Since I’ve been tinkering around with HTML5 on my own theme, and reading debates over it the last few months, I’d like to propose a session on HTML5. There are quite a few things we can discuss, including, but certainly not limited to:

• Features of HTML5, including new tags and tag attributes, offline web applications, Geolocation, et cetera.
• Implementing HTML5 now; Design and development considerations for using HTML5, including browser support of certain features.
• HTML5 in the context of the Apple/Adobe argument over Flash.
• Potential impact of HTML5 on digital humanities work; How do standards bodies for technologies and languages affect our work and, conversely, how might digital humanities as a field begin to influence the development of standards such as HTML5?

I imagine we could hack out some code and examples, too. Any other ideas for this?

CC licensed photo by lets.book

What role should social networking play within online academic environments? Should faculty members, administrators, and students be able to friend one another on campus-wide blogging platforms? Is the term “friend,” used as either a noun or a verb, insufficiently serious for the august members of the academy? Or is friending so firmly established that any other term will sound hopelessly contrived?

These are not idle questions. As Project Director of The CUNY Academic Commons, an academic social network that connects the twenty-three campuses of The City University of New York system, I am trying to gauge the comfort-level of my local scholarly community with these issues. Our site uses uses BuddyPress, a set of plugins for WordPress Multi-User, to enable a social network that includes friend-based connections between members. So far, at least, we haven’t altered the default language of friending on BuddyPress, but that doesn’t mean we won’t or shouldn’t.

When we first unveiled the Commons to the CUNY community at the December 2009 CUNY IT Conference, one audience member expressed discomfort with the idea of friending colleagues. This prospective member of our site found the “friend” terminology a bit inappropriate to the academic sphere; more than that, though, he felt uncomfortable with the intimacy that friendship implied. He didn’t want to “friend” his Provost or receive a friendship request from a grad student working in his office. He just wanted to work with them.

So, one question I have is whether some term besides “friend” would be more appropriate for a work environment, even an informal one that includes social ventures like CUNY Pie. Would everyone be happier if we were colleaguing one another on our academic networks?

Of course, friending — the bi-directional, mutually affirmed confirmation of a relationship — is not the only model for connection in a social network. Twitter utilizes an asymmetrical “follow” system in which one user can follow, or subscribe to, the updates of one another without both members agreeing to a shared relationship. Similarly, sites like Flickr and Delicious allow users to add others to their networks without requiring a mutual decision by both members. LinkedIn, meanwhile, allows members to mark one another as colleagues, co-workers, or classmates. Academic.edu goes both ways: in addition to designating others on the site as colleagues, members can “follow” the work of other scholars.

On the Commons, we’ve been so busy developing the site that we haven’t really initiated this discussion among our users. Some conversation began over on Boone Gorges’s blog, where Boone and I began to hash out these issues in a post that really had little to do with the conversation that followed (+1 to me for hijacking the comment thread).

Obviously, individual academic communities may have different answers to these questions, but I figure that as long as we have some of the best minds in the Digital Humanities and Emerging Media gathered together in one place this weekend, we might as well take a crack at them, too.

So: will you be my friend colleague some-other-term-that-expresses-a-vague-and-perhaps-specious-connection? I hope so, because a request is already on its way.

Well, it looks like there is a good number of campers (Julie, Jeff, Dave – just to name a few…and I know that Beth has a lot to say about mentorship) interested in teaching/curriculum (self paced, open access, formal, etc, etc).  My original proposals is in that domain as well.  Here is what I originally submitted:

We are beginning to see an increasing number of university programs and classes intended to equip students in the myriad disciplines that constitute the field of cultural heritage with both the practical and theoretical skills necessary to creatively apply information and communication technologies to historical and cultural heritage materials

The worry I have with many of these programs (or classes) is that they are very discipline specific. As one would expect, they are mostly populated by students from the department in which the program lives (students who are steeped in the epistemology of that specific discipline). The result is that the student’s outlook on digital cultural heritage might be insular, and lacking much of the vibrant interdisciplinarity of cultural heritage.

