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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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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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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)?