Some of us who work on the computing infrastructure that supports digital humanities talked at THATCamp about the need for a forum where we can discuss non-academic technology topics but with an implicit context of digital humanities.  This is a forum where we can share our experience as system administrators and application developers.

I’ve created the DH-Tech@listserv.tamu.edu list: listserv.tamu.edu/archives/dh-tech.html.  Subscription is open to anyone who has an interest in technology in a digital humanities context.

Has anyone read or made use of “Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage” by Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine? I found it to be a bit dense and hard to get through. Any other suggestions for recent scholarship on new media/cultural studies?

I’m missing the types and quality of discussions we had at THATCamp. We were encouraged by the THATCamp organizers to use this blog as a way of continuing our discussions.

So to that end, let me point to The Bamboo Digital Humanities Initiative: A Modest Proposal, a recent and thoughtful blog post by Sorin Matei (Purdue University) on the Project Bamboo that I first learned about via Dan Cohen. I’m in the process of writing a response and am very curious about what you all (THATCampers and others) think about the ideas in the post.

Bess Sadler was quick to realize the need for bot to log our chats, and setup thatcampbot for us. Thanks, Bess! If you’d like to look back on some conversations had in IRC, they’re online now, including separate logs for the room-specific thatcamp channels in 401 and 450.

Although the IRC channel has thinned out from our high of approximately 30 campers, we can keep the conversation going by sticking around. Prospective attendees for next year can do the same. We’re #thatcamp at irc.freenode.net.

Jeremy, Dave, Tom, Dan, CHNMers (who I must be forgetting), & fellow campers:

Thank you to everyone, especially the gang at the CHNM, for making the weekend so excellent and thought provoking!

If any of you lose the blue paperclip, here’s the link to American Social History Online.  We welcome partnerships with you and your institution.   If you are interested in contributing a collection of 19th and/or 20th century digital primary resources (MODS only, please), or would like to collaborate in other ways, please contact us.

Hi all,

I started a THATCamp set on flickr – so far it only has one picture, but I’m sure it will grow.

If any of you upload pictures to your own accounts, please use the “thatcamp” tag.

Is it obvious I’m a total hack?

The project I wrote up in my application was to demo adding Zeroconf to Zotero, with the goal of having a little tool for anybody with a Zotero collection to run to let them instantly see and “borrow from” the collections of people nearby, like in the same office, or in the same coffeeshop, or in the same part of the library stacks. I’ve made a lot of progress on this and with the help of a few Zotero- and otherwise code/network-savvy campers I think we can finish this well enough to pull off a compelling demo of the idea.

If you’re not already a coder, but might like to learn to hack some, I recently started a video tutorial series called learn2code. The goal is to introduce basic concepts of programming using the Processing computer art platform. Processing is very easy to learn and incredibly fun to use, and can make a magnificent platform for data visualization and interaction. I’d love to do a quick session introducing Processing, since it might be a tool you can use in your work, and it really is a lot of fun!

Also, I spend most of my time working on something called the World Digital Library. We’re prepping for a spring ’09 release, but in the meantime, we’ve learned a lot about how to build an app like this (multi-lingual faceted search with Solr was a big one), and I’d enjoy the chance to give a tour of what we’ve done so far. More importantly, though, I’d like to learn from you what we might be able to do at the Library of Congress (where I work) to help make our resources like WDL and others more useful in digital humanities work.

How do we move from print versions of variorum editions, to marked-up versions, to basic and (yet non-existent but imaginable) sophisticated visual interpretations of them?

A project I’m currently working on seeks to bring together several existing standards and tools some of which – (TEI) standards for markup of digital texts, collaborative annotation, and timelines – have been proposed for discussion. I would like to offer some of our thoughts about possible directions for visualization in collaborative variorum and critical editions, as well as ask for suggestions.

I’m working, with Sean Gurd, a classics scholar at Concordia University in Montreal, on a tool for collaborative comparison and annotation of classical (and potentially any other) texts. Such a tool would display a visual timeline of a given classical text, with versions of it from antiquity to our own time, with translations, linked to commentaries made in published sources, plus ongoing users’ comments.

The idea takes off from Sean’s work on different versions of Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides, where he argues that in most cases there are no “originals” for classical texts – they are often known only in excerpts, translations, or annotated versions that are much younger than the missing “original.” In such cases, versions, translations, and commentaries constitute the work itself. A digital representation of such a “work in progress” would make real something that so far exists only as an abstraction.

When we looked for interface models for this project, we couldn’t find them at such major classics websites as the Perseus Digital Library or the Thesaurus Linguae Graeca – these are great compendiums of texts but have minimal user interaction features. Neither the wiki versioning interface in Wikipedia, nor the Simile Timeline seem entirely adequate. Sadly, the most evocative versioning/timeline interface so far seems to come from the timeline of backups in Leopard Mac OS. And while there is nothing wrong with borrowing from major industrial designers – Zotero borrowed some of it interface features from iTunes – ideally digital humanities should try to develop their own comparably elegant interface designs.

