Thanks to everyone for great THATCamp! Some last links:

Final report on THATCamp Iowa City

THATCamp Iowa City participant responses

Storify of Tweets during TCIC

Flickr photos

Shared notes from workshops (Google Docs):

• Teaching With a WIKI
• Docs / Databases

Shared notes from 3/31 sessions

• Museums and Social Media
• Online Learning
• Digital Collaboration

Shared notes from 4/1 sessions

• Digital / Physical and here (scroll to end)
• User Experience / Design

And if you haven’t seen them, there are some lovely videos in the post below. One last thanks to all of our campers!

I interviewed a handful of campers for these videos. Many thanks to the participants!

Introductions and takeaways: who are you? What do you do? What’s one takeaway from THATCamp Iowa City?

Where do the humanities and technology converge for you?

March 31 session on digital humanities pedagogy | liberal arts undergraduate research & education

One of my pet projects for the past several years has been to advocate for the acceptance of digital dissertations (and digital scholarship). I spent two years interviewing grad students, faculty, grad directors, and deans to find out why (or more often why not) their institution accepted digital dissertations and how they prepared (or again more often why they didn’t prepare) their grad students to write/create/design digital projects. Hands down the biggest stumbling block for departments and universities was the lack of a sustainable place to deposit such dissertations.

Enter my current project, which just received NEH funding, to build an opensource repository for digital dissertations. I’d be interested in having a brainstorming session to think about what this type of a space should look like. Some of the questions I’m tackling:

• Should the repository be centralized or decentralized?
• How can digital projects be maintained (e.g., emulation, upgrades, etc.)
• How should such a repository deal with IP issues (e.g., copyright vs creative commons)

Those questions would be a way to get the conversation started, but by no means represent the only questions I have as I embark on this project. We could maybe even work in some hack with our yack!

I don’t know if this needs to be its own individual session, but I’d like to talk about ways to get undergraduates involved in creating and using DH projects.

Maybe take as a starting point this DH Manifesto written by undergraduates at Bloomsburg University?

Coming from a residential liberal arts college, I am hoping to exchange ideas with similar institutions about how the digital humanties fits within the mission and resources of a liberal arts college. 

More particularly, I’d like to talk about using digital tools to help students grow as writers and collaborate with others.  As an example, I can share a few ideas for how I’ve used Twitter, Skype, and WordPress to do a film/writing exchange project with another college.

I’d be interested in a ‘what is new media, and where is it going?’ discussion.

I teach in an English for New Media degree program. So, I’m trying to always stay on top of how media is changing and how our changing needs are shaping media. We often hear people talking about social media and needing ‘social media experts’, for example, and there is so much more to that set of skills than just knowing how to incorporate facebook, twitter or YouTube into our projects.

With the rise of mobile technology, apps, channels, streaming, watch instant, and the new Google Play, what should we be doing with it all? And where is the new new thing?

I’m chewing on the slippery topic of collaboration, and proposing a general discussion session to brainstorm and compare experiences and ideas. While the digital can facilitate collaboration in the humanities, I’m more interested in how the people work with each other through the tech, than how the tech works (also important, but I think it’s gotten more attention already). What are some best practices for fostering successful collaborations in the digital world, and what are examples of successful collaborative projects – artistic, academic, or otherwise? (Particularly interested in interdisciplinary collaborations.)

I recently attended the interactive portion of the SXSW conference in Austin, and went to a few design* sessions. From these and from looking through the descriptions of other design sessions, I gather that Digital Humanities presents its own set of particular design problems. Some ideas for discussion:

• How to operate as a sole designer at a DH center or department? How can you get input, build a community of others to bounce ideas off of or to honestly critique your own work?
• How can you get your stakeholders to honestly critique your design beyond “I don’t like purple?”
• How important is good design (here I am referring to a more traditional definition – colors, layout, pixel pushing) anyway?
• What does it mean to design for DH/education, and how is it different from the for profit world?
• What kinds of designers exist in DH/education, and what are they expected to do?
• Are there ways to use some of the testing efforts of the “big guys” (A/B testing, formal usability tests) without the expense?
• Am I the only one obsessed with design?

Some reading: Jeremy Boggs’ post about DH design, Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. My post on my design process. Any others?

* I am using design here to mean not just the actual website design but the interaction, experience, usability, etc. I find in Digital Humanities it is rare to get one designer, let alone several who can each specialize in one of the above.

Just wanted to get the wheels spinning on some possibilities for the hack sessions. It looks like we’ve got a big chunk of time plus some shorter sessions if there’s interest. I’m really in love with the idea of making something during the camp but don’t know how many people will be into that.

But what to work on… We could follow up the Omeka tutorial with some Omeka development? Build a quick and dirty mobile app? Write a twitter bot? Map some data?

Inspired by the event/video, Digital Humanities and the Future of Libraries, I’d like to have a big picture discussion about real possibilities for DH initiatives in public libraries. The New York Public Library has carved a path for digital projects and digital preservation of cultural heritage by public libraries, but what can smaller, non-research libraries do? In addition, with the IMLS Learning Labs grant competition under way, we are seeing more opportunities for libraries’ visions to align with grant funds that will support them.

Questions I’m interested in exploring:

• What populations can digital humanities initiatives in public libraries serve?
• What learning opportunities can be tapped to engage patrons (in person and from afar) with the library?
• What goals must a public library have wrt mission and purpose to be suited for digital humanities initiatives?
• How can public libraries create partnerships with institutions (governmental, academic, cultural, grant-funding) to support digital humanities initiatives?
• What would it take for libraries to become local digital publishers, documenting the past and present experiences of their publics?