It is in this context, informed by my own efforts at Michigan State University, that I would like to engage in a discussion with other cultural heritage professions (academics, archivists, museum professionals, archaeologists, etc.) as to how we might go about constructing digital oriented curricula that embrace the interdisciplinary nature of cultural heritage and encourages cross disciplinary collaboration among future cultural heritage professionals.

If such a curriculum existed, what would it look like? What theory & practice would it investigate? What tools & platforms would it explore? How would it be taught?  Who would teach it?  Are there best practices and general models that can be developed which would serve to prepare students (either graduate or undergraduate) for a broad range of settings (public service, private sector, or academia)? Is such a curriculum even possible? It is these questions (and more) that I would like to explore with other interested THATCamp attendees.

blah, blah, blah…I know…this might seem to be a lot of yak, and not a lot of hack.  However, if you turn it on its side and look at it slightly different, its also about hacking curriculum, the domain of cultural heritage, models of content, identity, and interdisciplinarity.

There are a couple of important things that bear added (or emphasizing):

• How do we create a culture of technological ingenuity (where students build stuff – especially stuff that might live outside of their comfort zone) in such a curriculum?
• How do we create a culture of collaboration in such a curriculum? (this certainly falls into the domain of David’s proposal)
• How do we create a culture of interdiscplinarity in such a curriculum?

(oh yeah, and games as well)

While I didn’t “formally” propose it, I would love to talk to people about serious games (meaningful play, playful interaction…whatever you would like to call it).  I’m PI on the NEH ODH funded Red Land/Black Land: Teaching Ancient Egyptian History Through Game-Based Learning project, co-founder of the Serious Game MA program at MSU, co-founder of the undergrad game design and development specialization at MSU, and a pretty big gamer myself – so I’ve got a fair amount of experience in the domain.  It bears mentioning that I’m not just interested in digital games…I’m also really interested in non-digital games as well (tabletop games, boardgames, collectible card games, collectible miniature games, etc.) for learning (mostly cultural heritage learning).  So, if there are people interested in exploring games (any aspect – best practices, approaches, nuts & bolts…whatever), I’m game (game…get it? har har har)

Since “DSPOADHCFMCSOU” doesn’t spell anything useful, I’m using “Project Retrain” as the working title for this project.

Some of you may recall a tweet by me a few weeks ago, in which I “announced” a new project and called for volunteers. Despite not saying anything else about that project besides its lengthy title, many people said “I’m in!” or “that sounds grant-worthy”—all pretty darn fine responses for something as yet undescribed. So, I figured the best place to describe it (in brief) would be here, because what I’d like to do at THATCamp is gather all the folks I’d be asking for help/input anyway and brainstorm (or flat out plan) parts of this project.

NOTE: This may seem to go against the more hack, less yak directive, but I want to walk away from THATCamp with a loosely constructed advisory team, an outline of first phase content and actions, milestones, and a general action plan. That’s pretty hacky although there’s yakky to get there. And if this doesn’t happen in a session of any sort, I will track people down in the hallways. You’ve been warned.

My initial thoughts…

Self-paced: the idea is to create modules (more on that under “DH Curriculum”) that contain a series of topics organized into bite-sized lessons; here I’m thinking of the scope of content within the Sams Teach Yourself “in 24 hours” series, which I have plenty of experience writing, that tries to ensure the content of each lesson can be digested within an hour (although time for end-of-lesson exercises can take longer).

So, for argument’s sake, let’s say one of the modules is “Basic Web Site Construction”. A topic might be: “Setting Up a Web Server (hosted version)”. The bite-sized lessons might be: what to look for in a hosting provider, understanding client-server communication, exploring your control panel, finding an FTP client, uploading your first file. If the topic is “Setting Up a Web Server (geek version)”, the bite-sized lessons might start with installing XAMPP and moving forward with that. Also under “Basic Web Site Construction” would include initial forays into (X)HTML, CSS, and so on.

I think you get the idea of the granularity of the content. I have a ton of my own content I can repurpose, and there’s open access content to be had, or crowdsourced (hint: you’re the crowd). While the topics within the modules would be linear, the modules themselves would not necessarily be linear (and you could be working on more than one module at a time) although I do have this idea wherein completion of X number of modules would prepare a person to attend Y scholarly institute or apply for Z grant (e.g. “you’ve completed basic text encoding and it’s almost summertime? great! think about attending DHSI or an NEH-funded workshop for the next step”).

