading.” Scholars are using digital media to collaborate and connect with one another. And there is an abundance of new original work that is could be considered scholarly in nature, but only exists in the form of digital media (just thinking of podcasts alone, this and this come to mind).

But I wonder: are classrooms and syllabi keeping up? How much are humanities instructors building non-traditional assignments into the core of their curricula? How can scholarship in digital formats be recognized by the academy? Will we one day be seeing essays in YouTube form, podcasts as final papers, Powerpoint presentations as final exams, and feature documentaries as dissertations?

Moving beyond using digital media tools in research, I’d like to discuss the advantages, disadvantages, and challenges with assigning projects that involve creating original video, audio, and images.

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I am an educator above all else. So my vantage point is as someone who is primarily interested in an end-user as opposed to the technology (mean) or even the historical materials (content). I want to know how I can share information with people in compelling ways.

My work in the digital humanities thus far, though always firmly grounded in sound scholarly practice, has been all about harnessing technology to create access to historical material and to present those materials in intriguing ways that inspire inquiry and (hopefully) learning.

While I understand and value the need for scholars and academics to connect with one another and materials, I’m hoping we can talk about a place outside the realm of this specific group, to explore how to use the practices/experiences of digital humanists to reach a much broader public with our work. We are all so deeply involved in doing the real work of historians, humanists, etc.–we are experts. How can we channel this energy into more public offerings that will invite novices, teachers, high school students, etc. into our world so they to can become deeply involved and invested in this work as well?

I have been working on one specific project (www.oldnorth.org/tories), but would love to hear more about other initiatives that are geared toward connecting with non-academic audiences and that are about more than just ACCESS to materials, but using technology to model and encourage the use of these digital materials.

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The frustrations with and criticisms of learning management systems (LMSs) run the gamut from usability (“why is it so hard to load content?”) to integration (“why can’t it work with my blog?”) to the very purpose of the tool itself (“can we really manage learning with this tool?”).

All of these points are valid, but are they the result of inherent flaws with LMSs, or with specific design choices made by the corporations or groups responsible for these systems? Institutionally, even the biggest detractors generally note that LMSs are a necessary evil, ensuring FERPA compliance and providing a barrier for copyright/fair use cases. Individually, however, many folks frustrated with the system simply go outside the system, using free online tools and avoiding the official campus LMS as much as possible.

None of the above is news to anyone who has used an LMS, whether a student, teacher, or administrator.

Here are some of the questions I’d like to discuss, preferably agnostically (i.e., this isn’t the place to discuss why Moodle is better than Blackboard or other similar topics):

• Does a centralized campus LMS have (or could it have) value as a teaching, learning, or research tool?
• How important are factors like privacy/FERPA, copyright, and intellectual property when thinking about using an LMS or other web services?
• How can we drive the ever-changing LMS market to make it better able to support folks in the digital humanities?

General venting about how awful your campus’s LMS is will be met with both sympathy and empathy, but will be most appreciated if it includes constructive answers to the above questions (or poses new questions to ponder).

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I’m interested in a session that would allow THATCampers to share examples of the ways in which they’ve gone beyond the basic “course blog” in order to add additional functionality (and opportunities for learning) in their online course companions. I’m interested to hear about the platforms that people have chosen, the customizations that they’ve made, and the assignments that they’ve designed in order to take advantage of, or enhance, the course website. (And when I say “hear about” I actually mean see– and get a walk-through of– since that’s the format that I imagine this session would take).

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Following the great session proposals by Lincoln, Aaron (in both what researchers want and is it really you?), and Colin, I would also be interested in exploring the uses of networks and databases in the practice of digital humanities. In particular, I would like to discuss how we can rethink the way that archival records are organized and displayed online, to more effectively present the networks of ideas, goods, and people that are often at the center of historical work.

I work on Atlantic abolition movements, and most of my research concerns tracing very geographically broad networks of people and ideas as they moved throughout the Atlantic basin. As I work to illuminate these networks, I can’t help but think that in many cases, I am re-doing work that has been previously done by others. Could historians, like scientists, get into the habit of putting their data online for the benefit of others? What barriers, technological and otherwise, currently prevent historians from doing this? What sort of infrastructure would we need to create in order to enable this sort of information sharing in an organized and coherent manner? How might we reconceptualize the archive to incorporate data sharing?

Related to these issues, I am intrigued by the way that most online archives are still organized around discrete collections of documents, even though most documents, such as letters, books, broadsides, and land records, were created as part of much larger networks of exchange that go far beyond the boundaries of collections. How might we use digital technology to better display the connections between documents and collections? Would it be possible to foreground these networks by making them an access point to archival material? This is obviously largely a problem of limited resources – archivists don’t often have the time to undertake these sorts of massive projects. With that in mind, could we make the creation of these networks into a participatory endeavor that leverages the expertise and work of both archivists and historians?

I think that many of the more technical questions that Aaron and Lincoln brought up in their session proposals are central to thinking about this, and I’d love to have a session made up of archivists and historians to talk about the issues around displaying historical networks.

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A somewhat less amorphous proposal…

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can define who someone really is on the Web. With bibliographic material, we have the Library of Congress Name Authority File, which, though Orwellian sounding, does a fairly good job helping us differentiate the John Smith who romanced Pocahontas from the John Smith who wrote the definitive biography of Benny Hill. This business becomes a little more complicated, however, with archival material on the Web. Archival collections are filled with obscure people, whose roles in history, while not individually significant enough to make it into a high school text book, or the Name Authority File for that matter, are important because of their associations with significant movements, historical events, or other like minded and sometimes more famous people.

