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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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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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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?