The Auld Shebeen — an excellent Iris pub and restaurant in Fairfax has offered their downstairs for a meetup of THATCampers starting at 5:30 on Friday. Come join us! All (even non-campers) are welcome.

The restaurant is located in downtown Fairfax, on the corner of Chain Bridge Rd and North St. [See Map], and also accessible via CUE Bus. For those that are driving, there’s a free parking garage across North Street.

Hope to see you there!

I expressed two ideas in my proposal, both of which have been expressed in some form or another by others.

One, I am interested in the tools people use for digital projects and why they use them. The reason for this is that both I and the Programmer where I work are fairly new to the position and sometimes I feel like we are grasping at straws, recreating what others may have already figured out. I suspect that this may not take a session of its own, but will come out of talking to people and hearing about other’s projects.

The other thing I suggested was this:

I am really interested in visual (fine) art and the digital humanities. There was a session last year on fine art and the DH, which was only attended by myself and two others, but I had a great time. Since then, I’ve thought more about how fine art and art history might be supported by DH. I also blogged about the possibility of an artist in residence at a DH center, perhaps supported by the Fellowship at Digital Humanities Centers grant. I would love to hear what others think on this topic and would be very willing to do a little overview of what’s out there right now.

I’m not so sure about the overview part- partly because I have not had much time to research this in depth, and partly because my cursory look hasn’t turned up much. There seems to be a split between fine art and digital humanities centers. David Staley’s post, for instance, talks about a visually oriented humanities project- but the work (and the title of the post, even!) make me think “artwork” and “artist.” I find it really interesting that just about the same exact work could be “digital humanities” or “fine arts” depending on who is doing the work. The point was driven home during Lev Manovitch’s plenary speech at DH ’09. Manovitch os a Professor in the Visual Arts Department, and the kind of things his lab does could be considered both fine art and digital humanities. I’m interested in talking about the overlap, as well as how to involve artists in DH, not only in the areas they have been (maily web design) but also in more theoretical conceptual roles such as visualizations.

I’m not sure if this could stand on its own, or if it should be combined with a more general session on visualizations (which also seemed to be a hot topic at DH ’09).

woohoo THATcampers!  i’m so psyched to hang out with you.  actually, i need to learn from your enormous brains…

a major theme of my graduate course in digital history at the u of c was the opportunities lying around unprecedented scale of access and manipulability.

historians, for instance, typically train to write 20- to 40-year studies, at most 100-year histories; they frequently teach by the century, at most the five-hundred-year time period.  proposal: digital archives, as a revolution in access, radically open the horizons for legitimate big history of long-term trends.

ideas for sessions:

* how would you text mine a 500-yr history?  how bout a 5000-yr history?  many of the tools for text-mining (cf philologic) look narrower and narrower within a peculiar text; how could these tools be used to crunch many texts across large time periods (off the top of my head: graph for me, computer, the top verbs used around the word “eye” in medical texts since Greece …  )?  how can timelines more usefully render the results visual (and interactive!)?

* how bout images.  here we’re talking about 200 years   what can you do with 1 billion photographs?  what happens when you automagically photosynth (livelabs.com/photosynth/) the entire nineteenth- to twentieth-century city of London?  what about “averaging” photos: www.faceresearch.org/demos/average ?  what does the average house look like, decade by decade?  what does an average coal miner look like?

* how bout maps.  doug knox (hi doug!) and i have been talking with the newberry map librarians about how you’d collate atlases of place names, travelers’ diaries, and maps to annotate an interactive atlas of chicago where any given block could be peeled back, year by year.  how would you make a 300-year thick map of the american west?

For the last two years, I have been very interested in visualizing data that emerges within my particular field: literature. This interest emerged as I read Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees at the same time that I was experimenting with using GIS tools like Google Earth as a portion of the analysis in the last chapter of my dissertation. In my last year as a graduate student, a fellowship in the Emory Center for Interactive Teaching gave me additional time to begin experimenting with timelines. Timelines in literary studies were nothing new, but I wondered if it would be possible to have a class collaboratively build one in a manner similar to writing a wiki. The result was–in turn–a collaboration with Jason Jones (@jbj) where I coded a timeline, he designed an assignment, and his students created the data for a timeline of the Victorian Age. I’ve since had the chance to play with the tool in my own classes.

Jason and I both thought that timelines would be a fruitful subject for conversation THATCampers. And as many others have done, I thought I would share my original THATCamp proposal and then propose some ideas about where a discussion might go:

I would like discuss the different web-based tools and software that can be used to produce interactive and collaborative timelines. The presentation would involve demonstrating the different tools, showing the strengths and the weaknesses of each one, and producing a finished product. The tools would range from CHNM’s Timeline Builder to xtimeline and from Bee Docs Timeline 3D to the Timeline and Exhibit widgets that were developed in MIT’s Simile project. Having already spent some time with these tools, I think that the tools from Simile might be the most interesting to THATCamp participants due to their flexibility in representing data in multiple ways, including color coding events, sorting events, and with GIS data, as well as the ability to grab data from sources as diverse as a Google Docs spreadsheet or Twitter. Perhaps the best demonstration of the usefulness of a timeline would be to create–during the session/event–a timeline of THATCamp.

