Google Doc link

• Do students respond to peer pressure?
• What do you do about students’ need to “grope for meaning” (privacy)
• Disappointment with available texts (not enough editions available authoritatively annotated)
• Can students embed their research in a text?
• Can students refer back to their own annotations? Others’ annotations?
• Check out H20 from Berkman center — legal texts, casebooks
• Is a “commonplace” book the same as annotation? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book
• Annotation of objects — 3d models at MetaLab (eg for museum collections)
• SocialBook — works well — community lacking?
• Annotating library catalog records perhaps?
• Digital Public Library of America — example of the effort to make resources accessible
• We might need a taxonomy of kinds of annotations
• To build that into the tool or not? (Annotation Studio’s approach is not to build-in this sort of pre-determined interpretation of annotation activity — Jamie)
• Link to Annotation Studio website (explanatory context) Link to Annotation Studio public demo version (let me know if you’d like help getting set up)
• Crocodoc “kind of fun!” — ingests PDFs
• What changes about our idea of texts if/as we annotate? What does the tool do for us/to us?
• “Agon of multiple intelligences” within a text — what does that do to our reading?
• Idea from Best American Essays: students can’t sit alone with a text as easily anymore Garrett Keyser (sp?)
  • Two girls who got through Ethan Frome by reading together via Skype (cool! cool?)
  • Some students are more interested in Drama and Poetry (because it’s performance and/or somehow more social in nature)
• To have a social reading experience is not just to be distracted, but also to be more connected to other people.
• Do students still have the capacity for sustained focus?
• Tension between close reading and just skimming
• Over-achievers clobber the text with their annotations in crocodoc.
• “Annotation that kills” (discussion), is not helpful — provides an answer, not a question!
• We have to teach student these things if we ask them to annotate. Make those ideas explicit.
• Instructor gets more visibility into the students’ reading of the text.
• Might eliminate some of the class time spent on locating areas of interest, allow discussion to cut to the chase, as it were.
• “Motion away from the text” — note-taking as a precursor to analytical activity
• Collaborative essay writing? Interesting idea. Bold!
• Micro to macro reading
• Start with a text that students are annotating, and going to a text that they produced, maybe all the way to an Anthology
• How would you annotate a video (or other time-based text?)
  • Like tweets during a TV viewing?
  • Soundcloud for audio is a nice example
  • Timeline — visualization
  • Google search/books
  • Internet archive — thumbnails culled from
• Zeega — annotation of video — very cool!
• SavePublishing — bookmarklet to locate “tweetable” sentences — interesting proof of concept — it’s not too hard to do some kinds of “computed preprocessing” of text, perhaps as a scaffold to close reading.
• Voting — thumbs up/down might be a good feature for annotations/documents to locate best notes.
• Make selection of high-quality annotations a task for students?
• Overall activity could have as a goal to create a product that is somehow better than the original text.
• Perhaps collaborative online annotation can “make students aware of the ‘meaning of the screen’” — Great point!
• A paper-based text is easily annotated, but we can all remember the first time we realized that it was “licit” to make notes in a book — a revelation! A screen-based text is somehow beyond reach until/unless we provide screen-based annotation tools.
• Same with the screen — power is in play.

Here are the notes from the “Teaching Digital Archives” session proposed by Paul Jaussen: docs.google.com/document/d/1OvSbVBxXNqSGFiOfebiUNqTRppUZpY05bJ1Nz46YXzg/edit

Session notes

How to teach archives? How to add historical context to 19th-century poems as well as doing close reading of poems?

Emphasis point: work with librarians and archivists to develop the course and support the technology. Take students to an actual archive (if possible) and talk to actual archivists, especially about the process of digitizing.

