I know I’m getting into the game a bit late, but I’d like to throw out a few ideas for a shared session or set of demos.

I’m the lead developer of a project in the English Department at UT Austin for collaborative word-level annotation of literary texts. The goal of our application is to take a digital edition of a text (possibly a TEI file exported from an application like Adam’s) and allow a class of undergraduates (or graduate students) to write all over it, producing shared tags and threaded comments associated with specific words or phrases.

The project incorporates ideas from a number of different existing applications: In many ways it’s like the Institute for the Future of the Book’s CommentPress, but the annotation can be word-level rather than paragraph-level. It is intended to operate a bit like Awesome Highlighter or the many online whiteboard applications, but is more structured. It is inspired by elements of Word Hoard, Juxta, and the Amazon Online Reader, but it’s multiuser and networked.

We currently have an early prototype of the application hosted at UT’s Computer Writing and Research Lab. The prototype is implemented in PHP and MySQL and uses the Smarty templating engine. We’re only beginning to think through the possibilities for visualization: for example, the prototype uses “heat maps” to show density of commentary, etc.

I’d love to hear about similar projects, or other solutions that people have used to allow students to do collaborative close reading online.

I’d also like to talk about the ways that people are modeling texts. Of course XML and TEI are great for archiving and exchanging texts, but it seems to me that we also need to be thinking about the kinds of data structures that we use to represent texts in our applications. Treating texts as trees can be a useful fiction, but it also limits what we do with them. Our application represents texts as collections of ranges over tokens, from which XML or HTML trees can be generated on demand (the system is inspired by Gavin Nicol’s Attributed Range Algebra). I’d be interested to hear how other people are tackling the problems posed by intersecting hierarchies and XML.

Things are really coming together for this weekend’s THATCamp, including an impressive set of session ideas posted to the community blog. Registered campers are encouraged to use the blog before this weekend, as well as during the unconference to share ideas.. so don’t stop! Here’s just a list of all the blog posts so far, including links to their author’s THATCamp profiles:

• Hello THATCampers! by Jeremy Boggs
• THATCamp Room Setup by Dave Lester
• Building a F/OSS DH Infrastructure by James Smith
• The Joys of RDF by Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn
• RDF Tools by Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn
• Making Things by Bill Turkel
• Swapping Subscriptions by Ben Brumfield
• Hotels and Transportation by Dave Lester
• Teaching Digital History by Jeffrey McClurken
• Civic Engagement, Teaching, and Digital Humanities by Marjorie McLellan
• Scholarship and Digital Texts by Adam Solove
• Omeka Hack Session by Dave Lester
• Playing History: Video Games and the Humanities by Trevor Owens
• Out and About by Mills Kelly
• An archive aggregator by Laura Mandell
• Flash and … by David Rieder
• Using technology to maintain the orality of oral history by Kristen (Krissy) O’Hare
• THATCamp T-Shirts are Here.. by Dave Lester
• Dork Shorts by Adam Solove
• Time and Space Session? by Sean Gillies
• Text mining and visualizations by Rob Nelson
• Challenges to Historical Visualization: the Need for an Event Standard by Tom Scheinfeldt
• 2 Ideas by Tom Scheinfeldt
• Visualizing Aggregated Data by Jeanne Kramer-Smyth
• Crowdsourcing Transcriptions by Jeanne Kramer-Smyth
• Playing Historian by Will Riley
• Digital Objects & Local History by Anna Kruse
• Exploring research methods by Lisa Spiro
• Whither museums? by Matthew MacArthur
• Creative Commons and digital projects by Karin Dalziel
• Search and digital projects by Karin Dalziel
• Bridging the Divide: The 3D Component by Kurt Knoerl

If you’ve recieved feedback on your ideas and/or would like to organize a session based upon the blog discussions, email us. We’ll be organizing the finalized schedule this weekend once everyone is here, but the more definite sessions we have lined up the less time it will take to get going on Saturday morning.

Over the last two years I’ve grown increasingly interested in how online organizations can bridge the divide between the Internet and the physical world we live in. My background in underwater archaeology and history blended well with my interest in digital museums as a tool for teaching the public, hence the Museum of Underwater Archaeology (the MUA is an online only organization). The material culture side of me, however, feels constrained by a web only format and has sought ways to reach out to the actual classrooms and communities we wish to engage.

