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?

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/.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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 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.