I mentioned this in my earlier post–there are many faculty grappling with how to define and evaluate the quality of applied, public, collaborative, and/or digital scholarship. The digital work takes many forms including publishing a monograph as an electronic book, developing research tools and models, blogging, building Web resources for education, and producing public projects like Mark’s Euclid Corridor Oral History Project in Cleveland. I’ve written about this a bit on Tellhistory. I would like first to learn, from those more directly involved, about broader digital humanities initiatives on this front and to discuss what more needs to be done. When departments with public history graduate programs do not recognize traditional peer-reviewed print publications about public history as scholarship — it seems like there is a lot that needs to be done to support the greater emphasis on methodology, collaboration, and organization that Tom Scheinfeldt addressed in “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?”

If there is interest, I’d like to have a session on web mashups:  what they are, how you can make them, and specifically, how they can be applicable to the humanities.  For instance, one specific application I’ve been focused on recently is that to integrating such tools as Flickr and other applications into the classroom for the teaching of art history.  Another application is how to turn Zotero into a mashup platform.

My original THATCamp proposal mentioned some playing around I have done under the inspiration of Bill Turkel’s mapping of libraries that hold copies of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis.

I adapted Bill’s Python scripts to screen-scrape Worldcat holdings records for a number of thematically related publications, and then made a script to create some PDF maps using the GMT software (Generic Mapping Tools) rather than Google Maps. I now have a couple hundred publications in a MYSQL database and have set up a small project using the Django development framework to browse the information, although I haven’t incorporated mapping into the framework. This is a personal hobby project at the moment, and I have not yet had as much time as I hoped to develop it further.

Although I could demo GMT and Django at a basic level (I’m no expert) if there is any interest in them, the larger issues I’m interested in discussing concern aggregation and visualization to support inference. Some clear connections here are Laura Mandell’s Archive Aggregator, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth’s Visualizing Aggregated Data, Tom Scheinfeldt’s Challenges to Historical Visualization, and Karin Dalziel’s Search and Digital Projects.

It’s exciting to see how much is going on with visualization and with data linking, and how swiftly the barriers to entry are dropping. We need experiments of many kinds, including free-form play, to figure out what the tools are good for. Without limiting the experiments, I’m interested in thinking about how it is that a visualization or data pattern can come to mean something and support some kind of inference. That’s different from search.

Within the area of bibliographic data of various kinds, what starts out as “metadata” (created with a particular context in mind of search and discovery, description and access) can have an additional role, provisionally, as primary data. When I do a search in a library catalog, or a timeline visualization in Zotero, although that can be a means of discovery for particular items, and it may not need to be anything more than that, it can also be a direct provocation to interpretation—if I see a pattern, and if there is some historical hypothesis that can explain that pattern. How can we think more clearly about when such inferences are warranted, and what information researchers might need to better evaluate them? And what would it take to develop the standards and tools to better enable this kind of exploitation of existing data? I would like our library catalog searches not to return twenty results at a time with a “next” button, but to offer the full set of results in a single standard form to be downloaded or piped directly to whatever other tools we might have for further processing.

In addition to this kind of discussion, I’m very much interested in digital civic engagement, in sustainability and project management, and in the demos and tools discussions, and in the RDF-related presentations. I posted a comment to Tom’s “event standards” post that I think bridges between the point made above and my novice curiosity about RDF.

There is such a range of interesting stuff here! Enough to go all week and not run out. I’m looking forward to meeting you all.

