As mentioned in his previous blog post, David Staley displayed a digital installation in the Showcase center during THATCamp. Here’s video of David discussing his work in greater detail:

These are the notes from the first breakout session I attended, is Libraries and Web 2.0. People attending included “straight-up” librarians, digital humanists, a programmer at NCSA even. Let’s see if I can capture what we talked about.

The European Navigator was originally intended to show people what the EU is, in general. But then teachers started using it in classrooms, with great success, and later began asking for specific documents to be added. The site talks about historical events, has interviews and “special files”, has a section devoted to education, and one for different European organizations. The interface is intricate yet easy to use, and uploaded documents (some of them scanned) are well captioned.

Teachers are asking for more on pedagogy/education, but the site’s maintainers feel they don’t have the skills to oblige. [vz: So are teachers willing to contribute content?] The site is having a bit of technical problems: the back end was based on an Access database exported into SQL (exporting is painful! quality control of exports takes a lot of time), and the front end is Flash (slow); they’ll be changing that. It’s made as a browser, which means a navigator within a navigator (which, Frederic Clavert says, is bad, because it doesn’t lend itself to Web 2.0 tool addition — vz: plus accessibility is pretty much shot, and they haven’t created special accessibility tools), and they have to ask users to contribute content, which ends up being too biased.

They do know who their audience is: they did a study of their users in 2008. That’s a great and important thing to do, for libraries.

They’re migrating to the Alfresco repository, which seems to be popular around the room. They want annotation tools, comment tools, a comment rating engine, maybe a wiki, but ultimately aren’t sure what web 2.0 tools they’ll want. They’re obliged to have moderators of their own to moderate illegal stuff (racist comments, for example), but for the most part it seems that the community will be able to self-regulate. Reserchers who are able to prove that they’re researchers will automatically have a higher ranking, and they’re thinking of a reputation-economy classification of users, where users who aren’t Researchers From Institutions but contribute good stuff will be able to advance in ranking. But this latter feature is a bit on the backburner, and — vz — I don’t actually think that’s a good thing. Starting out from a position of a default hierarchy that privileges the academe is actively bad for a site that purports to be for Europe as a whole, and will detract from participation by people who aren’t already in some kind of sanctioned system. On the other hand, part of ENA’s mission is specifically to be more open to researchers. They’re aware of the potential loss of users, and have thought about maybe having two different websites, but that’s also segregation, and they don’t think it’s a good solution. It’s a hard one.

On to the Library of Congress, Dan Chudnov speaking. They have two social-media projects: a Flickr project that’s inaugurating Flickr Commons, and YouTube, where LC has its own channel. YouTube users tend to be less serious/substantial in their responses to videos than Flickr users are, so while LC’s Flickr account allows (and gets great) comments, their YouTube channel just doesn’t allow comments at all.

They’ve also launched the World Digital Library, alongside which Dan presented the Europeana site. Both available in seven and six languages, respectively (impressive!). WDL has multi-lingual query faceting; almost all functionality is JavaScript-based and static, and comes out of Akamai, with whom LC has partnered; so the site is really really stable; on the day they launched, they had 35 million requests per hour and didn’t go down. Take-away: static HTML works really well for servability and reliability and distributability. Following straight-forward web standards also helps.

Good suggestion for Flickr Commons (and perhaps Flickr itself?): comment rating. There seems to be pushback on that; I wonder why? It would be a very useful feature, and people would be free to ignore it.

Dan Chudnov: the web is made of links, but of course we have more. Authority records, different viewers for the big interconnected web, MARC/item records from those, but nobody knows that. More importantly, Google won’t find it without screenscraping. What do you do about it? Especially when you have LC and other libraries having information on the same subject that isn’t at all interconnected?

Linked data, and its four tenets: use URIs as names for things; use HTTP URIs; provide useful information; include links to other URIs. This is a great set of principles to follow; then maybe we can interoperate. Break down your concepts into pages. Use the rel tag, embed information in what HTML already offers. So: to do web 2.0 better, maybe we should do web 1.0 more completely.

One site that enacts this is Chronicling America. Hundreds of newspapers from all over the country. Really great HTML usage under the hood; so now we have a model! And no “we don’t know how to do basic HTML metadata” excuse for us.

Raymond Yee raises a basic point: what is Web 2.0? These are the basic principles: it’s collective intelligence; the web improves as more users provide input. Raymond is particularly interested in remixability and decomposeability of it, and into making things linkable.

So, again, takeaways: follow Web 1.0 standards; link to other objects and make sure you can link your own objects; perhaps don’t make people get a thousand accounts, so maybe interoperate with OpenID or something else that is likely to stick around? Use encodings that are machine-friendly, machine-readable — RDF, JASN, XML, METS, OpenSearch, etc. Also, view other people’s source! And maybe annotate your source, and make sure you have clearly formatted source code?

There’s got to be a more or less central place to share success stories and best practices. Maybe Library Success? Let’s try that and see what happens.

(Edited to add: please comment to supplement this post with more information, whether we talked about it in the session or not; I’ll make a more comprehensive document out of it and post it to Library Success.)

So @GeorgeOnline (whose last name I simply MUST discover) has set up several platforms at teachinghumanities.org, and we semi-agreed over Twitter that it’d be fun to use the 9am “Digital Training” session to build it out a bit. Gee, anyone have a laptop they can bring?

Do please let us know via Twitter or comments on this post whether you’d like to use the session for that purpose; far be it from me to curtail conversation, especially the extraordinarily stimulating sort of conversation that has so far been the hallmark of THATcamp.

The recent PLoS ONE article on interdisciplinary connections in science made me wish instantly for a way to map citation links between individuals at my institution.

From Bollen J, Van de Sompel H, Hagberg A, Bettencourt L, Chute R, et al. 2009 Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science. PLoS ONE 4(3): e4803. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004803

So the authors of the article looked for connections among huge areas and journals. In practice, interdisciplinary collaboration is helped tremendously by individualized matchmaking. The clickstream data for Bollen et al is one example of “linkage” but there are others: Google Scholar can probably help connect scholars at individual institutions by the sources they use in common. The title is a misnomer: trying to follow sequential citations to find the grand-grand-grand-grand-grandciters of Thomas Kuhn would be overkill and impractical. First-level citation overlaps would identify individuals who share either substantive or methodological understandings.

I thought this was impossible until one fellow camper told me at the end of the day that there is a Google Scholar API available to academics. Woohoo! Is any enterprising programmer interested? Or someone who works at a DH center interested in getting this started? Or someone….

Incidentally, I suspect that there are many possible data sources (six degrees of Twitter @ refs?) and ways of working the practical uses of this (seeing detailed overlaps for two specified individuals, or identifying summary overlaps for groups of individuals at a university, in an organization, attending a conference, etc.).

And, finally, … yes, to answer the logical question by those at the last session today in the GMU Research I auditorium, the Bollen piece is catalogued in visualcomplexity.com.

The following are my raw notes on the Saturday morning “Context and Connections” session. Assume that unless otherwise noted, they are paraphrases of comments made by participants (either labeled or not). It began with a note that this was about making connections with and adding context to historical document collection (e.g., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson with Monticello/Jefferson Foundation, on the UVA Press Rotunda site), but this is about both research and teaching. The problem in the classroom: students often USE digital archives but do not interact with it in terms of mashups (or scholars, with contribution)

Someone suggested this is sort of like Thomas Jefferson’s FB page: who were his friends, etc.

Montpelier/Madison foundation has a hierarchical set of keywords and two separate databases for names that may not interact.

Problem of places/data sets that do not talk to each other (e.g., LoC has largest set of Jefferson papers, but limited (and difficult-to-read) image sets.

So if there’s a suite of tools, is there one appropriate for both archivist/research community and for students?

MIT Media Lab’s Hugo Liu has an older project that simulated “what would they think?” AI.

Web forces textual connections (links). E.g., Wikipedia keyword linkages. It is not required to rely on a folksonomy; could have a multi-level tagging system (by persona).

How much text-mining (by computer) and how much is intensity of analysis/interpretive-focused? LoC project on Civil War letters is on the second end of the spectrum.

From library/archive world: WordPress has hierarchical categories AND (nonhierarchical) tags

Someone asked about a tag suggestion system? Someone noted that existed with delicious.

Another person: Try Open VocabThat does move it into the semantic

What to do with “rough piles” of tags, etc. If the tags accrete, we will want to analyze who tags how, and how that changes depending on context (and time.

“That sounds like scholarship.

Conversation. “That sounds like scholarship.”

Tags aren’t enough. Conversation isn’t enough. I want both.
We want a person behind that tag.

The Old Bailey is working on this problem — the largest holding of information on dead proletariats in the world, and how do we make connections among sparse information (e.g., Mary arrested as prostitute, with place of work, date, and pimp).

We need a Friendster of the Dead.

Maybe a way of figuring out by context who wrote (or context of writing).

[Sherman]: Like quantitative ways of guessing authors of individual Federalist Papers, except less well defined

Archivists have to do that all the time — “what did this word mean”? Time and place contexts

A question of how much preprocessing is required…

We need a way of mapping concepts across time. There’s only so much computationally that you can do. A social-networking peer review structure so that experts winnowed out the connections that a program suggested.

That’s a task good for socializing students — give them a range of potential connections, make them winnow the set and justify the judgments.

As a scholar, I need computers to suggest connections that I will judge by reading the sources.

Library (archival collection) no longer provides X that scholars use. There needs to be a conversation/collaboration.

Philologists on disambiguation: that’s a tool I can use.

Toolbuilding is where these connections will be made: with Zotero and Omeka, I spend as much time talking with archivists/librarians as with scholars.

Does anyone know about the Virtual International Authority File?

There are standards for marking up documents in public format? Will that standardization translate to what we do online, much more loose and free with Digital Humanists.

Back channel link to Historical Event Markup and Linking (HEML) project.

The “related pages” links for Google sometimes work for documents.

You don’t know why something is coming up as similar, and that’s a personal disambiguation process (reflection).

Discussion about extending core function of Text Encoding Initiative.

Discussion around www.kulttuurisampo.fi/ about intensity of work, selection of projects, etc.

DBPedia– controlled-vocabulary connection analysis for Wikipedia from infoboxes on articles, but the software is open-source. (and could be applied to any MediaWiki site).

