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!

I would like to purpose a session on teaching collaboration, no not teaching collaboratively (although that might be part of the answer) but rather how do we encourage collaboration amongst our students. In some sense I have come to believe that “collaborative literacy” (I know poor name, need something better) is a key component to creating digitally savvy students. But this creates problems in the classroom.

First issue: Most of the disciplines we all teach in value singular scholarship and singular production, to the point of idealizing it (the picture of a scholar sitting alone amongst a stack of books producing a manuscript). What’s worse is that many of us became academics because of an attraction to this kind of singular work, and very few us got any graduate instruction or experience in collaboration.

Second issue: The institution is structured in such a way as to not only not encourage collaboration, but make it difficult. We are asked to evaluate students individually, give them credit for work that they have done, and assign a grade which signifies individual achievement.

How do we teach our students collaboration? So how do we craft assignments in such a way as to not only encourage, but require this sort of collaborative approach? How do we then evaluate this and make it fit into the existing system?

When group projects go well they do really well, when they go poorly they go really, really, really poorly. So here is something I am thinking about doing for next semester, an idea with which I am toying:

At the beginning of the semester students will form groups based on project interest. No minimum to group size. If some projects have a lot of interest, might divide into two groups.

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?

I am interested in seeing how audio is being used in classroom technology–whether it be website browsers like Browse-Aloud, or with video/podcasts of classes or student papers, or word-processing programs like Dragonwriter. As always, I want to be able to integrate such programs into the standard computer lab in order to normalize their use and make it possible for all students to benefit from them.

(Note: I didn’t apply to THATCamp, but I decided that I get to propose a session anyway, since I’m darn well coming in my role as Regional THATCamp Coordinator. That’s what admin privileges do for you, heh heh.)

In E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End, the bohemian intellectual Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, both try to connect with men outside their normal bohemian intellectual circles. It’s a rather naive idea, and it turns out rather tragically for both the bright working-class dreamer Leonard Bast and the muddled bourgeois businessman Henry Wilcox, but in the end there’s some good at least that comes of it. David Lodge played with this idea in his novel Nice Work, too, and in that novel it turns out rather better.

My idea is to spend a session simply connecting with people we don’t usually connect with, people outside our normal professional and disciplinary circles. That might mean calling a prof in the Computer Science department at your own university to see if s/he’ll come speak to your Literature class; or it might mean getting in touch with Apple to see if they’ll give your library an iPad to lend out; or it might mean arranging for someone from a community college, someone from K-12, someone from a university, and someone from business to all have lunch together for no particular reason at all. I’m often meaning to do this kind of connecting and never getting around to it — I figure we could do a little brainstorming, a little Googling, and then a little e-mailing or calling in an hour fifteen, and who knows what might come out of it?

We might also use some of the time to discuss the ethics of corporate sponsorships of academic projects, including THATCamp. Though of course that might easily be a whole separate session.

I’d like to discuss text mining. I’m currently looking at narratives of conversion offered by fourteen laymen and -women to join a church in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1700-02. This project raises questions about text mining that I haven’t seen addressed elsewhere. First, how can text mining can help scholars deal with the problem of scarce, rather than abundant, sources? Most projects that I’ve seen use text mining to plow through huge volumes of text. But there are only fourteen narratives from East Windsor (about 30 printed pages), and at most a couple hundred narratives from sixteenth-century New England. How can text mining provide close readings of the scarce documents that scholars from earlier eras work with? Second, how can text mining be adapted to documents that employ a vocabulary that is at once allusive and precise? Nearly every word in these dense narratives is a biblical or theological allusion, which is crucial to their meaning. At the same time, they use a very precise vocabulary. (For example, the term “saving faith” means “the type of faith that saves” rather than the more obvious “faith, which by necessity saves.”) How can text mining bring out the richness of this vocabulary? Though my project is focused on early American religious history, I think the questions it raises could contribute to the larger discussion of text mining.

Since I write for my own blog and for a group blog on the history of American religion, I’d also like to discuss the value and danger of blogging for graduate students and early-career scholars.

I’d like to explore the potential parallel between academic knowledge production and open-source software development. Here’s my thought: while things are economically dire for universities (the de facto centers of scholarship), they are pretty good in open source communities (Linux, WordPress, Drupal and the like are more widely used all the time and supported by ever-growing communities). So maybe there’s something that scholars can learn from the open-source folks. Two possible lenses:

1) Economics – The open source economy is, arguably, a gift economy when viewed from the inside. But externally, the open source movement is largely dependent on the commercial world: companies like Google and Sun officially steward open source projects, and more broadly, many (most?) contributors to FOSS projects are only able to do so because of their gainful employment in the regular economy. To some extent, the academy already works like this: scholars can only create contribute to the scholarly economy because they are supported by their employers (universities) who enlist them for income-generating service (mainly teaching, but also financially attractive research, etc.). Are there other parts of the commercial economy where scholars can be parasitic? Or, in the way that a company like Automattic provides paid support to commercial users of WordPress in order to finance the continued development of the software, are there ways that scholars could independently charge to “support” (speaking gigs, consulting, etc) the ideas that they give away for free?

2) Process – Much of the pushback from open publishing models centers on the importance of peer review: good review costs money, and the closed model of an academic journal provides necessary funds. Take away pay walls, the argument goes, and you can’t have good review. In successful open source projects, code has to meet an extremely high standard of quality, yet many (most?) contributors are not paid for their contributions. What are the ad hoc models of review, hierarchy, and encouragement that emerge in open source communities? How might the structures that emerge out of open source communities – ideas like ‘commit access’ and ‘version control’, the notion of fluid and complex rather than fixed and linear hierarchies, and so on – play a role in the development of a new kind of peer review?