My current thinking:

As I’ve been preparing for THATCamp, I have gone ahead and evaluated as many of the timeline tools as I’ve had time for. I’ll be looking at another one or two tomorrow. I’ve gone ahead and created a spreadsheet listing the abilities of these different tools, along with some evaluation. Admittedly, some of the categories that I was using to evaluate the timelines stem from my deep involvement with the Simile widgets, and so the cases might not stack up as being completely fair to the competition.

Also, wanting to blend together both streams of data visualization that seemed valuable to me, I’ve also expanded on the original timelines that I designed for my courses by adding a Google Maps view this week. You can choose to either look at one view at a time or a dual view.

While a conversation could certainly be held about the different strengths and weaknesses of these different tools, most of the timeline tools that are available are going to be fairly easy for THATCampers to pick up and run with. The most complicated among them is the Simile tool, but I’ve heard there’s a fairly straightforward tutorial on building your own. Instead (or in addition to), I wonder if it could be possible to have a conversation about other possible research and pedagogical uses for timelines than those to which Jason and I have put them to use thus far. One obvious apporach would be to timeline a particular text (say, Slaughterhouse-Five) rather than a contextual time period. But what else could we do with timelines to make them valuable?

Moreover, I wonder if a discussion about visualizing time could be a part of a larger discussion about visualization that seems to be on the minds of other THATCampers (at least per their blog posts) such as Tonya Howe and Amanda Watson. How best can we use such visualizations in our research and/or teaching? At what point are there diminishing returns on such projects? Since these tools are relatively easy to learn (as opposed to programming languages), are they a good gateway tool for “traditional faculty” to begin comfortably integrating new technologies into their research/teaching? And, perhaps most broadly, what is the relationship between digital humanities and visualization

(I should meniton that while Jason and I proposed related ideas to THATCamp, this post is my own. So don’t hold him responsible for my shortcomings in expression.)

Well, I’m finally caught up in reading these blog entries, so I’m taking my turn to post about my proposal. I hope this isn’t too late to get some response and maybe interest in participation this weekend. In short, I’m working with Drupal on my course websites, and I’ve developed some practices and tools with it that I’d like to share. Specifically, I’ve been working on adapting a gradebook module for my own purposes by adding in a mechanism for evaluating student blog entries. I’m basically a committed Drupal fanboy, so I’m really interested to hear if anyone else is doing cool things with this platform. I’d love to converse about my projects or yours, or just generally about best practices and future directions in Drupal development.

I don’t know if there’s enough interest for an entirely Drupal-focused session, but since a lot of the proposals here include comments like “I’d love to see what tools or solutions other people have come up with,” I’d be happy chiming in about what I’ve done with Drupal.

The main thing I’ve done recently (and what I initially proposed) is to use Drupal instead of an LMS (a la BlackBoard) for class websites. I position my use of Drupal as part of the post-LMS conversation discussed in this chronicle piece. Whether we want to call it edupunk or not, the point is that open, flexible tools let us make online class conversations that look (when they work) more like we’re constructing knowledge with our students and less like we’re managing learning. (Also, note how the BlackBoard guy closes the article with the assertion that other tools are inferior because the lack a gradebook feature. Ha!)

To make this more about digital humanities and less ed tech, the thing I like about Drupal is that its flexibility is such that it doesn’t solve problems for me — it gives me tools to solve my own problems. If the defined problem is one of learning outcomes, then maybe Drupal can be built into an LMS. But since we don’t start with that paradigm when we download and install Drupal core, it instead gives us an opportunity to think about information structures, conversation, and knowledge in several different ways at once.

For example, what does it mean that one can use Drupal to think through an answer to ShermanDorn’s question as well as Dave’s?

To put it more generally, what are the relative strengths and weaknesses of any platform, and how are those affordances related to knowledge construction in a (physical or virtual) classroom? I think we’d all agree that WordPress MultiUser allows for different kinds of conversations to emerge (with arguably different stakes) than, say, a Blackboard discussion forum, but why are those differences really important, and does that difference also extend to research and publishing (yes, obviously).

I realize some of these paths may be well-worn, but it’s what I think about as I try to build new Drupal sites, as I’m doing this summer. Anyone want to talk about it this weekend?

I’ve written about this some on my non-blog, and anyone who is interested is welcome to visit my recent courses. Also, for more on using Drupal for teaching, there are several groups and projects out there, including, most notably, Bill Fitzgerald’s DrupalEd project.

