Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

sustainability redux

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

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?

A note from the bleeding edge

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

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.

THATCamp Reminders 5/28/08

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

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 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 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.

More Presentation Ideas

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

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

 

 

city as museum

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

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!