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.

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