Mining archival material for these associations can be complicated. How do we know that the John Smith who has letters in the Big Famous Guy Papers is the same John Smith that is recorded in notes that are part of the Import Student Revolutionary Movement collection as having attended some significant meeting. As anyone can imagine, this problem becomes even more significant when archiving contemporary collections of individuals who are represented on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and in chat rooms…

Tools like FOAF, EAC, and FRAD are emerging for disambiguating individuals and defining their identities throughout their distributed representations on the Web and in archival collections in widespread repositories. How might these tools work in systems that publish archival material on the Web and what impact on research in the humanities might these different approaches have?

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This is a rather amorphous session proposal but it gets at a discussion that I would love to have at THATCamp this weekend.

At the University of Massachusetts, we’ve started large-scale digitization projects that in the next two years will put more than a hundred thousand digital objects online, with thousands more in the near future.  As we weave together descriptions of individual documents in MODS, TEI transcriptions, RDF encoded relationships for collection structure, and EAD encoded finding aids, it’s become clear that there is a lot of potential in this rich and varied metadata to deliver researchers customized access to our digitized primary source material.

I would love to hear from humanities researchers how you envision using these resources.  At first, ignoring the specific technologies involved, fantasize about ideal research environments for digitized primary sources.  What kinds of data mining/manipulation, visualization, or integration would help your research?  Do you want APIs directly into XML-encoded metadata; do you want linked data that allows you to use the tools of the Semantic Web to interrogate data from primary sources; or do you want shiny, end-user applications that make use of these magical tools to bring you polished presentations of primary source data and information.

As a digital archivist, I see huge potential in the digital content that archives are publishing.  It would be exciting to meet minds about how this potential might shape humanities research and what we can do make access to our digital content better.

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This isn’t a session proposal; that can be found here. Rather, this is a reflection that I recently posted to my much neglected blog and was invited  to post here as well.  

My experience at THATCAMP New England promises to be quite different than my first un-conference encounter back in May at the Center for History and New Media. That first exposure felt like a dizzying plunge off the deep end into a freewheeling yet purposeful culture of conversation, creative energy and camaraderie.

Yes, “more hack, less yack” emerged as the unofficial theme for that spring weekend but, for a relative newcomer like me, who has plenty of yack but very little hack, talking about ideas, projects and the issues confronting digital humanities seemed within reach whereas hacking did not. (This said, I still sat in on a few of the programming-oriented sessions, if only to absorb the spirit of things while the content soared over my head.)  Overall, I observed much, contributed a little and came away inspired by the different models of digital scholarship that I’d encountered—in both human and project form.

My lack of technical know-how continued to nag at me, however. For this reason, I kept thinking back to a session on BootCamp organizing that I sat in on briefly. How great would it be, I thought, if I could attend a series of workshops designed to help folks like me build some of the basic technical skills needed not only to do the work of digital humanities but also to collaborate more effectively with the technical experts who support and partner with us?  Well, I’ll soon find out exactly what it is like to attend such workshops.  The chief reason my THATCamp New England experience promises to be different than my first un-conference is that I will be participating in all the BootCamp sessions being offered.

I plan report on my experiences as part of my contributions as a HASTAC scholar this year. Since I first stumbled upon this enterprise that (some of us) call digital humanities or digital scholarship, I’ve been interested in how it is (beyond DIY) that one acquires useful skills and becomes a part of this dynamic, diffuse, diverse community. So, I hope by chronicling my journey that I’ll help demystify the process for anyone else out there who is drawn by the buzz of excitement but uncertain about how to find their footing on unfamiliar terrain. Heck, the last time I made a foray into the hack side of things it involved an undergraduate class “CIS 197: Introduction to Computer Programming: Pascal” in the punch-card era!

Now, if I can only decide on the appropriate footwear. Boots at Bootcamp too last season?

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Brief version

I’d like to have a practical session for (1) identifying DH tools (or sites, though that’s a little trickier) that need multilingual user interfaces and (2) taking the first steps toward making a MUI for one or more of them.

Long version

Most technology for learning languages, in my brief experience, is not even chocolate-covered broccoli — it’s carob-covered broccoli at best (or maybe broccoli ice cream). However, engaging students with an institution’s library and museum holdings through DH work provides them a way to strengthen their language abilities and DH abilities in tandem, and to see how language learning can open up new perspectives on their studies and new options for their academic (or other) life paths.

While I am always excited to see the wonderful tools coming out of the DH hacker community, it strikes me often that they are missing multilinguality. While localizing/internationalizing an application is not simple, the success of WordPress in getting translations for the core components is encouraging. (And yet: Even WordPress does not expose the multilinguality level of a plugin, leaving users hanging when they just want to find, say, a plugin to send messages in correctly formatted Hebrew to subscribers.) In keeping with the “more hack, less yak” motto, I’d like to get together THATCampers interested in doing DH in languages other than English to identify some important tools/sites that would benefit from crowdsourced translation, and then to start taking steps toward getting this translation done. My thought is that I’m talking about tools that can be used in or hacked for use in pedagogy, but there’s no reason we can’t look at research tools or library tools or museum tools or anything else. I’m certainly not talking about tools that were designed for language learning or SLA research, such as corpora.

The big kick in the pants is that I’m green enough that I don’t really know how best to start with such a project. (What are the most widely used? What tools are targeted at multilingual users?) This session would need people either who know more about the tool landscape than I or participants willing to do a bit of discovery/exploration first.

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I’d like to discuss best practices in designing databases for humanities research. I don’t mean software that creates or depends on databases, like Omeka or WordPress for public presentation. I mean more designing databases for research in the history. I’d like to compile a group of databases used for historical analysis, and dissect them to see how they work. How do they structure and normalize data? How is the data coded? What formats are best? How can databases be made publicly available? How was the data compiled and entered? What uses can be found for databases beyond their original purpose?

To that end, here are a few examples of historical databases that I know of off-hand. I’d be glad for more examples, before or during this session.

