I have read all the proposal made so far and I am very excited about tomorrow’s thatcamp.

I noticed that most of the proposal are open questions (rather than volunteering to lead discussions) which could be organized in some sort of clusters for discussion, instead of separate sessions.
I can see different areas of interest around which the conversation(s) could be organized.  Mainly I would cluster them in two-three areas:

Digital Humanities as a field

I think one fundamental question is if Digital Humanities is a discipline in its own right, in which case you would need to discuss the creation of a common network for researcher in the field, as proposed in DH info hubs: what are we missing?. Also important is to enter into mainstream computing, which is something that both IT wishlist  and
In the path forward for usable systems for productive academics are emphasising.
In this cluster also Building DH community fits very well. That’s Not My Department could also bring an interesting perspective (sort of “un-disciplinarization” – bringing the un-conference to another level).
MLA Commons and Capturing Tweets could provide a practical outcome to the discussions.

Tools and Technologies

A second cluster is related to tools and technologies that can be used, both as workshops for existing ones and proposal/discussion for new ones. A further specification could be made between research-centered and teaching-centered tools (although overlapping occurs).

Among the ones more related to teaching there are

• MOOCS
• Workshop on Annotation Studio – which could be interesting to see it as a note taking tool for researcher as well.
• Cyberteacher: Digital Writing and Digital Pedagogies – check the Writing and Coding course for “expanding writing” (augmenting) ideas.
• Teaching Digital Archives is also somewhat addressing the question of new writing and pedagogy, involving databases and digital archives in the process.
• Named Entity Workshop
• Twitter/Technology and Class Discussions: Live Blogging?
• Multi-text Projects

A session that could somewhat give general overview of the teaching side could be Designing DH Projects.
On the research side, the general overview could be given at the Digital Literary Studies – for which an helpful starting point is the Bamboo Dirt website.
Also (self-servingly) I would say that the idea of a Humanist’s Operating System could be part of this discussion.

Amongst the more research-centered are

• Digital bibliographies
• Topic modeling, which introduce Natural Language Processing into thematic textual studies, which is an interesting and promising approach, I believe (unfortunately I don’t know much about natural language processing, but DH is interdisciplinary, right? so there is space for collaboration here). If you don’t know what topic modeling is, check the wikipedia entry.
• Let’s plot to learn GIS
• Juxta : I am also very interested in discussing tools for translation studies (working a side project on that for a course I am taking)
• Omeka Neatline and spatial-temporal visualization and/or Omeka and Scripto Workshop
• Network Analysis
• Domain of One’s Own/Scaling Up

I am not sure this idea of clustering, instead of separate sessions, fits into the thatcamp philosophy, but I think things are clustered it will help when discussing the unfolding of the day and also in making connections between different topics.

Anyway, I am looking forward to meet you tomorrow. Happy New Year to everybody.

I was immediately intrigued by the idea of the humanist’s operating system when I read it in the website of ThatCamp NE 2012 (I wrote a summary of the camp from what I could find online):

An operating system is the most basic software on a computer, which allows the computer run higher order applications. Scholars also need an ‘operating system’—a set of basic tools that work together reliably to handle the low level tasks of scholarship so scholars can concentrate on higher order thinking.

I was not able to go the Camp, but I read what Lincoln Mullen wrote before and after, and some of the reactions. I am not able to do the same workshop (described in a Word Doc here), but it would be nice to have a conversation about the ways in which different tasks are done and what digital tools are used by humanists, using the idea proposed by Mullen to create a comprehensive and useful “operating system” for humanists.

Anyone interested? Comments?