A number of THATCamp sessions generated collaboratively written notes, syllabi, and brainstorming documents, most frequently using Google Documents. Here’s a list of these collaborative, shared documents. Let me know what’s missing!

• Digital Humanities Curriculum (DH 101)
• Digital Storytelling
• Ethical Hacking in the Humanities draft syllabus
• Courseware that Doesn’t Suck
• The Social University
• ARGs and ARGHives
• Geolocation and Locative Media

This is a more playful session idea, but no less serious than anything else proposed: I’d like to hold a Zen Scavenger Hunt at some point during THATCamp.

I got the idea of a Zen Scavenger Hunt from ARG designer Jane McGonigal. A Zen Scavenger Hunt is essentially a reversed-engineered scavenger hunt. We form teams and each team goes out and finds ten or or so items and only afterward do they receive the list of the items they’re supposed to be scavenging for. The teams then have to improvise a series of hacks and demonstrations to prove that their items perfectly match the list.

How this might play out: perhaps sometime Saturday afternoon we form teams; then between the last formal session on Saturday and the first one on Sunday, the teams go out and find their items. Then sometime on Sunday the list is revealed and the teams defend their finds.

How does a Zen Scavenger Hunt relate to the digital humanities? It’s playful, process-oriented, and some locative media/GPS/geocaching could even be incorporated. And the list itself, well that will be comprised of various items relevant to the humanities…

My involvement in the digital humanities is wide-ranging, but there are three areas that I would particularly want to focus on at THATCamp.

First, I have a pedagogical interest in geolocation and mobile computing. While some of the benefits of geolocation are immediately apparent to historians and teachers of history, very few people have thought about using geolocation in a literary context. Even less attention has been paid to the ways geolocation can foster critical thinking in students. I am currently thinking of ways to “re-purpose” Foursquare in ways unintended and unforeseen by its creators, for use in a new media studies class in Spring 2011.

My second area of interest concerns digital preservation, social networking, ephemerality, and creativity. That sounds like a muddle, and it is. What I’m fascinated by is the tension between (1) digital preservation as a social act and (2) erasure, fallibility, and unreliability as a creative or political act. I see pedagogical, scholarly, and artistic implications in this tension that are worth exploring among other like-minded (and differently-minded) digital humanists.

And finally, I’ve recently realized we need to think more critically about the use of software emulators (those programs that mimic other platforms, allowing you to run otherwise inaccessible programs and games using the original ROMs). As I wrote in a comment to John’s post on Hacking Ethics for Edupunks, these emulators are crucial for our scholarship, but they often rely on copyrighted BIOSes and ROMs that are, strictly speaking, illegal to possess (unless you happen to have gotten the ROM from a legal copy of the original software that you already own). So, there are ethical concerns to consider. But there are also important process-oriented questions we should be asking. How does an emulator change our experience of a program? What does an emulator add or take away from the original program? What about the emulation gap—the technological, methodological, and epistemological gap between studying software on its original platform and on an emulator?