Elena (of Concordia Digital History Lab, Concordia University, Montreal)

P.S. I’m also interested in crashing a related suggested session on analyzing video/audio and critical video editions because I work on Vertov, the video analysis tool that came up in the discussion.

I want to think a bit broader about digital history and the wider historical community, particularly in an international setting. In the US, digital history has definitely gained momentum, whereas in for instance Norway, the term “digital history” has not even been used. We have some projects that would classify as digital history, but in general these are one-way digital presentations of material rather than truly collaborative web 2.0-style projects.

I am working on a Norwegian-language article on digital history for the major history journal in Norway, and I find it quite challenging to translate much of the context of doing digital history. Since we don’t have many large, visible digital history projects, showing the relevance of digital approaches to mainstream historians is hard. Being at THATcamp will hopefully give me some help here, but for now I’d be interested in thinking about ways to make digital history more international. The Zotero people have done a great job here (I have translated parts of Zotero to Norwegian), but I think digital history projects that want to be truly open to the larger community has to consider the localization issue.

Looking at the range of interests represented so far on the blog, I also wanted to share an idea that caught my imagination raised recently by Geoffrey Rockwell, digital humanist and TAPoR director, at last week’s New Horizons in Teaching and Research 2008 Conference at the University of Virginia.  The humanities research process has made quantum leaps in terms of widespread access through mass digitization efforts such as Google Books and the Internet Archive, and the development of citation tools like Zotero and text analysis tools.  These enabling tools have and are making significant impact on the discovery and selection stages in the humanities research process.  These however are discrete steps in the whole process.  Geoffrey envisioned the day when there would be a comprehensive tool or suite of tools that would carry research data from the very beginning stages of search & discovery, through selection, text analysis, and right through to publication.  He painted a future where humanities scholars can move and relate research material through the entire research cycle, not just portions of it.  What would a tool or suite of tools like that look like?

I’m intrigued by Chris Blanchard’s Pronetos project.  At the International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS) at Monticello, we’ve been exploring ways to build an online community of Jefferson scholars, historians and research fellows (past, present & future), where they can identify and link up with other scholars working in similar topics relating to the life, times, and legacy of Thomas Jefferson.  We think of it as an extension of the physical space and community we provide at Kenwood for scholarly exchange and discourse, and a means for fellows and scholars from all over the globe to continue conversations beyond their time at ICJS.  We’ll like to see a research commons emerge that incorporates collaboration, sharing of sources, critiquing of draft papers, joint development of conferences & symposia, reviews & recommendations, a repository of research papers, toolkits for historical analysis, etc.

I can definitely see the potential of creating a social network built around a specialized focus, but linking out to a wider network of Early American historians, and then also to scholars in Pronetos and other scholarly social networks.

I’d be interested to learn from folks about other F/OSS like Pronetos out there.  What do folks think about adapting Facebook, or Mediawiki to do something similar?  Is there a good way to manage different discussion threads over time so there’s some coherence?  How do we encourage scholars who are less comfortable with technology to participate?  How do we incentivize participation, contribute content, and share research?  In other words, how do we enlarge participation beyond the 20% who contribute 80% of the content?  And how do we remove real and perceived barriers to participation from the remaining 80% of folks whom we want to draw in?

This probably falls at least partly under the general heading of sustainability, but I would be interested in a mini-session or discussion about development practices and patterns for small teams in academic settings.

My development team was recently expanded from myself to myself and two undergraduate programmers, and we’re currently in the process of setting up a system with a few basic tools: Mercurial for distributed revision control, Trac for bug tracking, task management, and documentation, and some ad-hoc mod_rewrite sorcery so that we can easily deploy and try out our own revisions and each other’s.

I would be curious to hear about other people’s experiences in similar situations. What worked? What didn’t?

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.

Though I’m way late in doing so, I did want to just introduce my project to the folks here before we all converge (if only hours before). I don’t think it’s covering any drastically new ground but maybe ties in to a number of the different conversational threads that have been going through these posts. I’m happy to demo what we’ve got this weekend, but equally happy to watch & learn from the audience.

Encyclopedia Virginia is a new project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Quite a few different state and regional encyclopedia projects have cropped up over the past decade; EV is one of the first to do so with a mandate to create entirely new entry content instead of simply publishing online a preexisting print encyclopedia.

We got charged, as I’m sure most of you have been, with creating a web project that would take advantage of the latest & greatest web technologies while also building itself for longterm sustainability (seeing as how an in-depth state encyclopedia like ours could be 10 years in content development alone, so we’ve got to have technology that can nimbly adjust to changing web standards, trends, etc.).

To that end, we’re borrowing a few tricks from digital libraries and archives, and encoding our entries in TEI. In some sense it’s overkill — this content is all digitally-born, so much of TEI’s capabilities w/r/t annotating archival manuscript is lost here. Hopefully, what it empowers down the road is some interoperability between EV content and other regional encyclopedia or digital library content, and some small immunity to the changing web trends over the long course of our content development.