Keep an eye on the IMLS website! – there is a project proposal to use TEI for other projects.

So I didn’t have time to ask the two questions I had for everyone during my Dork Shorts session on the Libraries of Early America, so here they are …

1. I’m very keen to hear what folks think about how this sort of data might be used by scholars and for teaching?

2. What kinds of visualizations would folks be interested in experimenting with by using such bibliographical data, e.g. date/place of publication, publishers, content, etc.

The links again:

Thomas Jefferson’s library on LibraryThing

Subject tag cloud | Author tag cloud

Examples of interesting overlaps:

Books shared with John Adams

Books shared with George Washington

The list of Collections in the pipeline is here. This is a subset of the larger Legacy Libraries or “I See Dead People’s Books” project.

Being a semi-liveblog of our first session of the day – please annotate as you see fit (and apologies if I left anything or anyone out).

Attendees: Andy Ashton, Laurie Kahn-Leavitt, Tim Brixius, Tad Suiter, Susan Chun, Josh Greenberg, Lisa Grimm, Jim Smith, Dan Cohen

Lisa: Kickoff with brief explanation of upcoming project needing crowdsourcing.

Susan: Interested in access points to large-scale collections – machine-generated keywords from transcriptions/translations, etc. Finding the content the user is most likely to engage with.

Josh: Landing page of the site to steer the crowd to certain areas – flickr commons?

Susan: Discovery skillset? Asking users – ‘what are you interested in?’ Discipline-specifc, multi-lingual vocabularies could be generated?

Josh: Getting more general: moving beyond the monoculture – what is the crowd? Layers of interest; Figuring out role – lightweight applications tailored to particular communities.  NYPL historical maps project example – can we crowdsource the rectification of maps? Fits well w/community dynamics, but the information is useful elsewhere. Who are the user communities?

Laurie: Relation between face to face contact and building a crowdsource community? Susan & Josh’s projects have large in-person component.

Defining the need for crowdsourcing – what is the goal? Josh likes notion of hitting multiple birds with one stone. What is the crowd’s motivation? How can we squeeze as many different goals as possible out of one project?

Tad: issue of credentialing – power of big numbers.

Jim: Expert vs. non-expert – research suggests amateurs are very capable in certain circumstances.

Susan: Dating street scenes using using car enthusiasts – effective, but key is in credentialing.

Andy: The problem of the 3% of information that isn’t good – the 97% that’s correct goes by the wayside. Cultural skepticism over crowdsourcing, but acceptance of getting obscure information wherever possible (e.g. ancient texts). Looking into crowdsourcing for text encoding. Data curation and quality control issues to be determined. Interested to see Drexel project results next year?

Susan: Human evaluation of results of crowdsourcing – tools available from the project there. (Yay!)

Jim: Transitive trust model – if I trust Alice, can I trust Bob?

Josh: Citizen journalism, e.g. Daily Kos – self-policing crowd. Relies on issues of scale, but not just ‘work being done that’s not by you.’ Cultural argument about expertise/authority – ‘crowd’ meaning the unwashed vs. the experts.

Susan: Long tail is critical – large numbers of new access points.  How to encourage and make valuable?

Tad: Translations: ‘they’re all wrong!’ (Great point).

Andy: Depth, precision & granularity over breadth

Jim: Unpacking the digital humanities piece – leveling effect. Providing an environment for the community, not just a presentation.

Josh: Using metrics to ‘score’ the crowd.

Tad: Wikipedia example – some interested in only one thing, some all over.

Josh: Difference between crowdsource activity as work vs. play. Treating it as a game – how to cultivate that behavior?

Susan: Fun model relies on scale.

Josh: MIT PuzzleHunt example; how to create a game where the rules generate that depth?

Susan: Validation models problematic – still requires experts to authorize.

Tad: Is PuzzleHunt work, rather than play?

Andy: NITLE Predictions Market – great example of crowdsourcing as play.

Dan: Still hasn’t gotten the scale of InTrade, etc. – how to recruit the crowd remains the problem. Flickr participation seems wide, but not deep.

Josh: Compel to do job because they have to, do Amazon Mechanical Turk model and pay or get deeper into unpacking the motivations between amateur and expert communities.

Susan: Work on motivation in their project determined that invited users tagged at a very much higher rate vs. those who have just jumped in.

Susan: Paying on Mechanical Turk not as painful as it might be – many doing tons of work for about $25.

Josh: So many ways to configure crowdsourcing model – pay per action? Per piece? Standards & practices don’t exist yet.

Susan: We’ve talked a lot about them, but there are still relatively few public crowdsourcing projects.

Dan: Google averse to crowdsourcing (GoogleBooks example) – they would rather wait for a better algorithm (via DH09).

Susan: But they have scale!

Dan: Data trumps people for them.

Andy: Image recognition – it’s data, but beyond the capabilities now.

Dan: Third option: wait five years – example of Google’s OCR. Google has the $$ to re-key all Google Books, but they are not doing it.

Josh: Google believes that hyperlinks are votes –

Dan: Latent crowdsourcing, not outright

Susan: Translation tools largely based on the average – our spaces don’t fit that model

Tad: Algorithm model gives strong incentive to proprietary information – you have everything invested in protecting your information, not openess.

Dan: OpenLibrary wiki-izing their catalog, vs. Google approach. Seems purely an engineering decision.

Andy: Approach informed by a larger corporate strategy – keeping information in the Google wrapper. Institutional OPACs almost always averse to crowdsourcing as well. What is the motivating factor there?

Josh: Boundary drawing to reinforce professional expertise and presumption that the public doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Andy: Retrieval interfaces horrible in library software – why keep best metadata locked away.

Sending around link to Women Physicians…

Susan: different views for different communities – work with dotSub for translation.

Dan: Other examples of good crowdsourced projects?

Susan: Examples of a service model?

Josh: Terms of service? Making sure that the data is usable long-term to avoid the mistakes of the past. Intellectual property remains owned by person doing the work, license granted to NYPL allowing NYPL to pass along license to others.  Can’t go back to the crowd to ask for pernission later.  Getting users to agree at signup key. Rights and policies side of things should appear on blog in future.

Jim: Group coding from Texas A&M moved into a crowdsourcing model – future trust model ‘model’

Please continue to add examples of projects (and of course correct any ways I’ve wildly misquoted you).

It would be great to have some crowdsourcing case studies – e.g., use flickr for project x, a different approach is better for project y…

Posting to the THATCamp blog *so* late has allowed me to change the focus of my proposed session and to consider my very most recent project. For reference (and perhaps post-conference follow-up), I’m posting a description of my original THATCamp proposal, in addition to some thoughts about a possible session about searching of museum records:

My original proposal involved a project called “The Qualities of Enduring Publications” that I developed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art during the financial crisis that followed the 9/11 attacks. Faced with a deficit budget resulting from severely diminished attendance, the museum planned to implement radical budget cuts, including significant cutbacks in publishing. In light of these cutbacks, I was interested in examining the essential nature of the publications (for 2002, read: books and print journals) that the discipline was producing and reading, and in thinking about what gives an art history publication enduring value. The question was examined through a personal prism, in a series of small workshops (ca. 10 participants each) at the Met and at museums around the country. Participants came to the workshop having selected one or two publications that had had enduring value for them in their professional lives–books that they had consulted regularly, had cited frequently, or had used as models for their own publications. A few minutes at the start of the workshop were spent sharing the books, after which I (as workshop chair), began the discussion, which centered around a series of simple scripted questions, to which answers were responded for later analysis. The questions asked whether titles had been selected for (for example) the fidelity of the reproductions, for the lucidity of the prose, for the multiplicity of voices, for the well-researched bibliography, and so on. The workshops were fascinating, not just for the results they produced (the publications most valued by art historians had relatively little in common with the gigantic multi-authored exhibition catalogues produced by museums during that time frame), but also for the lively conversation and debate that they engendered amongst museum authors and future authors.

I have recently been encouraged to expand the workshop scope to include participants and titles from all humanities disciplines, as well as to consider the impact of electronic publishing and distribution on an individual’s choices. Staging the new version of the workshop will require the recruitment of workshop chairs from across the country and throughout the humanities, and the drafting of a series of additional questions about the ways in which electronic publishing might impact a participant’s thinking about his or her enduring publications. I had hoped to use THATCamp as an opportunity to identify potential workshop chairs in humanities disciplines other than art history, to discuss examine the existing workshop discussion template and to work on the questions to be added on e-publishing, and to think about ways to analyze a (much larger) body of responses, perhaps considering some bibliometric analysis techniques.

Though I’m still interested in speaking informally with ANY THATCamp participant who might be interested in participating in the expanded “Qualities of Enduring Publications” workshops, I’m actually focused right now on a newer project for which some preliminary discussion is needed to seed the project wiki. Along with colleagues at ARTstor and the Museum Computer Network, I’ll be organizing a team that will examine the user behaviors (particularly search) in repositories that aggregate museum records. The project, which will take place during the six weeks before the Museum Computer Network conference in November, 2009, will involve analysis of the data logs of ARTstor, the museum community’s key scholarly resource for aggregated museum records, as well as logs from other libraries of museum collection information, including (we hope) CAMIO and AMICA. A group of recruited participants will consider the logs, which will be released about six weeks before the November conference, articulate questions that might be answered by interrogating the data, and write and run queries. We’ll also think about ways to establish and express some useful ways to query and analyze an individual museum’s search logs, and will use these methods to look at the logs of participants’ museums, as a baseline for comparison with the ARTstor, CAMIO, and AMICA records. At an all-day meeting during MCN, we’ll gather to examine the results of the preliminary results; discuss, modify and re-run the queries, and work together to formulate some conclusions. In the eight weeks after the meeting, ARTstor staff and/or graduate student volunteers will produce a draft white paper, which will circulate to the meeting participants before being released to the community at large. Although the project is limited in scope (we have not yet figured out how to get any useful information about how users of Google look for museum content), we hope that it will help museums to begin to think about how their content is accessed by users in the networked environment using real evidence; at present, very little quantitative information about user behaviors (including which terms/types of terms are used to search, whether searches are successful, which objects are sought) is available. Results could have lasting impact on museum practice, as organizations prioritize digitization and cataloguing activities, and consider what content to contribute to networked information resources. I hope that a discussion at THATCamp might provide some seed content for the project wiki, which serve as the nexus of discussion about what questions we will ask, and about what methods will be used to answer them.

