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.

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!

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.

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?

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.