Colleagues,

I, too, am eager for the camp to begin, and seeking your insights for the project I will be presenting.

I will be using the video wall in the Showcase center to display a digital installation titled “Syncretism,” which will run for both days of the camp. The piece is an associative assemblage of still images that each depict instances of cultural syncretism; juxtaposed together, the images suggest associations and analogies, and this a larger theme, between differing instances of cultural syncretism (for example, images of “English-style Indian food” juxtaposed next to skyscrapers in Shanghai next to a rickshaw driver in Copenhagen.

I am seeking feedback both on the visual message of the installation itself, as well as thoughts on the idea of an installation as an example of scholarly performance in the humanities. Is there space in the humanities for a “humanities-based imagist?”

I don’t know if I should propose a separate session to discuss these themes, or whether I should informally speak with you all during the conference while the installation runs.

In any event, I am eager to hear your thoughts about the installations.

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.

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.)

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.

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.