To that end the MUA created teaching kits to send to schools around the world, visited college campuses and field projects to interview its contributing writers, and is working toward becoming a “distributed” museum where our physical exhibits would exists in small bricks and mortar museums around the world rather than in one centralized facility. The kits not only teach students about underwater archaeology but they also integrate the website’s content by mining the posted entries both old and new as case studies. The graduate student interviews conducted onsite became part of the student’s posts as well as a tool for evaluating the site’s effectiveness. The physical exhibits will be the most involved effort undertaken by this organization. Working with local institutions we wish to create both the physical and web versions of an exhibit in an effort to make the information as widely accessible as possible.

I think there are links here with some of the concepts others have mentioned in their blogs including Mills Kelly’s May 20^th post on “how we can get digital humanities off the desktop and out into the community.” I’d very much like to hear how others are making those connections.

Though I submitted Creative Commons as a topic when I signed up for THAT Camp, lately I have been very interested in the various types of search- either search that makes new uses of existing metatada or search that gets new metadata from users. This seems to fit in with what a lot of people have posted about – data visualization in particular. I see data visualization as a kind of search, along with timelines and anything else that helps people find what they need. Also part of this discussion is figuring out how to get users to add their own data to facilitate better search. Making it a game is one method, while rewarding them with some kind of recognition is another.  This will probably come up in several other sessions, but I was wondering if anyone would be interested in a session talking just about different methods of presenting data to users and helping them find what they are looking for.

I’m especially interested in brainstorming ideas on how to make Omeka’s search more powerful- I think there is a lot of potential there.

When I submitted my ideas for THAT camp, I listed Free Culture (Creative Commons in particular) and localization of the Internet as my topics. I think the localization thing is covered by several proposed topics here, and I’m anxious to sit in on all of them (realizing, of course, that I will likely have some conflicts).

As for Creative Commons, I’m not sure how much this crowd a) knows about Creative Commons already and b) wants to know. I think most academics- especially those involved with a digital projects- get pretty tired of copyright talk. Though it is necessary, it’s not the most fun topic. For most, anyway.

Creative Commons is an attempt at self regulation to clean up the copyright mess. As an (amateur) artist, I use CC to license my own work, and I am fascinated by how it has worked out for authors like Cory Doctorow. I worry, though, that the model is not sustainable- especially in the case of incompatible licenses. As an individual creator, deciding how to license my own work is hard enough, but when you take a digital project, mix in old and new materials plus original scholarship, you have the recipe for a huge mess. I have more questions than answers, including:

• How should digital projects be licensed? Should the scholar retain full copyright and dole out permission as requested? Or should he or she try and choose a license that allows for use from the beginning?
• How can creators of digital projects make users aware of copyright without hitting them over the head with it? This is especially a problem with projects that contain some public domain materials and some that are still under copyright.
• What kind of support do institutions give for alternative licenses? I know many universities require copyright to the university by default.
• How can we build copyright decision making into programs like Omeka. I think Flickr does an OK job of this, they allow users to select a CC license when uploading photos, and restraining search to CC only materials. But I think it could be done even better.

What relates most to THAT Camp is that last point- because right now, it is really hard to consistently find, use and keep track of Creative Commons work. If people are interested, I could give a brief overview of various licenses and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of creative commons and other licenses.

From XKCD, a CC licensed webcomic.

Though I have an academic background in history, I feel like a bit of an outlier in this crowd as my career has been spent in museums.  At the National Museum of American History where I work, the role of my little group is to extend the museum experience online as well as develop a range of digital products both inside and outside the museum.  One can find both marked similarities and differences between what museums do and the work of academic institutions, but I can see already that I will find much interesting food for thought by hearing about the work of you all – especially in the area of open-source, reusable toolsets as we are always seeking to do more with less.  For my part I bring an interest in, and focus on, audiences and how to engage them in history.