• Ariela Gross, database appendix to Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom
• Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
• Buddhist Authority Database Project
• This I Believe

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Thus far this semester, I have exchanged precisely 0 pieces of paper with my students. Additionally, I have exchanged exactly 0 MSWord documents. (Oddly, the latter has been far more difficult than the former to maintain!) This session will discuss a variety of tools for classroom planning, class prep, “handouts,” readings, discussions, and all of the work of teaching in a paper-free way. I’m not imagining a hardware intensive discussion (e.g. if we all have ipads we can do…). Some specifics I can talk about include: WordPress in the classroom, Scrivener as a class planning and archiving tool, and using Wordle for really a wacky number of things. As a mac user on a PC campus, I can also speak to some of the cross-platform pitfalls. I’m also excited to hear discussion of others’ classroom, class planning, and teaching techniques.

Interestingly, not long after I posted this, I saw this article. Perhaps we can discuss the ethical and class issues around assuming access to the technology required to be paperless as well!

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First of all, I think Clarissa, Carrie, Lincoln, and to some extent Cathleen have raised issues that I’m very interested in– all related to how researchers might build and use collections of digital sources, either individually or collaboratively. As a history researcher who’s worked in lots of different archives, I can do a brief show-and-tell of the materials I use for digitizing and organizing sources and talk about what’s worked well and not-so-well for me. (I’ve spoken about this before, but I figure there are always people who want to learn this stuff.) I’ve relied on command-line tools and basic automation with OS X tools rather than on Omeka, mostly because working with raw images is much faster for handling the number of sources I use.

More relevant to my own work, I’d like to discuss the specific case of government-held archival collections, like those at National Archives repositories, and the possibility that researchers can work together to collaboratively digitize the materials we use. I’ve been thinking about this specifically in relation to an important women’s history collection, and I’d love to brainstorm with people about what the next steps should be for such a project.

I’d also be very interested in talking with library/IT professionals who’ve installed Fedora Commons and/or Islandora for use as a research-data infrastructure. My sense is that both of those are designed for larger-scale applications than Omeka usually handles, but that they also require a correspondingly large investment of time and funding– which means that even if they’re better tools for what I need, they’re impractical to use at the dissertation level. Can we envision cross-institutional collaborations to solve this problem of virtual research environments for humanities scholars, and if so, what forms might those collaborations take?

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I’ve been beginning to invest some time in data modeling for the Semantic Web using RDF Schema and OWL (the Web Ontology Language), especially in terms of providing representations of archival resources online. I buy into the promise of Linked Data, but many of the things I am hoping to represent are complex. Arguably, data modeling can become as complex as you think it needs to, but it’s easy to get stuck in a black hole of doing too much, as humorous blogpost from the University of Southampton describes. Just the same, however, incautious modeling, or even undermodeling, can lead to undesired consequences (see, for example Simon Spero’s poster from DC2008, “LCSH is to Thesaurus as Doorbell is to Mammal” [abstract, blog post with poster diagram]).

I attended this year’s Dublin Core conference in Pittsburgh. In the Linked Data working sessions coordinated by Karen Coyle and Corey Harper at the conference, I kept reiterating the need for developing a means by which we can create models iteratively. I’m not sure what this looks like, however, and I’d be eager to talk about this. I’d also like to help myself and others determine when borrowing from existing ontologies and vocabularies makes sense, or when we should go off on our own.

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I’m about to teach my first class this coming semester, and I would love to hear THATCamp-ers thoughts (and experiences?) on using Twitter in the classroom.  I’m a social Twitterer (@ajin212), and I’ve personally live tweeted at a museum un-conference hosted by the John Nicholas Brown Center and for a public humanities course on memory and memorials.  However, I haven’t live-tweeted in the classroom.

I’ve read up a bit from scholars and critics here [“How Twitter in the Classroom in Boosting Student Engagement”], and here [“Twitter and Facebook in the Classroom”], and here [“Purdue University Adds Twitter and Facebook to Class Participation”].  In general, there seem to be mixed reviews from both professors who have used social media and question tools in lecture.

It seem unreasonable to hold a discussion amongst 15-20 students and having everyone live tweet simultaneously.  No one would look up from their laptops, phones, and iPads…  However, I would like to encourage students to do more than use tweets to direct classmates to quotes in the reading before class.  While it was exciting to try something new, I didn’t find it that helpful or engaging when I participated in a “conversation” with other students (many of whom posted an hour before class and didn’t talk to one another in their posts or use RT or hashtags to delineate lines of potential conversation).

In the course I’m TA-ing now, I wonder how using Twitter or blogging might draw my quieter students into the conversation.  I do have them submit questions ahead of class by email, but they’re talking to me, not to each other.

So, I’m curious how one might go about integrating Twitter in a seminar course.  Perhaps a few students are responsible for tweeting each day?  Perhaps students live tweet while watching films, television clips, or slide shows?  We could even practice by live tweeting the session!

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The research lab in contemporary literature that I am working for are now putting in place a new project that have the mandate to be a portal for different web projects that showed research content. That portal also wants to make an inventory of researchers and students’ blogs associated with the research lab. This Web platform will also have it’s own content.

When putting the project together, some questions were at the agenda. Question that might have been there for other project of that kind in digital humanities:

1. How to display scientific content from different Web sites and databases, and on different media (text, audio, and video).  We want the user to navigate easily through the content of the site, but we also want to keep the traceability of the content.

2. How to search in all those contents, which set of metadata should we use to simplify that task. In the same order of idea, which search engine should we choose? The search engine must be able to index content in more than one site.

3. How to make the researchers share their research notes or be intrinsically associated with the project, like having a blog in our platform. This question seems to fit with the session proposed by Jeri Wieringa, Starting and Marketing Digital Archives.

