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