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.

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.

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?