As an academic researcher, teacher and writer in Religious Studies with an avid interest in comparative magic, I earnestly embrace the concept of co-creation.

My goal for this weekend is to come away with a working knowledge of digital humanities fundamentals. I thought it might be useful to propose a session for those of us who are new to the field, in which expertise and knowledge is shared so as to create a toolkit of essentials for use in our research, teaching and writing. My interests are very specific: I am building a new project, and I want to know, step by step, piece by piece, how to proceed. Here are my building materials.

Dreambook number one

Dreambook number  two

Dreambook number three

These items are images of Dreambooks. The actual books are held publicly in various library collections and some are in my personal collection. Dreambooks are a kind of text from the African American magical tradition known as Hoodoo. Their main function is to increase gambling luck, so they may be considered magical objects, as well as sacred books. With alphabetical lists of objects and situations found in dreams, their interpretations, and an arcane numerological system of prediction, Hoodoo dreambooks, which originated in late nineteenth century America, came into prominence for playing policy, an illegal (and now obsolete) lottery once popular in urban African American communities. They are significant in that they provide a lens into a kind of indigenous magical tradition in the United States that can be dated, located, and followed over time, and they provide insights into culture-specific interpretations of local and folklorized forms of metaphysical practices and ideas.

(As with many things magical, I have found, they also work.)

My question: how might I turn these materials into a dh project? Should I build an archive of these books? How should I treat the texts? How might I organize them? What can be gleaned from these materials so as to create a viable, academic, publishable project? Where do I begin? What do I need to know? And most importantly, before venturing out into a project like this, what are the most important tools that I need to possess?

I’d like to propose a discussion session on the whole issue of collaboration across institutions.  William Pannapacker recently wrote in the Chronicle about the potential value of creating partnerships between research institutions and teaching colleges.  He mentions one good example as his starting point. There are other kinds of examples such as the collaboration between Bryn Mawr, Haverford and Swarthmore.  What are the best examples out there and why have they worked?  What are the impediments to creating cross institutional projects and alliances and how are they best negotiated?  Can such collaborations grow organically, from the ground up so to speak, through small scale collaborations between individual researchers, or do they require institutional level initiatives on a much larger scale?  If there are collaborations between small colleges and large universities, how can we make sure that the institutional cultures, visions, and priorities of the smaller players are equal partners in the project?  How are cross-institutional projects of any sort best sustained over time so that they don’t die off once individual faculty members go in different directions.

I am in the process of working on a collaborative venture with Harrisburg University and my own institution, Messiah College.  We are hoping to bring together a number of different institutions in the Central PA region–the strong liberal arts colleges in the regions, state cultural institutions, possibly Penn State regional campuses–on larger scale Digital Humanities work than we can accomplish working in isolation.  I’m hoping there will be others interested in discussing what has worked or might work or wouldn’t work during the course of such a venture.

Long long ago….
Once upon a time…

Digital storytelling is buzzy right now, and I think it would be interesting to gather and talk about what that means for the way humanists communicate with the public. This could be in terms of personal or organization branding or presenting research. I’d also like to dig into why scholars revert to common narratives and how thinking with the lens of storytelling can disrupt those narratives for better(?) engagement. There’s an increasing number of storytelling tools (Cowbird and Backspacesto name two) that are circulating as ways for people to tell their own digital transmedia stories. So how do scholars take this into account in how they present themselves and their work?

I propose a session in two parts. First, talk about what’s out there, how ideas of digital storytelling can/cannot help scholars communicate, and then a second part where individuals or groups put together their own short digital stories. At the end we could share the stories around a campfire (or maybe just circle around a screen with this).

Do Dhers use Markdown? Created by John Gruber in 2004, Markdown is an easy to use text-to-HTMl markup language, one that’s instantly readable on the page and, when pushed through a dingus, becomes beautiful web-friendly prose. I was recently converted to Markdown through the evangelizing efforts of Brett Terpstra and Merlin Mann, and now all of my notes and first drafts are written using the MultiMarkdown syntax in Sublime Text 2. I’ve discovered that writing in Markdown allows me to organize my notes on the fly and, when I’m writing, sloughs off all of the pretensions that come with most writing apps and forces me to just get words down on the page. I’m still a beginner when it comes to living and working in a plain-text world, but if there are any Markdown gurus out there who’d like to come and share their expertise, I’d really appreciate it. I’d also be willing to introduce people to the syntax, if this post has sparked your interest.