We’ve built a custom CMS that ingests TEI and strips out various elements into your standard MySQL database for web delivery. We perform a similar task for our media objects, creating METS records for each object which the CMS ingests and strips apart. While, again, this in some ways constitutes quite a bit of overkill, it makes more sense when we try to think about the project as both an online encyclopedia and a digital library, and we’re hoping that the flexibility and openness offered by XML will reap benefits for us down the road.

So, a few different things I’d love to talk about over the course of the weekend (not including all of the great things I’ve already read — my curiosity and interest are piqued!):

1. What is our responsibility vis-a-vis creating content that is accessible with the technologies of both today and tomorrow? How do we build digital creations that can themselves be lasting archives?
2. Are archival standards like TEI and METS appropriate for digitally-born content? Obviously, EV is doing this, but I don’t think it’s a given that it’s always the right choice.
3. (one close to my heart) What is the responsibility of digital archives w/r/t copyright and intellectual property? I manage EV’s media objects, finding things we can use in all kinds of archives, and struggle with this every day — as I try to get as many objects as possible delivered to the public, without getting sued. What role can humanities institutions and projects play in this culture battle? I think particularly there may be some overlap with the interest in Creative Commons that was expressed earlier.

See you on Saturday!

A side-note to travelers: I heard a report on the radio that the Woodrow Wilson Bridge is going to be down to one lane this weekend.  If that’s right, anyone is coming in on I-95 south might want to look for non-95 routes.  Anyone know more about this?

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 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.

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.

In my thesis, I make use of layers of conspiracy to engage the reader (the top layer being the text itself as a “conspiracy of one” on the part of the author to convince the reader that there’s a story).  I want the reader to toss around possible narratives that could explain what’s in the text and test them to see if they are consistent.  A kind of “scientific” fiction.  I invite exploration of the text and the world I build even though it is a static and linear presentation.

As the author, I find the world I’ve created to be quite engaging.  Almost all of the information I have on it isn’t in the novel.  Instead, the novel assumes that the reader is familiar with it already, as if the novel took place in a contemporary society.  I don’t explain a lot.  It’s just there.  If the point of view character wouldn’t notice it or act on it, then the narrative doesn’t cover it.  Any feelings of unfamiliarity on the part of the reader should be just culture shock.

The next step I want to take with the material in my thesis is to create a virtual world that reproduces the experience of the reader, but interactively.  While the original thesis invites a “passive interactivity” from the reader, I think it would work better as an interactive system that encourages active participation: a MUD.

I’ve been playing around with MUDs off and on for a while.  I’ve never gotten enough done to actually have a game to show, but I’m starting to get things organized: 216.32.80.146:6661/ (until my DNS secondary starts resolving the hostname [mofn.net] again).

A system such as a MUD allows me to have several complex plots going at once.  It allows the player to explore at their pace, even hopping between plots as they see fit.  World of Warcraft has done well in setting up their quests to push the player along in a narrative, but an overall limited set of goals isn’t yet apparent there.  My goal in a game is to have a few meta-plots that drive everything else, even to the point where players find out there’s really another plot (or conspiracy) behind the series they thought were the meta-plots.

I’m using the Dead Souls LPC mudlib as a basis.  It’s not open source or public domain, but it’s a free download.

I’d be interested in a session on interactive fiction, creating interactive worlds, perhaps even a walkthrough of LPC and a mudlib (which I could put together).

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 digitalscholarship.wordpress.com, and I’m sharing my raw research notes at 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.

I would love to discuss ideas for visualizing aggregated data.

My personal focus has been on descriptive data about archival record groups and manuscript collections – with a stress on subject terms, quantity of materials (think total linear feet), subject terms and physical location of the materials.  I worked on a prototype visualization tool called ArchivesZ – but I have also seen many other inspirations for alternate approaches.

General topics I would like to include:

• leveraging standard markup, such as EAD (Encoded Archival Description), to support aggregation of  information about collections both within and across institutions
• the challenge of non-standard subject terms
• the coolest visualizations we think could be adapted to this type of data (my current obsession being the TimeRiver as exemplified by the NY Time’s box office revenue visualization)

I think that these ideas could coordinate well with what Laura mentioned in An archive aggregator.

I am already committed to talking about historical visualizations and event standards with my buddy Jerm. But I’d also really like to see/attend/crash two additional panels:

1) Something on management: Project management, organizational management, staff management, financial management, resource management. Digital humanities work has put a lot of us in the position of managing fairly large “businesses”—work for which our graduate work emphatically did NOT prepare us. I’d love the chance to discuss management challenges and strategies with other campers. A group therapy session, if you will.

2) Something on funding, and more specifically on sustainability, both for digital humanities projects and digital humanities organizations. Dan, Mills, and I talked about sustainability on the last Digital Campus, but there’s a lot more to be said. It’s a huge issue both for us and for our funders, and one around which there’s a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding. It would be nice to start a dialog at THATCamp.

Anyone interested in either of these ideas, please chime in with comments.

