A lot of great tools exist to annotate collections and bibliographies – Zotero being one of the best lightweight examples for end-users.  At the same time, some large scale projects are exploring annotations as low-level data objects.  I want to discuss the middle –  potential annotation frameworks that could slip easily into the services layer of web applications for manipulating textual collections, particularly TEI.  One idea is to use AtomPub to post, retrieve,  and edit annotations tied to texts and text collections. There are several benefits to this approach:  one is the ease with which one could embed metadata that could be used to ingest annotations into a digital repository as independent objects, to be recombined with texts at the application level;  Another is that it would establish an annotation framework that could apply to diverse types of collections, and would enable the ability to annotate data using rich media.

While AtomPub is easy to implement, building connections between Atom documents and very granular segments of text or multimedia is more difficult.  For TEI, there are some native tools (XPointer), but they are fairly clunky.  There are also abstraction tools that could be used to tokenize a text for annotation purposes, but the complexity involved in building that abstraction layer may negate the benefits of a simple,  RESTful annotation framework that uses AtomPub.

I would like to work with other folks at THATCamp to brainstorm and hopefully test some ideas for using AtomPub for granular annotation.

Here is my original proposal for THATCamp, which I hoped would fit in with session ideas from the rest of you:

I would like to discuss theoretical issues in digital history in a way that is accessible and understandable to beginning digital humanists.  This is probably the common thread running through my interests and research.  I really wonder, for instance, whether digital history has its own research agenda or whether it simply facilitates the research agenda of traditional academic history.  I believe that Zotero will need a good theory for its subject indexing before it can launch a recommendation service.  Are any digital historians planning on producing any non-proprietary controlled vocabularies?  We need to have a good discussion of what the semantic web means for digital history.  Are we going to sit on our hands while information scientists hardwire the Internet with presentist ontologies?  Can digital historians create algorithmic definitions for historical context that formally describe the concepts, terms, and the relationships that prevailed in particular times and places?  What do digital historians hope to accomplish with text mining?  Are we going to pursue automatic summarization, categorization, clustering, concept extraction, entity relation, and sentiment analysis?  What methods from other disciplines should we consider when pursuing text mining?  What should be our stance on the attempt to reduce the “reading” of texts to computational algorithms and mathematical operations?  Will the programmers among us be switching over to parallel programming as chip manufacturers begin producing massively multi-core processors?  How prepared will we be to exploit the full capabilities of high-performance computing once it arrives on personal computers in the next few years?

Here is a post that just went up at my blog that addresses some of these issues and questions:

Zotero and Semantic Search

The good news is that Zotero 2.0 has arrived.  This long-awaited version allows a user to share her or his database/library of notes and citations with others and to collaborate on research in groups.  This will be a tremendous help to scholars who are coauthoring papers.  It also has a lot of potential for teaching research methods to students and facilitating their group projects.

(more…)

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about ways to get primary source documents to “talk” to each other and to the cloud of secondary sources that surround them.  For example, at Monticello we’re working on a digital version of Jefferson’s memorandum books (60 years’ worth of purchases made, places visited, people seen, etc.) and want to enrich it far beyond simply getting the text on the web.  Can we make that incredible information come alive in a rich and user-friendly way?  Put these and other primary sources into a broader context of people, events, ideas?  Connect these seamlessly with secondary sources treating the same topics?  Can we decentralize the process to pull information from non-Monticello assets?  What visualization tools will help?

Or another version of the same “problem.”  Thomas Jefferson wrote between eighteen and nineteen thousand letters in his lifetime and received several times that number from other writers.  What are ways to illuminate the connections among those letters?  What are ways to permit an easy understanding of the larger (political, social, material, geographic) contexts in which that correspondence took place?  Are there good tools that will let people explore letters by theme?  And beyond that, can the same solutions be applied to other correspondents at other times in other places (and, ultimately, turned into a giant killer spiderweb of correspondence)?

