I’m coming late to the blog party, and can’t believe what an amazing group of people we have here! Dan, can we all crash for the week?

My initial proposal to THATcamp was to set up a kind of birds-of-a-feather session on policy and management issues around open source development in higher ed — so I was glad to see that Tom is thinking more broadly, but along similar lines. (And of course all the sustainability talk fits right in here.)

My department at UVA supports and contributes to a number of open source faculty projects, and we also have a few of our own going on right now: Blacklight (which my colleague Bess may present), Fathom (a kind of showcase/social networking portal project being built, at least initially, for the digital humanities community at UVA), and a new, still nameless, web-services framework for delivering GIS data for a variety of scholarly applications. (Can’t link to the latter two yet; developers would squeal, but sneak peeks are possible.)

These are three projects coming out of the same lab, but with radically different institutional / policy-level situations regarding their open-source status. We’re in a situation where patent and IP policies designed for big pharma can squelch digital humanities development without even noticing. It’s a vexing issue at UVA — and I suspect more broadly, too. Would anybody be interested in helping me do a kind of a survey and see if we could share approaches, successes, horror stories, etc?

Some other thoughts: we’re working a lot with geospatial data in collaborations with faculty and also in figuring out how best to manage and deliver library GIS collections at UVA. I’m a geospatial neophyte (suddenly managing GIS projects) and am eager to learn from Sean and others with more experience.

The temporal is the next dimension poised to smack us in all these geo-referenced projects, and we’re keen to explore some of the special problems around representing time in humanities data. Along those lines, maybe as a part of a session on historical visualization, I’d be happy to share some experiences from the late, lamented Temporal Modelling Project I undertook with Johanna Drucker about six or seven years ago. This was an attempt to create a visual “language” for expressing the kind of inflected temporalities you see in literary and historical documents. Can you put impatience on a timeline? What about déjà vu? Foreshadowing? Regret? (Temp Mod is also an example of an abortive DH project. Why are there so many? Foreshadowing? Regret?)

On with the random notes: if somebody can re-energize me about gaming in the humanities, please do! I used to teach (and do) game development at UVA, but I think I got Ivanhoe‘d out.

Finally, count me in on visualization and aggregation — Jeanne and Laura’s conversation about federating archival data and what you do with it once it’s all there. Collex and NINES have been fruitful, but I’m ready to imagine some next steps.

One of the things I hope to spend a little time discussing with people at THATCamp is how we can get digital humanities off the desktop and out into the community.

To give you an idea of what I’m up to on that front, next summer I’m teaching a “field studies” course here at George Mason that will take a dozen or so undergraduates down into the Northern Neck of Virginia (the peninsula  between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers) to begin building a website called Becoming Warsaw. Warsaw? It just so happens that there is a small town in this region called Warsaw (I’m an East European historian, hence my curiosity about it) that took the Polish name back in 1831 in solidarity with Polish revolutionaries who were attempting (unsuccessfully) to throw off Russian rule that year. This is a very interesting historical moment that raises lots of questions, the first being how the hell people in a rural Virginia community even knew what was happening over in Russian Poland?

We’re going to spend two weeks in the area gathering raw historical information by working in local archives, at historic sites, plantation ruins, cemeteries, etc., etc. Everything we gather will be dumped into an Omeka database and will then become the stuff of a website on our course topic.

In addition to the field work, we’ll be establishing connections to the local community of historically interested parties–historical societies, genealogists, museum directors, history teachers–and will be inviting them to join in our effort, adding material to the database throughout the year. My hope is to have the students see this as both a historical research project and a community outreach project.

Will it work? Who knows. But I’m going to find out the hard way…