Hello, THATCampers! Jeremy and I have been thinking about doing something on the genres and challenges of historical visualization in the digital realm.  We’d like to take a catholic view of visualization, considering everything from simple timelines to rich visual reconstructions such as Rome Reborn.  The former have gotten a pretty bad rap over the years, but as historians, we personally tend to be just as skeptical of the latter.  We’ll tell you why at Camp

One of the things we’d like to discuss in particular is what we see as one of the primary roadblocks facing quality historical visalizations of all kinds: the fact that there aren’t any good or widely accepted standards for describing and marking up historical events. Digital historians have managed to do a lot with maps and documents, places and artifacts, because there are good and well established metadata standards for describing these units of historical analysis (e.g. longitude, latitude, KML, MARC, OAI, etc.)  But we don’t have anything comparable for marking up happenings, which are at least as important as place and stuff to historical discourse.  There are, however, several contenders, including HEML, Microformats (hCard, hCalendar, Geo), and iCal, and we’d like to bounce these around to see if any stand out or can be made/hacked to do the job. At the very least, we’d like to start a conversation and encourage smart people to start thinking about just what a useful event standard would look like.

We were thinking Tom might introduce the session with some thoughts on historical visualizations in general and on timelines (and their persistent audience popularity) in particular.  Jeremy could then introduce the more specific (i.e. meaty/practical/useful) topic of event standards and demonstrate a proof-of-concept for implementing various Microformats for creating maps, timelines, and other visualizations with ads from the Virginia Runaway Slave database. To round out the session it would be great if we could find a couple campers with more experience working in Second Life, gaming, or 3-D reconstruction to join us to share their thoughts on the role (or lack thereof) of time-centered and other standards in more immersive visualizations. Finally, we’re totally open to suggestions from campers who would like to take the session in another direction altogether. Jump on board!

Tom and Jeremy

I’d like to second Laura’s suggestion about a session on textual visualizations and document archives.  I’d like to add to that the issue of text mining.  I’m soon going to be beginning a text mining project using a couple of collections of nineteenth-century American documents: the Valley of the Shadow Archive and the complete run of the Daily Dispatch (Richmond, Virginia, paper) during the Civil War.  I emphasize the word beginning.  I’m really suggesting the panel this as a humble supplicant.  I know that Bill’s done some work on text mining (and I’m already indebted to him for his very thoughtful blog posts on the subject), and that Dan, Jeremy, and Sean Takats are beginning a major text mining project at CHNM–I was hoping that you who have been thinking about and have some expertise in text mining would be interested in such a session.  A particular issue I’d be interesting in brainstorming about is methods to use text mining for analysis, i.e. producing visualizations drawn from thousands, maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands, of documents that shed new light on historical questions.

I’ve been doing a bit of thinking about using text mining for analyzing the Valley Archive.  Compared to large online archives like Google Books and the American Periodical Series, the Valley Archive is comparatively modest in size.  But as a curated collection it does offer something that I think likely to be useful: a number of pre-existing axes that offer what I expect will be some analytically interesting opportunities to contrast different caches of documents .  One obvious point of contrast is northern vs. southern documents.  Another axes would involve the nature of the document–from public documents (any published source), to very private documents (e.g. diaries), to semi-private (e.g. letters).  Being able to throw up visualizations in six quadrants (well, that’s not the right word, but I can tell you that “sextrants” definitely isn’t right) and compare language used in northern vs. southern public writings, southern public vs. southern semi-public vs. southern very private documents, etc., might immediately offer what I’m hoping will be interesting and useful interpretative possibilities.  What are the difference between the way northerners and southerners write about “nation?”   How does (or does) that change over the course of the war?  Do we see convergence or divergence between the sections/nations?  Is there any sectional difference in the language involving or surrounding death?  How does that change over time?   And what are the differences in the language around “death” in public vs. private documents?

I was really interested in Adam’s post on “Scholarship and Digital Texts.”  Perhaps we should have a pair of sessions on texts, one focused on issues of deep markup (xml, tei, etc.) and innovative presentation of particular documents (making the most of micro collections like a critical edition) and another focused on issues of using text mining and visualizations to tackle and make use of the abundance of digitized documents now available (macro collections).

I’d like to find out what you all are doing with time and space data, and applications like Simile Timeline, Google Earth, SketchUp, Second Life, or even conventional GIS software. Omeka has some geospatial features now — we could discuss future directions and perhaps do a little hacking. I hope Mikel Maron would be interested in talking about OpenStreetMap and implications for open historical geodata, and Bill Turkel about GeoDJ and that sort of locative exhibit appliance. I’d be surprised if many of you didn’t have equally interesting projects in time and space.

Any interest in such a session?

Somewhat related: I’m experimenting with using the OpenLayers (openlayers.org) javascript library as a tool for study and annotation of images on the Web. My demo is at atlantides.org/inscriptol/. It’s just an inscription tracing toy at the moment, but I’m eager to discuss how it might be enhanced to upload and share captured data with anybody who is interested.

Would anyone else be interested in giving very short presentations on purely-technical matters as a way of introducing us to new languages and libraries? It’s always hard to find the right way to approach a new tool. A brief description and book or code reading recommendation from an expert would certainly help.

