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!

12 floor West.

It appears that there have been a couple of issues in connecting Apple computers to display from the podiums. There a a few simple steps to follow, which should enable you to display your desktop through the projector:

• Connect your laptop to the VGA cable via dongle (if you need a dongle, let a volunteer or organizer know)
• On your computer go to System preferences
• Click on Displays
• Select Detect Displays

This should find the display and give you options about how you want your desktop to display (through the projector alone or mirroring your desktop through the projector).

If you have any problems let a volunteer or organizer know and we will try to get it resolved as quickly as possible.

Thanks

The schedule of sessions has been updated and can be found on the schedule page.

I’m interested in gathering a group of people to talk through some implications of disruption theory (developed by Clayton Christensen) on the humanities, and for academic, library, and museum institutions.

I proposed a similar session at THATCamp Museum 2012 and it was well received, so I figured why not again?

I’m interested in bringing together people who are thinking about different approaches to text mining. I think it would be helpful for people to discuss different workflows–from cleaning texts, creating databases, mining the texts, and visualizing the data. I have some experience in text mining, but I think it would be useful to hear the pros and cons of different methodologies. What types of questions are people asking? What are the main challenges people have faced? What types of skills are people trying to learn?

I would like to propose a subject on incorporating more undergraduate students into the process of DH. I would like to propose a session in which we discuss ways of getting digital scholarship skills and methodologies in the the skill sets of undergraduate students. What are some basic competences that these studies must have? What tools and techniques are worth teaching? As well as other questions could be discussed.

Friday 530PM-715PM
Lucy Bruell
JITP (Kimon Keramidas, Ben Miller, Amanda Licastro, et al)
Ben Miller, Amanda Licastro, Jill Belli
Collin Jennings
Jane Carr & Cecily Swanson
Cathy Moran Hajo
Jonathan Reeve
Silvia Stoyanova
Micki McGee
Matt Miller
Susan Naomi Bernstein
Butheina Kazim

Saturday  (9:45-10:00AM)

Robin Camille
Roger Panetta
Cristina Vignone
Dennis Tenen

I would like to discuss visualization tools for qualitative content, such as concept maps and other platforms allowing non-linear navigation, especially tools allowing to play with the visual structure of the content and helping picture how concepts and data are linked together. CMap is interesting but quite limited in the way it displays the content (linked media and other maps). I am also affiliated with a research project working on digitizing the archive of a theater company, and I would be interested in learning more about Omeka + also about Wikidot for teaching.

I would like to propose a grab bag session that would take us off-site and into the streets of New York City to cultivate compassion in the digital humanities.  This session would be offered in the 4:45 time slot at the end of the day to allow sufficient time for traveling and researching off-site. If there is sufficient interest, we may choose to collaborate on a blog or other digital publication with the data that we collect.

Join this session for an off-site walking tour of New York City, with special attention to places and spaces linked to Occupy Wall Street.  Working with contemplative pedagogy for the digital humanities, we will visit and digitally record our responses on this walking tour.  By mindfully mapping our embodied connections to living history, we may begin to imagine a means of cultivating compassionate in our teaching and scholarship in the digital humanities.

At the Bard Graduate Center where I run the Digital Media Lab we have been experimenting with a wide array of digital applications for the study of material culture. We have had thesis-level digital-born projects, are working with digital interactives in gallery spaces, are using wikis as course software, have a NEH funded startup grant for a mult-year faculty project, and are experimenting with 3D printing and scanning and the question of the representation of materiality in a digital age. I would like to propose a session for anyone interested in the use of digital technology in the study of material culture, epistemological questions that digital technology raises about material culture, 3D printing and scanning, museums and technology, or any other related questions. Some people at TCNY may have attended THATCamp Museums NYC that we hosted in the Spring and I see this session as possibly a bridge between those two events

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.

For THATCamp this Saturday, I would like to have a general discussion about the relationship between the digital humanities and scholarly communication and the different forms of online scholarly communication, such as MediaCommonsPress and hypertext. This week at my DH class, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, director of scholarly communication at the MLA and author of the DH book Planned Obsolescence, discussed online peer review and blogging and the changes regarding professors receiving tenure- it was interesting and very insightful.

