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.