Wow, I am recently back from a long vacation and reading up on all the posts. This weekend should prove very interesting! Several posts have resonated with projects I’m designing at Alexander Street Press, a scholarly publisher of online databases in the humanities. I know I’m rather late to suggest a session, so I’ll be happy to play it by ear and demo what we are up to in relevant sessions. Here is some background before Camp:

•  Krissy’s post on oral histories and Vertov was relevant to what we are working on in video. In opera, dance, and history, we are developing Critical Video Editions that allow for a more scholarly analysis of video. The problem with most video currently online is that access is almost always at the full work level or at the small clip level with no context of the overall piece. Just as technology enables text analysis, data mining, and other advanced research with texts, we are aiming to create tools to enable that kind of study with video. In particular, we are working on ways to clip, annotate, and segment video at a more granular level as well as enable searching on the subtitles or transcript of a video. I’ll be happy to share a beta of what we are working on, and I’d love to see other ideas.
• Several posts mention visualizing time and place. We have implemented the Simile timeline in The Gilded Age and would like to learn more about how others are using timelines. We are in the planning stages integrating our content into Google Maps, especially with historical letters and diaries and local history images. Tom, Sean, Anna, and others all touch on aspects of this. I’m wondering how others have dealt with a large amount of information on a map (how to represent 500 letters from a single town, for example.) We are also playing with the intersection of space and time (letters over time in a city, etc.). I’d love to see how you are thinking through these issues.
• Text mining is of particular interest, especially as described in Rob’s post. We are beginning similar experiments with our nineteenth-century American documents. In particular we are looking at how the controlled subject vocabulary we’ve developed in our Civil War Letters and Diaries database can be used as training data to mine for dates, events, and people in our Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines database. We are collaborating on this with ARTFL at the University of Chicago and are just in the beginning stages.

My background is in instructional design, so I’m personally curious about the pedagogical implications of all our ideas. How can a technology create a way of teaching and/or learning that previously wasn’t possible? How are we advancing scholarship and learning?

I look forward to meeting you all Saturday.

 Andrea

Following on Tom’s and Chris’s posts, sustainability has emerged as an important issue. Let me offer a couple quick words on the subject.

1) Sustainability demands not just funding but digital infrastructure, including both hardware resources and technical knowledge/competence.  How do we build and sustain technical competence in a university, institution, or community? How do we reward it, nurture and develop it? This includes developing such competence among faculty.

2) It seems to me that sustainability also demands collaboration between multiple partners. Within universities, this might mean between faculty and librarians, between faculty and technology/computing folks, developing technical services that support digital humanities (its great to see digital humanities centers here–I want to learn more.)  But, it also means collaborations across institutions and across universities. How can we build sustainable collaboration that advances multiple projects–and collaborations in which technology is embedded and integrated as part of the inquiry itself? And, how do we encourage meaningful scholarly collaboration, not just “advisory” boards?

I may be a bit older than most of the campers — I used my first computer in 1969 and have been on the bleeding edge of the new technologies game since the late 70s, when I turned a box of IBM cards into a dissertation on men’s clothing. Lately I’ve been feeling cranky and burnt out, particularly after a wicked experience with a hybrid course last fall. I am looking forward to sucking up as much positive energy as possible during THATCamp, and wouldn’t be averse to sharing horror stories of others who have the sting of having innovation smack you backwards. I’m not looking to bitch; I want to figure out what went wrong and save myself some pain next time.

I live in the Maryland suburbs, near UMd and usually prefer public transit, but would be open to carpooling or just hitching a ride to GMU from the closest Metro station and back.

As we get closer to this weekend I wanted to clarify some lingering questions. Feel free to leave comments with any additional questions.

Times and Schedule
Registration and breakfast for THATCamp begins at 8:30am on Saturday, and we’ll be meeting and building from 9am through 5:30pm. On Sunday we’ll follow a similar schedule — breakfast at 8:30 and sessions beginning at 9am. Breakfast and Lunch will be provided free of charge both days.

Location
CHNM is located on the fourth floor of the Research 1 building on the main Fairfax campus of George Mason University. Parking is available across the path at the Sandy Creek Parking Deck. Driving directions to George Mason can be found online at http://www.gmu.edu/welcome/Directions-to-GMU.html Research 1 and the Sandy Creek Parking Deck can be found on the online campus map at http://coyote.gmu.edu/map/fairfax.html. We’ll start on the first-floor on Saturday and upstairs on Sunday. You’ll see us wearing our THATCamp t-shirts.

