I really like the idea of learning about these tools and their uses (and how they can be productively hacked) and also developing a community developed resource so we can continue to share our expertise and experimentation.

It would be nice to have a discussion about the relative merits of different approaches & languages for this kind of work – especially as it relates to the kinds of humanities materials we are working with.

For the Collection Dashboard, we’re also exploring existing online APIs and services that help with some of this work. My colleague Piotr Adamczyk has built a nice site that explores tools like Yahoo! Pipes, Many Eyes, Google charts and mapping. (museumpipes.wordpress.com).

1)I’m also in between the “programmer” and neophyte stages. Thus Processing sounds interesting and useful.

2) Almost all scholars will be doing this sort of reading online (just think about Google Books). Easily created tools to make this work better sound like a great investment (I think Zotero broadly fits this definition and look at its success).

3)My next job involves reading many documents online and anything that can make this more efficient and successful using OCR or metadata sounds like a great use of digital humanities tools.

I’m not sure about other’s interests, but this topic certainly looks useful to me.

— George

I think your idea is a good one and would like to participate to such a session.

Your post make me think of what could be called “the high cost of entering the digital world” for non digital humanists: the little things to learn to be efficient with digital tools – even “simple” ones like Wordprocessors – are costing too much (in terms of learning time) to the eyes of many humanists and historians and that’s often why they are skeptical about digital humanities.

Frédéric