As I did last year at THAT Camp, I will be creating a site-specific installation on the Video Wall (where we picked up all our food last year?)  This year’s piece is called “Writing Space,” and I look forward to everyone’s comments.

I imagine the Video Wall as a large writing space, and want to explore its compositional properties.  What does it mean to write on a surface divided into a grid of 16 squares?  What does it mean to “publish” in this fashion?  “Writing Space” is a text collage, fragments of text that, when juxtaposed in new ways, creates new meaning.  It is an example of my work with “mashup logic:” the mixing and juxtaposition of found objects recombined in novel ways.

Randomness is a key compositional element of the piece.  The text fragments—and the white space between them—appear in ever changing patterns and configurations.  Thus, the meaning of the text is constantly shifting as new juxtapositions form.  This installation/text will be different each time you view/read it over the course of THAT Camp.

So I am curious to know:  Is this an installation to look at or a text to be read?

Dave Staley

What fundamental decisions need to be made at the beginning of a new project or book for historians working with traditional archival resources, but with an eye to digital dissemination?  There is an ongoing discussion in digital history about the extent to which lo digital can or should transform the definition of historical scholarship, so long dominated by the lone historian crafting the long-form monograph. Collaborative history, digital storytelling, new approaches to long-form narrative, moving beyond simple curation, new processes for peer review– digital history offers possibilities to transform professional historical practice.  I think that is an important long-term discussion. I would also add that based on my experience at an R1 state university, that discussion may still be a bit premature, as my colleagues need more basic groundwork. I have more immediate concerns in the proposal I offered this year, and they’re directed at that solitary scholar, and newly dissertating ABDs, sitting at a desk in front of a stack of dusty manuscripts.

I’d like to discuss up-front decisions we can make at the point of project conception, as well as during the research phase that will ease adaptation to digital forms later on. In many ways, this points to individual application of themes that Hugh Cayless mentioned in his post. How should the lone scholar deal with archival resources that are not currently digitized? Each step of the way between project conception and publication (in whatever form) carries with it questions like that with implications for later digital presentation. What of using a digital camera to collect manuscripts? During the transcription and note-taking phase should we utilize particular mark-up languages that will be more flexible later on? If so, does that have implications for best software applications for note taking and transcription? Should those two elements be separate? Is it worthwhile to teach ourselves an our grad students TEI? What of the development of databases of individuals, events, other data that constitute an important part of historical scholarship? What of textual analysis of small and large bodies of manuscripts? Ultimately, decisions on questions such as these have implications for the ease later digital dissemination of our work. At the beginning of a project (and particularly for graduate students writing dissertations), it can be difficult to forecast what the state of digital practices will be 2, 4, 6 years or more down the line when the project is finished. (more…)

UPDATE: Rough notes from this session (co-led by Tanya Clement, Ethan Watrall, Brian Croxall, Jeff McClurken and many others) can be found at docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddz3r8kz_65ggjm74f3

My proposal seems to mesh well with some of the other teaching-related proposals already seen (Bill Ferster’s on visualization, Dave Parry’s on teaching collaborative learning, and the extra question Rob Nelson asks at the end of his post about what we should be teaching students in undergraduate DH classes).  I want to talk more broadly about what are the (digital) skills that we think people need to have today, as well as 5-10 years from now.   To some extent, we might build on Howard Rheingold and Cathy Davidson’s discussions of 21st-century literacies, but I think THATCampers can come up with more than just a list but also some ideas about how we might cultivate these skills among not just students, but faculty, cultural history institutions, and archivists.  DH seems like a natural fit, but are there things DHers miss or overemphasize about what will matter in the years to come?

A second major issue, perhaps worthy of a separate session if there’s interest, regards classroom design for the future:  What should the physical space for learning include looking forward?  What are our minimum expectations?  Does the physical classroom matter any more?  For how long and in what ways will/should it change?  I’m still mulling (see my post here for one exploration of these ideas), but this could well be something that goes beyond classrooms to something like “learning spaces of the future” that would combine the physical and intellectual space that classrooms, libraries, and museums occupy now and in the years to come.

