Regards

Steven Hayes

Is the purpose to help faculty invent the university of the twenty-first century? Or is it just to close a gap in technology skills that every other type of knowledge worker had to close years ago? I think the two goals would have two different agendas.

bit.ly/dhBX2m

We need to rethink the next generation LMS and online course. I do believe that online education can be better than classroom education for many reasons. Mostly because we all learn at different speeds and engage at different times. I’m very interested in WordPress and Buddypress. I think a very light simple elegantly designed courseroom can be created using WordPress.

Think about how the smart phone looked before the iphone came out. The same opportunity exists with the typical old school LMS.

Yes! This is the way forward. As a stereotypically beleaguered University SysAdmin, I seriously appreciate the courtesy and professionalism expressed here.

I’ve put my archive of #THATcamp tweets into a zipped CSV file: blog.ynada.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/thatcamp-all.zip
You can also get the version maintained by Twapperkeeper (www.twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/thatcamp), which also includes tweets made since after the camp, but (I think) doesn’t go back as far.

Cheers,

Cornelius

-bowerbird

Just looking over some post-THATcamp documents (I was set to go but had to pull out last minute). I’ve had some similar thoughts (www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2010/05/post-story_post-promotion_post.php) if you’re interested in reading.

Alex

While I’d love to see a more dynamic and customizable LMS system, it’s got to take into account the fact that few faculty can handle anything more than a basic dropdown menu interface.

The Wikipedia page about Ivan Illich’s 1971 book Deschooling Society illustrates a vision for the future of educational technology. Illich rejected the institutional nature of schooling, and hoped for destructured, de-instutionalized future for education. The article not only explains Illich’s vision for a new educational system and it’s presence as an entry on the Wikipedia demonstrates the way his idea of decentralized, interest driven, “learning webs” are now a core part of internet culture. This presentation of his argument is itself a representation of how his vision has become a central feature of internet culture. Informal online learning communities like Flickr groups, fan fic sites, game forums, and DIY and crafting sites, offer further evidence of how unstructured, self directed “learning webs” are now some of the most important sites of learning in 21st century society.

Dan alludes to the scarcity of attention. In his book titled _The Economy of Attention_, Richard Lanham argues that an excess of information demands a new way of generating value. Since information is plentiful, the new role of the scholar is to help us focus, to create attention-getting structures. Lanham doesn’t offer the following examples, but the wide range of works developed by DHers can be valued as scholarship for an age in which information is plenty. Like silhouettes on a bright, white screen, an attention structure limits the flow in order to create value. Whereas the traditional scholar is confronted with a dark screen that needs to be enlightened, the DH scholar is confronted with a white screen on which she needs to introduce some contrast.

>> One potential solution on the demand side might come not from the scarcity of production, as it did in a print world, but from the scarcity of attention. @dancohen <<

The information economy has upended the scarcity model on which traditional scholarship has been based. Traditionally, the lone scholar must add to a scholarly universe that is incomplete. The corpus of ideas with which a traditional scholar is identified is finite. S/he is expected to have read it all, to known it all. New ideas and perspectives are hard to find. It takes genious to create or envision them. Someone with singular vision is needed to help bridge the gap between the known and the unknown, the near past and the distant future. What the scholar is a creater, a producer—someone who shine some light ahead of us.

The information age has turned that traditional relationship on its head. Digital scholars today do not face a future in which the existence of great ideas and novel perpectives are scarce. In an information age, there is an excess of great ideas and novel perspectives. Like a 24-hour gas station on the highway, the road ahead is well lit. The gap between the past and the future has been reduced to little more than a speed bump. From the standpoint of the web, the scholar is surrounded by so much information that s/he lives in an eternal present. S/he can’t possibly know everything about her field, and there are so many great ideas and novel perspectives from which to choose that s/he is confronted with a new scholarly exigence: how to deal with an excess of knowledge.

Dan alludes to the scarcity of attention. In his book titled The Economy of Attention, Richard Lanham argues that an excess of information demands a new way of generating value. Since information is plentiful, the new role of the scholar is to help us focus, to create attention structures. Lanham doesn't offer the following examples, but the wide range of works developed by DHers can be valued as scholarship for an information age. The growing number of ways in which to filter, connect, and visualize information are attention structures. They are forms of scholarship tailor-made for an age of informational excess. Like silhouettes on a bright, white screen, they are a model of production that turns the traditional model of scarcity on its head.

