I’d like to have a working session to pick the brains of other campers on ideas for overhauling NYU’s Literature, Arts, and Medicine database. The database has thousands of annotations on various works of literature, art, theater, and film that relate to the practice of medicine, and it’s very much in need of an overhaul. Specifically, right now the database is very much in a pre-social web format, and I’d like to discuss ways to integrate and engage user participation to move the site away from a “static repository of information” model and towards an active, dynamic, collaborative platform for showcasing the combined efforts of humanists, medical professionals, artists, and developers. I’d also like to discuss sustainability and how to make the database a self-supporting entity that doesn’t rely on grant funds. I would love to hear from anyone who is involved or has been involved with similar projects, or knows of anyone doing something similar that I might be able to learn from.

Many wikis, including Wikipedia, encourage user-centered curation through a combination of discussion and notification: Talk pages and Watching. Talk pages are forums affiliated with each content page, where users can defend or question posted information, providing both a history of how the wiki page arrived at its present form and a rationale for why it should or shouldn’t change in the future. When Watching is enabled, users can opt to receive email or RSS notifications whenever specified pages are modified; in this way users can help to maintain the quality of content for which they have the greatest expertise.

In this session, I’d like to work on implementing these features within a Drupal 7 site, using modules such as Rules and QuickTabs, to enable watching and tab-separated comments at the level of individual nodes.

I haven’t done this before, so any expert help is welcome, but so are any other intermediate (or even beginner) Drupal users who are interested in figuring it out alongside me.

I’ll be working with a development version of writingstudiestree.org, a D7-based crowdsourced academic genealogy of writing studies, composition and rhetoric.