Jason Cohen facilitated this session for introducing THATCampers to the possibilities of spatial humanities. My notes are particularly scant here, limited almost entirely to resources mentioned.

Patrick Murray-John of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University (though I hear he does have a separate existence as well) led a very practical session on Omeka, also from CHNM. My notes are available, with the disclaimer that I knew some about Omeka already and thus that there are likely a bunch of unexamined assumptions and lacunae in there.

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.

Please take just a moment and fill out an evaluation form for THATCamp — only two required fields, but plenty of space to wax loquacious: j.mp/thatcamp-eval

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

NETWORK ANALYSIS 1-2:15 Shawn

Basic network analysis: nodes (characters, places, words, books) and edges (connections between those nodes, ideas that comes up, books mentioned etc.) weight?

Software that can be used to do this:
Evoo
GELPHI
A plug for GELPHI, export to earth.
Republic of Letters
Google refine (allows you to clean up big data sets)

Interested in seeing other people’s experiences in starting a network analysis project. Digital component add on to dissertation, uses a text based. Evaluated in computer science dept. not in English dept.

The challenge:
Very few texts online of women’s writing. Some through evoo but not good. When you don’t have a corpus online digitized you need to do work on your own: respondent took high res photos of docs, TEI of documents but it took six months to do one play out of 12 texts.

Question about social network analysis in times before there were social networks. Discussant is interested in intellectual network analysis. Particular theories, letters, travel areas etc. works with Margaret Cavendish

Issues with current tech:
Well known tool is Republic of Letters which can help to map letters and see basic connections.

Cordell: think of each letter as a connection and the more letters the more connection. Who is central to network who is on periphery?

What were challenges with GEPHI?
Response: it visualized people pretty well and so could see names and locations and it was fine, but to add in other data was harder and didn’t work well. Then used neat line to map locations and texts and that didn’t necessarily line up with GEPHI.

Can you get metadata from evoo? Negotiate with proquest…

Way to use excel, node xl: allows to create a network graph in the same way you create a pie chart in excel, can tweak the various visualization options.

Plug-ins for GEPHI, one written by Dave shepherd at UCLA. Takes network graph and if you have a field with XY coordinates, it lays out the data and you can export it into google earth. Can illustrate why network graphs are different from maps, because in regards to geographies it obscures more than it illuminates. The plug in is called export to earth.

What is the design method?

Inter textual and para textual connections between author and work being published during the period

What is that intellectual network?

How to determine edges after nodes are no longer made up?
Perhaps use literary theory to determine what is a node and what are edges.
Respondent notes that he used affect theory but it got more and more complicated and edges turned out to be affects.
Turns out the edges are more interesting than the nodes, yet the nodes are totally privileged. What about developing edge-based mapping?

Ontology of network analysis what counts as nodes and what as edges?
Human centered. Animal centered. Object centered. Etc.

Novels or authors being edges? And then connected based on who is talking about those things.

Trying to get this to a point to open it up as a project that people can critique.

Other theories that might include network analysis:
Actor network theory: distributed agency models… Among or across people and commodities. Mapping networks of commodity circulation.
Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Warner’s counterpublic vs public (outside of direct social interaction that are none the less conceived of…)
The conceptual community rather than the actual community…

Tutorial
All data about reprinted texts from newspaper archives.
Nodes are individual publications
Connections between them are shared texts and the more texts two publications share the larger the edge between them. If two texts reprinted fifty of the same texts in a decade then it is perhaps a strong connection. Age before copyright law. We can speculate about who was reading who and what publications were in conversation. HOWEVER the whole graph can be inverted with texts as the nodes and publication reprints as the connections between them.

Some questions:
What are the best sources for encoding data for network analysis?
How do we determine nodes and edges?
How do we conduct rigorous selection of nodes and edges in network analysis?
How can we collaborate on encoding non digitized/create collaboratives to save time?
Is it ethical to put “ghost entries” (letters that have been burned or lost) in data analysis?

Ah-the pull/conflict between tech and trad classroom teaching

Informal notes on the session can be found here. Thanks to all participants!

(Original session proposal can be found here)

Here is a link to the notes for the session that largely focused on Voyant and similar tools: Session Proceedings.