Vieing for a spot on the ‘absolutely last-minute proposal postings’ roster, here’s mine:

A demo and discussion of the ICONCLASS multilingual subject classification system (www.iconclass.nl)

This system might be known to students of Art History and hard-core classification library science geeks, but it has applicability to other fields in cultural heritage. Originally conceived for use by Art History Prof Henri van de Waal in the Netherlands, it has matured over the past 40 years and is in use internationally. Over the past few years we have made several new digital editions, software tools and have applied it to diverse other fields including textual content. In the near future we will be making a brand-new ‘illustrated’ version public, and hope to also make it a Linked Data node.

A session showing what it is and how to use it, or a more advanced discussion on thematic classification is possible, depending on feedback.

Apologies for the extremely last-minute post, which I’m writing on the plane en route to THATCamp!

In a nutshell, what I’d like to discuss in this session is the mapping of literature. By this I mean not only strictly geographical mappings (i.e. cartographical/GIS representations of space and place) but also perhaps more abstract and conceptual mappings that don’t lend themselves so well to mathematical geospatial mash-ups.

How can we (and do we already) play with the possibilities of existing technology to create great DH tools to read literature spatially?

I’ll first demo my Litmap project and hopefully that’ll serve as a springboard for discussion. You can read more about Litmap and look at it ahead of time here.

Very much looking forward to a discussion with all of the great people who are going to be there!

I’m wrestling with how we can move past the electronic facsimile as the standard digital humanities web-based presentation.  Projects such as The Valley of the Shadow (to select a well known one at random) are presentations of static objects.  The meta-data is usually searchable and there are other tools sometimes for slicing and dicing the objects to help in doing research.  Is there a way to move forward to something that plays more of the role of the monograph?

A facsimile performs a useful service to the scholarly community and supports further research, but does not itself usually form a narrative.  The monograph does, but presents a fairly linear argument (disregarding tables, figures, and plates, the text of a monograph can form a single string of glyphs that can be read as a linear set of words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, etc., that take the reader from an initial state to some different, final state).

Online presentations consider the user to be the reader: a passive consumer instead of an active contributor.  This is similar to a book reader, but instead of turning pages, the online reader composes searches and flips through pages of results.

I’m trying to figure out how video game and film criticism can be turned into a critical tool for unpacking digital humanities web presentations and figuring out how to design projects that are participatory, encouraging information flow not only to the reader, but from the reader.

One of the texts I’ve found useful is Alexander Galloway’s “Gamic Action, Four Movements” (in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Electronic Mediations 18.  Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2006).  He presents four modes of gamic action: play (operator initiated diegetic action), algorithm (operator initiated non-diegetic action), process (machine initiated diegetic action), and code (machine initiaited non-diegetic action).  In the context of digital humanities presentation, these might be exploration, transformation, curation, and code.

There’s still something missing though, and that’s participation by the reader.  All information still flows from the machine to the operator (site to the reader).  What if we flip things around and have information flow from the reader?  We still have exploration, transformation, curation, and code, but now from the machine persepective.  We can have systems prioritize prompts to maximize the information gained for the time spent by the participant, transform the information based on how much the system trusts the participant, have the participant track sets of objects they care about, and I’m still figuring out what “code” might be in me.

Here’s my original proposal:

Been thinking a lot about what it might mean to make Linked Data reliable and resilient. We can do better than just “the LOD cloud” – we can make a web of data that can survive the temporary or permanent loss of a node in the big graph or a set of data sources. Since Linked Data is a natural extension of the web, we have all the knowledge and experience of 20+ years of web and networking developments to apply to building Linked Data systems. We’ve learned a few things about proxying and caching, in particular, and those concepts should apply equally well to linked data. If you’re interested in the “web of data”, whether as a consumer of it in the course of your research or as a producer of digital humanities resources or both, I’d like to highlight some of these issues for you by demoing some work we’re doing in the realm of digital collections in libraries, and to leave you with a few ideas for making your own stuff more resilient.

But then the King of Pop died.

So instead, I would like to demonstrate the shot-for-shot recreation of the famous Thriller video I made last night with an Arduino, Omeka, Processing, crowdsourcing, rectified old maps from NYPL reprinted using e-ink, and a native RDF triple store.

I’ve lost my thatcamp proposal (go figure) but since I’ve been concerned about the same issue for some time, I think I can piece it together again briefly here. I’m very interested in what another camper has posted here as making static archives more social by using something like Omeka. My particular focus is a digital edition of poetry written by a Dadaist poet that I’ve created called In Transition: Selected poems by The Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (see it here: www.lib.umd.edu/dcr/projects/baroness/ user: dcr; password: dcrstaff). The thing about the baroness is that she was super popular during the 1920s New York bohemian art scene. She published poetry in The Little Review but she also performed on the street in outlandish dress and pretty much provoked the world at large by flaunting her sexuality, chiding men like Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams for “selling out” and becoming popular, and otherwise behaving hilariously obnoxious. Point is, what made her poetry the talk of the town at the time was in part due to her social network and the collaborative audience that both responded to and provided fodder for her art.

Now, someone anonymous has created a mySpace page with over 700 friends for the baroness (see awww.myspace.com/dadaqueen). The interesting thing is the response her persona attracts. People upload videos and poems and some just comment on their adoration. Very few, however, mention her poetry. So, what happens if we bring her poetry into this scene? How will this popular response change? Would it? What would people find in her poetry that may have been missed in an anthologized, normalized rendition of “A Dozen Cocktails, please?” How might people respond to each other in this space, a space imbued with her poetry?

This brings me to my third and final point. These questions are what has provoked my interest in Omeka, but why Omeka? Why not try and start up an edition in Facebook or MySpace? What would that look like? Well, . . . good question. I have found–in my humble experience–that digital projects are in part restricted by the digital means to which one has access. That is, currently the edition I have created is on a server waiting to be incorporated into the official University of Maryland digital repository which is supported by Fedora. Currently, the library doesn’t have an exhibit application that they use for projects like mine. (The whole library world is trying to figure this stuff out, after all.) I think incorporating Omeka (as opposed to trying to figure something out in FB or mS) would provide for the social network I’m trying to tap into as well as a very real structure that the library community could embrace and incorporate in the existing infrastructure. Thoughts . . . ?

Are others interested in discussing strategies for bringing museums and colleges/universities together to create content? In my field, art history, graduate students chose either a curatorial or a teaching path and rarely look back. Of course a professor and curator may share a particular interest and collaborate, but these are isolated instances. Wouldn’t our students and museum visitors be better served if collaborations were on-going? Can the ease with which we now publish high quality images, audio, video, and text be used to coax institutions beyond their cloistered walls?

One interesting discussion occurred on twitter a few weeks back. Dan, Brian, and a few others were discussing the future of the Digital Humanities, and I (attempting to make what I believed at the time would be a “funny” science fiction joke) said that the definition of the Digital Humanities would be much cooler in the future. Dan Cohen’s response stuck with me, though. He said that, in the future, it would just be called “The Humanities”, and that stuck with me. The idea that the Digital Humanities is a transitional form, a sort of leap ahead into what everything should be. Now, Dan might not even agree with that statement (it was, after all, just a tweet) but I think it is an interesting thing to consider; are we simply what comes next, or will there always be classic (albeit technologically improved) academia and that group of Nerds in the corner using Zotero? To turn it into geek terms: Are we Homo Sapiens (Homo Superior if you are a Bowie fan), or are we X-men?

Running parallel to this topic is the notion of the “Digital Native”. That word has always caused a little discord for me – after all, according to the definition, I am one of them! However, it has always struck me as an odd term, either oddly placed or oddly defined. If oddly placed, it is because I have seen my fellow “digital natives” stare coldly and run frightened from a wiki page, or even saving a word document. There are so many in my generation that refuse to go deeper than surface level, and in many cases, repel technology as an unwanted obstacle. This is not an insignificant minority, by my observation. If it is oddly defined, then the problem comes with the expansion of the phrase. What I mean to say is that while the strict definition I’ve heard is “Someone who has grown up with technology”, of which my generation applies, but always comes with the adage “and is therefore more comfortable with it and probably very knowledgeable”. For the same reasons as above, this is not always true – regrettably – and therefore creates a sort of double-blind issue; it seems that the digital natives are under-performing for the seemingly powerful title, and those deeming us with the title are overestimating the meaning of it.

I bring this up because they both highlight an issue that has seemingly existed since the playground: The Us vs. Them mentality. are the Digital humanities a breeding ground for ideas that will one day be excepted, or are they a toolbox that the professors and academics of tomorrow will turn to in a time of experimentation? Will there always be geeks, or will everyone eventually be logged on? For complications sake, do you think that the Digital Humanities are sort of “reaching far”, and only the more median of pedagogies and academic memes will gestate into the population as a whole? For instance, Digital Archives will be obviously used in the future, but in-class use of wikis will not? iPhones, but not EBooks?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

P.s. Thatcamp is my very first academic Conference. I am immensely excited, and look forward to seeing you all there!

For the past few months, I’ve been involved in the development of the CUNY Academic Commons, a new project of the City University of New York whose stated mission is to “to support faculty initiatives and build community through the use(s) of technology in teaching and learning”. This is no small goal, given the mammoth size and unruliness of CUNY: 23 institutions comprising some 500,000 students, 6,100 full-time faculty, and countless more staff and part-time faculty. The Commons – built on a collection of open-source tools like WordPress MU, Mediawiki, Buddypress, and bbPress – is designed to give members of this diffuse community a space where they can find like-minded cohorts and collaborate with them on various kinds of projects.

My work as a developer for the Commons pulls me in several directions. Most obviously, I’m getting a crash course in the development frameworks that underlie the tools we’re using. These pieces of software are at varying stages of maturity and have largely been developed independently of each other. Thus, making them fit together to provide a seamless and elegant experience for users is a real challenge. This kind of technical challenge, in turn, leads me to consider critically the way that the site could and should serve the members of the CUNY community. How do you design a space where people with wildly different interests and wildly different ways of working can collaborate in ways that work for them? By making the system open enough to accommodate many ways of working and thinking, do you thereby alienate some of those individuals who need more structure to envision the utility that the site could hold for them? How do the choices you make when developing a tool – decisions about software, about organization, about design – mold or constrain the ways in which the site’s uses will evolve?

