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?

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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.