I would be reasonably qualified to discuss Ruby. Someone working on Zotero ought to present XUL+JavaScript. If we could get python, a handful of RDF libraries, and maybe some stranger languages in there, everyone might learn something.

Although the conference should certainly focus on technology in the humanities, it’s always good to broaden our horizons of what technology is available and what others are using it for.

.. and they’re sweet!  Every camper whose proposal was accepted for this year’s THATCamp will receive a THATCamp t-shirt and other swag that we’ll have laid out.  Check it out, including the new tent logo!

Hi Everyone!

I’ll add my enthusiasm for the range of projects currently under discussion. It promises to be an exciting and informative weekend.

Here at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (based at Concordia University, in Montreal) we are in the process of creating an in-house, open source, transcribing / archiving / annotating tool that will be geared to meet the specific needs of oral historians. The basic features of the new program are known as many other software programs can be repurposed. However, what is not available is an interface geared specifically to the needs of the oral historian. At THATCamp, I had hoped to demo an early version of the new tool, but it will not be ready yet. I can however demo (if people are interested) how we use Vertov, a media annotating plugin for Zotero, and Interclipper, a proprietary media database program, to manage and analyze oral histories.

The goal is to use technology to move beyond traditional textual analysis of oral history transcripts to a direct examination of the video and audio record. Essentially, we want to maintain the orality of oral history by using technology.

I am hoping to connect with others who use oral histories, or more generally audio or video recordings, and discuss / shared our strategies for using technology to analyze these types of sources. Furthermore, at the Centre we are in the early stages of this project’s development, so I would very much welcome the opportunity to network with others working on their own software projects to get a sense of how one undertakes such a task.

Cheers,
Krissy

Hi Everyone,

The session I proposed is a short demonstration/discussion of a “constraint” developed by the OuLiPo, a mid-Twentieth research group comprised of (mostly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians. They were interested in experimenting with what language could be, and they did it oftentimes with the help of math. The snowball was one of their popular applications. It is essentially a triangular number set that is used as the basis for developing texts/poems. In other words, it’s a text in which an additional element — a letter, a syllable, or a word — is added to each successive line; so,

1

2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9 10

etc.

Since this is a chapter about which I’m writing for a book on Flash ActionScript 3 and rhetoric/writing, I thought it might interest some of you.

… BUT as I read your posts and bios, I get the impression most of you would already agree and/or probably know the basic arithmetic and algebra I’d show. I’d love to collab with someone who could show me a bunch of interesting math. I’d also be happy to go with the flow and change gears in order to collaborate with others. I enjoy programming in Flash AS3, if anyone wants to try to do something with it. There are a pretty wide range of APIs — from Twitter to Yahoo/Google Maps — to play with as well as stuff we can just make up. In fact, Bill’s post about Arduino got me thinking about Flash and Arduino. Brendan Dawes’ book, Analog In/Digital Out, demonstrates some experiments with Teleo, but it’s no longer available.

David

I’ve been working along with a great group of people at Virginia on NINES, and now, Bob Markley at Illinois and I will be working with UVA to start an 18th-century version. NINES peer-reviews and aggregates digital archives, taking their metadata in along with marc-record and journal-article metadata to create a comprehensive research environment. I just recently put some movies online about NINES and 18thConnect:
unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/NINES

unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/NINES/18thConnect.html

I am also really interested in Games as modes of learning, along with Trevor Owens; a group of us at Miami are working to develop a Humanities-Methods game:

wiki.lib.muohio.edu/literature/index.php/Going_Public

(another movie: unixgen.muohio.edu/~poetess/digHum.html)

I am currently working on ways of visualizing texts and archival data in order to know more about them, but I’m interested in joining up with people to explore their interests (TEI, XSL, databases, whatever).

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…

As we get closer to the camp I thought I would test the waters and see if any of the THATCampers are interested in pulling together a games in the humanities session.

At CHNM Dave and I are in the early stages of planning and developing a collaborative directory for freely available history games and interactives. In my experience, finding serious/educational games on the web is a haphazard and disorganized business. There is no systematic way to search across the content. There are currently thousands of free educational games available online in individual content silos. Broadcasting entities like PBS, BBC, and the History Channel, and subsidiary programs like NOVA, each develop a variety of games associated with their programming, but these are often buried in the very complex sitemaps of their large websites. Similarly, independent educational game developers like Persuasive Games, provide access only to their own offerings. These individual repositories limit the ability of teachers looking for game content related to a specific topic. For history teachers faced with ever increasing burdens on their time it takes far too long to research each of these sites individually. Further, without any means for user feedback, the widely varying quality of these games ensures that web searches return a random mismatch of high and low quality games divorced from their potential classroom use.

Beyond this, if we get funding, we plan to have some historians and history teachers review a subset of these games, with the historians focusing on the historicity of the games and pointing to primary sources that teachers might present to students to read with or against the games argument and the teachers focusing on how the game could fit into the classroom setting.