In light of these varying challenges, there are a couple different things that I would be interested in talking about at THATcamp. For one, I’d like to get together with people working with and on open-source software to talk nuts and bolts: which software are you using, how are you extending or modifying it to suit your needs, and so on. I’m also very interested in talking about strategies for fostering the kinds of collaboration that the CUNY Academic Commons has as its mission. I’m also anxious to discuss more theoretical questions about the design and development of tools that are meant to serve a diverse group of users. In particular, I’m interested in the interconnections between the designer, the software, and the designer’s knowledge and assumptions about the desires and capacities of the end user.

I’d like to meet with others who want to discuss the publication end of digital humanities. I’m particularly interested in how scholarly argumentation can be represented in or strengthened by the use of non-text-based  media. What are the possible bearers of argumentation? How exactly does this work outside the traditional essay format? I’m an analytic philosopher who has done some work on the representation of (philosophical) arguments in film and I’m thinking that some of the analysis done in this context might also apply to questions such as:  Do articles in Vectors Journal offer arguments? Can a map mash-up offer an argument? Can a series of images offer an argument? Are there limitations to the sorts of arguments that non-text-based media can offer? Are non-text-based media better than the traditional essay at presenting certain types of arguments?

While a starting assumption of mine is that scholarly communication in the humanities involves at a minimum the presentation of arguments, perhaps this is also something that could be opened for discussion.

I have some ideas on reasonable answers to these questions based on the analogy with argumentation in film and on recent discussion at UCLA’s Mellon Seminar and DH09, but my thoughts haven’t gelled to the point that I feel comfortable saying “I want to present on this topic.” — So, anyone want to join me for a discussion?

I’m worried this sounds a little boring compared to everyone else’s topics, but here goes!

I would be interested in talking about using Omeka in a somewhat un-likely way — to develop an archive of materials for a museum education department. The archive/”collection” would primarily include images and video of our programs and participants.

I am currentlybuilding two sites that primarily use the exhibit builder functionality of Omeka (not the collections functionality), but I would be interested in extending our use of Omeka to include creating an archive of department material and enabling some of the interactive features of Omeka like the Contribute plugin and “My Omeka.”

I’m interested in sharing the 4b2288;text-decoration: underline">Digital Storytelling Multimedia Archive with folks and brainstorming ideas on taking the site from its current, unfinished, static state to a truly social environment for students, teachers, and scholars of teaching and learning.

I see ties between this idea and those expressed around making digital archives social and also around taking archives and libraries public.  My apologies for how long this post is–I probably  have way too much detail in here!–so I put some stuff in bold after the next paragraph to facilitate a skim.  The real heart of it is in the last couple numbered points.

The Archive presents the results of a multi-campus study of the impact of student multimedia narrative production (or digital stories).  Digital stories are short (3-4 minutes) films combining text, music, voice-over, intertitles, and are used as an alternative tool for expression of academic arguments.  The Archive currently contains mostly interview clips with students and faculty from classes in Latina/o studies, American studies, media studies, and American history.  We have additional clips from ESL classes that we want to include at some point.

These interview clips are currently presented within a traditional hierarchical website organized by our three research questions. The three main sections present our ‘argument’ or ‘findings’ and folks drill down through statements of findings to evidence from student interviews.  We have an additional section which presents our findings within a ‘grid’ that ties together ‘dimensions’ of learning (the ‘grid’ is a little opaque at present, but it is cool to click around).  Finally, we have the ‘archive’ section, which at present is only a list of clip names with a link.

We are working on lots of obvious things like general clarity of writing.  We also have tags for all of the interview clips.   We want to make these tags public every time the clips appear (currently they are in a backend database).  In addition,  we have more digital stories to include and we want to tie examples of stories to interview clips.  We are also working on creating short, one-minute video “talking head” overviews of each section and also a screencast of how to use the grid.

However, what we want to do ultimately is to expand out the archive section and/or create a new social exhibits section.

1)Within the archive (really, throughout the site) we want to give folks the ability to add video of other interviews or of digital stories and to engage in their own commenting, tagging and adding tags to the existing archive.  We also love for there to be a way for folks to create their own grid, but marking tags that they think are important and linked and having those pulled together for their own presentation.

2) We’d like to also (perhaps using Omeka?) to create an exhibits section. This could allow faculty to showcase stories and interviews from their own classes, to pull together multimedia essays about what they think they’re learning about multimedia work, or to have students play in putting stuff together.

And so, I’d love to get input from folks on these and other ideas, how best to implement, what tools we can possibly use, what other ideas for increasing the ‘social’ nature of the site.

Also, see some additional stories at: gnovisjournal.org/coventry

]]> http://chnm2009.thatcamp.org/06/25/taking-a-rich-archive-of-learning-from-static-to-social/feed/ 2 http://chnm2009.thatcamp.org/06/25/modelling-subjectivity-in-space-time/ http://chnm2009.thatcamp.org/06/25/modelling-subjectivity-in-space-time/#comments Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:38:42 +0000 http://thatcamp.org/?p=249

This is just a tardy post to say that I’d love to see this year’s THATcampers engage seriously with the notion of subjectivity in spatial and temporal visualization.  I’m picking up here on ideas by Amanda and Brian, and also on a series of conversations I’ve been having this week at the annual Digital Humanities conference (hashtag #dh09, for the few THATcamp Twitterati who haven’t already experienced the deluge!).

At DH09, I presented one particular cultural artifact that has become a touchstone for me in thinking about the geospatial tools and services we’re building at the UVA Scholars’ Lab.  This is a little journal from 1823, in the private (open-access!) map collection of David Rumsey.  I hope to publish something on it in the coming year (so be a sport and let me share my find with you without worrying about getting scooped!).

It’s Frances Henshaw’s book of penmanship, a wildly imaginative collection of spatialized textual representations of states in 1820s America, together with hand-drawn, -lettered, and -colored maps. If you check it out, you’ll see what I mean and why the subjective and aesthetic qualities of the document are so interesting.  I’d be happy to give a brief guided tour at THATcamp as well.

I want our analytical tools for spatial information to become attuned enough to the interpretive aims of humanities scholars to help us say something about the Henshaw document.  What do we need to articulate and know in order to get there?  The Scholars’ Lab will be hosting some conversations through SCI (the Scholarly Communication Institute) and our NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship, but — as I found last year — there’s no place like THATcamp!

That’s space.  Then there’s the subjective dimension of time.  I never go to a conference without having at least one person ask me about the Temporal Modelling Project, which was a prototyping project I undertook when I was a grad student, in collaboration with Johanna Drucker.  Temp Mod aimed to create a fluid kind of sketching environment in which humanists could model time and temporal relations as they interpreted them in their objects of study.  So you could map time in, say, a Faulkner novel, and concentrate on those subjective qualities of temporality that particularly interest humanists: moments of disruption, anticipation, regret, catastrophe, joy — and create graphical expressions of moments that seem to speed by or drag on.  Out of that iterative sketching, you’d get a formal data model you could use to encode (primarily, we imagined) texts in XML.

Temporal Modelling lost its (bizarre) corporate sponsorship unexpectedly after 9/11 and never really recovered, but the intellectual work was good and I think the time is ripe to consider these ideas again — especially in the broader context of geo-temporal visualization for the fuzzy, inflected, madcap, subjective humanities. Could we look at projects like Temp Mod and artifacts like the Henshaw journal to open a discussion at THATcamp?

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!?

I know there’s been a bit of dicussion back and forth about the best ways to get to and from GMU, but I thought I’d try to get it all together in a central location.  I’m told by the folks at the Hampton Inn (where I’ll be staying, and I’m sure there are others as well) that it’s best to take the Orange Line (presuming everything is more or less normal on it after yesterday’s news) to Vienna/GMU and take a cab.

I’m sure there will be a few people gathering in the lobbies of both hotels Saturday and Sunday mornings – will people be sharing taxis to the campus, or is it walkable?  Google Maps offers a bit of a zigzag walking path and I wondered if there was a short cut.

I saw that the shuttle to GMU from the Metro is normally reserved for students – do they let conference attendees aboard?

Anyway, I’m just looking to get some advice from locals – I’m sure others have similar questions.

Thanks!

I mentioned briefly in my original post that we have a good deal of 19th-century textual material in what are now fairly obscure German dialects; we have scanned the originals and had parts translated, but we have two further goals with this project: 1) encourage more translations of other related material and 2) create a resource/destination for researchers to debate and discuss the materials.  (A further goal is to start digitizing our snazzy Paracelsus collection, once we have this in place as a test case – but that’s down the road).

We have the scanning and digital object handling well underway (or would, if our server upgrade were finally finished, but that’s another story – I may not be able to show off much from this collection, but can demonstrate how we are set up with some other materials), but we are looking for inspirations and ideas for the other two goals.  Since we’re looking for low IT involvement, creating a blog highlighting some of the materials and encouraging discussion in the comments is one idea, but we’d like to avoid creating an additional digital ‘space’ that we’d require users to navigate to (especially since we already have a blog for our collections in general).

Is anyone using a more interactive plugin (or similar more modular feature) to create spaces for discussion in a way that’s still tied to the digital object?  One of our concerns is that there may be a steep IT learning curve for a high percentage of scholars in this particular subfield and we’d like to make sure they all feel welcomed, so ease of use is key.  We are also looking to use the project to reach out to other scholars who might not currently be aware of the materials (likely language scholars and historians in related fields) and feel pretty confident about putting that plan in place once we know what sort of sandbox we can offer them.

Anyway, I would love to hear what suggestions everyone has and am definitely looking forward to seeing some examples of what everyone else has done.