I don’t know if those three issues need a session, but I would like those interrogations to be included in some way in other sessions.

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One of the discussions that I’m interested in having with folks at THATCamp intersects with points raised by Lincoln Mullen and Karrie Peterson. Lincoln invites us to explore the potential use of Omeka as a primary source repository that can function as a digitally-enabled anthology for teaching and other uses. Karrie encourages us to talk about the problems that scholars, experienced and novice alike, face in the digital humanities, the tools that they currently use, and the ones they still need so that libraries can usefully reinvent their services and products.   

For my part, I’m curious to discover whether Omeka might be a solution to problems I’ve encountered in my own work. Specifically, scholars concerned with contemporary events and culture increasingly find it useful, if not essential, to include Web-based and other born-digital materials among the primary sources that they study. The transient nature of Web-based information, however, presents a problem for long-term projects and creates difficulties for those who wish to consult a scholar’s sources at a later date.  My own efforts to study museum engagements with the current war are a case in point; much of my data is drawn from Internet sources, such as the exhibition pages on museum Web sites, press releases issued as PDFs, reviews from online media, etc. These born-digital materials are supplemented by material from my own fieldwork (photos, collected printed matter, sketches of exhibition layouts, etc.). So what I end up with is data scattered across virtual as well as physical file folders and a collection of Delicious bookmarks. It’s hard enough for me to navigate let alone share with other researchers who might be interested in, say, a broader topic such as the viusal culturesof war or to utilize in the classroom. 

Are you in a similar bind? What tools are you using? What solutions have you jury rigged? What features would your ideal tool or suite of tools possess?  

My wish list includes a one-stop resource that could be used to:

• Collect, preserve, organize, and display
  • Web sites or selected pages from them
  • Image, text, audio, PDF, and video files
• Analyze data (text mining, georeferencing??)
• Share evolving and finished work
  • In an open access or pass-word protected environment, or a combination of both as desired by the primary user(s).
• Invite collaboration from a broad range of possible constituencies
• Provide informal and formal learning opportunities for a variety of learning communities   

I can imagine Omeka, with its plug-in capabilities, being the springboard for such a tool—but I lack the programming know-how to move it further in this direction myself. (Hello, BootCamp; you’ll be seeing a lot of me this weekend.)

Others have commented on the pitfalls (copyright issues being a significant one) that such archives, which pool together materials from other sources, pose. And, what is the right term for this sort of personal, project or topical archives-on-steroids? Custom archives-plus? Personalized research and teaching platform? Super scholar software?  

I look forward to learning what other folks are doing and thinking in this area.

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The MLA Office of Research will be updating its Guide to Doctoral Programs in English and Other Modern Languages www.mla.org/gdp_intro
in the coming months  and would like to hear from users how the guide can be made more useful to them and more “born digital.” What information is most useful to you? How can Web design best present that information?

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Just as I like to think of what’s needed for long-term preservation up-front when I plan to digitize a collection, so, too, I’ve been thinking, should I consider geo-referencing the items of some collections. Would love to develop a guide for planning and doing collection georeferencing. Questions we might discuss: 1. What kinds of collections should be georeferenced? 2. What does georeferencing a whole collection of items involve/what does it mean to georeference a collection? 3. Is batch-georeferencing an option and, if so, in what situations?  4. What tools would I use? 5. How does georeferencing affect other metadata about an item? 6. Is there a way to relate similarly geo-referenced items? 7. What would it entail to consider georeferencing already curated and digitized collections? 8. Should georeferencing be introduced into archival practice and finding aids? Lots of questions I have no idea how to answer yet. Some people must already be doing this. Who? Where? This session would need a GIS specialist or two or three, which I’m not at all, to share some basic knowledge so the rest of us can start being pro-active about enhancing our collections geographically, just as way we might think of enhancing them historically by using timelines (or other time-based visualizations).

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If your library doesn’t add genres to the MARC record of films, it’s really difficult to browse a collection that is shelved alphabetically by title (which is common). If you know what film you want to watch, you can search the OPAC/library catalog and go to the shelves to find it. But suppose you’d like a western or a romantic comedy or a horror flick for the weekend, and you want to browse the collection of horror films, you can’t do it onine — and you’re stuck browsing the whole collection of DVDs on the shelves until you land some satisfactory horror movie, romantic comedy, or western. To make a list browsable online by director, say, is easy enough since most directors are listed in a MARC record field from which the data can be exported. But if you want to sort by data that isn’t in the film’s MARC record….   Wouldn’t it be nice to have a list of DVD holdings browsable by genre? Let’s solve this problem, design the solution, and build it!

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This session will feature a discussion format exploring the (r)evolution of the 21st century book and scholarly monograph.  For some, the paper-based book is considered an analog age relic.  Yet  this format is very much at the heart and soul of humanities scholarship. During this conversation we will try to identify trends v. fad when considering the future of the book and its emerging digital iterations. Depending on size of the group, we might break into sub-group conversation for reporting back to the whole group.

Examples of inspirations and/or resources for this session might include: The Institute of the Future of the Book,  IDEO’s video on the Future of the Book,  “Beyond Textbooks” Initiative from Vail AZ, Virginia Center for Digital History , Digital and Hypermedia Scholarship from HASTAC,  Wikinovels and crowdsourced collaborations (Clay Shirky example), and finally, Dan Cohen’s course blog on the Theory and Practice of Digital History.  Realizing  some of these examples are not exclusively focused on book publishing, the participants in this session would be asked to consider how these emerging examples are influencing the practice and evolution of the book.

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As a librarian, I’ve been immersed in reading and discussion about the kinds of support that researchers in digital humanities might need.  My question is being asked in a lot of places — how can libraries reinvent information services and products in the digital age?