This brings me to one of the things I would like to pick other campers brains about. What kinds of criteria should these types of games be reviewed against? There are models for reviewing commercial games (Things like this review in game informer), models for reviewing historical works (Like scholarly book reviews), and designed based research offers ideas for assessing curricular activities. This leads to a very practical question for us, what sort of rubric/guidelines and interface do we provide for reviewing games in our project. I do, however, think it is of broader concern as well. What kinds of value do games bring to humanities teaching and scholarship and on what criteria do we evaluate the success of a given game and interactive in the humanities?

Beyond direct responses to my issues anyone interested in games and the humanities please post comments with your thoughts and ideas for discussions/sessions at THATCamp.

I hope to lead a session (along with Jon Lesser) that will focus on Omeka from a programmer’s eye by hacking away at plugins, looking at the core, and discussing future developments of the code.  I know some THATCampers are currently using Omeka, so this could be an opportunity to not only say ‘now, what I REALLY want to do is X,’ but for some work to be done hacking away at a solution.  One of our developers at CHNM, Jim Safley, has been working on an OAI-PMH harvester that we could hack as a work-in-progress example of data migration, and there are a host of other hackable Omeka plugins that are currently under version control.  Also, I wouldn’t mind showing people how to convert WordPress themes into Omeka themes by using Omeka helper functions to retrieve data.  Yes, you too can be an Omeka hax0r.

This session is really up in the air, and anyone who has tried Omeka and done anything from hacking a theme, to migrating data, to creating a plugin is welcome to come.  I think Omeka will come up in other theoretical sessions of digital humanities, but this may be a good time to see what’s “under the hood.”  I’d like to spend 10-15 minutes opening up the code and explaining the basics of the guts, and beyond that I’m open to any possible path for how things will go.  Post comments with your ideas or questions, and perhaps we can plan on collaborating on one or a series of plugins that could wind up in the Omeka plugin directory.

In both history and literature, we study the past through surviving writings. Our many stately scholarly conclusions sprout from the fertile soil of critical editions, which provide textual history, variant readings, linguistic and structural analysis, and relevant comparisons.

Digital critical editions surpass their print counterparts in the depth of interconnected information that can be expressed and the breadth of audience that can quickly find accurate information. More importantly, scholarly communities too small to warrant the typesetting costs of print critical apparatus could easily create such texts with the aid of appropriate software. Rather: all of this would be true, except that producing a digital critical edition is currently technically difficult and viewing one is less than satisfactory.

Where are we?

The TEI Guidelines have set good reference points for the character encoding, semantic tagging, and other technical requirements for saving archival-quality digital texts, The Standard ensures that these texts are saved in an open format readable by all, and that they will remain readable for long into the future.

But I would like to suggest that we move beyond seeing TEI as synonymous with digital texts and consider it instead simply a storage protocol. Then we face two interesting tasks: how can these texts best be created? how can they best be displayed?

Midwifing digital-born critical editions

TEI is superior to other standards because it represents data about a text semantically, rather than simply by visual formatting. A Word document may visually suggest to a human that some blocks of text are titles, translations, notes, etc.; but to a computer it is simply a series of distances, font sizes, and other purely decorative touches. This is problematic because such file formats may change and render old files unreadable, and also because the computer does not understand the structure of the text and cannot answer any meaningful questions about it.

TEI texts, on the other hand, use XML to mark the semantic properties of the text and can thus be operated on in useful ways. But the standard includes all the extensibility of XML itself, so scholars who want to produce such texts are quickly instructed to learn the details of XML, doctype declarations, and character encoding. Unsurprisingly, the scholars who do original textual scholarship and those who create digital texts are generally different groups.

We would never say to museum staff: “we’ll be saving your exhibit in a relational database, so here is a SQL tutorial.” We do the hard work and then hand them a lovely application like Omeka. Similarly, if we want to get scholars creating new digital-first critical editions, we need to stop pretending that someday everyone will know XML and do the hard work of creating useful software for creating semantically-tagged texts.

Critex is my in-development tool for doing just this. It is a Cocoa-based application for creating critical editions that can then be exported to rich text, .pdf, html, or TEI XML. It eliminates all the unnecessary formatting options available in most word processors and instead includes features of use to textual scholars. It will eventually include multiple footnote series, different formatting options for critical apparatus, and a database for tracking editions, glosses, and word usage. At the moment it is somewhat pre-alpha, but I am always looking for suggestions or programmers who would like to help.

Typesetting digital critical editions

Let’s just all agree: there is nothing lovelier than well-set critical apparatus. We’ve all had a crush on a book–maybe an edition of Milton–with big margins, marginal notes, two-columns of footnotes, all set in a beautiful humanist face with kerning and ligatures.

I want to see if we can claim that same beauty (and usability) back for online presentation.

Digital critical editions are usually displayed with each set of notes in a separate frame and appropriate links connecting them. Perhaps the best texts I’ve seen come from a group working at Oxford, which has produced “Old English Literature: A Hypertext Course Pack.