Here is the original submission I made to THATCamp followed by some additional background ideas and thoughts:

Forget the philosophic arguments, I think most people at THATCamp are probably convinced that in the future scholarly manuscripts will appear first in the realm of the digital, I am interested in the practical questions here: What are born digital manuscripts going to look like and what do we need to start writing them? There are already several examples, Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence, Wark’s Gamer Theory, but I want to think about what the next step is. What kind of publishing platform should be used (is it simply a matter of modifying a content management system like WordPress)? Currently the options are not very inviting to academics without a high degree of digital literacy. What will it take to make this publishing platform an option for a wider range of scholars? What tools and features are needed (beyond say Comment Press), something like a shared reference manager, or at least open API, to connect these digital manuscripts (Zotero)? Maybe born digital manuscripts will just be the Beta version of some books which are later published (again i.e. Gamer Theory)? But, I am also interested in thinking about what a born digital manuscript can do that an analog one cannot.

Additional Thoughts:

So I should start by saying that this proposal is a bit self serving. I am working on “a book,” (the proverbial tenure book), but writing it first for the web. That is rather than releasing the manuscript as a beta version of the book online for free, or writing a book and digitally distributing it, I want to leverage the web to do things that cannot be accomplished in a manuscript form. It is pretty clear that the current academic publishing model will not hold. As I indicated in the original proposal above, I think that most participants at THATCamp are probably convinced that the future of academic publishing is in some ways digital (although the degree to which it will be digital is probably a point of difference). But, in working with this project I have come to realize that the tools for self digital publishing are really in the early stages, a pre-alpha release almost. Yes, there are options, primarily blogs, but for the most part these tend to mimic “book centered” ways of distributing information. To be sure there are examples of web tools which break from this model, namely CommentPress, but I am interested in thinking about what other tools might be developed and how can we integrate them. And at this point I think you have to be fairly tech savvy or have a “technical support team” to be able to do anything beyond a simple blog, or digital distribution of a manuscript (say as a downloadable .pdf). For me one of the early models we can look to is MacKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory, but he had several people handling the “tech side.” For me I can get the tech help to do the things I cannot on my own, but is seems pretty clear that until the tools are simple and widely available digital publishing will either remain obscure or overly simple/conservative (just a version of the manuscript).

So, what tools do we need to be developing here? Should we be thinking about tools or about data structures and than developing tools around that? (I realize this is not an either or proposition.) I am imagining something like WordPress with a series of easy to install plugins that would open up web publishing to a much wider range of scholars. Perhaps a “publisher” could host these installs and provide technical support making it even easier for academics. I have a fairly good idea of what I personally want for my project, but am interested in thinking about/hearing about what other scholars, particularly those from other disciplines would need/want.

I’d like to share some work we have done at NC State to bring digital collections to the mobile environment. Now that libraries have made large parts of their photograph and image collections available in digital form on the desktop, the next step is to deliver them via mobile devices that, through the integration of (relatively) large touch screen, faster processors, high-speed connectivity and location-awareness, are becoming an increasingly attractive platform.

“WolfWalk,” a prototype application for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch, is our attempt to leverage these technologies to provide access to a small subset of our library’s digital collections, in this case historic images of buildings on the NC State campus. Users can access these images, together with short descriptions of the buildings, through an alphabetical list or a map interface. Instead of having to access print photographs in a controlled library environment or viewing digital surrogates on the desktop, “WolfWalk” allows users to view these images “in the wild,” i.e., they can view them while at the same time experiencing the real object. Also, by (eventually) making use of the device’s location awareness, we can add a serendipitous aspect to the process of discovering images. Instead of having to browse through a search interface or a virtual representation of our campus, the campus becomes the interface when the application shows users buildings, related images and descriptions in their vicinity.

I’d be interested in hearing what others think about the impact of the mobile medium not only on digital collections, but also how these new technologies and practices could be leveraged in other contexts related to work in the digital humanities.

I would  like to lead a session on the application of Freebase.com to the humanities.  Freebase is “open database of the world’s information”, with an API that allows for integration with other applications (such as Zotero).    I’ve been experimenting with using Freebase.com in the realm of government data, specifically to create PolDB, an “IMDB for politicians” (though my progress has been meagre so far.)   I would like to share my experiences on that front, speculate on the usefulness of Freebase for applications in the humanities (particularly art history), and foster a discussion about the application of other “semantically oriented” techniques beyond Freebase.

I hope I’ve not missed the boat on the pre-un-conference-idea-generating-posts! In brief, I’d like to meet up people interested in a web project visually weighting by color simple semantic relations in literary texts and/or putting together an NEH grant for said project. Caveat: I’m not an expert on this. Here’s my initial proposal, though in retrospect it looks rather stilted and sad:

For the past year or so, I’ve been interested in putting together a small team of like-minded folks to help bring to fruition a data visualization project that could benefit less-prepared college students, teachers in the humanities, and researchers alike. Often, underprepared or at-risk educational populations struggle to connect literary study with the so-called “real world,” leading to a saddening lack of interest in the possibilities of the English language, much less literary study. I am currently working with Doug Eyman, a colleague at GMU, to develop a web application drawing on WordNet—and particularly the range of semantic similarity extensions built around WordNet—to visually mark up and weight by color the semantic patterns emerging from small uploaded portions of text. This kind of application can not only help students attend more fully to the structures of representation in literature and the larger world around them—through the means of a tool emphatically of the “real world”—but also enable scholars to unearth unexpected connections in larger bodies of text. Like literary texts to many students, the existing semantic similarity tools available through the open source community can seem inaccessible, even foreign, to a lay audience; this project seeks to lay open the language that so many fear, while enabling the critical thinking involved in literary analysis. Ultimately, we hope to extend this application with a collaborative and growing database of user-generated annotations, and perhaps with time, to fold in a historically-conscious dictionary as well. We are seeking an NEH Digital Humanities startup grant to pursue this project fully, and I’d like the opportunity to throw our idea into the ring at THATcamp to explore its problems as well as possibilities, even gathering more collaborators along the way.

Here’s a hand-colored version of something like what I’m thinking; I used WordNet::Similarity to generate the numbers indicating degree of relatedness, and then broke those numbers into a visual weighting system. Implementation hurdles do come out pretty clearly when you see how the numbers are generated, so I’m hoping someone out there will have better insights into the how of it all.

To a related, larger point: I always have the sneaking suspicion that this has been done before–Jodi Schneider mentioned LiveInk, a program that reformats text according to its semantic units, so that readers can more effectively grasp and retain content. This strikes me as simlar, as well, to the kinds of issues raised by Douglas Knox–using scale and format to retrieve “structured information.” Do the much-better-informed Campers out there know of an already-existing project like this? I wish the checklist of visual thinking tools that George Brett proposes were already here!

A tweet by @WhyHereNow (Brooke Bryan) “thinking about how we create tools to do things, then the tools come to change the things that we do. #thatcamp” spurred me to suggest a discussion about using visualization tools like mind maps or concept maps or other graphical diagrams to augment research, information management, collaboration, as well as other work processes.

I have personally used mind maps to brainstorm ideas for a long time. Lately I take the early model and expand it into a visual notebook to store collected materials as well as do quick show and tell for colleagues. Recently I learned how to use multi dimensional maps for analytical purposes using the Issue Based Information System methodology.

Mind maps can be much more than quick brainstorm sketches. The available range of stand-alone and networked applications, along with a host of Web 2.0 mapping tools continue to expand. The many ways these tools are being used, with the tips and tricks of the experts, and with advice about which one to use for what result are bits of information that really ought to be shared.

So, I’m proposing an informal session that could grow into an online annotated check list of tools, or at least or at least contribute to another resource like Digital Research Tools (DiRT).

I’ve been putting this off for a while now, especially after seeing some of the really impressive projects other campers are working on.  My job is not research-oriented; much of what I do revolves around operationalizing and supporting faculty projects in the History Department where I work.  What follows is a rather long description of one such project in which students, in the context of a local history research seminar, are tasked with digitizing archival items, cataloging them using Dublin Core, and creating Omeka exhibits that reflect the findings from their traditional research papers.  Despite the fact that the students are typically Education or Public History majors, they are expected to carry out these tasks to standards which can be challenging even to professional historians and librarians.

I’ve written about some of the practical challenges in projects like this here.  For a full description of the project at hand, click through the page break below.  What is intriguing me right now are the questions such projects raise, particularly those relating to content quality and presentation.

What are realistic expectations for metadata implementation?  Is enforcing metadata standards even appropriate in the context of humanities education?  Many trained librarians aren’t even competent or consistent at cataloging, how can we expect more from undergrad History students?  It’s not that they don’t gain from it (whether they like/know it or not), it’s just that poor metadata might be worse than none.  Information architecture is another challenge, even when students have no role in the initial site design.  They can still confuse the navigation scheme and decrease usability through poorly organized contributions.  Likewise, the content students create is not always something we want to keep online for any number of reasons.  Where do you draw the line between a teaching site (as in, a site designed and used for training projects) and one which is distinctly for use by the broader public?  It’s very blurry to me, but I think how you answer that dictates what you are willing to do and what you end up with.  We really want to create something that is generated entirely by students but with a life outside the classroom.  Ultimately though, we will make decisions that best serve our instructional goals.  I think the value is the process, not the result (though it would be nice for them to match up).  We have done some very ambitious and high quality projects working with small, dedicated teams, but working with large class groups has led to some interesting and unforeseen problems.  I wonder if anyone has any idea about how we might be able to replicate that small team experience and quality on this significantly larger scale.

Has anyone out there done a similar project?  I’d love to hear some experiences and/or suggestions on pedagogy, standards or documentation?

I think this fits in to some degree with Jim Calder’s post and Amanda French’s post, among others (sadly, I have yet to read all the posts here, but I will get to it soon and maybe hit some people up in the comments).

OVERVIEW
This past semester, the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at CSU has been training teachers, interns and undergraduate students in the History Department to use Omeka as a tool for exploring archives, sharing research, and curating personal exhibits.  Students in our Local History Seminar are trained in archival research, image handling and digitization, and archival description and subject cataloging, including the use of Dublin Core metadata.  In the interest of harnessing student labor for the benefit of the library, and protecting heavily used artifacts from further deterioration, we have tightened the process so that each participant’s labor may yield results that can be directly transferred to the library’s digital archive, Cleveland Memory , which runs on the ContentDM platform.  Through trial and error, we have devised a barebones metadata plan,  set digital image processing standards, and crafted a workflow that optimizes time and labor investments by students, faculty, and department and library staff.  We hit a few bumps along the way, but have plans to revise our process next semester.