A lot of the discussion about supporting digital scholarship is visionary, focussing on ultimate goals — well-developed, high end, mature products and services.  I would like to see a discussion that is more process-oriented, more about the nuts and bolts of getting libraries from where we are now to where we need to be.  Here are some sub-topics around which I would organize that kind of discussion:

• What are the tools and services already existing that serve the needs of early-adopter scholars in the digital humanities?  And how can libraries leverage what is already going on to further develop relevant services and tools? I’m thinking of an environmental scan thru the abundant literature to create a digestible mindmap or overview of the categories of new tasks and research questions being asked, and the concomitant essential tools.  I’m focussed here on interpretation and research (not new forms of expressions).  For example, how is close reading different in the digital age?  How does technology make different kinds of intellectual biography possible?  How can massive-multiplayer collective reading change the way we privilege certain interpretations of a text?  How are place and time mashups affecting research into a text or the body of work of a creator?  How are haptic or visual technologies changing interpretation?   And then, how does the library put that knowledge to use?  With a sense of what early adopters are about, we can think more concretely and systematically about supporting all scholars. By examining how early adopters are solving their information needs (finding, in some cases developing, or accessing the data they need; using tools; doing version control; documenting their methodology; storing their data in the short and long term with various levels of access; presenting their results), we can start asking what resources would help provide more robust structures via our institutions or our consortia or via other groupings?  A very simple example here is the “oneweek-onetool” workshops in which practitioners get together and identify a real need, and then develop a tool to address it–that’s a way to build not only tools, but also relationships, new skills, networks, and organizational capacity.
• In a parallel way, what are the problems facing scholars who are novices in digital humanities?  What kinds of services and support do they need? Once we have a good problem statement, we can begin to think of solutions that are less of the “gee whiz” one-off pilot variety, and more of a systematic approach to creating a people-and-tools infrastructure that we can build on over time.
• Those two discussions, to me, precede the important discussion of expertise.  What are the new skills and understandings needed in the library profession to support these researchers? We’ve had a very specific model of support for decades that has created an explicit understanding of what an “expert” librarian is — how is that changing based on the solutions we need to try and put in place for new modes of research?

To facilitate this conversation, I plan to review “No Brief Candle” especially the sections by Paul Courant and Rick Luce, and to look at the British Library’s new website “Growing Knowledge: the evolution of research.”  There are lots of great reports and examples out there suitable for the kind of inductive review I’m proposing, and I hope folks will use the comments to suggest others!

Finally, and humbly, I’m not saying this kind of categorization hasn’t already been done, but that I want to engage with other people in conversation about it in order to “get it” more deeply and learn to better articulate how to shape library services in a fluid environment.

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The problem: Today’s students, despite their reputation for technological savvy, still need to be taught how to conduct research.  The increasing amount of digital material available makes research easier in many ways, but it can also complicate matters — particularly in terms of “information overload.”  Rob Widell and I propose a discussion around strategies for introducing students to research in a digital world.

Our first step toward a solution: We are in the process of collaborating on a LibGuide for students engaged in historical research using primary sources.  In doing so, we have encountered a number of questions that we suspect are common to scholars teaching humanities, and we propose an open discussion of ideas around those questions.

• Have you encountered something similar regarding student research? If so, what have you done?
• How do you get students past reliance on basic Google?
• How are students actually working/getting research skills/collaborating online?
• What is the best way to get students to understand that there can be many silos of information and that sometimes good research can require investigation of many of these silos?

Our project is very much in progress, so we’re interested in discussion of the broad ideas as well as the smaller details.

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I’m not, strictly speaking, a gamer, nor am I anything like an expert on the subject. But one of the things I’m interested in talking about at THATCamp is the pedagogical potential of serious play: the use of games to engage students with a topic or get them to enter a text in a new way. I thought of this because for months I’ve been playing an online game called Echo Bazaar (a.k.a. Fallen London), a turn-based “appointment game” linked to Twitter, which is set in a sort of steampunk-esque 19th-century London that’s (literally) gone to hell. Players assume a character and play out a few turns at a time, making choices that determine the storyline and build up certain character traits that in turn unlock further storylines. Because I’m a literature Ph.D, part of what I find most appealing about this game is its riffing on the tropes of Victorian and Gothic novels (with generous dollops of Lovecraftian horror) and its constant literary allusions to everyone from Jane Austen to T.S. Eliot. It also forces the player to experience narrative in sometimes unfamiliar ways, as a character moving through a story by choosing different potential outcomes and watching other storylines open or close as a result. The creators’ blog has more information, including a fascinating series of posts about what they call “narrative physics.”

Thinking about games like this one and others more deliberately designed for pedagogical purposes (like the University of Virginia’s Ivanhoe Game), and about location-based games like Gowalla, and about conversations like the recent Playing with the Past unconference on history gaming, I think we could have quite an interesting session on play as a way of bringing the digital humanities into the classroom. As a librarian, I usually teach students in very pragmatic ways — here’s how to use the catalog properly, here’s how to deal with the quirks of this or that database, here’s what “peer review” means — and I’m always looking for a way to communicate to them just how playful and exploratory the research process can be. I’d like to talk about games as a model for research, but I think there’s also plenty to discuss about games as a way of analyzing a text, or exploring a historical period, or encountering the arts.

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This is the short version. THATCamp is next on my list after I survive this week. But I’m throwing this in the mix because it’s what I’m most interested in/in need of. I’m a humanities/education person through and through. Don’t know a thing about the “back-end” of all this DH stuff. Though I would say I’m pretty quick and comfortable with learning new technologies.

What I have is a great idea and a solid prototype DH website/program. The question is how can I take it to the next level? Not knowing what the technologies are and what it can do for our great idea makes it difficult to even begin to assemble an elite cadre of partners to start the grant-writing, planning, etc.

