In pondering this proposal, I’ve come up with four basic types of documentation that I think are relevant to digital humanities projects.

• supporting creation of scholarly output
• supporting reporting to funding agencies or academic departments
• allowing sharing one’s research methodology with other scholars
• informing and educating system administrators about the system-level requirements of the software itself

All these types of documentation are important, but I think it’s time to start talking with each other about that last type. We all want the results of our work to survive and mature, and one of the best ways to insure longevity and sustainability is to properly document system-level requirements—software dependencies, negotiated service level agreements, database design, etc.. Improving our communication with our IT system administrators ensures that we can meet as equals, moving away from handshake deals and hopeful bribery with baked goods as a means to attempting get the support our projects require.

We’ve learned some hard lessons at UVa Library about the sort of documentation and process definition that are required for long-term support of our digital tools and interfaces, and I’d love to share these with anyone who’s interested. Just as importantly, I’d love to learn from other attendees experiences creating usable system documentation for their projects.

related to:  karindalziel’s  session proposal

Here’s a bit from my THATCamp application:

Many of the tools of Web 2.0 and social media offer opportunities for collaboration, between institutions as well as individuals, yet the opportunities are not taken. Museums, archives, and universities could make use of tools like Google Wave, wikis, etc to share information. I would like to be part of a discussion the stumbling blocks that prevent collaboration, and possible solutions or routes which could be taken, even if they’re small steps. I’d also love to hear other people’s ideas for collaborative projects.

Here’s where I started from: I work in a historic house museum, and I have friends who are professors, grad students, librarians, and fellow museos. We have great conversations and a lot of our work overlaps. We share the info informally but there isn’t an officially sanctioned way for us to combine and collaborate and make the resulting information available to everyone.

My personal dream-project is some sort of shared wiki or webpage for all the Early American Republic sites and scholars in Virginia. There are so many overlaps in individuals and events; rather than every place recreating the wheel we could benefit from shared ideas.

I’d like to have a conversation about collaborations between different kinds of institutions, both ones which have worked and ones which failed (and the whys of both).  It would also be helpful to discuss strategies to encourage TPTB to engage in collaboration.

I may also join in the conversations proposed by Jeffrey McClurken and Chad Black, to raise the questions of where and how libraries and museums fit in to classrooms and academic scholarship.

Some THATCamp attendees may know that last fall, with the help of Jeremy Boggs, I launched an experimental quasi-journal to highlight what digital humanists were reading and talking about: Digital Humanities Now. You can read my ideas behind DHNow here and see the (modest) technical infrastructure here. The basic idea was a crowdsourced journal of the community, by the community, for the community. No publisher or press needed, rolling and varied content (not just 8,000 word articles but pointers to new digital projects, debates, thoughtful blog posts, writing outside the academy as well as inside it), and room for interactivity.

I’ve now had six months to look at what DHNow‘s automated processes surfaced, and want to iterate DHNow forward so that it covers the digital humanities much better and functions more like a journal—that is, as a place for the best writing, projects, reviews, and commentary in our field. I would also like to see if the model behind it—taking a pool of content, applying a filter to show the “best of,” and publishing the results with the inclusion of comments from the community—might work beyond the digital humanities, or if we might find other models for journals to move past the same-old article/submission/editor/press model. There are other experiments in this vein, such as MediaCommons. Important to me in all of this is a recognition that we have to work as much on the demand side as the supply side.

Right now DHNow is strongly connected to links mentioned on Twitter by over 350 digital humanists, but I have been working to replace that system. On the “pool of content” piece, Sterling Fluharty and I have started to combine our large OPML files of digital humanities blogs; regardless of its use in DHNow it might be good to complete that project since a comprehensive listing would be broadly useful for the community. I’m thinking of replacing the filter mechanism (Twittertim.es) with a modified version ThinkTank and/or an RSS aggregator, and I’ve also come to the (perhaps wrong) conclusion that some light human editing is necessary (and so I’m on the lookout for a rotating group of editors). Finally, in addition to the daily stream, I’d like to fix the best of the best at intervals more like a traditional journal, likely using ePub.

I propose this topic sheepishly because I don’t feel that THATCamp should be for pet projects like DHNow. But if others have found DHNow helpful and would like to collaborate to make it into something more useful for the community, let me know.

I’m beginning to think traditional print may suffer from a case of poor design. Text itself has evolved with the medium that represents it, and with each evolution came an upgrade to the user interface. Digital text gives us another powerful evolution (hyper-linking, mass storage, and perfect indexing for starters) and with it should be a sufficiently powerful  upgrade to the user interface, one that no one has nailed down yet.

The benefits of digital text are obvious. Less money spent on physical books, less backs broken by those same books. Less obvious, are the the innovations which truly digital texts could allow. The current crop of e-readers  are dropping the ball when it comes to electronic text. In my eyes, the strangest of the lot is the near-ubiquitous iPad; beyond arguments regarding the application of purchasing books through Apple, the fact that they ask you to physically turn the pages of their digital books strikes me as fundamentally wrong (I understand that there is a mass-market to consider, but still).

My biggest issue with e-readers is not what they do wrong, but what they do not do. There is so much in the way of analysis, collaboration, class participation, and more that could be done with an digital text reader. What we need is a piece of software that runs on multiple devices, a standard for digital texts across platforms, and a new series of terms to deal with a post-paper work (for instance, how does one cite a selection when the text no longer uses pages?).  These are all issues I feel THATCamp is capable of discussing, and even attempting to correct.

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