I would like campers to share and discuss the different software and platforms currently available for mapping and timelines.  A quick list, and please add more in the comments, for timelines would be: Simile, Chronos, Verite; for mapping (and timelines as well): Omeka, Viewshare, Historypin.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of these platforms (perhaps with an emphasis on the level of programming/technology knowledge required)?  I personally use Omeka for my site, but my experience in that has led me to what I hope is a good segue into debating DH skill sets.  I do not mean to rehash the longstanding debate, but possible questions are:   When does programming knowledge turn into a gatekeeper, limiting the implementation of an idea/research? Do advanced programming skills reduce, even eliminate the need for collaboration with those who have those skills?  If someone does not have these skills, what can/is the DH community doing to facilitate acquisition of those skills?  Is a workshop in the timespan of one hour or hours enough to acquire those skills? Are w3schools or codeacademy useful self-teaching platforms? Are funding issues complicating big ideas for solutions to these questions?

I realize this panel proposal slightly overlaps with other proposals and may be better suited to two different sessions, perhaps leading to workshops led by experts in attendance.  I look forward to hearing more ideas in the comments section.

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 discuss building a central textual annotation website, which would allow for open, collaborative literary marginalia on a line-by-line or word-by-word basis.

I’d also like to talk about using a similar engine to allow for open, collaborative textual editing. In cases where a literary text has several flawed editions, creating a wiki-style collaborative editing platform might help to facilitate the creation of accurate, crowd-sourced digital editions.

If anyone’s interested: a general discussion about Wikipedia and libraries; using Wikipedia in classes (Campus Ambassador Program: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:United_States_Education_Program/Courses/Present).

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  am proposing a session for those creating new visualization tools about how programmers can work with humanists to organize content in a way that responds dynamic user interests. I am particularly interested in how to create narratives through the display of archival documents.

I have been  working with a collaborative interdisciplinary team that includes a computer scientist, an interactive graphic designer, a historian, and a cartographer to design and develop a new digital tool called Mix D that visualizes  historical journeys.  The product prototype (based upon the actor Ira Aldridge) intends to create multiple narratives that will enhance user understanding of a historical figure, and create a narrative that goes beyond the bare reading of the data.  Some of the visualizations are pre-scribed (timelines and maps) while others are dependent upon user interests.

Anita Gonzalez is a Professor of Theatre Arts at SUNY New Paltz.

Does anyone else use Mendeley? I’ve only recently begun to use it for citation organization — would love to meet any power users who can show me more Mendeley magic.

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?

I agree that a general discussion on DH in the classroom, broadly under the concept of “DH pedagogy” would be useful. I would propose the following issues for discussion:

1. Lesson plans and learning outcomes: incorporating DH in the classroom
2. Student projects: ideas for structuring a realistic outcome
3. Applications and tools: for both students and instructors
4. Assessment: grading more than just content
5. Resources: publications and community engagement, beyond just the tools
6. The teaching environment: the classroom, the library, the lab

These are just a few basic things to start. I welcome any additions, suggestions, criticisms and comments.

www.library20.com/

I am very interested in a session that would be devoted to curricular applications of DH.  I would very much like to hear short presentations from all who have used DH in the classroom, or from those who have ideas they have not yet implemented on using DH in the classroom.   I have a theory that DH could potentially rejuvenate the liberal arts curriculum, bringing the humanities and the sciences closer together, and I would like very much to hear from others.

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?

Christine Parker: 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?

THATCampNY 2012 (TCNY) will take place on October 5 and 6 on the campus of Fordham University at Lincoln Center in New York City. TCNY will be a space for librarians, archivists, researchers, scholars, and computer scientists working within the digital humanities to explore ways to foster collaboration among themselves and libraries, archives, academic institutions, and other information centers.

Some of the emphasis this weekend will be on ways research collections based in New York City and the greater metropolitan area can be exploited to inspire new digital humanities scholarship or to strengthen current projects, but any collection or project is of interest.

Workshops will be available for participants who wish to learn more about specific tools, skills, and platforms for digital scholarship.

For more information about TCNY, write the organizers at thatcampny [at] gmail [dot] com .

Feel free to propose workshops and sessions via All Our Ideas below!

We would like to thank the THATCamp NY 2012 sponsors for their generous support:

• Fordham University
• New York University Libraries
• Hunter College Libraries
• JSTOR
• & CUNY Libraries!

THATCamp NY is scheduled to take place in October, 2012 in NYC! Read more about other THATCamps at thatcamp.org.