Ron: Art historian, WIT
Interdisciplinary group
Trying to launch DH initiative, had faculty workshops w/ NITLE
Launched intro to DH course last semester
Working towards a program
Bringing humanities to technology/engineering students through DH
Faculty are interested, but timid about getting started
Looking for ways to introduce DH project as part of history, etc. course
Having difficulty finding projects that faculty can introduce to get their feet wet

Chris: Projects for faculty to design to give to students?

Ron: For students; some interested in enhancing own research, but teaching institution

Q: Something w/ ownership, can craft specifically for course?

Ron: Both– some would want to partner w/ faculty at other institutions and existing projects
One project they can control (esp. older faculty)– interested in developing a timeline

Q: What should students get out of it?

Ron: Why is provost/administration– interdisciplinary, project-based learning
Students are familiar with lab/studio culture, engineering/design labs, working together, building/making things
Humanities core courses: sit in a room w/ lecture, write papers
Bringing ethos of building/doing/making in group and individual projects
Learn material less through rote consumption/reproduction, build something
Know how to do lecture/discussion group, research papers, etc.
How to guide students along
“Bite-sized” project-type work to start with
Feel confident with digital humanities, ready to try a “bigger bite”

Vika: Faculty looking for student engagement w/ primary sources via apprenticeship?
Work in a library– how to provide support to faculty interested in getting started with DH
Success talking one-on-one (not sustainable, 45k faculty) — here’s things other people have done
Pointing to example projects; here’s how other people have helped students engage w/ primary sources –> this leads to ideas
First figure out what you want to do with the material, then figure out how to do it
“How” shouldn’t drive the direction

Asking students what kinds of projects/skills they’re interested in?
Students can lead faculty into experimentation with this
Chair of department, learn mostly from students, postdocs, etc.
“Tell me what tools are available, what questions can be answered, etc.”
Talking to teaching assistants/junior faculty, can do the same w/ undergrads

Ron: Surprised at lack of familiarity w/ tools
Spent first couple weeks of class giving links to numerous tools that do different things
Timeline, mind map, etc. — start playing with these, start critiquing them, working out what they do or don’t do, how they might be useful, etc.
Start culling from the list what seems like it might work for humanities content

Similar position to faculty– latched onto “problem” of problem-based learning
Trying to start with a problem: scholars haven’t been able to answer X, representative challenge
Not having skills to teach coding, but can bring sense of what constitutes an interesting problem in this discipline
Students use skills to solve those problems

Ron: Faculty are diverse, in traditional/non-traditional approaches to classroom
Divide between experimentally inclined and more traditional
How do you not create small group of faculty who are DH curious/friendly and others

Divide along tenure lines?

Not traditional tenure, but more or less
Younger faculty tend to be more experimental
As art historian, visual culture, material culture, part of humanities too
Non-text-based participants
Many composition, literature are the most resistant

Q: Emeritus faculty are sometimes most receptive
Younger faculty can be more conservative, tenure concerns
Get some “plants” in departments, and keeping up with the joneses follows

Graduate student– learning how to teach in general, and wanting to experiment
Pattern for understanding how to traditionally approach problems (you have to get that down to be a competent teacher)
Enabling students to undertake projects in their own discipline (bring your own project)
Teaching is new, and letting students talk back– challenging
The more seeds you get at an early phase, more younger academics will be more comfortable using those tools
You have to gain a lot to get to the point of having nothing to lose

Problem isn’t getting younger faculty interested, problem is higher threshold for engagement for permanent faculty.
What’s the carrot– relief from committee work, additional TA, $1,000 grant, etc?
How to make them feel supported for admin infrastructure

Problem is lack of exposure/knowledge of DH
More widespread professional development/exposure might reduce anxiety about “how do I teach DH/through DH”
Faculty anxiety will be there if they’re not sure what they’re doing

Ron: Looking for baby steps
Have to learn how to approach long-term work differently
Get feedback from students about what they’re looking for, as a way to persuade faculty

1) Resources out there
2) Tools out there
Seeing there’s digital versions of materials, and how to work with those materials– excited about supplementing existing work in classroom
Having other faculty show what’s possible