EDUCATIONAL RATIONALE
Holistic experience in history-making, from archival process to research to public exhibition

• Creation and collection of student-generated content (images, maps, charts, exhibits, etc.)
• Hands-on research in physical and digital archival collections
• Image processing (digitizing physical artifacts according to locally-defined best practices)
• Archival description using common metadata standards (Dublin Core)
• Increased awareness of organization and use of metadata in libraries/archives may lead to increase in use and overall research effectiveness?
• Experience using online archival software / publishing platform (Omeka)
• Curating thematic local history exhibits based on area of research
• We believe this increases readiness for employment, teaching, and continued education.

PROCESS
Students choose a research topic in local history, most often a neighborhood, park, district or institution/building with historical interest.  Students are required to write a 15 page analytical research paper based in primary source research.  They collect documents and images from available archival resources, including both digital and physical artifacts.  Items are uploaded to an Omeka installation (csudigitalhumanities.org/exhibits) and described using Dublin Core and local metadata standards.  Non-digital items are digitized according to processing guidelines set by CSU Special Collections.  Using the items they collect, and the content from their research papers, students use Omeka to curate an interpretive exhibit around their topic, which they present to the class at the end of the semester.  Professors spend a limited amount of class time providing ongoing instruction and guidance in technical matters, but generally focus on content.

As Center staff, I met with the class for hands-on sessions in Omeka use and image digitization, and have created handouts and an online student guide (csudigitalhumanities.org/exhibits/guide) containing instructions for using Omeka, digitizing items, and employing metadata standards.  The guide contains general rules for Dublin Core and, as the first semester progressed, has evolved to also address common mistakes and questions.  I track and enforce quality control on new items, and use the MyOmeka plug-in to leave administrative notes on each record containing instructions for correcting errors, as well as other suggestions for improvement.  These notes can be seen only by students and administrators who are logged in with the single shared username.  At the end of the semester, items and exhibits are graded and vetted to determine which will remain online.  Items which contain complete metadata records and meet copyright and quality standards are exported into the Cleveland Memory collection.  The rest are deleted.  High-quality Exhibits remain public, others are deleted or made private.

RESULTS
Despite the extensive documentation, administrative notes, classroom instruction, and my availability for one-on-one consultation, the results in our first run were decidedly mixed. About one-third of students met the expectations for overall quality; another third came very close but made a few significant mistakes.  Common mistakes included use of copyright protected items, grammar and syntax errors in metadata creation, improper use of controlled vocabulary terms, use of editorial voice in item descriptions, and image processing errors (low resolution, poorly cropped or aligned images, etc.).  Others failed to translate their research into well-crafted exhibits, despite the fact that their in-class presentations were almost unanimously excellent.

From an administrative perspective, we also have some work to do to streamline the process.  Some of our challenges involved limitations with the Omeka software, which was not necessarily designed for such projects.

We gave comments via the MyOmeka plug-in, which requires students to log-in and find their items via the public view.  Once they find an item in need of correction, they must return to the admin view to make corrections and cannot see comments without again returning to the public view.  At least one student complained about this cumbersome process.  It was equally difficult for administrators.  While printing out item records and adding handwritten notes would have been ideal for students and instructors, our workflow and other commitments dictated that this would not be possible.

At the end of the semester, we began the vetting process.  I went through and reviewed each item, tagging them with “keep,” “revise,” “remove,” “rights,” and “cmp.”  “Rights” was assigned to items in which copyright status was uncertain.  “CMP” was assigned to items which were already available via the Cleveland Memory project.  The tags were useful in quickly identifying the status of each item in the collection, but moving beyond that point has proven problematic.  For one, the University dictates that we keep student work for up to 6 weeks after the end of the semester.  Were the items and exhibits graded as a final exam, we would need to keep them for a full semester (thankfully, the physical research paper was “the final” for this course).  Additionally, there is no easy way to batch delete or batch edit items from Omeka.  Again, this is not necessarily a shortcoming in Omeka’s architecture, just a limitation of our project design.  Due to each of these issues, we are making items and exhibits public or not public according to our vetting criteria.  Deletions and revisions will have to wait at least six weeks.

We have decided to postpone plans for migration to Cleveland Memory until we can address some of the problems encountered  in our trial run.  We are optimistic that we can improve our instructional and administrative processes next semester, but that will require some new approaches and answers to some of the questions that emerged the first time around.

NEW APPROACHES

Next semester we will use the Contribution plug-in to collect items.  This will allow us to limit confusion about which fields to fill and will also allow us to track submissions more effectively.  Because we still want students to have some experience with metadata standards, and need to collect some additional information for later migration to the Cleveland Memory repository, we have customized the plug-in to include some additional fields.

To solve the issues of grading and revision, as well as required retention, we will use the ScreenGrab plug-in for Firefox, which allows for the capture of complete web pages.  Students will save each item record and exhibit page in JPEG or PNG format, adding them to a printable document that they will submit for review as items and exhibits are added.

We are still trying to figure out a way to modify and delete items in batches.  Since most mistakes involved improper use of controlled subject terms, it would be nice if we could identify a recurring term and edit it in a way that would cascade across the entire installation (e.g. locate all instances of the incorrect subject “Terminal Tower” and replace each with “Union Terminal Complex (Cleveland, Ohio)” ).  This would likely involve a major change in Omeka, which – to my knowledge – does not collate Subject fields in this way.  Batch deletion for superusers, on the other hand, might be easier to accomplish.  Any thoughts?

Students will receive more comprehensive training.  Based on common mistakes and frustrations, we will adjust instruction and documentation accordingly.

At THATCamp ’08 I learned how to draw a smiley face with a few geometric programming commands.

Dan Chudnov demonstrated how to download Processing, a Java-based environment intended for designers, visual artists, students, and others who want to create something without being full-time professional programmers. Dan’s purpose was to show librarians, scholars, artists, and free-range humanists that getting started with simple programming isn’t as hard as people sometimes think. You don’t have to be a computer scientist or statistician to develop skills that can be directly useful to you. Dan posted a version of what he was demonstrating with the tag “learn2code.”

I’m not a trained programmer, was not new to programming altogether, but was new to Processing, and for a while I didn’t have much reason or time to do more with it. But last winter I found myself highly motivated to spend some of my spare time making sense of tens of thousands of pages of text images from the Internet Archive that were, for my purposes, undifferentiated. The raw, uncorrected OCR was not much help. I wanted to be able to visually scan all of them, start reading some of them, and begin to make some quick, non-exhaustive indexes in preparation for what is now a more intensive full-text grant-funded digitization effort (which I will also be glad to talk about, but that’s another story). I wanted to find out things that just weren’t practical to learn at the scale of dozens of reels of microfilm.

Processing has turned out to be perfect for this. It’s not just good for cartoon faces and artistic and complex data visualizations (though it is excellent for those). It is well suited to bootstrapping little scraps of knowledge into quick cycles of gratifying incremental improvements. I ended up cobbling together a half-dozen relatively simple throwaway tools highly customized to the particular reading and indexing I wanted to do, minimizing keystrokes, maximizing what I could get from the imperfect information available to me, and efficiently recording what I wanted to record while scanning through the material.

Having spent plenty of hours with the clicks, screeches, and blurs of microfilm readers, I can say that being able to fix up your own glorified (silent) virtual microfilm reader with random access is a wonderful thing. (It’s also nice that the images are never reversed because the person before you didn’t rewind to the proper spool.) And immensely better than PDF, too.

At THATCamp I would be glad to demonstrate, and would be interested in talking shop more generally about small quasi-artisanal skills, tools, and tips that help get stuff done — the kind of thing that Bill Turkel and his colleagues have written up in The Programming Historian, but perhaps even more preliminary. How do you get structured information out of a PDF or word processing document, say, and into a database or spreadsheet? Lots of “traditional humanists,” scholars and librarians, face this kind of problem. Maybe sometimes student labor can be applied, or professional programmers can help, if the task warrants and resources permit. But there is a lot of work that is big enough to be discouragingly inefficient with what may pass for standard methods (whether note cards or word processing tools), and small enough not to be worth the effort of seeking funding or navigating bureaucracy. There are many people in the humanities who would benefit from understanding the possibilities of computationally-assisted grunt work. Like artificial lighting, some tools just make it easier to read what in principle you could have found some other way to read anyway. But the conditions of work can have a considerable influence on what actually gets done.

More abstractly and speculatively, it would be interesting to talk about efficiencies of reading and scale. Digital tools are far from the first to address and exacerbate the problem that there is far more to be read and mapped out than any single person can cope with in a lifetime. Economies of effort and attention in relation to intellectual and social benefit have long shaped what questions can be asked and do get asked, and to some extent what questions can even be imagined. Digital tools can change these economies, although not in deterministically progressive ways. Particular digital applications and practices have all too often introduced obfuscations and inefficiencies that limit what questions can plausibly be asked at least as much as microfilm does. Which is why discussions even of low-level operational methods, and their consequences, can be of value. And where better than THATCamp?

Hello, everyone! I’ve been reading over everyone’s posts and comments, and letting it all percolate – but today’s my day to finally post my own thoughts.

Here’s my original proposal:

“Digital collections of material culture – how to make them, share them, and help students actually learn something from them!

– “quick and dirty” ways for faculty to develop digital collections for the classroom, without giving up on metadata. For the recent workshop we held at Vassar, I’ve been working on demo collections (see grou.ps/digitalobjects/wiki/80338 ) to evaluate 8 different tools,  including Omeka. In each, you can view the same 8 historic costumes and their metadata, with 43 jpeg images and 1 QTVR. I’m developing my work as a template, with support documentation, for others to use.

-how students can use digital collections and contribute to them, without requiring a huge technological learning curve, especially for students with non-traditional learning styles

-the potential of union catalogs”

Of course these issues cross over in many ways with issues that have already been posted. So, I’m not sure if this needs to be a session, or if it’s more about bringing this material culture perspective to other relevant sessions. That probably depends on how many other material culture people are coming – anyone?