Finally, I’d like to propose an ongoing conversation, if not a session.  [In fact I could see this being a theme of the discussions over coffee in the hallways between sessions, over lunch, or over stronger beverages later.]  I propose that we devote at least some of our time at THATCamp to the question of how to address a constant refrain for those of us trying to encourage our colleagues to embrace at least some of the technology that we use: “I’m not doing anything new until all technology works.”  In other words, this would be a discussion of how to innovate when the infrastructure isn’t working, OR how do we avoid changing printer cartridges when we want to be changing the academy/institution/museum/archive/library?

This is how I started my proposal for THATCamp:

I admit that my first priority at ThatCamp is to learn rather than to present.

That said, there are several areas of particular interest to me. First, the infrastructure challenges of doing digital humanities outside of R1 universities. And more generally, the landscape for the pursuit or support of digital humanities scholarship. I’d like to learn more about both ends of the equation for digital humanities projects: how to create compelling new projects and second how to sustain projects for the long term.

Pretty vague perhaps. I come to that area of interest from two directions. First, I am helping to develop what we are calling the “South Jersey Center for Digital Humanities” at Richard Stockton College. The Center is part support group for Stockton faculty interested in digital projects, part publicity center for those projects. We are members of CenterNet — indeed, as far as I can tell, the only center at a SLAC that is a member. So I would be eager to discuss with my fellow liberal arts college colleagues what they think a “digital humanities center” should be and do in the small college environment. In discussing this, I think we could also follow up on Tanya Clements’ attempt to create a listing of undergraduate programs with digital emphasis and individual scholars doing digital projects.

At the same time, I am working on digital projects of my own. I am very interested in the issues Rob Nelson raised about the role of argument in digital scholarship. But I want to begin with a more pragmatic question that connects my role in South Jersey Digital to my role as a scholar doing digital work. What are the plusses and minuses of the various currently existing options for creating and hosting scholarly digital projects? I can imagine the following “publishers” of digital projects: self-created independent site on hosting service, site attached to a personal home page, site attached to the home page of an academic department, site attached to a digital humanities center, site attached to a college or university library electronic resources collection, site attached to a home page of a traditional academic professional society like the AHA, site at the home page of a non-university based research center like the National Humanities Center or NYPL, site attached to a funding organization, site attached to an emerging digital community like MediaCommons, site published by a digital imprint of a university press. Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s book Planned Obsolescence focuses on the latter two. But I would say that independent sites and sites attached to digital humanities center predominate among academic digital projects. Basically, if you are affiliated with a university that has a digital humanities center, you create and publish your projects there, if you don’t, you publish them as independent sites. Is that right? Can or should anything be done to change that?

Semi-related to the above… A while ago, I gently challenged Tom Scheinfeldt’s post about Soft Money by arguing that there was a pretty strict limit on how much digital work could be supported just on the basis of grant support. Soft support could congregate in a few powerhouse digital centers like George Mason, Virginia, Nebraska, Duke enough to keep them going. But if it does, what should the obligations of those centers be to the rest of us? Or, to pose the question more closely to how we did at the time: how many digital humanities centers do we really need and what can we do to build as many of the ones we need as possible?

Although I have attended THATCamp the two years previous to this, this is the first in which I am fully immersed in the day to day building and maintaining of websites.  Because of that, my view of what to talk about has become a bit more… pragmatic. Some days I manage to try to ask bigger questions about what we’re doing and why-but most days I am fixing broken things (hard) and trying to not break my own things (harder). Migrating old sites to new technologies also takes up a good deal of our time.

So, the session I proposed was on the life cycle of digital humanities projects- specifically how to design and develop for the eventual long term preservation of a project. Bethany Nowviskie is addressing this in part with her work on Graceful Degradation, but I am also interested in what we can do at the beginning of projects to make them easier to maintain indefinitely. I’m not sure exactly what this might mean. Some ideas: limiting the kinds of technologies used so that projects are easier to support; pre-building a planned HTML only version, to be deployed in case of a loss of technology. (Also of interest is Hugh Cayless’s session proposal). Some sites don’t have such easy answers, like older GIS sites that depend on a specific commercial server. Other aspects include documentation and commenting code (something we have lacked due to heavy workloads around here). I am curious how others in similar situations deal with this- are there standards in place, or do you decide on documentation and technologies on a project by project basis?