How can digital skills and issues be thoroughly incorporated into a humanities curriculum, especially a graduate curriculum? It’s basically a “lazyweb” question, because that’s exactly the question I’m grappling with now in my current position, so if the minds at THATcamp would help me, I’d be extremely grateful indeed. It’s easy enough to design and teach a digital humanities course or two, but there’s something about that approach that just seems wrong. It keeps digital humanities in its own little pen, which is odd considering that those of us yelling into that echo chamber simply *know* that the whole practice of the humanities is going to have to come to terms with new technologies sooner or later. It’s also odd considering how many more careers are opened up to digitally literate people. I do think that digital humanities has been very much a research-oriented field, and I’d really like to concentrate on teaching for a bit. It may be that current educational course-centric structures are simply inimical to the digital humanities; I wager that most of us learned to be digital humanists through collaborative project work and self-directed study, which aren’t well supported by a 3-credit single-teacher single-department course structure.

[Several months later . . . ]

I’m in the thick now of writing a curriculum, and I can tell you a few things:

There are guidelines for M.A. programs set by the National Council on Public History and the Society of American Archivists, and I’m drawing heavily on those. There’s also the AHA’s book, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-First Century, published 2004, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet — I’m pretty sure there’s nothing about social networking in it, though! There’s also Dan Cohen’s recent narrative of the GMU PhD in Digital History in the May 2009 issue of AHA’s Perspectives.

What there isn’t is a set of guidelines for baseline digital skills that humanists should have. Perhaps all humanists don’t need digital skills. Nevertheless, it’s something I’m hacking away at.

(Let me just work out a Zotero issue & I’ll link to my bibliography with the above-named resources in it.)

In days of yore, the researcher had a limited set of tools at their disposal to get a broad sweeping view of what a research collection consisted of.   There might be a well-crafted NUCMC entry,  a quick glance at a finding aid, a printed catalogue, or a chat with an archivist or librarian.  Sometimes these pieces of information might tell you how much of a collection might meet your research needs (and correspondingly how many days you should plan to spend working with a collection).

Unfortunately many of our digital collections still rely on modes of presentation and description that are based on analog interfaces to collections.   With increasingly large repositories (gathered into even larger aggregations) it is often hard for the researcher to know just how deep a particular rabbit hole goes.  Improved search capabilities help solve part of this problem, but they can often impede serendipitous discoveries and unexpected juxtapositions of materials.

As part of our work to update the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project’s Opening History site, we are exploring ways that we can make the contours of a collection more explicit, develop modes of browsing that facilitate discovery, and provide researchers a sense of what’s available at different levels.

I’m looking forward to THATCamp because this looks like a great group of people to brainstorm with.   Thus far, we’ve been using a paticipatory design technique known as “patchwork prototyping.” By the time of THATCamp we’ll have a few pieces of prototype together for review.   If others are interested, I would be willing & able to lead  a session that explores the general problem space using Opening History and any other collections that participants suggest.

Here is what I proposed for THATCamp:

I have two major interests that I would bring to ThatCamp. The first is how to make my institution, the Washington State Digital Archives, more interactive, useful, and Web 2.0ish. We have 80 million documents online but a quirky interface that does not allow much interaction. I need not only ideas on how to change, but success stories and precedents and contacts to convince my very wary state bureaucracy that we can and have to change.

Second, I am interested in all manner of digital history training. I just began directing a Public History graduate program at Eastern Washington University. How can I prepare my history MA students for the jobs that are instead of the jobs that were? How do I work with the computer science and geography departments? How do I, a traditionally trained scholar, model the new realities for my grad students? There just is not space in an already-crowded 60 credit program for a bunch of courses on web design and such. I need to integrate digital training into an existing curriculum.

Since sending in the brief blurb for THATCamp I’ve gone through the latest edition of McKeachie’s Teaching Tips book and spent some time pondering what’s necessary to make a seminar work. In some ways this is designing from the back end: for online graduate programs in the humanities or social sciences to work for a large segment of potential students, the classes have to accomplish a certain number of things, and that requires a certain (but undefined) intensity of exchange. I’m afraid I’ve got the Potter Stewart problem with definition here: I can’t tell you what constitutes sufficient intensity, but I know it when I’ve experienced it as either a teacher or student.