4-5 faculty who’ve done something, show fellow faculty, extremely effective

Encouraged by administration to be experimental
Younger/newer people will be encouraged to do more for teaching/research portfolio in non-traditional direction– not problematic for tenure
Last year, whole-day workshop on tools– faculty were there (mandatory) but overwhelmed

Realization that students had fear of technology, had been faking it
Were being left behind; couldn’t do much besides Facebook/email
2 wks to get students using WordPress
Digital work as a way of not leaving first-generation students behind
Anonymous survey about how many people could bring laptops to class; less than 1/3 could (@ affluent school in general)

Ron: Students mostly first-generation college
All students are issued a laptop– how do you get them to put it away so we can have a conversation?
Did an anonymous poll about familiarity with tech, little beyond Facebook
Had to spend first few sessions giving links to tools

Vika: Creating small RAships, pair up students/professors in groups of 2-3 (1-2 students per prof)
Exploring doing DH in smaller than classroom setting, to scale up from there
Students do legwork, teach professor about tools to use
Outside classroom setting where they feel responsible

Work w/ faculty in other departments (e.g. CS)
Saw Ryan’s job talk, and saw presentation of what can come from those tools, now working with him to see how the machine functions
Start off w/ polished end result, which is inspiring, then look behind the scenes

Starting small– in writing classes, just beginning with discussion about what blogs are
Just a small portion of the class, not reworking the whole class as a DH course

Show faculty they can do something quickly/easily
One small step towards something that could be assessed through other means

List of tools you use

Husband is programmer, he finds it immersive
Steep learning curve personally to learn anything new with technology
Suspicious of anything that’s potentially a time suck
Technology is a time suck, to learn how to use it
Can spend 100 hours just to make banners on a blog
Quickly spirals out of control

Integrating this into students’ work in the classroom
Came across Crocodoc annotation tool, instead of worrying about how to use tool, learned just enough in advance, then spent a week as an assignment playing around with the tool
Created Google Doc to share with future students how to use it
Used it all semester long
Integrating it into an assignment/lesson plan
Fear of saying “I don’t know how to use this”

Asked students to research tools, write proposals about which tools to use and why
Students loved that they were teaching the instructor
Given students options to choose from, leave it open, sometimes students come with new tools
Faculty fear of saying they don’t know how to use something
Different work for students– this sometimes comes out badly in evaluations
Making play something that’s valued in classroom
How to assess experimentation
Promote failure

Q: Please post students’ work on Bamboo DiRT tool directory

Incentive– groups of students w/ constraints, competition
“We want a map of campus” — have to come up w/ different ways to do it
Time pressure, comeptitiveness
Using ethnography in libraries: anthropologists study how people use libraries
Study students, do more formal survey
Ways to reach them using these tools/methods

Ron: Have writing competition– faculty nominate existing papers, go to committee, specialty prizes
DH project competition?

Move from how to encourage faculty towards students
How do we let students influence faculty?
If faculty hear from students who want this, it could have influence

Faculty responded positively to student survey– students very familiar with some things, but not others
Some don’t want to use too much tech in classroom (don’t want cell phone integrated with class)
Eye-opener to hear from student perspective

Faculty resistance because this is unknown thing coming down from on high, when what they’ve been doing has seemed to work just fine
Much more persuasive to hear from students

Useful to think through tools students do know how to use
Assignment to take a class reading, turn it into social media site of some sort
Created Facebook page for Emily Dickinson (as a user)– comments, friends, poems, etc.
Annotations, links between texts, images, etc.
Interface they know how to use
They still have to write a final essay, but it’s a research tool
Foster learning you want in ways traditional stuff can’t do
Present to class, explain why you made the choices you made
Creates a climate of using digital tools in the classroom that might encourage faculty members to try something more advanced

Assign author & theorist, commentary

Creating historical friends to comment was students’ idea, could be part of assignment, to create dialog

Older student– had to dig through tape recordings to find what we can now access via mobile phones
Get over your fears, it can make a difference

Make it personal
Give students a small personal project (make digital artifact of a scrapbook, oral history, etc.)
Way to learn the technology (small % of grade, small scale)

Storycorps– submit to NPR
Have to create podcast audio file

Podcasts as final essays?