I’m proposing a discussion-y session on the role of the physical in the digital humanities. I’m coming at this as someone with an interest in the material history of books and texts and who works mostly with physical library collections. But I’d love to have a broad conversation about the physical structures/formats that we use to do digital work [ie. hardware, work spaces, etc.] and the way we account for and represent the physical attributes of objects when we create digital surrogates. We could also talk about physical computing and get theoretical about possibilities like what Gary Frost calls the “interdependence of paper and screen,” digital metaphors of physicality, and more. I’d love comments/additions/ideas!

A couple jumping-off points:

Trettien and Elish. “Acts of Translation: Digital Humanities and the Archive Interface.” MIT 6 Conference, 2009

“It’s time to bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual—time to use more than just your fingers to interact with your computer. Step outside of the confines of the basic computer and into the broader world of computing.”
— Tom Igoe, Physical Computing

If anyone would like to talk about project management, I would love to be in on that conversation. I would like to hear about what has worked successfully and what hasn’t.

I would like to propose a session on crowd sourcing. I would like to talk about what sorts of projects people are crowd sourcing and the tools they use.

I’m interested in sessions that might cover the teaching/study of literature and writing using such  digital techniques as text analysis, data visualization and databases.

We propose a session devoted to conversation between librarians, technologists, and digital humanists.  For digital humanists, what support could librarians and technologists provide that would help you in your research and teaching?  For librarians and technologists, what can grad students and faculty do that would help you help them with digital projects?

– Chris J. and Julia B., Grinnell College

I would love a session that provides a (REALLY) introductory crash-course on html. The trouble is, there’s no way I can “lead” this session–the reason I need it is because I don’t know the first thing! So if there are any others interested, and if there’s anyone out there who’d be willing to lead us onward, thank you all!

Online Learning is of course a hot topic in education of all levels and likely intersects in some fashion with all of our work/academic lives. Would people be interested in discussing this topic as it pertains to student learning? I’d be interested in people’s experiences with this or other forms of asynchronous instruction, as well as real time teaching that more closely approximates in-classroom lecture and discussion.

This could either be during a specific session(s) or run self-serve throughout the camp.

Stop by the DRP tutorial room to lay down a small chuck of your knowledge on video! Record a few-minute screencast on any subject in your realm of expertise or you feel comfortable teaching other participants. No idea too big or too small! A computer with easy-to-use screen capture software, a web browser, office software, and microphone will be provided.

Know something about how Heidegger sees poetry and technology as two contrasting ways of “revealing?”

Have thoughts on Node.js’s implementation of the observer pattern using the EventEmitter class?

Know where to look to find writing about the Second Great Awakening in Jacksonian Era African-American newspapers?

Ideas don’t have to be complex or grand. Just share a few minutes of your knowledge and at the end we’ll see how we overlap and diverge. It could be fun.

A comment from Florence Boos:

I think I’ll be looking for sessions on digital archives, data management and software for literary sites which contain manuscript material.

Hi! I am excited to attend my first thatcamp! I am researching the use of social media in museums to extend the learning experience (specifically non advertisement purposes). Is anyone else interested in this topic? I would love to hear from others and gain different perspectives.

Is anyone interested in discussing/learning about options for archiving data?  I see that there was a discussion in 2009:  Jeffrey McClurken, Archiving Social Media Conversations of Significant Events.  Since data storage (I am mostly concerned with audio-visual, but this could be anything) is a moving target, this is something that I would like to talk about.   Laurie Graham (Anthropology)

Melody went through and turned the application information submitted by participants into a Wordle (yes, she knows they can be overdone, but they still serve a purpose). Take a look to see how we describe ourselves. (Click the image to enlarge.)

On Wednesday, October 26, 2011, Katherine and Melody participated in the Pecha-Kucha presentations organized by the Digital Studio for the Public Humanities. This month, DSPH staff member Nikki Dudley uploaded the video recording of the PowerPoint and voice-over to YouTube. We’re sharing it here for those participants who may have missed attending the Pecha-Kucha in person.

Came across this blog post mourning The Death of the Unconference retweeted by the THATCamp Twitter account, and it was a great reminder for us to get another post up about what THATCamps are for. The tl;dr version worth highlighting here is that THATCamps thrive on the active participation of the people there. “Participants” are just that–they participate in the greatness of the event; they contribute to a productive outcome. The programming is not top-down, which means that you get out of it what you put into it.

As organizers, we want to provide the space, the technology needs (wifi, power outlets, projection capabilities), and sustenance (food and coffee). We encourage our participants to be open to new ideas, be flexible with their expectations, and to be vocal in the discussions.

We very much look forward to everyone being involved in the discussions!

As if you needed another reason to spend a weekend in downtown Iowa City, the Mission Creek music festival is the same weekend as us! So we can all have fabulous discussions during the day, then head out for some wonderful live shows in the evenings. They’re still announcing artist and ticket info, but so far we know that David Cross will be doing a show, and the Magnetic Fields and various other cool bands will be performing.

In a related note, our registration is currently open! We’re at about 30, and planning on capping at 75. So get your spot soon!

Stumbled upon this video and love the introduction in the first couple of minutes. From those who have come before, we present to you the 3 ground rules of THATCamps!

The rules are written out on Tom Scheinfeldt’s Found History blog.

THATCamp Iowa City will run Friday, March 30 – Sunday, April 1, 2012. We are still in the early stages of planning, so if you would like to help plan let us know!

Registration will begin the first week of January 2012.

Email: thatcampic@gmail.com

Twitter: thatcampic

Mailing list sign-up: ow.ly/7c1Vk