It’s certainly possible to construct that intensity in live chats, but since most online classes I’ve seen or taught are asynchronous, I have to think differently from “Oh, I’ll just transpose.” (Here, you can insert platitudinous warnings about uploading PPTs and thinking you’re done.) But while several colleagues have pointed me to some of their online discussions with deep threads (and at least at face value, it seems like intensity to me), that doesn’t help, in the same way that telling a colleague, “Oh, my seminars work great; what’s wrong with you?” isn’t sufficient.

So let me step back and reframe the issue: the existence of great conversation in a setting is not helpful to the central problem of running a seminar. In some ways, it’s a type of chauvenism (“you can have better conversations in this setting”), and that prevents useful conversations about what a seminar experience requires. Not a seminar class online or a face to face seminar but a seminar class in any setting.

Unfortunately, while I have searched, I have not been able to come across ethnographic or other qualitative research on this. There are plenty of how-to guides for running face-to-face discussion, but I am hungry for something beyond clinical-experience suggestions. There is some decent research on transactional distance, and cognitive apprenticeship is an interesting concept, but neither is that satisfying.

So back to basics and some extrapolation. In my most memorable literature classes, and in informal conversations around books, plays, movies, and poems, I’ve been entranced by how others think that writing works–maybe not in the same way that James Wood would parse it, but in some way.

“What does this mean? Was it good or bad? Why did that appear then? No, no, think about these moments, because she could have done something different. They swept in at the end, and that’s why it’s called deus ex machina.”

That’s the type of conversation I imagine for and remember from seminars: close readings, fast exchanges, excruciating pauses while I tried to piece ideas together, rethinking/reframing on the fly. Never mind that I’m an historian, and never mind the excruciating boredom in plenty of classes; the texture of intense conversation stuck in my brain is derived from conversations about novels, poems, plays, and movies.

And as fellow historians of ed David Tyack and Larry Cuban would point out, I have relied on this experience as a “grammar” that I would be predisposed to impose on online seminars. But as my original proposal for THATCamp pointed out, I don’t think the world (or learning) works in the same way everywhere.

What can be extrapolated from the best face-to-face seminars beyond the setting-specific events? I’ll propose that the best seminar classes are ill-formed questions, puzzles with weakly- but effectively-defined targets. Here, I am using “ill-formed” not in the sense of grammar but in the sense of a question that is not itself the best approach to a topic, and in this case, deliberately so. The best framing of an history class I ever took as either an undergraduate or graduate was Susan Stuard‘s course on early modern Europe. In essence, it was historiography, but framed as, “How do we explain the rise of modern just-pre-industrial Europe?” That was a great focus, but it was ill-formed in that it did not have a closed-form answer. The answers we read about and argued over were hypotheses that led to different questions. The course did not finish with our finding an (intellectual) pot of gold, but it was a great way to structure a class.

In many ways, problem-based learning uses the ill-formed question, “How do we solve this problem?” That question assumes a problem, a problem definition, and a potential solution, and of course the value is not in the solution itself but the development of analysis and the application of important concepts in the setting of problems. In this case, the course goal is not the motivating question, but the question is essential to meeting the goal.

Problem-based learning is great when it fits the goals of the course. Not all courses can be designed around problems, and if a seminar is online and asynchronous, I suspect that the loose “how does literature work?” question is not going to… well, work. But the ill-formed question can appear in more than the examples I have described or experienced.

Anyone looking to co-house for the conference? Let me know. I don’t care about your gender, but I’d frown upon late-night booze-fueled ruckus.

For the record, below is what I proposed for THATCamp. Since I wrote the following months ago, I’ve had additional thoughts on where to go with this, but origins and drafts matter, so here it is, warts and all:

Rant/discussion/query:

Dialog: (How) can we generate and maintain the type of dramatic/performative classroom interaction in an online environment that exists in the best discussion and seminar classes? Face to face classes have a spontaneity that generates such dialogue, and teachers or facilitators can play the Devil’s-advocate role in a way that hones the issues moment to moment, iteratively. But in an asynchronous environment, there is no such inherent moment-to-moment tension and drama This is one essence of humanities classes that I have been unable to replicate online, and the technology skeptics such as Margaret Soltan doubt it is possible.

Central questions:
Are there elements of a live-dialogue drama that can be translated into an asynchronous environment, or should we give up on the “aha!” moment embedded in an argument?
If the first, what are those elements?
If the second, how do we pick different goals that still serve that conversational, perspective-shifting goal for the liberal arts?

