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.

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?

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.

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?