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.

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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.