As a complement our discussions about new forms of scholarship and scholarly publication, I’d like to propose a session about how digital tools are already transforming the academic production of knowledge. Despite recent transformations, I think most scholars in the humanities still follow a research and writing model that goes back at least a hundred years:

1.) Collect information
2.) Organize information
3.) Write scholarship

As a history graduate student knee-deep in dissertation research, I’ve been surprised how little my advisors and my peers’ reflect upon their method. I suspect that their approaches to steps two and three have changed very little in the past twenty years. For most, Microsoft Word and notecards still seem to be the “tools of the trade,” with perhaps a nod to citation software (Zotero/EndNote) and data backups (DropBox).

In this session, I’d like to discuss how 21st century scholars should approach both the organizing process and (on good days) the writing process as well. Everyone has their own system I’m sure; this would be an opportunity to share our tips and tricks. How do people fit their messy data –archival photos, interview transcripts, and odd notes– into searchable databases? Or do they? Have people ditched Word for plain-text files or Scrivener? Do people hide their data away on their personal drives, or publish it online? When are digital tools helpful, and when are they just, well, fiddling? Hopefully our conversation will generate some useful guides and blog posts.

THATCamp offers a gathering of individuals from many disciplinary and professional backgrounds, and that mix of experiences is one of the things that make it such a great opportunity for collaboration. But, so much work in the digital humanities is driven forward by literary and media studies, I’d like to propose that the historians in the crowd take an hour to talk about ways to form a loose affiliation of those individuals who share our disciplinary commitments and questions.

I think it might make sense to strengthen/create some channels that will let us share questions and methods with others historians (academic, public, independent, and enthusiast). I’m not sure that the outcome of this session might be: a working group? a group blog? an aggregator of conference sessions and meeting events? What do you think we need to grow the sense of community and innovation among digital historians?

I would be interested in having a conversation about using blogs to enhance student engagement with course material. How do you use blogs? For research? For reflection? What has/has not worked for you (or: what would you like to do with a blog?)? What skills can blogs help students develop? Is the class blog an intermediate step in some larger project or is it the final product? What is its relationship to other assignments? If there is interest, we can extend the discussion to the use of other social media in the classroom, e.g., Twitter.

In the digital humanities we often talk about distant reading and big data. In the more traditional humanities we often talk about close reading and the importance of small details. But it seems to me that both approaches to cultural material—distant, close, big, small—fail to reckon with what it means to change the scale of things.

The premise of this proposal is that changing the scale of something is one of the most transformative modes of producing knowledge. I’m thinking of actual, visual scale. Imagine a short passage from literature, blown up to fill an entire poster board, which students take turns annotating. The words in the story, once lost in a sea of text, become a separate entity, manipulable in an entirely new tactile way. Or take a panel from a graphic novel or a historical photograph, and zoom, zoom, zoom using a document camera. What do we see now that wasn’t there before?

As I said, I’m thinking of visual scale, but certainly there are other magnitudinal changes to consider. The size of a textual corpus is another obvious scale adjustment, but what about the other senses, like touch or sound? I’m drawn personally to theorizing closeness—to seeing the world in a grain of sand—but it’s just as crucial to rethink the distant and far.

In this session we’d discuss tools and techniques for changing the scale of things, what changing the scale of things means for teaching and research, and in general strive to move beyond the binary distinction between distant and close in order to think about scale in new and inventive ways.

N.B.: I began this post before seeing John Glover‘s Shock and Awe proposal. These could easily be combined.

For those lucky enough to have jobs that directly relate to the Digital Humanities, whether you’re working in academia, museums, libraries, or archives, part of your job is to advocate to the unconvinced. While those that created the position may have seen the importance of digital work– or were at least keeping up with trends and understand that DH is the new hotness– many of your colleagues may be less convinced.

We have to find ways to advocate to those in our fields about the advantages of digital work– and persuade them to invest time, money, and energy into digital projects. Likewise, we have to reach out to our audiences and get them to use our digital tools and resources.

I’d like to propose a discussion on best practices for advocacy and outreach. What do you find helps convince your institutions to get onboard with projects you can’t do alone? How do you shift institutional inertia and get people to work together who may be skeptical about DH projects? How do you raise awareness of your projects when they’re ready to go live? How do you convince people outside your institution that it’s worth investing energy and time into your projects?

