Would those working on or developing Omeka projects be interested in collaborating post-THATCamp on a joint wiki or doc?  My idea is creating a resource for those interested in Omeka in which we can list our sites, share how we built the features, and also detail lessons we’ve learned from the process.  Contact me if interested either here or at cparker030@gmail.com Also thank you THATCamp organizers for a very rewarding experience this weekend!

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.

I’d like to have a discussion around what existing web platforms folks are using for publishing scholarly journals and other publications online, and what their successes and wish-lists are within these applications. I’m thinking WordPress, OJS, Ambra, plus any others. Also would love to hear about any original scholarly publishing projects outside of these, and reasons for going off the grid.

Within this topic some areas to consider will be: working with digitally native content vs. print to digital; developing for mobile consumption; incorporating rich metadata; and breaking away from traditional peer-review models.

Sketch of the Washington Square Arch (from the New-York Historical Society)

I use Omeka as a major component of Creating Digital History, a graduate course for NYU’s Archives and Public History Program.  Students in the course locate, digitize and contribute digital items to the Greenwich Village History Digital Archive, learning how to create metadata, mapping their items, and creating an exhibit on some aspect of Greenwich Village History.  Some of the issues that have come up in using Omeka are:

• Tech skills versus History skills – The range of technical skills that students bring to the class varies greatly.  Omeka works well out of the box, but to create customized exhibits, students should know HTML, CSS or PHP.  Should we be attempting to teach that in addition to the digital history skills and practices? How much emphasis should we put on learning technical skills in a history course?
• Enhancing Exhibits – As students are participating in a group-created digital archive, they do not have a lot of flexibility in how they enter metadata or how the digital archive will appear.  Where they do have creative license is in their exhibits, which they create on their own, or in a self-selected team. Without having programming skills, changing the look of exhibits is not that easy. I am working with a programmer to develop a theme that can be more easily customized, enabling user-defined fonts, colors, backgrounds and navigation. I am interested in talking about the options students should have in exhibits lay out, and whether anyone has new ideas on how to structure exhibits within the section and page format that Omeka imposes.
• Structured versus Unstructured Tagging – The first two years that I taught the course, students tagged their items as they thought best, and the results were a mish mash of tags with little rhyme.  While working on a new theme, I decided that controlling tag vocabulary was more useful as a tool for searching the items and exhibits. This will be the first year we use these newer tags and I’d be interested in talking to those who have built larger collections (ours has about 900 items after 2 years) about how they use tags.

I’m interested in creating digital editions collaboratively in the classroom, having students work on mapping places, linking the text to referenced works, providing images, explanations of rhetorical devices used… Visualizations based on text mining would be amazing, too.
I’d love to hear ideas and insight from others interested in this kind of thing.

From Roger Panetta:

• What are the best platforms for developing semester-long collaborative class projects?
• What are the best ways to engage the public in the development and use of archives?
• For an interdisciplinary history of the Hudson River, what are some models of a multimedia e-textbook?

1. Student Digital Projects
Find a consistent and effective platform for the development of semester long collaborative class projects.

Upgrade the organization and programming to develop projects that are more fully digital.
Review past projects to establish a base line for moving forward in a more dynamic format.
See the following

South Street Seaport

Hudson-Fulton Celebration 1909

SS Normandie: Paris and New York

Lincoln Center and Lincoln Square

Not the Hudson River

2. Discuss the state of eArchives and ways to engage the public in their use and development.

See DigitalHudson

3.  Models and support for the creation of an eText for an interdisciplinary history of the Hudson River.

I’m interested in discussing a topic that dovetails nicely into sessions that others have proposed: exploring DH-enabled alternatives to the long-form researched argument in undergraduate courses.  In a Spring course (cross-listed as English and Environmental Studies) I’ll be working with my upper-division students on a wiki and a handmade book.  Advice from those who have developed short- or medium-form research assignments using DH tools and platforms would be immensely helpful.

How can blogs best be incorporated into the college classroom and can they build a bridge with the broader online community?  Jane Carr and I have been considering this question while launching a new blog, Archive Notebook, where we share and write about our unused archival research in hopes of fostering productive discussion with other scholars. In the longer term, we aim to make this forum a pedagogic tool that will facilitate qualitative crowd-sourcing within and beyond the university, the institutional archive, and other traditional repositories. We are in the early stages of our own work on these topics and would love to share ideas about digital collecting, curating, and archiving as scholars and with students. We are currently using a Tumblr format but we welcome discussion of other tools and interfaces as well ideas on how to maximize engagement with formats like our own.

Topics might include:

• Thinking critically about the “commons” online – how to share public resources and participate in a collaborative cultural sphere
• Evaluating the efficacy of standard academic blogging practices within existing institutional frameworks
• Probing the line between documentation and analysis in digital writing. How can we — and our students — become skilled at the art of description as well as critical evaluation
• How we can build audiences and learn how to be better audiences online? What sorts of users tend to be rewarded within the digital commons?
• How can we continue to explore the relationship between the visual and the verbal? What exercises might facilitate various forms of new media literacy?
• How do we teach archive-related digital writing while remaining mindful of the distinction between material archives and born-digital data?

Hi everyone – Tatiana clued me in to a great idea for a session proposal – “dork shorts” is a short series of 7-10 minute presentations of ideas or in progress projects that presenters is are interested in receiving feedback on or finding collaborators for (especially emphasizing ‘teachable moments’).  I’d like to present on an Omeka project for rare books I’ve been involved with for the past year – looking to expand in terms of interactivity, visualizations, and eventually linked data.  Anyone else interested in joining in for a Saturday session?