Podcasting as part of creating news stories for journalism course

In terms of teaching writing– more tangible relationship w/ language

No matter what, students will hate their voices, multiple recordings
Expect it, it’ll happen
Other than that, relatively easy
Audio less intimidating than video

How might digitization enhance scholarly (or critical) editions of literary and historical texts? I’m thinking in terms of incorporation of multimedia, accessibility of bibliographic resources, and integration of reference and/or pedagogical material (such as glossaries for foreign language texts)? What would the “dream” scholarly edition look like (from the vantage points of students as well as more advance scholars), and what obstacles would need to be overcome to implement it?

Sean Michael Morris and I would like to propose a session on what we call participant pedagogy, which is the idea that students take an active role in teaching and in constructing their own learning environment. Online learning, in particular, has democratized how we think about the student / teacher interaction, allowing students to both take ownership over and claim authority of education (including curriculum development, syllabus creation, assignment structuring, content generation, etc.). The sorts of tools we use and communities we form online inspire us to think differently about how we work in our brick-and-mortar classrooms. Digital pedagogy, even in the classroom, shifts from teacher-led tutorials to laboratory-based experimentation. Many of these ideas are inspired by our experiences during last Summer’s MOOC MOOC. One of the days focused on participant pedagogy. And we also hosted a #digped chat on this topic. For obvious reasons, students in attendance at THATCamp MLA would be excellent additions to this conversation.

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.

As I have become more involved with DH, and others discover the brave souls at my institution who are interested, I have started thinking more about boundary points other than institution and discipline that I’d like to cross. With a background in language tech, I’m particularly interested in how we can do translingual, transcultural, transnational DH — what tools, structures, patterns, theories exist or need creating. There is some kinship here with Anastasia’s proposal on interdisciplinarity and possibly with Marc’s on scaling up, but I think there’s something else to talk about here with DH on a world scale.

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?

(Quote stolen from John Ashbery’s “Quick Question”)

As someone who’s more interested in contemporary writing online than the archives of older digital work, I often wonder what the archives of twenty-first century online writing will look like in the future. Recent archival projects invested in recent digital already already seem outmoded or at least at odds with how information circulates in 2012/2013. For example, I’m currently preparing a NEMLA discussion that looks at the differences between the Poets Against The War website — a site begun in 2003 and “archived” in 2010 — and the ways poets write and publish work on the web in more recent years. Now, the Poets Against The War site seems clunky and isolated from the rest of the web (and I’d even argue that the site looked just as clunky back in 2003) when compared to the kinds of image macros and mixed media work that poets create for distribution on the web on sites like Internet Poetry (an “archive” of sorts for a burgeoning subculture). The difference between a site like PATW and Internet Poetry, to my eyes at least, is that the authors found on IP are creating work that has the web in mind as its ideal site of distribution and consumption, and it’s also work that tries to tailor itself to the modes of circulation present on sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. And the archivists / curators of these projects similarly design their collections to allow content to travel and to be taken apart (literally or analytically).

When I look at some of the projects that archive work from earlier time periods on the web, I often wonder if their frameworks, content, and designs are too often suited only for academic set of eyes (and I’ll admit here that I’ve barely scratched the surface, so please feel free to show me archives that seem to invite other kinds of readers and writers!). Why not allow an archive to interact more with the rest of the web? I guess this is one question that might come out of this discussion, and it’s one that might allow for a number of voices beyond people interested in contemporary writing. But I am also interested in how e-mails, chat material, tweets, social networking, blog content, etc. all might challenge or complicate our ideas of archivists and curators in our contemporary moment. There are already sites like Storify that allow users to corral particular threads in social networks, and things like the Internet Wayback Machine allow us to look back on the web of the recent past, and everyone loves a good word cloud, and etc. And of course, there are sites like the September 11 Digital Archive. But with writing being created in a variety of sites (not just locations, but also in terms of tablets, phones, laptops, etc.) for a range of different audiences, and with tools like hashtags, how might we think through ways of arranging and discussing these various modes of digital texts and literacies? Are we in an Age of the Archivist, in the sense that anyone with a Tumblr account (and / or a scanner or some familiarity with how screenshots work) can curate work? Or is there a need to consider whether the sorts of linkblogging and reblogging and uploading practices on Tumblr and elsewhere are something different?

This is rough and very open-ended, but I’d be happy to help mold this into a discussion that might be worth having with others tomorrow.