Registration
Due to space limitations, we accepted ideas/proposals for sessions in March and put a cap on the number of attendees this year. If your proposal was accepted but you’ve had difficulties with the THATCamp blog, email us and we’ll help you out. For those who missed out this year, we’d encourage you to propose an idea next year.

Forming Sessions
Many of you have posted on the THATCamp blog, which has been terrific. If you’d like to collaborate with others to create a session, email us ahead of time so we can have a rough idea of rooms/numbers. Of course, you’ll be able to add sessions once you arrive as well.

See you soon.

Greetings, all! Looking forward to meeting all of you. Since this is my first ever trip to D.C., I am coming in early so I can go to the Mall or whatever all day Friday. So if any of the rest of you are coming in early or have free time, I’ll be at the Courtyard by Marriot by GMU on Thursday night. You can get me on Twitter @LGM1 if you want to grab a beer Thursday, or sightsee on Friday.

As for the conference . . . so many good ideas . . .

I am more of a “mash-up” artist than a programmer these days. I certified as a web dev back in 2001 right between the transition from ASP to ASP.NET. So if anyone wants a session on Active Server Pages, SQL Server 7, or developing with VB 6.0, I am your man ; )

My interest these days is in figuring out what to do with all the cool technologies that are out there, and how to get them into the hands of faculty around the world. We have barely scratched the surface of getting a real installation base of digital publishing tools such as Simon Fraser/UBC’s OJS, and the digital repository tools that are out there. Those tools alone will revolutionize the publication process in academe if those tools are distributed properly.

That leads to my second big concern with all these tools, which echoes what Tom Scheinfeldt wrote about earlier, and that is the sustainability of the tools we create. One of the major weaknesses in my mind with the way academe is organized is that everything is grant funded and faculty run. The problem is that grants expire and faculty move on to new projects. This creates a high likelyhood of “abandonware” if we don’t come up with ways to sustain our projects in the long run.

So, with the Pronetos project that I started, we decided to go ahead and make it a for profit entity. We have just acquired our first customer – a public entity that wants us to help them convert one of their publications to an Open Access, all digital academic journal. We are running it for them as a hosted application. We can do this for any number of organizations and institutions. The revenues earned ostensibly will help us add new features and roll out new tools on a consistent basis.

We are also planning to take the existing Pronetos social network and turn it into a non-profit organization and at the same time make it an open source project. This will allow the community using the community to develop the features they want, and allow for different types of funding opportunities. 

So that is my bid to try to address Tom’s question of sustainability and running our projects more like a business (I think our model will be somewhat like the Canonical/Ubuntu model???). Like Tom, my M.A. in Applied Historical Research hardly prepared me to address these challenges, but I am confident that we can all figure something out!

Presentations at the conference? I’d love to do a ‘bird’s of a feather’ or loose-knit panel on sustainability, and as mentioned I am really interested in mash-ups – linking together the applications that are out there to solve major systemic problems in academe.

See you all there!

Chris Blanchard

Building on threads already being offered, I hope to extend those discussions in both theoretical and practical ways. Theoretically, I want to explore the city as a museum (following on Anna Kruse’s recent post) and, practically, I want to speak about phase II of our Euclid Corridor History Project, which seeks to do just that.

In what ways are city’s museums, collections of stories and objects, to be collected, curated, and interpreted? How do digital tools (such as Omeka) help us with this work? Is it desirable to move from the physical universe to the virtual universe, especially when thinking about curating cities?  What are the implications for teaching, research, and public history?

Questions like these have become central to my work in Cleveland as our Center for Regional & Public History at Cleveland State has transformed Cleveland and Northeast Ohio into a learning laboratory for undergraduates, K-12 teachers and their students, and community members. Our work in this area began about ten years ago with forays into exploring the history of public art through the Cleveland Cultural Gardens. More recently, we are exploring how to integrate our interpretive work with the online collecting arm of university library, best embodied by their Cleveland Memory Project (with over 20,000 items currently available on regional history, and over 100,000 additional items being slowly added, and which is now integrated with ten regional libraries in Ohio’s Heritage Northeast.)

