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?
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?