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I have two separate lines of thought that I will explore briefly here.  They both emerge from thinking about blogs and social media in the archives, but go in very different directions.

When I was blogging about archival processing for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania as a project archivist, I began to see the real potential of blogs as a way to connect the archives with the classroom.  More and more professors invited me into discussions about the ways that the study of history is changing to become more collaborative.  They asked me about ways that archives were inviting users to add content to finding aids, and spurred me to think deeply about my own role in creating an historical narrative with every finding aid I produced.  I had hopes of implementing some format that would provide users a platform to add content, link to other sources, and create layers of understanding beyond what I was able to do with my limited descriptive tools.  I envisioned an archival space that was less fixed, more open.  Because of the nature of project work, I was never able to bring these ideas to fruition, but I continue to think about how to make the institutional walls a bit more permeable and welcoming to new ways of working.

So, one question that lingers for me as an archivist is how to better present finding aids so that they can become more inclusive, more collaborative, and actually grow over time?

Another area (which I think Seth Bruggeman will touch on) that bears some exploration is how to forge viable collaborations between educational institutions/the classroom and collecting institutions/archives.  How can those of us stewarding historical sources speak to historians, future historians, and other users to invite collaborative knowledge-sharing?

The other issue of interest to me as a collector and steward of historical objects is how an institution might begin actively “collecting” social media as archival sources.  (There are some thought-provoking articles here and here that briefly explore this topic.)  While I am aware of larger projects to archive the web, and efforts to capture status updates and tweets, I am thinking about smaller collecting–on the scale of a diary or someone’s personal papers–and how institutions can create a collection of social media sites relevant to their collection development policies (or add social media to a larger collection of author’s papers).

Like most archives, the Maine Women Writers Collection has a fair number of diaries that have been acquired over the years as individual items.  As I began looking at our collection of singular volumes, I was thinking about the decline of this form of production and the rise of the diary’s online counterpart, the blog.  As blogs become increasingly mainstream, the use of journals that can be held in your hand or carried in your pocket will fade.  While the ease of publication and ability to share contents freely and quickly is a definite gain for the user, as an archivist, I see the challenge of collecting becoming much more interesting.

I recently put out a call for Maine women bloggers, and have gotten some response.  This is a preliminary step to thinking about how to actually add these items to our collection, if authors give their permission.  For now, I have added blogs to our blogroll while I come up with a longer-term collection policy.

I would be interested in hearing about what other institutions are doing with social media output–both their own and others’.  A larger discussion could include the overall value of social media as an historical source, privacy, copyright, and all of the other issues involved in collecting this particular type of ephemeral data.

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I like Konrad’s post on little dh and am especially drawn to using digital tools for analysis and mining of data. I teach an introductory computer science course with Python and am particularly looking for applied problems in the humanities. The course focuses on problem solving over a wide range of liberal arts. So I am looking for good research opportunities in the humanities that require some programming but not a high level of sophistication in computer science. I have seen some wonderful applications that show off technology’s ability to handle and process large amounts of info and am seeking more. For example, students write programs to do straightforward text analysis of collections of books or political speeches; they can do some elementary web crawling; and they can process real-time data such as earthquakes or stock prices. So I am looking for good problems that are useful to solve and of necessity engage the students in interesting computer science algorithms. My first goal is to convert all of them to be technology users and practitioners; I hope they reach for technology (including programming) with the same ease they would reach for a bibliography or an online source or an archive or a test tube or any other tool in their discipline. My secondary goal is to convert many of my colleagues to be little dh users, colleagues who have yet to appreciate the enormous benefits these techniques might bring to their research.

So, anyone interested in a session that explores the kinds of succinct, circumscribed dh problems that are amenable to programming solutions? Anyone involved in teaching? Teaching in a liberal arts environment? I’ll supply the computer science know-how if you have the problems.

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To make an unconference like THATCamp New England work, we all have to pull our own weight. That means you have two duties:

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 vote on which sessions to hold in first hour of THATCamp on Saturday. So let’s hear your ideas! If you need a model, see these early proposals by Konrad, Boone, Brian, and Lincoln.

Read and comment on others’ proposals. Read the session proposals that other people have written to see what might interest you at THATCamp: you’ll want to be a knowledgeable participant. If there’s a session that particularly interests you, start a discussion on the website. See, for example, the comments that Boone’s post has provoked. You can find all the session proposals here, and you can also subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you need help with doing any of that, send an e-mail to thatcampne@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.

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Since I’ve begun teaching, I’ve become mildly obsessed with buying anthologies of primary sources. Until I had to get up in front of a classroom, I didn’t realize how difficult it was to select and make available primary sources to teach students with. A good anthology of sources has done more to advance the world’s knowledge than many a monograph.

But print anthologies have their flaws. First, no anthology has all the sources you need; you’ve got to pick and choose from them all. Second, they are expensive—no small issue for students. Third, many of them are out of print. Of course, there are some great anthologies of primary sources on the web: for example, History Matters and Do History. And of course, more and more there are large archives of primary sources online, like American Memory. But it seems to me that a useful tool for teachers would be a way of building your own anthology of sources for teaching.

Enter Omeka.

If you’re not familiar with it, “Omeka is a next generation web publishing platform for collections-based research of all kinds, one that bridges the scholarly, library, and museum worlds through a set of commonly recognized standards. In doing so, Omeka puts serious web publishing within reach of all scholars and cultural heritage professionals.” The self-hosted version of Omeka is easy enough to use, if you have some basic skills at installing and running web apps. But even better, the recently announced Omeka.net offers a hosted service that will make the software even easier to use.