Open Access: by this I mean pulling together existing open access and Creative Commons-licensed content in order to mashup new “courses” as well as making those new courses open access. While there would be a registration process and the content would be “locked down” to those registered, registration would be free. The account business would have to do with tracking progress, assigning mentors, and so on.

DH Curriculum: the goal isn’t at all to say “this is what you need to know in order to call yourself a DH scholar” but instead “you want to learn about some core technologies that might find their way into your scholarly work, or to know more about the tools others are using so that you can have conversations with them? here’s some stuff you can learn.” I see this content ranging from basic web technology to document encoding to textual analysis tools to library systems to social media to pedagogical best practices with technology to project management to infinity and beyond.

Mid-Career Scholars: why “mid-career”? Obviously this isn’t a requirement—anyone who wants to learn stuff is welcome. But I want to focus on the “retrain” or “ramp up the skills” or “insert something else here” aspect for scholars who find themselves wanting to take the time to learn more in a structured sort of way, but who are too far out from their PhD date to qualify for post-doctoral study/research opportunities. Deciding to start this project came from conversations from two important people—an old friend and my diss chair—who both are midway through their careers and know where they want to go (in general) with technology in their scholarship but do not know the paths to follow or the right questions to ask in order to get there. They both came to me and asked me to teach them stuff. I figured if I’m going to do it for them, might as well do something larger for everyone. Then I thought about what could start to change in academia at large if just ten (ten!) mid-career scholars otherwise unaffiliated with DH-ish things turned toward this path each year by working through the material. How would hiring committees start to change? T&P committees? Heck, even just conference panels?

Ok, so…I’m moving forward with this, somehow and some way, and obviously I’d like all of you to come along for the ride. I have some ideas for how this project could intersect with existing projects (I’m looking at you, nowviskie et al). I actually have more of a plan than it looks here—I’d just like people to round out the team. I see THATCamp as a place to gather the team. I hear that worked last year for ProfHacker.

Okay, professional societies, large and small — what have you done for us lately? Are you ready to do more of what the digital humanities crowd needs? Less of what we don’t? (And, um, what is that, precisely?)

Because I’m in thorough agreement with the THATCamp mantra of “more hack, less yak,” I’m not actually proposing the following as a session — instead, I just want to put this concept out there with an open invitation to all of you, to corner me between sessions and share your views. I’m volunteering to take them back to the following groups:

• the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the primary professional society for the digital humanities;
• the program committee for the annual Digital Humanities conference;
• the Information Technology Committee of the Modern Language Association (MLA);
• NINES & 18th-Connect, established peer-reviewing bodies for 19th- and 18th-century electronic scholarship;
• the Scholarly Communication Institute (SCI), which is well-positioned to liaise with professional societies (and publishers and libraries and centers and institutes) around issues that matter to THATCampers.

I’m currently Vice President of the first organization (and a member of its outreach and mentorship committees), Vice Chair of the second group, an incoming member of the third, Senior Advisor to the fourth (for my sins as developer emerita), and Associate Director of the fifth. That’s a lot of administriva and service activity for a gal who hates to waste time — so I’m highly motivated to hear from the people these groups should be serving — that’s you — about how to serve you better and make what we do immediately meaningful to your lives as digital humanists.

There will actually be a few people at THATCamp who are involved in these organizations. I’m not naming names — although they’re free to self-identify in the comments section. I will, however, be quite cheerful about dragging my colleagues into any discussions you initiate. (Fair warning!)

Basically, I’m volunteering to be a walking suggestion box. Professional societies, by and large, can do better. How, exactly? You tell me.

A thought-provoking digital storytelling (DST) session at last year’s THATcamp inspired me to teach a graduate Digital Storytelling class this spring at Mason (thanks to all the participants at last year’s session!).

