Archives – THATCamp CHNM 2013

Transcribathon – Citizen Archivist Sessions

Meredith Stewart — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 01:45:59 +0000

We hope you’ll join the team from the Innovation Office of the National Archives to learn more about the Citizen Archivist Dashboard and take part in a transcribathon!

For the first Transcribathon session (Friday @ 11 am) we’ll do a quick overview of the dashboard and walk you through the National Archives Transcription Pilot and then we’ll get to transcribing!

In addition to the documents already on the site, we’ve uploaded Harriet Tubman Davis Widow’s Pension File — all 112 pages of it! — just for the event. It’s a fascinating document and we hope you can help us make it more accessible.

For the second Transcribathon session (Friday @ 1:30 pm), we’ll do a quick overview of the Citizen Archivist Dashboard and demo how to tag in our online catalog and National Archives records in Flickr. We imagine this session to be a bit more freestyle – you can tag, transcribe, or try out another project on the dashboard. We’ll answer your questions and assist you as you try out the tools.

We love feedback — let us know on this post or in person!

Intermediate Omeka

Amanda French — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 17:36:28 +0000

Because of popular demand, and because an extra slot opened up in the schedule, I’ve agreed to teach an Intermediate Omeka workshop on Saturday. (I may have to end it a bit early to set things up for challenge voting, though.)

Mostly what I’ll do in this session is answer any questions that people have left over from the Intro to Omeka workshop, but chances are I’ll demonstrate how to obtain server space, how to install the server-side version of Omeka, how to install themes and plugins from omeka.org, and how to customize a server-side installation of Omeka.

Great (and simple) Omeka exhibits

Waldorf-Astoria Exhibits – www.hosttotheworld.com/omeka/exhibits
Greenwich Village History Exhibits – gvh.aphdigital.org/exhibits/

Installing Omeka

Hosting Suggestions – omeka.org/codex/Hosting_Suggestions
Preparing to Install Omeka – omeka.org/codex/Preparing_to_Install
Installation step by step – omeka.org/codex/Installation

Customizing Omeka

There are many helpful documents on the Omeka Documentation page. The “Recipes” near the bottom are particularly helpful to beginners. See, for instance, the Recipe for how to set a default thumbnail image for items that don’t have an associated image file: omeka.org/codex/Recipes/Default_Item_Thumbnail_Images That’s a very similar process to the example we went over briefly in class for my project at steepletoplibrary.org of setting a regular thumbnail instead of a square thumbnail for items such as steepletoplibrary.org/items/show/1057 that do have an uploaded image. See also the full list of PHP Functions for Omeka — these are “template” pieces of code that will make a particular common thing happen (such as showing the thumbnail or the square thumbnail).

Note that any competent graphic designer who knows HTML and CSS can customize the look and feel of Omeka, and any competent PHP developer can customize the functionality of Omeka. You can pick up HTML, CSS, and PHP skills yourself from the Internet or from a book, but if you need extensive customization, you should hire someone. (You could for instance hire someone from the “Designer / Developer Marketplace” on the Omeka forums.) It’s kind of like your car: you can learn to change the oil, gap the spark plugs, and rebuild the carburetor yourself if you want to, or you can pay someone else to do all that. The Omeka team at the Center for History and New Media is like the team of Detroit-based engineers at General Motors, but there are designers and developers everywhere who, like auto mechanics, can work on your specific problems.

Build a Repository of DH Job Letters, T&P Files

Sean Takats — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:19:01 +0000

Although there are some examples out there of people’s DH job application letters and tenure & promotion materials, there’s no central repository of professional materials to help guide people through what should be a straightforward process of presenting one’s credentials. Those of us who have served on hiring committees have all read great and terrible job letters, but most letter writers have only seen their own.

There’s even less out there showcasing the other side of the equation, particularly in the promotion process. The ability to study not only the candidates’ tenure materials but also the letters prepared by department committees, chairs, college committees, deans, etc. would appear be of intense interest (and real utility) to people in all kinds of professional positions.