I would like to address both the technology (hardware) involved with storing student works and their processes of multimodal composing.

I’d be interested discuss any platforms or systems you use to 1) protect the digital works of our students; 2) protect them in terms of copyright materials; 3) use their works as resources/shareable content.    In our own university and others I’ve been at it, we’ve experimented with Dropbox, Chalk & Wire, Google docs, and Blackboard (the University’s system), but I’d love to hear if there are any other programs out there, the amount of data that can be stored, and how user-friendly they are.  I’d also like to discuss ethical issues and/or fair use practices if we have time.

I’m also very interested in how students create multimodal compositions.  I’d be happy to share findings from a case study I conducted in the fall 2012, particularly students’ process of juxtaposing images and texts, of remixing videos and sound, and creating their own works with a variety of programs – and I’d love to hear your approaches to teaching these works, or theoretical works you use to integrate them in the classroom.

This would be a simple discussion on the different repositories we use in our academic work that others might not know about. For example I rely heavily on Archive.org, Hathi Trust and project gutenberg for sample text to use with my class, but I’ve also use the W.E.B. Dubois collection at U Mass Amherst, the TEI collections and the Yellowback scans at the Emory library to show students different methods for handling text. I have to believe we all have link in our bookmarks for sites that we wish others knew existed.

somewhat similiar to the “That’s not an essay” and the Make session on Digital bibliographies, I’m interested in hearing how others think about “publishing” both as a a method of dissemination and as advancement. I’d also want  to hear where the next iteration of content publishing will look like.

I’d like to talk about and play with ways to get started, keep up, and manage a professional academic blog.  From the mundane how should this look and what site should I use to the more abstract  “Why is everything I say on the internet so stupid?” anxiety of publishing and how to get over it, as well as ways to get in touch with and interact with other academic bloggers.

I would be interested to hear from faculty who have met with resistance from other faculty to incorporating DH projects or multimodal composing into their courses. I can share some resources on assessment and multimodal composing that I have found helpful, but I am especially interested in hearing what has worked/not worked for others.

There has been quite a bit of conversation of late about textual analysis and topic modeling in literary studies (see here, here, here, and here for a handful of examples). The availability of tools like Voyant and Mallet have made it possible for digital humanists to begin work in textual analysis and topic modeling quickly and with little/no institutional support. These tools also allow us to give a fresh dh twist to traditional ways of practicing literary studies. Natalie Houston put this nicely in her talk at MLA last year:

Our method, quite simply, as literary scholars, is to pay attention to patterns. Digital tools offer us computational power for conducting analysis far beyond our human limitations. Such tools can offer us new ways of understanding the material places of Victorian poetry through analyzing patterns in the metadata, page images, and linguistic layers of the digitized text.

In light of all this, I’d like to propose a session in which we discuss the value of textual analysis and topic modeling for digital literary studies. The session could go in a number of different directions, including:

• an exploration of a specific tool like Voyant,
• a conversation about use-cases and current projects,
• a more meta conversation about how and why we might use these tools, and the questions they invite and/or foreclose. I’m particularly interested in talking about the recent meta-analytical work Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood have done with PMLA and the new avenues it might open up for understanding the work we participate in, the culture of a particular journal, and the shape of a given field: What can topic models of PMLA teach us about the history of literary scholarship?

The purpose of this session will be to discuss the shaping of a nascent university program in digital scholarship and pedagogy. What should the goals be of such an initiative? What hiring is necessary? What kinds of courses should be taught by its faculty? How do we mobilize available campus resources, faculty, professional staff, and students to contribute to the program? How do we make a case to administration for funding? More broadly, how do we make the digital humanities a part of the campus culture in places where it isn’t already? As someone who is involved in fostering such a program on my campus, I am hoping to learn from the insights of those who have experienced (or are experiencing) program development on their campuses. I also hope that the session will have something to offer grad students and other junior faculty who might find themselves in institutions (like mine) that are just getting off the ground with this work.

This session proposal is a confession and a cry for help. I’ve been charged with producing the Proceedings of THATCamp, and I’ve been struggling with it. Hoped we could have a therapeutic session where I can try to explain the problems with the project and you all can tell me how to get over them. Or myself.