Examples of assignments and tools:

• Having students annotate David Rumsey maps at davidrumsey.com
• Have students add things to HistoryPin at historypin.com
• Dipity timeline tool – www.dipity.com/
• VisualEyes tool – “web-based authoring tool developed at the University of Virginia to weave images, maps, charts, video and data into highly interactive and compelling dynamic visualizations” – www.viseyes.org/
• SmartDraw software (about $100) – www.smartdraw.com/specials/smartdraw.asp?id=104640&gclid=CN_ZgIm5yrQCFY1DMgodVDcAYw (for creating a map of Hell!) – can upload your own map from anywhere
• Omeka Neatline – could be hosted by the library – neatline.org
• Omeka – omeka.net

This goes along with many of the other posts that have mentioned students and the use of digitized resources in teaching, but I thought I might throw another element in. When attempting to get students involved in lessons, stories of the past, etc. it has always proven more effective to involve students from the beginning and make things more hands on. How can we make this happen in the digital humanities front? Have students create oral histories? Create online exhibits to demonstrate understanding? What other ideas do we have? These projects involve collaboration between faculty and archivists/librarians and most importantly students.

Would others be interested in a discussion of collaborative reading / annotation tools and pedagogy? Whether the goal is simply prompting reflective and engaged reading practices in general education students or developing a collaborative critical edition with graduate students, the idea of social reading is attractive. I would be interested in discussing and sharing ideas.  What tools (Wiki, Commentpress, ebook…) have folks used with success? What parameters or frameworks facilitate active learning and the creation of a useful “product?”  Is there a workable way to integrate mobile devices for in-class participation?

Hi everyone!

My name is Jason Lipshin and I’m a research assistant with Hyperstudio, MIT’s digital humanities research lab. Along with HyperStudio’s Director Kurt Fendt and Lead Developer Jamie Folsom, I’d like to propose a workshop on Annotation Studio, a digital annotation tool we’re currently in the process of developing. Created specifically for classroom use, Annotation Studio enables online, multimedia annotation of source documents by allowing users to collaboratively comment on a text at any scale (from a single word to an entire chapter, using different kinds of media).

Although there are many annotation tools currently in existence, Annotation Studio differs in its emphasis on pedagogy. While other tools often focus on annotation for the purposes of historical scholarship or assume familiarity with technical standards like TEI, Annotation Studio makes sophisticated analytic tools immediately accessible to students, with the aim of fostering skills in close reading and composition. Implemented in many MIT humanities classrooms over the past year, Annotation Studio has been used to support every step of the writing cycle, from students’ first engagement with primary sources to essay writing and revision. By supporting such practices as the filtering and exporting of annotations, as well as the importing of student texts (so that teachers can use the tool for feedback), many instructors have responded that Annotation Studio has allowed their students to engage with texts at a greater level of granularity.

In addition to its current, core functionality, Annotation Studio will also eventually feature innovative data visualization tools which track students’ interaction with a text (these tools are currently in development). Such visualizations could allow teachers to better understand how students read and interpret (for instance, identifying particular “hotspots” of interest within a text), while also allowing teachers to iteratively revise their lesson plans based on this dynamic feedback. Through this workshop, we hope to introduce Annotation Studio to interested parties, but also discuss the larger significance of annotation practices to humanities pedagogy and how such insights might fold back into the development of our tool.

What are the DH tools and methods used to study literature? How are these being used and to what end? I’d like to talk with others about the forms that digital literary studies have taken and the underlying methodologies. This could take the form of a “Make” session where we draft an inventory of DH tools and methods used in literary studies with notes on application, context, skills, methodology, etc. For example, what can mapping (topic modeling, text mining, digital editions) do to further scholarship and/or teaching? What is needed to complete a project?

While I don’t have a particular technology in mind, I’m particularly interested in exploring how digital humanities may impact what we teach as writing, from mutlimodal composition to video and audio and mashup, as well as how we teach it. No longer is writing just alphabetic. So for this panel, I propose discussing specific assignments and techniques but also considering larger theoretical issues, such as what do we owe our in students in terms of these expanding definitions of writing.

As a department chair with faculty who are curious, yet tentative, about how to begin DH projects in their classes, I wonder if there are fellow campers who might want to share some ideas about “baby steps” to get faculty jazzed about what they can do with their students.  How to best determine the kinds of projects to whet the appetite – when to use timelines, or concept maps, or GIS, or whatever – where the learning curve, just to get started, is quick and can help to build the enthusiasm.