After being hired, promoted, whatever we like to put all this messiness behind us and conceal it under the professional veneer of superior credentials inexorably prevailing, but it’s a complicated process of negotiation that could use some cleansing daylight.

I think it’s safe to assume that anyone who doesn’t participate in this session has crafted his/her professional reputation from a tissue of lies.

Freeing Images from Inside Digitized Books and Newspapers

Trevor Owens — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:55:09 +0000

“A cut section of the sun, showing the spots, Luminous Atmospher, and the opaque body of the sun” An abridgment of Smith’s Illustrated astronomy, 1850. This is exactly the kind of cool images hidden in these books.

We now have a massive wealth of digitized books. Between HathiTrust, the Internet Archive’s Open Library, Google Books and the other range of organizations that have gotten into digitization we have millions upon millions of digitized books. I don’t know about you, but (in general) I’m far less interested in reading these books than I am in skimming them for cool images. The same thing is true of digitized newspapers.

Those books are loaded with amazingly cool images, prints, engravings, woodcuts, pictures, plates, charts, figures and other kinds of diagrams. I tend to keep track of these sorts of things with Pinterest. (My Pinterest is full of images I’ve plucked out of IA books I’m skimming for these kinds of images.) I imagine there are a lot of folks out there who would be happy to play at this kind of visual treasure hunt. Find images, inside digitized items and describe them. I think it would be really neat if we had some basic sort of tool that would let folks who find these things pull them out and describe them so that other folks could find them too and use them as points of entry to the books.

I’d love to scheme with folks about how we could go about systematically tapping into this resource. How can we go about slurping these images out of the books, and getting them described in ways that make the reusable for any number of purposes? I could imagine something like Pinterest, but that pushed the items back into the Internet Archive or uploaded them to WikiSource and kept a link between the original resource and let someone describe the individual image and keep it connected with the information on the book or newspaper it originally appeared in.

How about this frontspiece, from the 1823 Elements of Astronomy showing a women teaching a young girl to use a telescope to study the moon. It shows up as visual evidence in Kim Tolley’s “The Science Education of American Girls” as evidence for the argument that in the early 19th century science was for girls while classics was for boys.

Or heck, it might be something one could pull together with some kind of marker in things posted to Pinterest. I imagine there are far more cleaver ways to go about this and that is what this session would be about.

I picture us hashing out how something like this might work. We could sketch out what things we might hook together to do this sort of thing.

Here are some things we might talk/work through.

What would the ideal user experience for this kind of thing look like?
What would be the best way to stitch something like this together?
Should some group host it, or is there a distributed way to do something like this?
What groups or organizations might be interested in being involved?

What do you think? Feel free to add other questions we might broach in the session. Oh, and there is nothing stoping folks from blogging out their ideas in advance. Feel free to write up as comments your ideas about how this might work best, or some other use cases you might imagine. Also, just feel free to weigh in and say if you think something like this would be useful.

A SWAT Team for Old Digital Humanities Sites

Jeffrey McClurken — Fri, 31 May 2013 03:02:27 +0000

The graphical world wide web has now been in existence for over 20 years. Some of the earliest digital humanities sites are almost as old. While some of these sites are tied to people or organizations who update them in one form or another, many are not as funding ran out or creators moved on. We can all think of sites that we’ve run across that are, at a minimum, not up to today’s visual and user experience expectations, and at worst, are simple unusable by some or even all of today’s users.

Since we know that many old sites don’t fade away (though they might blink in and out), but linger on virtually forever (unless they were on GeoCities), what might we do with some of these abandoned or no-longer-funded projects going forward beyond just hoping that the Internet Archive takes some snapshots of them? How might we build on the work that has already been done, and do so in a way that is more than just an aesthetic facelift for these sites? Is it worth considering ways that we might make such previous work more accessible (both in terms of accommodations and in terms of something that more people would want to use) and usable?

