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.

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.

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).