* use virtualization for older platforms
* design site as static as data allows from the beginning
* limit the number of platforms, esp. ones with data export
* design sites that degrade gracefully in loss of technology
* create a video/screenshots, etc of a site as a form of documentation – it records the site’s functionality which can be ephemeral
* think of the site as layers – separate, for instance, map stuff (KML) from presentation
* make your site available for lots of copies
* available for spidering (e.g static HTML version)
* clonable repositories
* open licensing
* Documenting – white paper at the end of a project, talking about the idea behind the project. Should be a joint effort between scholars and coders
* Use standards
* Create content people care about 😉

Also, group discussed whether every project needs preservation & why there is no digital humanities version of Yelp for projects/tools and what would have to change in order for that to change (it comes down to solving the “social capital problem”).

Tests are liberating. Code is like any other form of writing; it may need heavy revision after the first draft. Solid tests makes that revision work easier and more certain, and they allow you to work more quickly. Tests are actually more important, in the long run, than the actual application; as a general rule they far outlast the code that they support.

Wish I could be there with you guys — but on the other hand, I’d probably bore everyone in earshot to tears with talk along these lines … 🙂 Have a good session!

I wonder if a session or sessions related to DH teaching/classes/curriculum might produce a document (or if that’s too grand an idea, a list) of what we see as the core competencies/content areas for an undergraduate DH class/curriculum. Such a document could then be submitted to Tom and Dan’s Hacking the Academy volume.

Beyond what you (and Rob and I) proposed, we need to link this with the other sessions proposed in this area, including those by Dave Parry, Bill Ferster, Brian Croxall, as well as the work done by Amanda French at NYU.

devel.patrickgmj.net/thatcamp/hackingTemplate.html

it’s light markup that is so “light” that
it’s nearly invisible.

it converts out to .html and .pdf, but
its simple structure also means that
viewer-apps and authoring-tools can
be programmed for it quite easily…

-bowerbird

I think the standoff markup approach has the following advantages:

1. It can be generalized to media which cannot be edited with xml. You can add a timecode and thus attach metadata to a video. You can attach a logical code and somehow cite/analyze/encode an interactive work.

2. It allows for violations of nested hierarchy. Properly formatted XML files are trees; not all ideas or classifications in documents can be modeled by a tree.

3. It allows for maintenance of sources in a central location, and allows for only the most important (i.e. the extra data) to be kept in a database. A similar xml database would contain a great deal of redundancy.

4. Offsets into a text file are simple, and can even be used to handle changes between different versions by the utilization of references to stanzas or paragraphs.

Here’s the description from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities Library of Funded Projects: is.gd/cjP7U .

I’m happy to provide additional information if you’d like. Just find me in hallways at THATCamp– I’ll be the one with chocolate.

@John: there’s a growing number of tools out there, both toolkits (i.e. programming languages such as Flash, PHP, Python, R, Processing etc) and ready-made solutions that don’t require programming but are consequently more limited in their capabilities. When it comes to the type of visualizations we can currently do I feel like we have a chicken-egg problem: we need to combine an understanding of humanities data with a solid grasp of visualization (and, if we want to do quantitative stuff, statistics) to build meaningful visualizations.
And yes, combining subjective tagging with structural characteristics is a challenge. Kinda ties in with Hugh Cayless proposal for markup:
thatcamp.org/2010/the-inadequacies-of-markup/

@Brian: I’d definitly like to hear more about geospatial and temporal vis.

I really only care about what’s practical. The theoretical arguments are interesting but weighted down by ideology. Maybe it’s worth taking another look at where we are technically though.

Are you suggesting a practical discussion about how to overlay and weave commentaries and supercommentaries in an egalitarian fashion, presumably using markup tech? I’m not inclined to wade into any kind of debate over the “purity of the turf”, but I’d love to play with some ideas about how we could bum-rush the privileged position of the encoder of digital text.

Classroom design seems like a potentially interesting conversation, and I’d love to see what gets brought up beyond the predictable: reconfigurable/movable furniture, wi-fi access, white boards, projectors, and the like. Moreover, how can we best encourage people–ourselves included–to not simply reproduce old patterns of pedagogy within the re-oriented spaces (since, after all, movable chairs can be placed in rows as easily as anything else).

I see some commonalities between this idea and Julie Meloni’s proposal to begin a an open-access DH curriculum for mid-career scholars otherwise untrained. How, in other words, do we build digital humanists out of those who haven’t attended UVa, UMD, or UCI? We shouldn’t have to wait for a whole new generation of scholars to grow up to begin pushing further.

So as a hacking project, some kind of Omeka-as-ARGhive process would be cool, or even just a conversation about an Omeka-fied workflow for ARG play.