In November, phase I of our signature project, the Euclid Corridor History Project will be up and running.  The project  to interpret the region’s history and remake place in Cleveland emerged from a public art project for  the Greater Cleveland Regional Transportation Authority $168 million effort to develop rapid transit along the city’s spine, Euclid Avenue. We have envisioned a “virtual” Euclid Avenue that will run parallel to the “real” Euclid Avenue, with interfaces between the virtual, historic world and the physical world of buses and transit located at key points along the corridor. Embodied by 19 history kiosks (shown on a blog entry at our testing of the prototype in July 2007 at Cleveland’s Ingenuity Festival) that will be located at 12 stops along the corridor, the project has as its goal to transform the city into a museum. We have develop a kiosk interface that is map driven and potentially dynamic, especially if we can figure out how to use Omeka as the underlying CMS for the project, all of which would come into existence in phase II of the project.

As we finish phase I of the project and begin developing a dynamic version in Phase II, embodying web 2.0 principles, we are faced with a number of practical questions about technology, project management, institutional coordination, and lingering philosophical questions about the possibilities of transforming the physical world into a virtual museum.

The project itself underscores the broader question about turning cities into museums and about civic engagement, following on Marjorie’s thread from earlier in the month.

But, there are lots of practical issues tied to this process that cannot be ignored, at least in my experience.These include how to build and maintain the technological infrastructure. What technologies? Whose role is the technological expertise? How do we pay for it? Whose server? Whose responsibility is it for maintaining that community memory? Is it really the purview of universities?

In our projects, we have been collaborating with undergraduates, k-12 teachers and their students, community groups, and major cultural institutions.  We all might be able to agree upon a model of shared authority, but really, how can authority be shared between and among these groups? Each, after all, has different institutional, economic, and social positions? What induces a museum such as the Cleveland Museum of Art to participate, making their vast digital collections public? While that might be the future, part of the problem is that their educational programs derive a revenue stream from providing programs to teachers that use/involve those images? What happens if we propose solutions that all but remove the institution from the interpretive frame?

Moving from problems of shared authority, in terms of display and interpretation, to the question of shared resources, how do we build an institutional framework for such collaborations? Is it merely about creating the repositories and asking for contributions? How can we then get those contributions to stream into the collections? How can we build meaningful and comprehensive collections in this fashion. Or, is it desirable to develop a deeper and more profound level of collaboration–an active process–in which institutions and individuals would become invested in the making contributions to such a collection? It would seem that the latter approach requires an institutional investment in personnel resources, which is expensive.

Finally, how do we explain this history 2.0 model in a way that can engage funders, not to mention partners in the process? Greater Cleveland RTA has serious worries about the veracity of content on the street; but in a world of shared authority, some of that ownership is given up to the community. Indeed, among the most significant of the remaining challenges for our current projects is the process of educating the community broadly about history 2.0. It turns out the majority of our partners are spooked about losing control over sole authorship and historical objectivity, not to mention that traditional community organizer types have relatively unsophisticated understandings of technology.

Those are just some of the question on my mind, presented in a rather stream-of-consciousness fashion as I mull over some of the issues that I want to explore. I look forward to hearing what the *right* questions are and how we might answer them!

I just finished drafting a science fiction novel as part of my thesis.  The difficulty wasn’t so much finding a plot — those are easy to come up with — but creating a world and keeping myself consistent in its presentation.  If I were doing a physics thesis, I’d have stacks of papers to keep me on track.  I could compare what I was doing against what’s been published and make corrections without having to remember everything or decide everything myself.  What’s the value of e today?  The same as yesterday and it’s published in a dozen different places.  But did Adam have two parents or four?  I have to decide that and stick with the answer because it has significant consequences.

A traditional novel is a linear narrative that takes the reader and changes them, along with the characters.  It has a beginning and an end, even if they are left out.  Part of the experience of science fiction is the reader’s immersion in an unfamiliar world.  This immersion can challenge preconceived notions that the reader brings to the text.

(more…)