I’ve already proposed one session, but recent events in Iran and the various discussions of the role of social media tools in those events prompted this post.

I propose that we have a session where THATCampers discuss the issues related to preserving (and/or analyzing) the blogs, tweets, images, Facebook postings, SMS(?) of the events in Iran with an eye toward a process for how future such events might be archived and analyzed as well.  How will future historians/political scientists/geographers/humanists write the history of these events without some kind of system of preservation of these digital materials?  What should be kept?  How realistic is it to collect and preserve such items from so many different sources? Who should preserve these digital artifacts (Twitter/Google/Flickr/Facebook; LOC; Internet Archive; professional disciplinary organizations like the AHA)?

On the analysis side, how might we depict the events (or at least the social media response to them) through a variety of timelines/charts/graphs/word-clouds/maps?  What value might we get from following/charting the spread of particular pieces of information? Of false information?  How might we determine reliable/unreliable sources in the massive scope of contributions?

[I know there are many potential issues here, including language differences, privacy of individual communications, protection of individual identities, various technical limitations, and many others.]

Maybe I’m overestimating (or underthinking) here, but I’d hope that a particularly productive session might even come up with the foundations of: a plan, a grant proposal, a set of archival standards, a wish-list of tools, even an appeal to larger companies/organizations/governmental bodies to preserve the materials for this particular set of events and a process for archiving future ones.

What do people think?  Is this idea worth a session this weekend?

UPDATE:   Ok, if I’d read the most recent THATCamp proposals, I’d have seen that Nicholas already proposed a similar session and I could have just added my comment to his…..  So, we have two people interested in the topic.  Who else?

Just wanted to post briefly to update my application essay. I’m a faculty member at Brown and have just returned from a semester at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where a colleague and I co-taught an American history honors seminar called “American Publics.” Next year at this time, we will teach the course at Brown AND at Melbourne and link the students digitally.

That’s what I wrote in the application, now I have to figure out what I mean when I said “link the students digitally.” I explored and rejected wikis (the two campuses assign different kinds of writing and the students have different stakes in the writing) and existing social networking tools. I think what we want to do is design a lightweight, experimental “archive” to which students can upload texts (scanned documents, websites, images, sound files) to share across campuses. The new Center for Digital Scholarship at the Brown University Library will build a password protected web environment (using PHP and SOLR) within which students may upload, describe, and annotate digital resources. Students will be able to search and browse their resources, and arrange them into sets based on catalog records and/or student designed taxonomic tags. The interface would create XML records for submitted assets and then post that data to the index. We have done this for other student research projects at Brown and plan something easily portable, that could also be used or hosted at the University of Melbourne. We want to make this project experimental and quickly set up so that we can change it and modify it as we go.

We would hope to be able to share such a tool once its designed and tested and would love to hear thoughts about what we should and shouldn’t include and any possible challenges you could foresee.

All that said, I also teach a graduate course called “Digital Scholarship” for humanities and social science students and look forward to a discussion of what kind of tools, competencies and knowledge graduate students need.

I want to learn about how to use new web-interaction tools for teaching classes that have a public product. Students in the Brown public humanities program do exhibitions and programs for the public, and it would be good to add web outreach projects to those. A few of the tools that I’ve played with, but want to know more about:
•    Crossroads (shared markup of documents)
•    Voicethread (commenting on images, words, video)
•    Dipity  (creation of timelines)
•    Omeka  (collections)
•    Flickr (images)
And I’m sure there are others… I’d like to know more about them, especially tools that can be combined with oral history projects.
Several challenges here…
One is doing these as group projects – how to get a class, or several small groups from a class, to work together on these.
Another is how to automate the process of moving between these tools, and more traditional databases. Can we, for example, pull pictures from a historical society’s PastPerfect system, put the pictures onto Flickr, the objects in Omeka, and display a timeline on Dipity, without doing it all by hand. Can we take a community-curated collection from Flickr and move it into Omeka, or into a library system with better long-term storage, metadata, control, etc., without having to re-enter the data that’s there – and to continue to collect data from the public and capture it long-term?
Lots of questions!

Steve

I’m very new to this kind of community but I’ve been struck by how often a rhetoric of “digital revolution” versus a “conservative” establishment has been used in these posts. I wonder if there should not be time to discuss what appears to be a set of digital revolutions that are actually taking place, such as the current crisis in Iran, the censorship program in China/Burma etc. It’s striking to me how a technology like Twitter that has been widely derided in the US as self-indulgent narcissism has come to play a central role in disseminating ideas and information in situations such as the Bombay bombings and the current Iranian crisis. For me, the humanities must pay attention to developments such as these in making claims for the significance of networked critical practice. Or is this so obvious a thought that it’s taken for granted in digital circles, in which case I apologize!?