Deep Digital Collections / The Thing-ness of Things

Projects that successfully represent 3D objects are still pretty rare. Current systems of image representation are not sufficient – 1 image per object is not enough. Artifacts also continue to defy controlled vocabularies and metadata schema. For example, one of my current projects involves studying a historic dress inside and out – I have over 100 detail images and complex data (see a sample blog post that shows the complexity of the object).

I’m working to create digital access to the Vassar College Costume Collection, our collection of historic clothing, with about 540 objects dating from the 1820’s to today. Just to clarify, in the field of costume history, the term “costume” refers to all clothing, not theatrical costume.  For about 7 years I’ve been exploring different ways of digitizing this collection, giving students access to a database of the objects, and then sharing their research projects, in a variety of digital formats, as virtual exhibitions.

“Quick and Dirty” Classroom Tools / Low Tech Digital Humanities

In my demos, you can view the same 8 historic costumes and their metadata, with 43 jpeg images and 1 QTVR, in Omeka, CollectiveAccess, Greenstone, Luna Insight, ContentDM, VCat, Filemaker, Excel, and GoogleDocs.

My inquiry has developed beyond the initial comparison of different available tools, to explore a kind of “division of labor” in the process. My approach has been very much on the DIY side, but couched in a collaborative experience. I initially created my demos for a NITLE sponsored workshop at Vassar this past March (entitled “Digital Objects in the Classroom”). Our workshop emphasized the importance of collaboration, and we asked participating institutions to send teams of faculty, librarians, instructional technologists, and media specialists. Perhaps ironically, the demos have mostly been my own work (with wonderful help from Vassar’s Systems Administrator and Visual Resources Librarian). I continue to search for the perfect compromise – for faculty and students to be able to quickly and independently get resources both into and out of collections, while administrators feel comfortable with the security and maintenance of the technology involved.

Student Contributions

Even if you’re not working in a traditional academic setting, I encourage you to view your audience as students. We can use technology as part of a suite of pedagogical tools to provide differentiated instruction for different styles of learners.  What I imagine is a way for students to add to the conversation in ways beyond tagging and commenting – to contribute their own images and research.  Our work in the last couple of years has reinforced this in a backward kind of way. We envisioned a large grant might allow us to carefully photograph and catalog much of the collection, which we could then present to students (on a platter?). Such a grant hasn’t come through yet, but the students have kept on coming! So, each semester brings us a new project, with new research about some of the objects, new photographs that students have taken to support their research, new citations of and links to supporting references. And the database grows. And I wonder, if we did present the virtual collection to students on a platter, would they be as inspired to work with the objects doing their own research? Would it seem as fresh to them? We need to keep the focus on our students and not on technology for its own sake.

Union Catalogs / Federated Searches

For each of our collections we’re working hard to structure our metadata and to define controlled vocabularies. But most of the time we aren’t taking advantage of the sharing that structured metadata allows. Either collections aren’t having their data harvested, or if they are, they’re going into giant collections like OAIster where it can be hard to find them. We need more union catalogs for material culture objects that are oriented for specific disciplines. By harvesting for a more specific kind of union catalog, we can transcend the “dumbing down” of data for Dublin Core standards and create variations that allow for richer data in each of our fields. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but building on Dublin Core or VRA or CDWA can really benefit our specific fields. For collections that have a strong visual component, some form of image needs to be a part of what is harvested and shows up in the federated search.

I look forward to reading your comments – and to meeting you all in person later this month!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the uses of digital maps in literary study, partly because I’ve been thinking about the connections between place and memory for a long time, and partly because I got interested in GIS a few years ago, while working in the UVa Library’s Scholars’ Lab along with some extremely smart geospatial data specialists. There’s been talk of a “spatial turn” in the humanities lately, and there are already models for what I’m interested in doing. Franco Moretti’s maps of literary places in Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 and Barbara Piatti’s in-progress Literary Atlas of Europe have helped me think about the patterns that a map can help reveal in a work of fiction. I’m very much looking forward to hearing about Barbara Hui’s LitMap project, which looks a lot like what I’d like to make: a visualization of places named in a text and stages in characters’ journeys.

Since I came to the digital humanities via a crash course in TEI markup, I tend to think first of markup languages as a way to represent places, and capture place-related metadata, within a literary text. The TEI encoding scheme includes place, location, placeName, and geogName elements, which can be used to encode a fair amount of geographic detail, which can then be keyed to a gazetteer of place names. But there are also markup languages specifically for representing geospatial information (GML, SpatialML), and for displaying it in programs like Google Earth (KML). Using some combination of a database of texts, geographic markup, and map display tools seems like a logical approach to the problem of visualizing places in literature.

But (as I’ve said on my own blog, with a different set of examples) I’m also interested in spatial information that’s harder to represent. There are a lot of ways in which literary settings don’t translate well to points on a map. Lots of authors invent fictitious, and even when one can identify more or less where they’re supposed to be, one can’t supply exact coordinates. Consider Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence, both set in New York at the turn of the century and in the 1870s, respectively. One of my ongoing Google Maps experiments is a map of named places in both novels, focused on New York and Newport, Rhode Island. Both novels explore an intricate, minutely-grained social world, in which a character’s address says a great deal about his or her status. In some cases, the reader can precisely identify streets, points, and landmarks. And I think you can learn quite a lot about the world of Edith Wharton’s novels by looking at the spatial relationships between high society and everyone else, or between old and new money, or between a character’s point of entry into the world of the novel and where (physically and spatially) he or she ends up.

But in other cases the locations are harder to pin down. One can surmise where Skuytercliff, the van der Luydens’ country house in The Age of Innocence, is (somewhere on the Hudson River, not far from Peekskill), but it’s a fictional house whose exact location is left vague. The blob labeled “Skuytercliff” on my map represents a conjecture. And of course geoparsing won’t work if the place names are imaginary and the coordinates are unknown. So: what do we do with unreal places that still have some connection to the geography of the real world? And what if we want to visualize a writer’s completely imaginary spaces? What if we move out of fiction and into less setting-dependent literary forms, like poetry? How would one even begin to map settings in the work of, say, Jorge Luis Borges? Are there limits to the usefulness of visualization when we use it to analyze things that are fundamentally made out of words? Are some texts “mappable” and others much less so? (I’m pretty sure the answer to that last one is “yes.” I have yet to encounter an approach to literature that works equally well for everything from all time periods.)

So what I’d like to bring to the table at THATCamp is a set of questions to bounce off of people who’ve done more work with cartographic tools than I have. In some ways, my interests resonate with Robert Nelson’s post on standards, since I’m also thinking about what to do when the objects of humanistic study (in this case, literature) turn out to be too complex for the standards and data models that we have. If we end up having that session on standards, I’d like to be in on it. But I hope there are also enough people for a session on mapping and the representation of place.

Here’s my original proposal (or part of it at least):

“I would like to discuss the jarring, often difficult and certainly rewarding experiences of those, like myself, who have somehow managed to make the leap from humanities student to digital historian/webmaster/default IT guy without any formal training in computer skills.  While I am hoping that such a discussion will be helpful in generating solutions to various technical and institutional barriers that those in this situation face, I am also confident that meeting together will allow us to better explain the benefits that our unique combination of training and experience bring to our places of employment.  I would also be very interested to see if we could produce some ideas about how this group could be better supported in our duties both by our own institutions and through outside workshops or seminars.”

I’m not sure if this is the right place for this discussion, as I’m guessing that many campers may not share these difficulties.  However, if enough people are interested, I think I’ll go with it.  Related to this discussion, I would also like to talk about people’s experiences or recommendations for resources that could be useful to digital historians in training, as well as better ways to get our message about web 2.0, open source technologies, freedom of information, etc. to our colleagues.

Anyways, let me know what you all think.

The Friday before THATCamp (June 26th) we’ll be holding an Omeka “playdate” that’s open to campers and anyone else who would like to attend. Interested in learning more about Omeka? Already using Omeka and want to learn how to edit a theme? Want to build a plugin or have advanced uses for the software? This workshop is a hands-on opportunity to break into groups of similar users, meet the development and outreach teams, and spend the part of the day hanging around CHNM.

We’ve increased the number of open spots, and would love to see some THATCampers sign up as well. If you plan on attending, please add you name to the wiki sign-up.  Remember to bring your laptop!

Okay, not really.  But I do think this topic is particularly important right now.

This was my original proposal:
I’d like to talk about the role of faculty, IT, and administrators in collaborating to shape institutional strategic plans and planning in general for academic computing and the digital humanities.  I’ve spent nearly 18 months now involved in various strategic and practical planning committees at UMW regarding digital resources and goals for the humanities and social sciences.  Making sure that resources are allocated to the digital humanities requires broad commitments within administrative and strategic planning.  [Not as sexy or fun as WPMU or Omeka plug-ins, but sadly, just as important….]  I’d like to share my own experiences in the area and hear from others about theirs.

And today I would simply add that as UMW is closing in on a first draft of its strategic plan, I’m even more convinced that the college/university-wide planning process is something with which digital humanists need to be engaged.  In this time of dwindling economic resources, however, we also need to be, pardon the pun, strategic about it.  I think we need to figure out when we need to explain concepts, tools, the very notion of what digital humanities is and its place in the curriculum (something even THATCampers seem to be debating), when we need to do full-on DH evangelizing, and when we need to back off from our evangelizing in order to ease fears and/or recognize budgetary realities.  In any case, who else has had to make the case for Digital Humanities or academic technology as part of these processes?

Here’s my original proposal for THATCamp. The question and issues I’m interested in entertaining dovetail nicely, I think, with those that have been raised by Sterling Fluharty in his two posts.

The panel at last year’s THATCamp that I found the most interesting was the one on “Time.” We had a great discussion about treating historical events as data, and a number of us expressed interest in what an events microformat/standard might look like. I’d be interested in continuing that conversation at this year’s THATCamp. I know Jeremy Boggs has done some work on this, and I’m interested in developing such a microformat so that we can expose more of the data in our History Engine for others to use and mashup.