As a way of exploring possible formats for displaying critical editions, let’s compare their “Ælfric’s Life of St Edmund” with my version. I have reformatted the linked notes into floating notes that display themselves appropriately when the relevant text is visible. This is only an experiment, and I’ve just spent a few minutes entering a few paragraphs of the text, but I wonder what a reader’s experience is like on this sort of page, or how else we might better improve the look and feel of online critical editions.

New ways of storing and organizing text demand new models of writing and reading that are accessible even to the technically disinclined. I hope we will take up this rather plain topic among the many excited visualization and digitization topics at THATCamp.

I, too, like hearing about the range of projects as well and hope to carry home a much better understanding of digital humanities.

I am looking at the intersection of digital history and civic engagement. I directed public history at Wright State University for eight years and collaborated with area archives, museums, cultural organizations, and schools on various projects. My students and I had initiated a digital exhibit project looking at Dayton and the Miami Valley in the progressive era. Our initial plan, which required my sabbatical and research time over several years as match, became entangled in debates about what constitutes scholarship for promotion. Although this delayed our project, I signed on to beta-test Omeka in hopes that it would provide an alternative to the very expensive, highly produced digital exhibit that we had planned.

The Omeka platform supports some new directions with this work as well. The initial project—while it began with the students, local history partners, and I—would have been largely turned over to a production company. Now, the project may grow more gradually through student input over time or this may lead to a series of smaller, related but more focused projects. Public engagement would have been a feature of the final exhibit project but it may now become an integral aspect of the Omeka-based project. New partnerships with organizations may change the project goals as well.

Beyond the local project, I serve on the Ohio Humanities Council. The OHC has been interested in cultural heritage areas and civic tourism. Tom Sheinfeldt will be in Columbus tomorrow to talk with the OHC and others about Omeka. My thought has been that the OHC could encourage local organizations to do more to engage their audiences and to work with both humanities scholars and local history resources by developing online exhibits and collections using Omeka.

I would also like to talk with others about how humanities disciplines will evaluate work that is digital, interdisciplinary, collaborative, and/or public/applied in the future.

I’m very excited about the projects that have already been discussed, though I’d like to shift gears a little in terms of topics.

I’m interested in talking with others about their experiences teaching digital history/humanities to undergraduates (and graduates). I’ve experimented with a number of ways to involve students in the creation of group and individual digital historical research projects. In the past I’ve had students hard coding web pages in HTML or using Netscape Composer; others built their sites in wikis. These projects were typically part of content-based American History classes.

This year I set up an undergraduate digital history seminar, entirely based around the methods and practice of digital humanities. This course involved a great deal of planning and prep work (including emails to all majors before registration and a survey of digital skills and interest 6-8 weeks before the class started), and the help of a number of people outside the History Department, most notably, UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (including fellow THATCamper, Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn). With my DTLT colleagues we created a digital toolbox (including WordPress, Omeka, MIT’s Simile/Timeline, del.icio.us and others) from which the students were able to choose the appropriate tools for their own group projects. I’m happy to talk as well about the structure of the class, including questions of grading, work load and skills, and the four finished projects themselves.

More details about the class (and links to the projects themselves) can be found at digitalhistory.umwblogs.org and posts on my own blog.

I look forward with talking with other THATCampers about similar topics.

Several THATCampers have asked for advice choosing hotels and transportation – here are a few links that will help you plan your stay:

• Local Hotel Information
• Cue Bus
• Parking Services

My suggestion is to stay in Fairfax at one of the hotels near the CUE Bus, and take that into campus.  It should be a short trip.   If anyone’s looking for a ride from the immediate area or is willing to help out some THATCampers, I’d encourage you to post here.  And if you’re driving, park in the Sandy Creek Parking Deck, which is adjacent to the Research I building THATCamp will be held in.

Any other ideas?

About a year ago, Gavin Robinson and I swapped our Google Reader subscriptions. Neither of us is affiliated with an institution, so blogs really are how we stay connected to the digital humanities community. We’d each amassed a few dozen digital history subscriptions, and when we imported each other’s OPML files, we each discovered new and relevant sites.

I’d love to swap RSS subscriptions with other digital humanists, and what better community than THATCamp?

Possible problems:

1. Where can we put these files for easy exchange? I haven’t found a way to attach .xml files to posts in WordPress.
2. Google Reader expects you to import and export OPML files wholesale, which may involve wrecking carefully planned folders and tags.
3. Should we prune our subscriptions to DH-specific ones? I really don’t think THATCampers need to read my college roommate’s blog about whiskey and men’s shoes. It’ll be in my export unless I do some work removing it from the file by hand.

I’ve been having a lot of fun recently making interactive gizmos (a.k.a. “history appliances”) using microcontrollers and other small electronic and mechanical parts. If there is any interest, I could arrange to have some Arduino kits shipped to CHNM and we could have a session of building and programming gizmos. It is easier than you might imagine. Depending on the amount of interest, I could either provide the kits myself, or arrange a deal for participants to buy their own kits to take home.

I like Adam’s idea of the two sessions–I think that would be very helpful and interesting to many levels of experience.