Museums are unique, highly-valued places of learning—literally and figuratively, temples of knowledge.  When it comes to the online space—where museums compete with innumerable other sources of information and users call all the shots on when, where, how, and for what purposes they interact with museums, their objects and content—it is no surprise that museums find themselves somewhat at a loss.  Do they become just one more source of online information to be appropriated, used, and remixed (no doubt for nefarious purposes)?  How (if at all) do museums distinguish themselves in the online space?

On the other hand, when one considers the proliferation of information online, perhaps museums do possess a few virtues which might be useful: as focal points of community and lifelong learning; as sifters and interpreters of subject matter; as preservers of cultural heritage.  We are accomplished at doing these things in physical space—should we attempt to fill the same role online?

In a recent talk by the well-known historian Patricia Limerick to museum professionals, she pleaded with museums to “help” academics learn to speak to a broader audience and provide more opportunities to reach the public.  It seems to me that more conversations should be happening about how to take all the great tools and content being created by academic institutions and perhaps leverage the exposure and expertise found at museums to widen the audience for your work—not to mention figuring out how to preserve it for the future.  Is this something we can talk about at THATCamp?

In a compelling blog post several months ago, Tom Scheinfeldt suggested “that we are entering a new phase of scholarship that will be dominated not by ideas, but once again by organizing activities, both in terms of organizing knowledge and organizing ourselves and our work.” To what extent will the availability of massive amounts of digital information, along with tools to organize, visualize, analyze, and disseminate that information, catalyze changes in research methods in the humanities? Since THAT Camp is bringing together folks representing a range of fields—history, philosophy, English, Chinese, library science, anthropology, classics, archaeology, American studies, museum studies, media studies, and even biophysics—I’d love to participate in free-wheeling discussions about emerging research methods. Indeed, I think that questions about research methods will underlie many of the conversations we will be having at THAT Camp, whether we’re talking about visualization, text analysis, gaming, teaching, or history appliances.

Let me toss out some questions to consider:

1. What are the core research methods in different humanities fields?
2. What is the impact of information technology on those fields?
3. What new research methods are emerging? And how are traditional research methods being affected by the availability of new tools and resources?
4. As new forms of evidence—e.g. text mining results, visualizations, and simulations—and new forms of scholarly communication—e.g. videos, blogs, hypertext essays—emerge, to what extent will the conventions of scholarly argumentation change?
5. What kind of training programs should universities develop to prepare students to do research in the digital environment?
6. What kind of support do researchers need from academic departments, libraries, information technology groups, funding agencies, scholarly societies, etc.?

I find questions about research methodology fascinating (and overwhelming), but my interest in this topic grows out of three particular projects:

1) In collaboration with a colleague in the library and a professor in the English department, I’m developing a series of workshops on research methods for graduate students in English. I’m planning to infuse the workshops with digital humanities goodness, but I’m still trying to figure out what the students need to know and how best to cultivate that knowledge.
2) To explore what it means–and takes–to produce digital scholarship in the humanities, I’m remixing my 2002 dissertation on bachelorhood in 19th C American culture as a work of digital scholarship. So far I’ve determined how many of the works on my original bibliography are available online, experimented with text analysis tools, and begun working on a short video based on my article on the publication history of Reveries of a Bachelor, a key bachelor text. I’m blogging my questions and observations both about my project and about digital humanities scholarship in general at http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com, and I’m sharing my raw research notes at http://lisaspiroresearchnotes.wordpress.com

3) I manage Rice’s Digital Media Center, which aims to support digital scholarship by providing access to tools and training. I view one of my key duties to be helping researchers identify and learn how to use tools appropriate for their projects, such as bibliographic software and collaborative apps. To promote awareness of such tools, my colleagues and I are in the process of launching the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki, which is both a directory of research tools and a collection of concise reviews written with researchers in minds. As I work on this wiki, I’m wondering how to connect tools to research methods; the kinds of questions researchers ask should drive the selection of tools and not vice versa.

I’d welcome questions and suggestions related to any of these projects, and look forward to learning more about everyone’s work. I’m hoping that I’ll come away from THAT Camp with new ideas and energy—and perhaps some new collaborators as well?