While I’d like to talk about that particular task, I’d also be interested in discussing a related but more abstract question too that might be of interest to more THATCampers. Standards make sense when dealing with discrete, structured, and relatively simple kinds of data (e.g. bibliographic citations, locations), but I’m wondering if much of the evidence we deal with as humanists requires enough individual interpretation to make it into structured data that the development of interoperability standards might not make that much sense. I’m intrigued by the possibility of producing data models that represent complex historical and cultural processes (e.g. representing locations and time in a way that respects and reflects a Native American tribe’s sense of time and space, etc.). An historical event doesn’t seem nearly that complicated, but even with it I wonder if as humanists we might not want a single standard but instead want researchers to develop their own idiosyncratic data models that reflect their own interpretation of how historical and cultural processes work. I’m obviously torn between the possibilities afforded by interoperability standards and a desire for interpretive variety that defies standardization.

In his first post, Sterling thoughtfully championed the potential offered by “controlled vocabularies” and “the semantic web.” I too am intrigued to by the possibilities that ontologies, both modest and ambitious, offer, say, to find similar texts (or other kinds of evidence), to make predictions, to uncover patterns. (As an aside, but on a related subject, I’d be in favor of having another session on text mining at this year’s THATCamp if anyone else is interested.) Sterling posed a question in his proposal: “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?” I’m intrigued by that ambitious enterprise, but as my proposal suggests I’m cautious and skeptical for a couple of reasons. First, I’m dubious that most of what we study and analyze as humanists can be fit into anything resembling an adequate ontology. The things we study–e.g. religious belief, cultural expression, personal identity, social conflict, historical causation, etc., etc.–are so complex, so heterogeneous, so plastic and contingent that I have a hard time envisioning how they can be translated into and treated as structured data. As I suggested in my proposal, even something as modest as an “historical event” may be too complex and subjective to be the object of a microformat. Having said that, I’m intrigued by the potential that data models offer to consider quantities of evidence that defy conventional methods, that are so large that they can only be treated computationally. I’m sure that the development of ambitious data models will lead to interesting insights and help produce novel and valuable arguments. But–and this brings me to my second reservation–those models or ontologies are, of course, themselves products of interpretation. In fact they are interpretations–informed, thoughtful (hopefully) definitions of historical, cultural relationships. There’s nothing wrong with that. But adherence to “controlled” vocabularies or established “semantic” rules or any standard, while unquestionably valuable in terms of promoting interoperability and collaboration, defines and delimits interpretation and interpretative possibility. I’m anti-standards in that respect. When we start talking about anything remotely complex–which includes almost everything substantive we study as humanists–I hope we see different digital humanists develop their own idiosyncratic, creative data models that lead to idiosyncratic, creative, original, thoughtful, and challenging arguments.

All of which is to say that I second Sterling in suggesting a session on the opportunities and drawbacks of standards, data models, and ontologies in historical and humanistic research.

I just managed to read UCLA’s Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 that made the rounds a week or so ago, and I noticed its CommentPress installation hadn’t attracted many comments yet. Anyone interested in a session at THATCamp where we discuss the document paragraph by paragraph (more or less) and help supply some comments for the authors?

Maybe this isn’t the right venue,  but sometimes it’s never too early to start talking about extracurricular activities.   What happens Saturday/Sunday night?   Will Amanda French be leading us in a round of digital humanities songs around the campfire?

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.

Hi all,

Really exciting stuff so far! (Can we make this a week-long event?)

Here’s what I’m up to, thinking about, and hoping to get guidance about from the Manhattan-Project-scale brainpower at THATCamp.

I’ve been working on ways to use semantic web stuff to expose and connect more info about what actually goes on in our classes, and especially in our WPMU environment, UMWBlogs. So far, I’ve been slowly working on scraping techniques and visualizations of the blog data at Semantic UMW. It sounds like this is similar stuff to Eric’s interest and Sterling’s interest — making connections — but in the domain of students and teachers and what they study.

The next phase of it is to get from the blog to the classroom. I want to ask and answer questions like:

• Who’s studying the Semantic Web?
• Is anyone teaching with “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist”?
• Anyone teaching from a Constructivist viewpoint?
• What graduation requirements can I meet through courses that study things I’m interested in?
• Can I study viral videos and meet a graduation requirement at the same time?
• I’m a recruiter with a marketing firm. I need someone who has used Drupal, and is familiar with Linked Open Data.

I’d love to brainstorm about other kinds of questions/scenarios that people would like to answer!

(Here‘s a test/demo of an earlier version, with a handful of both fake and real data. Hopefully I’ll have demos of the updated version ready to roll by THATCamp.)

Part of the mission, and one of the things I’d like to hear thoughts about, is a types classification for the things that classes study. Here’s the run-down of it right now. Love to talk about where this succeeds and fails at being a general vocabulary for what classes study. — maybe even whether there are things in LOC I need to learn from?

Agent (Person / Group)
Culture
Era
Language
Perspective
Phenomenon
–Social Phenomenon
–Natural Phenomenon
Place
Practice
Object
–Artifact
–Natural Object
Tool
Document
Work

So, that’s the kinds of stuff I’d like to share and get feedback about.

I’ve got a handful of posts on this idea (warning! some contain serious RDF geekery, some do not).

And for the folks who are interested and are familiar with SPARQL, here’s an endpoint containing the current state of the vocabs, in graphs named www.ravendesk.org/univ# www.ravendesk.org/univ_t# . Also a set of sample data in graph example.university.edu/rdf/

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.

The bad news is that I think Zotero is about to hit another roadblock.  The development roadmap says version 2.1 “will offer users a recommendation service for books, articles, and other scholarly resources based on the content in your Zotero library.”  This could mean simply that Zotero will aggregate all of the user libraries, identify overlap and similarity between them, and then offer items to users that would fit well within their library.  This would be similar to how Facebook compares my list of friends with those of other people in order to recommend to me likely friends with whom I already have a lot of friends in common.  If this was all there was to the process of a recommendation system in Zotero, then I think Zotero would meet its goal.  But if Zotero is to live up to its promise to enable users to discover relevant sources, then I think there is still a lot of work to be done.

This may seem like a distinction without a difference.  My point is a subtle one and hopefully some more examples will illustrate what I am trying to say. But first let’s define the semantic web.  According to Wikipedia, “The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web.”  Zotero fulfils this vision when it captures citation information from web sites and makes it available for sharing and editing.  Amazon does something similar with its recommendation service.  It keeps track of what books people purchase, identifies patterns in these buying behaviors, and then recommends books that customers will probably like.  Zotero developers have considered using a similar system to run Zotero’s recommendation engine.  These are examples of the wisdom of the crowd in the world of web 2.0 at its best.

Unfortunately, there are limits to how much you can accomplish through crowdsourcing.  Netflix figured this out recently and is offering $1 million to whoever can “improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences.”  The programming teams in the lead have, through trial and error, figured out that they needed to extract rich content from sites like the Internet Movie Database in order to refine their algorithms and predictive models.  This is kind of like predicting the weather; the more variables you can include in your calculations, the better your prediction will be.  However, in the case of movies the concepts for classifying movies is somewhat subjective.  Without realizing it, these prize-seeking programmers have been developing an ontology for movies.  (That may be a new word for you–according to Wikipedia, “an ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.”)  Netflix is essentially purchasing a structured vocabularly and matching software that will allow it to vastly improve the accuracy of its recommendation engine when it comes to predicting what movies its customers will like.

One company that has taken ontologies quite seriously is Pandora, a “personalized internet radio service that helps you find new music based on your old and current favorites.”  The company tackled head-on the problem of semantically representing music by creating the Music Genome Project, which categorizes every song in terms of nearly 400 attributes.  And here is where the paradigm shift becomes evident.  Rather than aggregating and mining the musical preferences of groups of people, like what Amazon does with its sales data on books, Pandora defines similarity between songs in terms of conceptual overlap.  In other words, two songs are related to one another in the world of Pandora because they share a whole bunch of attributes–not because similar people listen to similar music.  (I told you this would be a subtle distinction.)  This is an example of how the semantic web trumps web 2.0.

Now let’s return to our discussion of Zotero.  As mentioned earlier, the envisioned recommendation engine for Zotero has been compared to Amazon’s recommendation engine.  The ability of users to add custom tags underscores how Zotero was influenced by web 2.0 models.  Apparently Zotero developers looked forward to the day when the “data pool” in Zotero would reach critical mass and enable the recommendation system to predict what items users would want to add to their library.  As we have seen, these models have inherent limitations.  They make recommendations on the basis of shared information, rather than on the basis of similarity between concepts.  I think at some level Zotero developers sensed this problem.  That is why they probably designed Zotero to capture terms from controlled vocabularies as part of the metadata it downloaded from online databases.  Unfortunately, though, some users and developers have said that imported tags, such as subject headings from library catalogs, are pretty much useless in Zotero.  Furthermore, the fact that Zotero comes with a button for turning off “automatic” tags, and that some translators sloppy or fail to capture subject headings, suggests that most users would rather avoid using these terms from controlled vocabularies.

And so the problem with Zotero is that its users and developers generally resist incorporating ontologies into their libraries (item types and item relations/functions are notable exceptions).  That may sound like a very abstract thing to say.  So let me provide you with some concrete examples of what this would look like.  The first is a challenge I would like to issue to the Zotero developers.  It has been said that Zotero would allow a group of historians to collaboratively build a library on “a topic lacking a chapter in the Guide to Historical Literature.”  My “bibliographer test” is a slight variation on this: 1) pick any section in this bibliographic guide, 2) enter all but one of the books in the given bibliography into Zotero, and 3) program Zotero’s recommendation engine so that, in the majority of cases, it can identify the item missing from the library.  Similarly, I would like to see us develop algorithms for “related records searches.”  You may think this is impossible, but this capability already exists in the Web of Science database.  And as we have already seen, Netflix and Pandora provide examples of the kind of semantic work it takes to make these types of searches feasible.

After reading this post, you may feel that Zotero has been heading down the wrong path.  I prefer to think of Zotero as having made some amazing progress over the last three years.  And I think the genesis of the ideas it needs are already in place.  In my estimation, we need to think more expansively about what means to carry out semantic searches with Zotero.  It also seems to me that we need to think more carefully about balancing the benefits of web 2.0 with the sophistication of the semantic web.  I will be excited to see what the developers come up with.  And maybe if I work more on my programming skills, I can help with writing the code.  As I see it, this will be an exciting opportunity for carrying out theoretical research in the digital humanities.

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