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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.