This afternoon Jeremy and I flipped the switch on the new thatcamp.org site, adding a community blog and camper profiles.  In this blog post I’ll briefly provide details about the unconference itself, mention an upcoming deadline, and suggest ways that we can begin a discussion relating to possible sessions long before anyone hops on a plane to GMU.

Schedule
THATCamp09 will take place June 27–28, hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.  CHNM resides in the Research 1 building of the Fairfax campus, and we have a ton of space and breakout room reserved that weekend.

Similar to last year, we’ll begin Day 1 with breakfast & registration from 8:30-9, lunch will be provided on day 1, and we’ll end the day at approximately 5:30 in time for dinner.  For those that are interested, we’re arranging a meetup after day 1 at a local pub in downtown Fairfax for dinner and a drink.  Day 2 will also begin with breakfast at 8:30, wrapping up in time for lunch and allowing campers to catch their flights home.

Hotel Information
There are two blocks of rooms for those interested in hotel arrangements.  Both the Hampton Inn and the Best Western are offering a reduced rate of $79 to any of our attendees that ask for one of the rooms reserved for the “THATCamp Conference.”

At the Best Western (3535 Chain Bridge Road, Fairfax, VA 22030 703.591.5500), there are 20 rooms reserved for our attendees – 10 singles and 10 doubles.

At the Hampton Inn (910860 Fairfax Blvd, Fairfax, VA 22030 703.385.2600) there are 40 rooms reserved – 19 singles and 21 doubles.

If you’re looking to share a hotel room with another camper, consider posting on the THATCamp blog.

User Accounts on thatcamp.org
When you applied for THATCamp, you were actually creating a user account on our WordPress blog.  Fancy, right?  This means that you already have an account to participate on the community blog, and you now have a profile on our site, such as: thatcamp.org/camper/yourusername/.

The URL to login to the blog is thatcamp.org/wp-admin/, and once you’ve authenticated you can go ahead and edit your user profile which includes additional information like your t-shirt size and dietary restrictions.  By filling out your profile, you’ll let others know more about your interests so we can get to business when we meet face-to-face.

Wondering why some users have photos, and others don’t?  The website aggregates profile photos using Gravatar, a universal avatar that WordPress and other popular blogging platforms use.  We encourage you to register using the same email address you used to create your THATCamp profile.  Once you’ve added an avatar, it will be used not only on thatcamp.org, but whenever you post a comment on a WordPress blog, and will be printed on your name badge.

Upcoming Deadline
May 25th is the deadline for you to specify your t-shirt size and any dietary restrictions that you may have.  This will give us the necessary time to order shirts and food.  To edit your user profile, you’ll login to the thatcamp.org WordPress installation (as described above).  T-shirts will once again be printed on American Apparel shirts, which tend to run slightly smaller than traditional brands.  If you’re not familiar w/ their cut, we suggest choosing a larger size.  We can supply unisex or womens shirts, so please specify.

Community Blog
The blog is a space for campers to post their session ideas and ask any questions.  We encourage each camper who has an idea for a session to create a new post on the blog, where others can leave comments, suggestions, and we can begin to organize ourselves.  An example of this from last year’s unconference is a post by Tom Scheinfeldt where he suggested an idea, received feedback, and found interested campers to participate in his session.  In addition to posting new entries on the blog, please leave comments on sessions you’re interested in attending.  This is your space to run with ideas, and will be foundational in organizing a schedule on Day 1 of the unconference.

Twitter
In addition to the community blog, many of us have been communicating via Twitter — remember to use the #thatcamp hash-tag when possible.  If you’re not already on twitter, you may find that it’s a positive way to network with other campers before and after the unconference.  The THATCamp twitter account is @thatcamp.. I tweet at @digitalhumanist, and Jeremy goes by @clioweb.

Question?  Comments?  Concerns?
You can send us an email (info [AT] thatcamp [DOT] org).

On behalf of Jeremy and myself, I’d like to thank you for sharing your great ideas during the application process.  We’ve been talking about THATCamp09 since last year’s event, and we’re really looking forward to meeting this year’s participants.

Best,
Dave Lester