Continue reading »]]>

Continue reading »]]>

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

Continue reading »]]>

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.

Continue reading »]]>

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?

Continue reading »]]>

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.

Continue reading »]]>

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!

Continue reading »]]>

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.