Teaching digital storytelling raises a number of pedagogical and technical issues, so in addition to the excellent questions posed by Kenneth Warren (Collecting the Digital Story: Omeka and the New Media Narrative), I would be interested in discussing the balance between teaching/evaluating content and technical skill in digital storytelling classes or classes that include a digital storytelling component.

What is digital storytelling (including a wide range from documentary format to interactive narrative development)? What happens when we tell a story digitally? How does digital storytelling work in the classroom? Does it change learning? How can it be used to teach/help students learn content in an engaging way? How can a one-semester course effectively teach digital storytelling, including technical skills and storytelling skills, while keeping a strong emphasis on content, research, historical accuracy? [or is the question “can a one-semester course. . . ?]

My goal for the class was to keep a strong focus on content, research, and narrative, but (of course) ideally without sacrificing technical quality. In addition, students came to the class with a range of skills (experienced filmmaker to absolute novice)–a challenge in many ways, but it also led to more collaboration and collegiality than I’ve seen in most graduate classes.

I started the course with many unanswered questions and ended the course with at least as many new questions. I look forward to the conversation!

Bad, bad me — of course I’ve been putting off writing up my ideas and thoughts for THATcamp almost to the latest possible moment. Waiting so long has one definitive advantage though: I get to point to some of the interesting suggestions that have already been posted here and (hopefully) add to them.

I’d like to both discuss and do text visualization. Charts, maps, infographics and other forms of visualization are becoming increasingly popular as we are faced with large quantities of textual data from a variety of sources. To linguists and literary scholars, visualizing texts can (among other things) be interesting to uncover things about language as such (corpus linguistics) and about individual texts and their authors (narratology, stylometrics, authorship attribution), while to a wide range of other disciplines the things that can be inferred from visualization (social change, spreading of cultural memes) beyond the text itself can be interesting.

What can we potentially visualize? This may seem to be a naive question, but I believe that only by trying out virtually everything we can think of (distribution of letters, words, word classes, n-grams, paragraphs, …; patterning of narrative strands, structure of dialog, occurrence of specific rhetorical devices; references to places, people, points in time…; emotive expressions, abstract verbs, dream sequences… you name it) can we reach conclusions about what (if anything!) these things might mean.

How can we visualize text? If we consider for a moment how we mostly visualize text today it quickly becomes apparent that there is much more we could be doing. Bar plots, line graphs and pie charts are largely instruments for quantification, yet very often quantitative relations between elements aren’t our only concern when studying text. Word clouds add plasticity, yet they eliminate the sequential patterning of a text and thus do not represent its rhetorical development from beginning to end. Trees and maps are interesting in this regard, but by and large we hardly utilize the full potential of visualization as a form of analysis, for example by using lines, shapes, color (!) and beyond that, movement (video) in a way that suits the kind of data we are dealing with.

What tools can we use to do visualization? I’m very interested in Processing and have played with it, also more extensively with R and NLTK/Python. Tools for rendering data, such as Google Chart Tools, igraph and RGraph are also interesting. Other, non-statistical tools are also an option: free hand drawing tools and web-based services like Many Eyes. Visualization doesn’t need to be restricted to computation/statistics. Stephanie Posavec‘s trees are a dynamic mix of automation and manual annotation and demonstrate that visualizations are rhetorically powerful interpretations themselves.

I hope that some of the abovementioned things connect to other THATcampers’ ideas, e.g. Lincoln Mullen’s post on mining scarce sources and Bill Ferster’s post on teaching using visualization.

Don’t get me started on the potential for teaching. Ultimately translating a text into another form is a unique kind of critical engagement: you’re uncovering, interpreting and making an argument all at once, both to the text in question and to yourself.

Anyway — anything from discussing theoretical issues of visualization to sharing code snippets would fit into this session and I’m looking forward to hearing other campers’ thoughts and experiences on the subject.

Over the last year, the Scholars’ Lab has undertaken a project to build a tool for creating interlinked timelines and maps for interpretive expressions of the literary and historical contents of archival collections which we are calling Neatline. When the project was first envisioned, it was seen as a stand-alone tool scholars would use to produce geo-temporal visualizations of textual content. However, as we began the planning process, we thought this effort might not only reach a larger audience, but also contribute back to the larger community effort, if the tools were thought of as a suite of Omeka plugins. This follows a general turn the Scholars’ Lab has taken in how it approaches new projects, from the boutique, or one-off projects of the last decade, toward a more concerted effort to use  frameworks in which we build additional functionality as needed.

