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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.