This past academic year, about a dozen University of Richmond faculty re-conceptualized their courses to integrate digital storytelling as a learning activity to encourage students to become more engaged with course content.  An emphasis on reflection, revised narrative, and presenting through new media sought to make the curricula more personally relevant to the student, while challenging their abilities to analyze and critique.  Additionally, there was a need to introduce students to a variety of technology tools used to produce new media and increase their ITFluency.  The conceptual and technological framework of digital storytelling afforded that.

As of May 2010, almost 300 students had produced digital stories in courses throughout the humanities, social sciences and sciences, many of which existed on Youtube.  However, collecting and aggregating these exemplars of student learning and sustaining it in a community of practice had proved to be a challenge due to technological constraints and lack of infrastructure.  Thus, The Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology at Richmond explored the possibilities of using Omeka to collect and organize these artifacts from students’ personal learning environments, ultimately creating an e-portfolio of exemplary digital stories to be used as both an archive and as a teaching tool.

I am interested in sharing our experiences with this project – from publishing with (and repurposing) Omeka to the issues that concern our faculty who incorporate new media production in their curricula.  Moreover, I would welcome any constructive feedback that could be offered to help strengthen our platforms usability, and would look forward to discussing best practices that encourage Humanities faculty to engage with narrative and new media.

The development version is located here: urctlt.org/nmn

In my proposal, I listed 3 ideas:

1) I’ve recently started work on linked data for papyri.info, using data harvested from different parts of the collection and an RDF triplestore that provides entry points to the data from many angles.  I’m very interested in tools and methods for doing this kind of work.
2) I’m co-PI on a project focused on linking text with digital images of text, and annotations, possible topics there include tools for working online with digital images, SVG, TEI facsimile, and/or transcription theory.
3) System design principles for digital humanities projects.  I’d like to talk about ways of modeling information and delivery systems so that they are loosely coupled, RESTful, sustainable, easier to archive, and easier to integrate with other projects.

After a bit of reflection, I think these are all going in the same general direction, which is probably closest to #3.  We’ve been doing online DH projects long enough that maybe we can start to distil useful patterns for representing types of data, handling the linkages between entities, formats and methods for encoding information, and interfaces for managing and interacting with information.

Can we come up with patterns for handling things like:

I’m not so much talking about the implementation details here as the affordances.  What ought you to be able to do with a project that exposes a lot of images, for example? I think the images should be available at high resolution, but should also be viewable in a browser in such a way that you can zoom, pan, and link to a particular view.  That’s what I mean by a design pattern.  Questions of “how” including toolsets, frameworks, and formats are interesting too, but those are often going to be dictated by the environment.

A few more patterns/practices off the top of my head:

• License with CC-BY
• Make data available as a single download
• Pay attention to URI design

What do you think?

Chronicling America is a brilliantly engineered digital collection of historically important material that, because of its API, and because of the understanding that “the Web is the API,” could be an exemplary part of an open digital infrastructure for American history. But for the API to matter the rest of us have to actually build on it. The scale of what is already digitized and accessible is enough to make it a major new resource for American history. So how do we follow through on that, in a distributed way, at large and small scales? I have played with making network graphs of newspaper business genealogies from the bibliographic data, without trying to do much of anything yet with the images and OCR text, and could share bits of that exercise to get some modest hackery into the mix, but there’s a lot more that could be done. Certainly we could speculate about text mining and high-performance computing, but I would hope we could also brainstorm where the opportunities for consequential innovation are as much social as technological. Even with the methods and technologies available now and yesterday, Chronicling America is finished enough to start changing history already. They flipped the switch on the API. So what? If we think it matters, then how do we start hacking the interface between the API and the world to demonstrate how it matters?