Here’s a quick list of the tools I’ve been using:

• RAP (RDF API for PHP)
• ARC (a lighterweight PHP API)
• SIMILE was mentioned below, I’ve spent the most time with PiggyBank, Exhibit, and Solvent
  
• IsaViz graph editor
• Protege ontology editor
• Twinkle quick SPARQL querier
• Tabulator FF extension for browsing Linked Data (see also the Semantic Radar from the SIOC project)
• Speaking of SIOC, there’s also their PHP API

I’ve tinkered a bit with the Geonames and DBpedia services, but haven’t really integrated them into anything yet.

I’d love to talk with anyone who’s set up a Virtuoso server for their RDF work. Anyone tried this out?

I’ll follow up on the post about the F/OSS DH Infrastructure to say that I’ll be very interested to hear about projects using RDF, and to talk about a couple of my projects using it.  One project is scraping the Atom feed out of our WPMU installation to RDFize it all and make it accessible in a variety of ways; another is an ontology for describing universities from the viewpoint of the actual teaching and studying (i.e., not just saying such-and-such a class is taught by Dr. X, but also what texts etc. they study, what tools they use in the course of study, etc.).

I’ll through this out, too–is there any interest/desire for some of the people already using RDF to get together to do a tutorial/workshop/something-or-other for the curious about RDF, SPARQL, ontologies, etc?

Back in November, I was brought in as the first DH lead developer for the TAMU College of Liberal Arts because a growing number of faculty are wanting to do something with digital humanities, they didn’t have anyone available who could interface between the faculty and the technologies, and they were wanting to leverage the open source community. The easiest way to produce open source is to pay someone.

I’m a single person. The faculty are many. It is obvious that I can’t build fully customized projects for each faculty member. I don’t have time. So I’ve set out to build an infrastructure that allows us to reuse as much code as possible between projects, even to the point of running projects on the same application layer but with different data, different processing, and different presentations/skins.

This project is still in its infancy. I’m slowly building a project development infrastructure, working through the design, and planning the milestones that will result in software releases. Ultimately, we hope to have a sandbox for faculty to play in where they can link together various actions and widgets, building presentations from data without having to write code.

We’re leveraging as much open source we can. We believe in using open protocols and building everything so it’s inter-operable with other systems. We want people to be able to explore a collection of documents presented by our system and file relevant documents away in Zotero. We want faculty to be able to work easily with collections of source documents presented in Omeka. We want to build on whatever comes out of Project Bamboo.

The resulting system isn’t something we expect a faculty member to install on their spare machine and run. We’re building something that should be installed in a central location by a knowledgeable UNIX system administrator (but without the need for a DBA or other specialized employees) so everyone can use it.

At the moment, I can count five or six bibliography projects here at TAMU. Every single one of them stores different data in different formats that can’t inter-operate. If I want to tie together papers written about Shakespeare by science fiction authors from California, I have to write quite a bit of custom code to screen scrape the World Shakespeare Bibliography and correlate information there with what I can download in the database dump of the Internet Speculative Fiction Database — assuming I don’t want to do all of that by hand (finding out who is a SF writer from CA and then searching for them in the WSB).

I want a standard RDF language for storing bibliography data (as an example of what can be stored). I want a standard way to reference source artifacts that support particular statements of fact in an RDF knowledge base. I want to be able to ask the computer a question and get back an answer with the references to back up that answer.

There are a lot of problems that we aren’t solving with this system, but I’m only one person, and there are a lot of faculty. This system can support a wide range of data-driven projects that allow for interactive exploration of the data. It’s extensible, and the openness allows others to build tools that we haven’t planned for.

This is what I’d like to talk about at THATCamp and perhaps get feedback (am I crazy?), pointers to useful resources (is there an “academic grade” bibliography RDF vocabulary already?), and some help.

Adam Solove asked about space details for THATCamp to help with brainstorming before the camp, so here it goes:

Research 1 has wireless access throughout the building. We currently have five spaces reserved:

• Conference room to hold 20-25 people, with projector, whiteboards with markers
• Conference room to hold 15-20 people, with projector, whiteboards with markers
• Conference table in a CHNM workspace (in front of my office actually!) that could hold 10 people fairly comfortably. Has a LCD TV hooked up to a G5 Powermac, but could easily be attached to a laptop. Whiteboards with markers.
• Conference table in a CHNM workspace that could hold 10 people fairly comfortably. No projector or tv, though, but we could figure something out with this.
• Computer lab that could comfortably hold 20-25 people. Widescreen TV mounted on wall, attached to a Powermac G5. Also has a GameCube, if someone wants to start a MarioKart tournament!

Welcome to the THATCamp website! We have a few plans in the works for adding features to the site. If you twitter, use the tag #thatcamp in your tweets and we can create an aggregated list of tweets. When blogging on your own site, or uploading relevant pictures to Flickr, tag them with “thatcamp” so other campers can find them too.

If you’ve registered, you’re free to contribute posts to this blog. Anything goes: live-blogging sessions, posts on organizing sessions, post-camp drinks, finding a ride to campus, interesting websites or tools, whatever! Dave and I will be using the blog primarily to keep campers updated on pre-camp plans and announcements.