All:

This workshop suggestion focuses on a tool, the Neatline map tool, that in some ways follows up on the discussion about the use of Scripto for Omeka projects. It follows first because of an underlying interest in Omeka, and second, because of an interest in visualizing archival data in interesting ways (which is what I take the text and archive based work in Scripto to be in the service of accomplishing). As I am sure a number of you know — and Patrick in particular — Neatline has the benefit or detraction of being a UVA product, so it is not currently supported by the Omeka.net hosting service and its server-based plugin library. Bummer as that may be, the advantage, I think, is associated with the increased potential flexibility of the tool.

My interest has been for some time now to marry textual / archival data with cartographic and spatial matter in order to create a richer and deeper data set. Think of this as an exploration of “big data” for cartographic or spatial humanists. One of the principle difficulties I see inherent in GIS platforms is the distinction (often under-represented) between powerful visualization and presentation platforms and powerful analytical platforms. We have begun to see strongly interpretive tools in corpus analysis and data mining applications; we have not, to my mind, seen the same evolution in the realm of humanist data visualization, and in particular, those visualizations tied to time and space through GIS technologies like Neatline. So, I would open this up for a potential workshop that might address themes like: what are some of the the analytical potentials of GIS based technologies? How do we see archival inquiries and historical investigations productively in conversation with the cartographic imagination? What are the limitations of tools like Neatline, or perhaps Google Earth / GMap? I mentioned QGIS in an earlier post and it got a big thud of silence, so maybe this is a better approach, but if anyone wants to dig into technical GIS (as in ArcGIS or QGIS, I’d be open to that as well). Any takers?

I’m interested in digital archives and teaching.  I find the digitization of historical materials (drafts, journals, maps, other documents, not to mention sound recordings and images) a powerful resource for helping cultivate a sense of history in humanities students.  Additionally, these archives offer alternative modes of writing and critical thinking; I’m particularly interested in talking about the intersection of digital composition/making and traditional “close reading” skills pursued in literary studies.  How can we use these resources more effectively?  How can students “write back” to the archive, and what are the advantages of these responses?  These are the kinds of questions I’d love to discuss, as well as learning more about specific resources and actual assignments that people have used in their classes.

I attended MLA for the first time last year, and that after much internal debate over whether it even made sense for me to attend a literature conference, working as I do primarily in digital narratives and games. But after spending most of my time in the digital humanities conference within a conference, I’m back, and I’m very interested in discussing the role of interdisciplinary and fully multidisciplinary convergence in transforming traditional conference spaces.

The leaking of the MLA Job List reflected some of this tension: the list is held beyond a paywall accessible to professors and graduate students affiliated with “member departments”, a status that highly interdisciplinary departments (including my own) are unlikely to ever hold. The leaking of the jobs list is a question in part of open access to opportunities  but it is also a reminder that the resources of this organization are of value to many beyond traditional affiliates.

The inherently collaborative world of DH is still only one fraction of MLA’s discourse, and a co-located THATCamp is an interesting opportunity to probe the conference’s identity. I’d be interested in talking to other out-of-discipline participants at MLA: why are you here? Do you identify strongly with any one discipline’s association? How are these organizations and conferences being transformed by the reconstruction of disciplinary models within institutions and in individual scholarly careers–not to mention alt-ac?

I’m really interested in talking to anyone who’s interested in the problem of scale: How do we move from individual innovation with particular tools & practices to larger adoptions, at the level of a program, project, or even a campus?  This might well be part of a conversation on MOOCs: Is there such a thing as a studio model for MOOCs, a MOOC that makes makers? If even the social or connectivist MOOCs aren’t the answer, and they likely aren’t, what kind of investment should departments, colleges, and universities be making instead? What would make the innovations of individual faculty more spreadable?

Along these lines, Emory is sponsoring a symposium in late January on Digital Publication, Undergraduate Research, and Writing. Key thinkers for the event will be folks like Jim Groom & Tim Owen at UMW, who plan to bring their Domain of One’s Own pilot campus-wide next year (h/t Croxall). Or Rebecca Burnett of Georgia Tech, whose Brittain fellowships have helped re-start the careers of many a humanist (she has won one of the Gates grants for a first-year writing MOOC–very curious to see what that will look like!).