As I read over Will’s and Trevor’s posts, I’m definitely keen on hearing more about games and archives.  Will, I sincerely appreciate your approach (casting evidence as treasure, as you put it, and sculpting a motif of discovery).  While I’ve only dealt with this in an imaginary space (alas, no programming background), I’m also convinced that we need, especially when it comes to education, to challenge the paradigm of passive spectatorship in archives/museums, virtual or otherwise.  And while taxonomies/data sets are clearly integral to the programming side of digital archives, I’d also like to see this epistemology of deduction supplemented by an affirmation of digressive exploration. For my digital humanities class, I spent the latter half of this past semester envisioning some sort of scheme that would cast digital museum objects as catalysts to discursive exploration– using an object as the impetus to radial or rhizomatic imagining/research/discovery rather than as the “here we have a Colonial hornbook, and here…,” dead-end culmination of un-embodied (and dare I say sometimes uninspired?) classroom discussions.  I meant to make it game-like, but I think it ended up more art-project than anything else.  I’d love to sit in on this session and hear what sorts of things people have done with this topic!

I’m also interested in joining up with Marjorie, et al., as they discuss digital history and civic engagement.  While I can’t anticipate whether discussion will head more toward digitally integrative pedagogies for pedagogy’s sake or on-the-ground installation/modification of web tools, I’d like to lobby for place-based pedagogy (in association with digital tools, of course!) as a framework for engaging and enlivening local history, especially in rural areas.

And what about combining the two and making local history one great, exciting scavenger hunt that could really bring home– literally!– the impact of local objects on local history (and vice versa)?  Sounds like this sort of thing is in the air…I’m looking forward to discussing!

I’ve been thinking about an Omeka plugin that would encourage K-12 and college students to play in the archives. How can one play in the archives? Playing and exploring are very similar. Playing is about exploring a possibility space. When a cat plays with a string, it is exploring the spatial possibilities of the string, possibilities largely defined by physical constraints. Similarly, when one plays a game of soccer, she is searching for those constrained actions that lead to the highest score. As playing takes on more specific goals (and constraints), it becomes a game. Playing and gaming is not always fun; sometimes it’s tedious work, especially if the exploratory actions are not linked to explicit and immediate rewards. So again, how can we play in the archives? Moreover, how can students play in the archives, so that they can learn how to think historically?

During THATCamp, I’d like to brainstorm some potential answers to these questions.

One answer, I’ve come up with is a treasure hunting game bundled into an Omeka plugin. The idea is that students break into teams, and then collectively search the virtual archive for certain items, adding them to their team basket. Before the treasure hunt begins, teachers must create one and assign it to their class.

To create a treasure hunt, teachers explore the archive, and tag archive items with questions, answers to which are partially or fully answered by information contained in the archive items. After students sign up for a treasure hunt created by their teacher, they are randomly assigned a team. Each team of students is assigned a random set of questions for that treasure hunt. The students must search the archive for items that help answer their questions. To answer a question, the student must write a textual answer and link it to archive items in their team basket. The archive items serve as evidence for their answers.

Different students can play different roles in this search game. Some students will search the archives, adding interesting archive items to the team basket, while other students will craft language to answer their questions, supporting their claims by linking them to collected archive items.

What is playful about this treasure hunt game? First, it reframes archival research as a social experience, where students experiment with different ways to jointly browse the archive, collectively looking for clues, hints, and connections to the questions at hand. Second, it recasts evidence as treasure, encouraging students to re-imagine research as a creative process of discovery and persuasion.

Extensions to the treasure hunt plugin include:

1) allowing the students to help construct the treasure hunt

2) allowing teachers to share questions and treasure hunts

3) allowing teachers to attach hints to items

4) devising competitive metrics between groups (shortest time to answer all question, highest number of votes per question, teacher’s favorite, etc.)

We may also want to think about how games such as “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” structure historical thinking.

The other idea I would love to talk about is the idea of distributed document transcription as I explain it in my blog post: Archival Transcriptions: for the public, by the public.  While I do love what reCaptcha does at the word level and Footnote.com does with locations, names and dates – I still think there is a place for a centralized web-based system where digitized documents can be uploaded and then transcribed & verified by volunteers. I think this would be especially powerful for smaller archives.

I would love to hash out this idea with others as well as learn what other projects like this might already exist.