In this session, I’d like to talk about the possibilities of using Omeka to create an anthology of primary sources for teaching. Specifically, these are the topics we might discuss:

• What would an Omeka anthology of sources look like? How would it be organized?
• What might be the best practices in creating an Omeka anthology?
• What are the copyright issues involved in creating an anthology? Does it make a difference if the anthology is publicly available, or available only to students in a given class?
• Can teachers roll their own Omeka anthologies, especially with Omeka.net, or should educational technologists get involved?
• What can Omeka offer that printed and bound anthologies cannot? I’m thinking here of capabilities like geo-tagging primary sources, as well as including media like audio, photos, and video that print cannot.

Most of all, let’s get our hands dirty and actually start using Omeka! I’ll have a self-hosted Omeka installation to use as a sandbox, and it’s easy to sign up for an Omeka.net account. In the words of Dave Lester, we need “more hack, less yack.”

If you’re interested in this session and want to think about it in advance, you might take a look at some of the fine Omeka sites that are already on the web. Two that I think are particularly good models of sites that are useful for teaching are Making the History of 1989 and The Object of History. You can see other examples at the Omeka showcase and at this wiki list of Omeka sites.

One last thing: if we have time, we might also discuss how to use Omeka as a repository of sources for research. Looking towards my future dissertation, I’ve set up an Omeka installation to collect the conversion narratives that I plan to study. (My Omeka archive is almost completely empty now, but here is the shell.) Can we use Omeka to promote transparency in research? If being an active researcher makes for better teaching—one of the assumptions of our research universities—then can making our sources available in Omeka make us better teachers?

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I’ll preface this by saying that, despite some (deep) background doing web stuff and working part-time on digitization projects as an undergrad and grad student, that I still feel like a novice when it comes to the digital humanities. So I’m really looking forward to listening, learning more, and meeting you all in person at THATCamp and at the BootCamp sessions in a few weeks.

Among the many things that fit under the digital humanities umbrella, I’m especially intrigued by the ways that digital tools and technologies can transform teaching and scholarly communication. I’ve been thinking particularly about the latter of late, as I’ve just taken on the role of web and online operations manager for the Committee on LGBT History, an affiliated society of the AHA. The Committee has a new, WordPress-based website, with BuddyPress social networking, and it’s aiming to foster greater online interaction among members. I’d be very interested in discussing how technology can encourage professional exchange, cooperation, and collaboration in this context. Some questions that I’ve been grappling with that might (I hope!) have broader applications and implications:

• What sorts of useful content can and should scholars with similar interests in a subfield of their discipline produce collaboratively? (Bibliographies are, I think, one example.)
• What sorts of tools might be most useful and attractive to less tech-savvy scholars who are more interested in technology as a means than as an end?
• How should tools built specifically for members of a professional society or organization (blogs, social networks, discussion boards) interact with general-purpose tools and networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Academia.edu? Where do older technologies, like H-Net lists, fit in?
• What challenges, and what opportunities, accompany scholarly communication on the scale of a topical, methodological, or chronological subfield, as opposed to something of the magnitude of an entire field or profession? Put another way, how are the dynamics here similar to and different from those of, say, the AHA (which Dan Cohen and his readers have been discussing lately)?

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I probably don’t have to convince anyone attending THATCamp that it’s important to cultivate – and to teach our students to cultivate – an online presence. But what does it mean, in practice, to build and maintain a personal cyberinfrastructure?

I can imagine taking a session like this in a couple different, and not necessarily mutually exclusive directions:

1. The technical · How do you get started with a website of your own? How do you use personal web space as a hub, an aggregator, and an archiver of the content you produce in places scattered around the web?
2. The theoretical and the political · Most of us live our digital lives in many places. The content I create lives on my blog, on group blogs, on Twitter, on Github, on Gmail, etc. Some of these places are under my direct control, others are not. What are the personal-data-related arguments for moving away from third-party content-storage services like Twitter and Google? On the other hand, is there a tension between the idea that we should create content only in our own spaces and the underlying distributed spirit of the Internet itself? In short, is a truly personal cyberinfrastructure something we should even be aspiring for?
3. The pedagogical · Ed tech gurus like Gardner Campbell (from whom I believe I’m stealing the phrase ‘personal cyberinfrastructure’) and Jim Groom have experimented with and theorized about cyberinfrastructure in the classroom, teaching their students how to set up their own servers and also how to think about their identities as full citizens of the web. What is to be gained by such an exercise? Is it worth your class time to teach students about things like cPanel and WordPress? Should we fight the apparent tendency for our students to live their online lives in third-party silos like Facebook?

What do you think? Is there the makings of a session here?

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I am excited to have the opportunity to join THATCamp New England  this November and look forward to learning from everyone I meet there. I was asked to post an entry here about the issues that I hope will be discussed at the event. I have no doubt many of the main themes I’m interested in will receive plentiful attention but I would like to bring up two issues that  I find of particular importance: 1) the continued need for the appreciation of and promotion of what I’ll call the “little dh” of the digital humanities and 2) an action oriented discussion about the need to plant seeds within each and every department that promotes the cultivation of both real skills and the requisite  appreciation for a spirit of experimentation with technology in the humanities not merely among the faculty but even more importantly as a part of the graduate curriculum.

Little dh

I have been unable to keep up with the ever-growing body of scholarship on the digital humanities but what I have read suggests that much of the work that has been done focuses upon the development of new techniques and new tools that assist us in conducting research and teaching in the humanities in roughly four areas: the organization of sources and data (for example Zotero, metadata practices), the analysis of data (e.g. using GIS, statistical text analysis), the delivery and representation of sources and research results (e.g. Omeka) and effective means for promoting student learning (e.g. teaching with clickers, promoting diverse online interactions).