Hello All,

Here’s what I put in my ThatCamp application:
I would like to talk about the ways that the digital humanities can be used to communicate information in a non-profit setting.  I can provide examples from the National Trust for Historic Preservation–especially through the work some of my colleagues and I have worked on in terms of creating an advocacy campaign for Save America’s Treasures and the Virtual Attendee conference page for last year’s National Preservation Conference in Nashville, TN.

In general, I’d like to hear how other organizations, individuals working in the digital humanities field have used social media and Web 2.0 to promote and market a particular message or idea.

Here are some links so that you can see what the National Trust has been doing.

In 2009 after we realized that the economic downturn would prevent many from attending the National Preservation Conference our web team put together a “Virtual Attendee” page as a way of encouraging individuals who cannot come to the conference to attend ‘virtually.  As a result we used live chat (Cover it Live), Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter to get information about the conference out to the preservation community.  In particular the web team looked at ways in which Twitter could be used by multiple people to tell the multiple stories from the conference–and as a result a team was deployed that consisted of each individual Twitter account having its own “beat”. For example, my handle @pc_presnation was tasked with giving a general history point of view for the conference, and I ended up actually tweeting the National Preservation Award ceremony as if it were the Oscars.

To prep our members we released this video.

The other example of how we use social media is for the recent (and ongoing)  Save America’s Treasures campaign. In brief, in the 2011 budget the monies for the Save America’s Treasures, Preserve America and Heritage Area’s programs were either completely zeroed out or drastically reduced.  In order to mobilize our members and remind Congress of the importance of preservation  it was decided that social media would a) put materials out there that people could use, and b)serve as direct marketing for the cause.  The text messages, the Facebook status messages, and the materials posted on YouTube and Flickr were divided between the emotional and the factual.

For examples check out our   Tweet for  Our Treasures page.

I’ve also been thinking, with the recent announcement by the Library of Congress regarding obtaining the Twitter archive about how historians can use these technologies to further our role in the public arena. How can we market the importance of what we do in the modern era? It strikes me that one of the things the National Trust struggles with is our image and reputation as being for a particular demographic. The same thing with heritage tourism, or preservation in general. How do we use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or whatever comes next to further communicate the broad mission, and dare I say-relevancy-to all Americans?

That ended up to be a lot more long-winded than I intended. Thoughts? Anyone else interested in talking about something like this?

About Me: I help run the preservation professional membership program (or the leaders level of membership) at the National Trust for Historic Preservation (Its called Forum membership). I write often for the PreservationNation.org blog,  and also post on a personal blog called ….And this is What Comes Next which while history related will also reveal my slight love for a little show called LOST–so since we are going to be having this conference on the eve of the Finale, you can also track me down to talk about the show as well.

UPDATE 6/21: Are you building a THATCamp website? We’ve put some resources at thatcamp.org/plan/website.

As you probably know, we received funding from Mellon to support regional THATCamps. One of the things we plan to do in this effort is develop a package we can give regional organizers to get a THATCamp started. What we’ve currently been doing is giving organizers a list of plugins I’ve used on the THATCamp site and the theme we use if they’d like to use it.

So, I’d like to lead a discussion on “THATCamp-in-a-Box.” It would be an idea-gathering, pie-in-the-sky chat about what we should offer regional THATCamp coordinators to get a camp started. The package itself could take on any number of forms: some custom WordPress plugins and a theme for managing applications, registrations, badges, scheduling. Or we could find some plugins already out there and bundle those with some instructions. Or we could just develop and launch a WordPress/BuddyPress/Mediawiki service, where sites for regional camps would be hosted by us, and attendees would have a BuddyPress profile and  use one registration for multiple camps. I’m think of something almost as hot as what Matt Gold,  Boone Gorges and others have developed for the CUNY Academic Commons. But, there are questions as to how much centralization we’d want to do with THATCamp. Regional organizers wouldn’t have to use the package, of course; Its just a way to make setting a THATCamp a little easier.

So, in this session, I’d love to bring together past regional coordinators, potential coordinators, or just anyone interested in contributing some ideas to this effort. We’ll be working on this more over the summer, so it’d be really great to have your input!