Having worked on several open-source projects, I know one the most difficult aspects of this style of code development is building a community of support around the software development effort. Perhaps one of the most engaging of the community efforts I’ve experienced has been in the Rails community with their Bug Mashes as new versions of the framework are being developed. The idea revolves around four general ways in which participants can participate:

• Confirm a bug can be reproduced
• If it cannot be reproduced, try to figure out what information would make it possible to reproduce
• If can be reproduced, add the missing pieces: better instructions, a failing patch, and/or a patch that applies cleanly to the current source
• Bring promising tickets to the attention of the Core team

Generally locations (usually programming shops that use Rails) sponsor a day where community members can gather and participate in the bug mashing, sometimes there’s even pizza and highly-caffeinated drinks. The goal beyond getting some good code written is to get more people introduced to some of the new features, encourage people to talk about the experience, and just have a day to geek out for a good cause.

So here’s the pitch, knowing there’s a concentration of software developers, users, and enthusiasts, could we organize a series of bug mashes that promote community involvement through documentation, patches, blog posts on usage, thoughts, etc. on some projects that are commonly used by digital humanists (not specifically this weekend, but some time in the future)? Chief on my mind lately has been some enhancements to Omeka since several of our current projects are tied to that framework, but are there projects that could benefit from this type of planned community involvement? Are there any perplexing coding issues we could could hack on while at THATCamp?

I’m attending THATCamp with my colleagues from the University of Virginia Library’s Scholars’ Lab (please see their posts in this space for more about what we’re doing). I’ll be interested in discussing challenges in geospatial scholarship (particularly the encoding and processing of ambiguity and imprecision) and how open platforms for supporting it can help, as well as digital repository technology and how it can make our work better. In particular, I’m always ready to talk about Neatline, our NEH-funded project to create open, lightweight, and flexible tools for the creation of interlinked timelines and maps as interpretive expressions of the literary or historical content of archival collections. We’re using Omeka as a platform, creating plugins that provide rich capabilities to manipulate and exhibit geospatial information as part of a unified scholarly field.

On a related note, a continuing concern of mine has been the nature of citation and evidence in scholarly argument in non-text media. As we create and use new and very sophisticated forms of narrative and argument, how will our technologies of citation grow? Are we ready to ensure that the scholarly record as extended through hypermedia maintains its rigor? What role will metadata technologies play in this effort and how can those of us who work in libraries and archives help?

—
A. Soroka
Digital Research and Scholarship R & D
the University of Virginia Library

Distribution of NRHP listings in continental US, courtesy Wikipedia

I propose a discussion of the National Register of Historic Places nomination form to reimagine the potential of historical research and documentation in the context of abundance of digital tools for the investigation and presentation of architectural and social history. The National Register nomination form dates back to the enactment of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and continues to reflect the technical limitations and, arguably, the ideological assumptions of architectural history during the 1960s. The rise of vernacular architecture and cultural landscape studies have directly challenged the tradition of engaging buildings and neighborhoods with a curatorial approach based in an art history. Questions of style, significance, context, and integrity are now contested and complicated in ways that may be poorly reflected within the limits laid out in National Register Bulletin 16A “How to Complete The National Register Nomination Form.” Beyond the scholarly transformation of architectural and social history, the existing form has been disrupted by the transition from a culture of of scarcity to a culture of abundance described by Roy Rozenweig. The capacity to conduct full-text searches of manuscript census documents across hundreds of years with Ancestry.com, browse dozens of digitized directories on the Internet Archive, download measured drawings or archival photos from a good portion of HABS/HAER, determine the extant status of buildings using Google Maps, create three-dimensional models with Photosynth, and manage nearly unlimited sources with Zotero must force a radical reconsideration of the process of object of local history research and documentation. None of this was possible in 1966. If we started from scratch today, what would the National Register nomination form look like?

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