This is a very nebulous proposal indeed, but lately I’ve been feeling a bit of a dearth in DH with regard to, oh, I don’t know, beauty. Inspiration. The kind of things you get from poetry and literature, right? Not that there’s always much emphasis on beauty in non-DH literary studies, either, of course, perhaps for good reason. I thought we might sit around and shoot the breeze about whether and how digital tools can or should provide interfaces to the aesthetic properties of literature. I’m thinking here primarily of originally analog literature (“Beauty is truth” etc.), but perhaps the folks who are studying e-literature are the ones who are addressing issues of aesthetics and technology. Or perhaps the critical code studies people (including especially those responsible for 10 Print) have a lock on it by getting into the larger cultural meaning as well as the aesthetics of code.

In proposing this, I’m thinking partly of a very interesting presentation I heard at the University of Kansas DH Forum by a poet and a scholar (Katharine Coles and Julie Lein) who are working with some technologists at Oxford to treat individual poems as “big data” and to create visualizations that would reveal their numinous nature. Basically, they reported failure (which I thought was awesome of them): they haven’t yet come up with a way of visualizing an individual poem’s gorgeous complexity. I wound up thinking that perhaps it simply isn’t possible. The abstract for their paper, “A World in a Grain of Sand,” is at kansas2012.thatcamp.org/big-data/ and their slides and a video of the presentation are at idrh.ku.edu/dh-forum-2012/.

I’ve been working intermittently on a project to create a digital catalog of the personal library of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who died in 1950. Her sister inherited her house and kept all her books (pretty much), and the house became a small museum in 2010. There’s a draft of the catalog up at www.zotero.org/groups/steepletop_library and a project description at dhcommons.org/projects/edna-st-vincent-millay-personal-library-catalog

One of the things I want to do with the catalog is put in a lot of tags creating links between the items, things like which books were written by women. If anyone wants to sit around with me and tag items for an hour or so (there are about 1000 item) with whatever you like, and incidentally learn more about Zotero group libraries if you’re into that, that’d be a big help. It’s kind of fun, I think, to see what she had. Lots of obscure poetic monographs from the 20s and 30s.

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.

Just on a whim: Is anyone coming through (or departing) the New Haven area in the wee hours of Wednesday morning who could give me a ride? I’m trying to make my transit more sensible, but have to work it out so I’m up to Boston and back on Wednesday.

Central IT often plays a minor role in supporting innovative digital humanities work, which is frequently concentrated in (digital) humanities centers and libraries. One of the factors contributing to this is the central IT tendency to pursue one-size-fits-all/none systems that target extremely generic needs (e.g. hosting for static web page, file storage space, etc.) If you could choose what the fundamental systems, platforms, and staff expertise central IT would have to provide a reasonable level of support for digital humanities (and free up resources elsewhere for projects with needs beyond the core supported tools), what would they be?

There’s no shortage of portals of information about digital humanities, from DH Answers for Q&A, NINES/ARC for temporally-oriented resources, DHCommons for projects, Bamboo DiRT for tools, TAPoR for text analysis, THATCamp, Day of DH, MLA Commons, and many others. Are we missing something? Are there ways that these resources could work better together? (Better data exchange or cross-site workflows? Not having to remember a different set of credentials for each site?) I’m interested in hearing people’s wish lists for how to improve the information ecosystem around technology and the humanities.

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.

Anyone interested in helping create an XML schema (customized TEI?) for encoding bibliographies for the web? We are working on a “black box” solution for scholars wanting to publish bibliographies to the web and the first step is to create a schema that can serve as the input and storage base for the data. We are wanting to create a schema that can accommodate all types of bibliographies and their “added value,” including annotated bibliographies, linked data, and descriptive bibliography. We may not leave the session with a complete schema, but may be able to come up with a substantial list of elements that need to be included. No knowledge of XML needed — just an interest in putting bibliographies on the web!

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.

Can anyone talk about topic modeling in the humanities? I certainly cannot, but would love to hear others talk about their experiences, tools, methods, and projects involving topic modeling. Anyone?

I’d be very interested in learning how to map a corpus of data (text and its metadata) to a map. Using a single example and the fewest tools necessary to begin to plot data onto a single map would be terrific first step. Hands-on, for beginners. Details about all of the available software, existing projects, etc., are available, but the time to learn and practice is far less. Can anyone take on a workshop like this?