I’m confident that these areas should and will remain the core of Digital Humanities for the foreseeable future. I do hope, however, that there continues to be an appreciation for digital humanities with a small “d” or little dh, if you will, that has a much longer history and I believe will continue to remain important as we go forward. So what do I mean by little dh? I mean the creation of limited, often unscalable, and usually quickly assembled ad hoc solutions tailored to the problems of individual academics or specific projects. In other words, hacks. These solutions might consist of helping a professor, student, or specific research project effectively use a particular combination of software applications, the writing of short scripts to process data or assist in creating workflows to move information smoothly from one application to another, the creation of customized web sites for highly specialized tasks, and so on. These tasks might be very simple such as helping a classics professor develop a particular keyboard layout for a group of students or particular project. It might be more complex, for example, involve helping a Chinese literature professor create a workflow to extract passages from an old and outdated database, perform certain repetitive tasks on the resulting text using regular expressions, and then transform that text into a clean website with automatic annotations in particular places.

The skill set needed to perform “little dh” tasks is such that it is impossible to train all graduate students or academics for them, especially  if they have little interest or time to tinker with technology.  “Little dh”  is usually performed by an inside amateur, for example, the departmental geek, or with the assistance of technology services at an educational institution that are willing to go beyond the normal bounds of “technical support” defined as “fixing things that go wrong.”  Unfortunately, my own experience suggests that sometimes the creation of specialized institutes that focus on innovation and technology in education has actually reduced accessibility for scholars to resources that can provide little dh instead of increased it because it is far more sexy to produce larger tools that can be widely distributed than it is to provide simple customized solutions for the problems of individual scholars or projects. One such center to promote innovative uses of technology in education I saw in action many years ago, for example, started out providing very open-ended help to scholars but very quickly shifted to creating and customizing a very small set of tools that may or may not have been useful for the specific needs of the diverse kinds of scholarship being carried out in humanities. There is a genuine need for both, even though one is far less glamorous.

I hope that we can discuss how it is possible to continue to provide and expand the availability of technical competence that can provide help with little dh solutions within our departments and recognize the wide diversity of needs within the academic community, even as we celebrate and increasingly adopt more generalized tools and techniques for our research and teaching.

Planting Seeds

I have been impressed with progress in the digital humanities amongst more stubborn professors that I’ve come across in three areas: 1) an increasing awareness of open access and its benefits to the academic community, 2) an appreciation for the importance of utilizing online resources and online sites of interaction, and 3) the spread of use of bibliographic software amongst the older generation of scholars. These are, to be honest, the only areas of digital humanities that I have really seen begin to widely penetrate the departments I’ve interacted with both as a graduate student and earlier as a technology consultant within a university. I’m now convinced the biggest challenge we face is not in teaching the skills needed to use the software and techniques to the professors and scholars of our academic community, though this is also an important task, but the pressing need for us to, as it were, “poison the young,” and infect them with a curiosity for the opportunities that the digital humanities offer to change our field in the three key areas of research, teaching, and most threateningly for the status quo, publishing.

There are a growing number of centers dedicated to the digital humanities but I wonder if we might discuss the opening of an additional front, (and perhaps such a front has already been opened and I would love to learn more of it) that attempts to plant a seed of digital humanities within every university humanities department, by asking graduate students to take, or at least offering them the opportunity to take, courses or extended workshops on the digital humanities that focus on: some basic training in self-chosen areas of digital humanities techniques and tools, the cultivation of a spirit of experimentation among students, and finally a more theoretical discussion on the implications of the use of digital humanities for the humanities in general (particularly on professional practices such as publishing, peer review, and the interaction of academics with the broader community of the the intellectually curious public). Promoting the incorporation of such an element into the graduate curriculum will, of course, be a department by department battle, but there are surely preparations that can be made by us as a community, that can help arm sympathetic scholars with the arguments and pedagogical tools needed to bring that struggle into committee meetings at the university and department level.

-Thanks again, Konrad

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We’ve accepted the first batch of applicants to THATCamp New England 2010. If you applied before July, you should have received an e-mail letting you know that you’ve been accepted, and another with login details for this site. If you applied and haven’t been accepted yet, don’t worry. We’ll accept the next batch in early August.

You can see who is coming to THATCamp New England on the list of attendees. Get on that list by applying here.

Watch this blog in the coming weeks for posts about discussion topics at THATCamp.

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We’re now accepting applications to THATCamp New England and to BootCamp—the educational camp within a camp. We hope you’ll join us at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston on November 13–14, 2010. Please take a minute to read about THATCamp and BootCamp, then apply.

Once you’ve applied, please consider getting involved in helping and promoting THATCamp New England.

Thanks for applying, and look for your acceptance e-mail soon!

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Welcome to the website of THATCamp New England. A group of digital humanists from around New England are planning to put together a series of unconferences about digital humanities. These camps will be part of the THAT [The Humanities and Technology] Camp network that started at the Center for History and New Media and is now spreading into many regional camps.

The first THATCamp New England will be held at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, November 13/14, 2010. We’re actively working out the details, so please watch this space or the Twitter stream for more information.

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Many thanks to the organizing crew for getting THAT Camp New England off the ground. We hope to host a camp at different schools around New England each fall and spring. Here is the group who has been involved so far:

Steve Lubar
Brown University
Twitter Id: @lubar

Adam Lipkin
Brandeis University
Twitter Id: @Yendi

Heather Prescott
CCSU
Twitter Id: @hmprescott

Lincoln Mullen
Brandeis University
Twitter Id: @lincolnmullen

Jon Berndt Olsen
UMASS Amherst
Twitter Id: @jonberndtolsen

Amanda Watson
Connecticut College
Twitter Id:@amndw2

Shane Landrum
Brandeis University
Twitter Id: @cliotropic

Tom Rushford

Stephanie Cheney
Wentworth Institute of Technology
Twitter id: @scheney

Amanda French
THAT Camp
Twitter Id: @amandafrench