I proposed a session at THATCamp AHA2012 on this topic where we began to list the issues involved. This time, however, I’m proposing a session where we come up with a design plan for a team that would work on rescuing (updating) older digital humanities sites, and a specific list of skill sets and tools that would be needed to do so. [In the latter category, I know questions of copyright/permissions are a substantial issue to resolve, as are those relating to the technical aspects of how the material was stored and presented, and how a site might be maintained going forward.]

Ideally, the session would bring together people interested in the project, would identify some potential test cases, and even discuss potential grants or other funding sources.

Anyone else interested in designing a digital SWAT team for rescuing old sites?

Designing DH websites in public humanities with multimodal functions (mapping, archiving, crowd sourcing, and curating)

phillidp — Tue, 28 May 2013 23:54:32 +0000

David Phillips and Tyler Pruitt, Wake Forest University

What do you need to consider in planning and designing a website for a DH project meant as both a resource for the public and a vehicle for outreach and public input? What strategies can you employ in creating such a site?

We would like to explore and have a discussion about experimental ideas and best practices in creating multi-modal sites that have these goals.

What platforms work the best for particular objectives, and why? What web design tools and platforms are most effective for a public humanities DH project?

If you’re in the early planning stages of site design for a DH public humanities project, come discuss your ideas, your questions and your insights. We’ll work collaboratively on developing ideas for a ‘matrix’ of solutions that looks at the relative advantages of a variety of API, plug-ins and platforms.

Introduction to Omeka

Sharon Leon — Fri, 24 May 2013 20:13:04 +0000

Instructor: Sharon Leon
Requirements:

A laptop
Sample materials (several images, pdfs, and audiovisual files would be great)
A free Omeka.net Basic account – sign up at www.omeka.net/signup

In this hands-on workshop for beginners, we will concentrate on the ways that humanities scholars and cultural heritage professionals can use Omeka (omeka.org) to build of collections-based websites. Omeka is a free and open source web publishing platform that offers a flexible way for users without a lot of technical expertise to publish digital collections and to embed those collection materials in a range of contextual data. During our time together, we will cover:

the basic structure of an Omeka repository
configuring and choosing a theme for an Omeka site
adding items to an Omeka repository (Dublin Core Metadata, file upload, etc.)
creating and using Collections to group materials
extending the basic Omeka functionality with plugins
creating many items quickly
using controlled vocabularies with metadata fields
creating relationships among items and collections
using Exhibit Building to create exhibits
collecting materials and stories from visitors
integrating Omeka with Zotero, Wikipedia, and other social networking sites

Can someone teach this? Intermediate Omeka

Judith Schwartz — Thu, 23 May 2013 23:37:30 +0000

Can someone teach an intermediate workshop for Omeka? Somewhere between an intro and advanced class. I know how to install Omeka and plugins, now what? The workshops I see are either too simple or too advanced. I would like to attend a workshop that would include how to modify a theme with some basic CSS and also setting up exhibits and simple pages. Are people linking their EAD finding aids in their Omeka sites? Is there an EAD plugin compatible with the updated Omeka? Can we discuss Omeka best practices. How are people naming files and digitizing collections that already have paper/Box/Folder/versions with pdf finding aids. How are CSV files of metadata working out for you? How are we actually working with Omeka and how are people teaching with Omeka?

Imagining THATClass: Move over STEM, Make Room for THAT!

Patrick Cronin — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:38:40 +0000

Why should STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) have all the fun? It is time for the humanities to embrace the studio model as a pedagogical means to foster intellectual curiosity. MIT has NuVu; let’s create THATClass! Bring your ideas on partnerships, collaboration, technology integration, hands-on projects, uncovering content, and ways to apply knowledge and skills rooted in the humanities to develop the future of secondary (and post-secondary) education. ==> Saturday

More about NARA transcribathon and tagathon

Amanda French — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:27:25 +0000

Meredith Stewart and colleagues from the National Archives will be running Transcribathon and Tagathon sessions on Friday, June 7. Here’s her description:

Staff from the National Archives will lead participants in tagging and transcribing historical records through the agency’s Citizen Archivist Dashboard. Participants will be able to provide feedback and suggestions on improving tools and ideas for how to further leverage citizen participation.