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.

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.

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 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!