Building on bernierr1‘s proposal, Designing DH Projects, I would like to explore ways of building local community around DH to generate ideas, build competencies, and determine what infrastructure is needed to support DH work in research and classrooms. We are working now on building such a community at my institution and, while we’ve had a great start with a surprising amount of enthusiasm, we’re still working out what our next steps should be. For example, how do we keep the momentum going? What do we need to get humanists working together (and learning together)? What are good “beginner” projects and methods to get folks interested and serve as examples? How do we determine what tools/methods should be supported to meet the needs of the majority? What are some solutions to hosting/customization problems? How do we maintain the focus on scholarship in DH projects? Lots of questions — let’s get together and discuss!

I would like to propose a session on the Juxta collation software. I understand this is a very good tool for textual editing, but I’m wondering if it can be manipulated for comparing, say, different translations of the Aeneid. Ideally, too, I’d like to know the difference between Juxta & the new Juxta commons.

I spend a lot of time in literature classes doing class discussion. Often, we spend the entire 90 minutes of any given class discussing our reading (often a novel or group of poems), and these student-directed discussions move in very unpredictable ways (I don’t script discussions). I’m often disappointed that these discussions disappear into the ether, just like any everyday conversation, and what remains are fragments of memory and a diaspora of notes. I’d like to introduce technology into our class discussions (starting with Twitter) as a way of documenting the class meetings, but also finding other uses for it. Here are some ideas I’ve been kicking around:

1. Assigning students to Tweet class discussions. But what are some different ways to structure this? Can a version of inner/outer circle work? How many students should be doing this? A small group or anyone who has the desire? How do you archive and are there unforeseen problems with archiving? I’ve been running this through my head quite a bit, and I see a lot of initial structuring that has to be done.

2. If there is a successful and consistent way to accomplish the above, how might technology outside of Twitter give further life to that record? Storify is one obvious option, but are there other ways our class discussions, via technology, might become usable/interpretable texts of their own? Might they, instead of being relegated to the past, be reintroduced into the class in interesting, even creative ways? (For example, how might those discussions be used to “perform” the issues of our reading, rather than document them? Could something like a Timeline be incorporated?)

3. What might some advanced end point be? Is it possible to imagine a visualization that in some way documented an entire semester’s worth of discussion, made it a text of its own, much in the way people are visualizing social network interaction?

One final note: I’ve read all the proposals posted thus far and am interested in all of them. If this is too basic of a proposal, trust me, I’m ready to participate in other things!

I have an idea for a research project that brings together visual images – paintings and magazine and book covers – the written (archive) correspondence between collectors, galleries, and museums that tie them together, and the scholarship (and popular writing) that has been done on both.  It has to do with pulp magazines and novels of the early 20th century.  I’m thinking of turning this into a course where students (undergraduate) help with original research and writing, and ultimately publication – traditional book form or not – of all this.  I need help getting started – how to shape this into an ongoing project.

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.

There is a gulf between the needs of industry writers and the needs of researchers and academics. One requires very orderly processes of feedback and comments, while the other is a messy connectivism melee of ideas and attribution.

I still recall a drawing of a 16th century scholar (though cannot find it) who has several books held up by mechanisms, cross referencing and comparing the texts. I’m reminded of my own multi-monitor display, and wonder how augmented reality and future devices will change even that modal paradigm.

The closest in terms of present-day systems to this aspiration of connectivity in knowledge remains Wikipedia, though the links (clicking text which changes everything) often hide the connections as much as they provide ways between ideas. Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu set out to realize the connections in a spatial way, though the system as envisioned was never completed. Giorgio Guzzetta’s proposal for this year’s THATCamp MLA talked of a scholarly operating system, citing the various tools and programs that would allow tweaking and cajoling Linux tools and systems into the specialized needs of academia, and more specifically the humanities. These tools are constantly moving, their combination volatile and their practicality at least uncertain. The primary technologies I currently use are Microsoft Word, Mendeley Desktop manager (which does a great job of helping manage citations and PDFs/Notes), but I (and most others) still feel there should be something more.

I’d like to be a part of a session that addresses these deeply embedded dissatisfaction with the ways that technology supports the fundamental process of writing and scholarship. Who is best suited to standardizing these solutions, who has the time and capabilities, and further, since we are professionals, what would we be willing to do to show there is a market?

Please weigh in on the comments, and I’d be happy to combine talk of semantic web, real-time collaboration tools with the existing applications and workflows.

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?

After taking a MOOC in Social Network Analysis (SNA) this past Fall, I’m interested in exploring network analysis further in the digital humanities. I not only wonder in what other ways the tools and theories of SNA might be extrapolated to examine literary networks (paratextual and intertextual), but I’m also interested in exploring social network analyses of digital humanities, so that we might analyze the myriad of growing networks. A careful analysis of such networks could show how networks grow, why, and help us determine why some networks fail to interact and impact with other similar networks in our field.

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!).

I have had to withdraw from THATCamp for family health reasons – so sorry.

I am interested in exploring browsing for fiction in large digital collections. I have a background in library and information science, so I know about ranking algorithms, recommender systems, faceted navigation, and the like. None of these works well in a fiction browsing scenario, at least not for me and many like me. I have no answers, but I would like to share ideas.

As many of you already know, we’re launching MLA Commons at the convention on 3 January. I’m hoping to spend a session at THATCamp MLA getting any MLA members who are interested into the network a day early, in no small part so that you can spend some time playing around with the site and help us produce some content there. We’re hoping that members coming in for the first time on the 3rd will get a sense of how lively the network might be, and seeing what you can do with the site will be a huge part of that. I’d also like to spend some part of the session brainstorming with THATCampers about ways that the network might develop as we go forward. I’ll look forward to generating some new ideas with you, and to seeing what we might make together.

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?

If there is interest (and space), I’m interested in setting up what has variously been called the “Craft Cabin” or the “Analog Remix Lab,” but what I think I’m going to call “Analog Hackerspace.”

Past incarnation: THATCampSoCal2011, and here is my write up of it. With all the discussion of making, and building, and designing, I have found the most analog of activities to be incredibly inspirational for digital projects. We could all have a chance to hack our #MLA13 badges (Though probably not in quite as many ways as the DefCon 17 badges, or maybe!)

There are two inspirations: First, I had amazing conversations at the craft table at THATCampSoCal2011, and those conversations directly informed my thinking on all things humanities and technology. Second, THATCamp can be overwhelming! Especially the big ones! And a space to chill out and absorb can be great.

This second insight is brought at least in part by the overwhelming answer “YES!” I had in response to @digiwonk’s post Social Work: Emotional Labour and the Core Mission. One of the criticisms we hear (and I know we hear it because I have occasionally been the one to voice it!) about technology oriented gatherings is that we are not welcoming enough to people for whom “all of this” is new. We use too many acronyms, to many shortcuts; we hack ourselves out of comprehensibility. At #THATCamp Prime this year, participants were encouraged to tweet and hashtag #jargon when they needed help with new words, and I think that was a great service, proposed by Patrick Murray-John.

If we find the space, I will encourage everyone to contribute! Bring your string, your rubber stamps, your stickers, and your glitter! We’ll have great conversations and perhaps make this the most glam THATCamp ever!

Meeting to discuss strategies for capturing/sorting the MLA 2013 twitter feed and tools (such as NodeXL) for mapping the MLA 2013 Twitter network. If possible, it would be great if we could work on this as a team during the MLA and list everyone as co-authors on what is produced. An experiment in collaboration, then.

Is anybody interested in a workshop on or discussion of MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses)? There are a lot of interesting technology/humanities questions that come up with MOOCs, one obvious one being: how can humanities courses be structured and evaluated in a purely online setting with tens of thousands of students? MOOCs currently available through edX, Coursera, and others are overwhelmingly in the sciences, especially computer science–how could that change over the next few years?

Would there be any possibility of pulling together a workshop on Omeka that would also include a Scripto element? It would not have to be limited to Scripto specifically, but anything on crowdsourcing transcription/editing/curation would be great!

I would love find out more about GIS, if anyone’s willing.

Have you heard that there might be a THATCamp before next year’s Modern Language Convention in Boston? ‘Cause I’ve heard that. Interesting.