I see this as a wide-ranging and rather loose conversation, an opportunity people to share across disciplinary, institutional, and other boundaries about what has worked for them, what has not, and why they think that is. Topics might include (but are certainly not limited to):

• How do you persuade the curatorial department of your museum to do the extra work so that your online exhibit might be more than just an online version of the physical exhibit?
• How do you talk to fellow academics who are inveterately analog when you feel they might benefit from DH approaches?
• How do you convince an archive that textual records are important to digitize too– not just the photos that drive a lot of hits?
• How do you work to gain the trust and efforts of a community to contribute materials for an online archive, transcription project, etc?
• Twitter: is it really useful for outreach, or are you just preaching to the choir?
• How do you weigh the need to do advocacy and outreach against the needs to actually produce scholarship/tools/databases/etc?
• Is there ever going to be an end to “What is the Digital Humanities and…” panels at every conference? Is it better to integrate DH scholarship with the rest of the group or to put DH at center stage?
• How do you reach out to other comparable institutions so they know about your projects, and perhaps either send interested parties your way or even collaborate?

…This may not be a super-groundbreaking topic– it’s something we’ve all talked about amongst ourselves. But I think it’s one of those perennial discussions we have to keep having as we all navigate a fairly new and frequently-shifting landscape.

We all have to summarize research, promote ourselves, and win over indifferent audiences, but how do we do all of those things simultaneously when our listeners don’t understand our aims or vocabulary? Elevator pitches are about presenting a product or idea, using a distilled message to make a sale or win over a key player, but summarizing DH for people used to authority and concision can be a challenge.

I’d like to talk about good approaches to advocating effectively and quickly for DH, whether talking with the general public, administrators, or potential donors. I think doing DH in the open means, at least right now, not just putting files online, ensuring public access, going CC, etc.: I think we have to be able to communicate to the people who don’t come knocking at our door. I categorized this as a “Talk” session, but depending on who’s interested, we might want to play around with practice pitches + instant feedback, or role playing. Here are some conversation sparks:

Shock & Awe. What are some of our favorite phrases or facts for talking about the power or breadth of digital humanities approaches? How about sharing our favorite sites or apps to showcase on phone or tablet?

Business Cards. How do you represent yourself–DH first, middle, or last? Do you use any jargon? Do you give people formal business, cards, informal cards, share your Twitter handle?

If you’re at an institution without a huge DH presence, or you’re meeting with someone who’s not that interested in it, how do you demonstrate the value of DH? What are some good strategies to use when your Provost/Dean/Principal/Lead asks why you haven’t produced a monograph (or three) yet?

Finally, why do I care about this? I’m a librarian, and while I work with students and faculty “doing” DH, I also work with people who have varying levels of awareness of it, or who might be interested but have little time to find an entry point. Maybe most of all, I want to be able to speak more effectively with people who are interested in contributing time, money, or energy to DH efforts, but who need convincing.

This is a call for help and contributions for a project that (if I get some collaborators) might be part of the maker challenge or might be something that lays the groundwork for a future project.

One of the tricky things about agreeing to and negotiating contracts for publishing something is an unfamiliarity with the options available. Unless you’ve done a lot of publishing, you might not have a sense even of what an author’s contract looks like. Even if you have published a lot, you might not know what a specific publisher offers—are you going to agree to write a contribution to a book only to discover that the publisher demands that you sign over your copyright and isn’t willing to negotiate? (That’s not a hypothetical example, by the way.) I’ve written about negotiating a new contributor’s contract; my experience of doing that and sharing the process suggests there’s a real hunger for advice on what contracts look like and what our options are for publishing.

What I’d like to see is a site where people can upload and share their contracts. There are possibly legal issues to sort through—I’m pretty sure that most contracts aren’t proprietary and therefore we can share them publicly, but I’m also pretty sure that most publishers might not like that. There are technical issues to sort through—what sort of platform is best for a project like this, allowing for public uploads of documents and controlled options for tagging and searching? And there are sustainability issues—this might be a project that is best run by an organization rather than an individual.

I’d love it if there were some THATCampers who wanted to think through these issues with me and to build a prototype of what it might look like. And I’d really love it if there were THATCampers who would be willing to contribute their contracts to it. (If you do contribute your contract, you probably want to black out your name and your publication’s name, but you’ll need to leave the publisher’s name visible.) If you want to contribute your contract, you can leave a link to it below or email it to me (<a href=”mailto:sarah.werner@gmail.com“>sarah.werner at gmail.com</a>)

“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.

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?

Digital visualization and data-crunching tools are fantastic at compiling and manipulating numbers and strings quickly and precisely. However humanities data is often far from precise! How do we faithfully and usefully visualize information that is uncertain, sketchy, speculative, or debated? For example, when mapping the movements of a person over the course of their life, how can we visually differentiate between terminus post quem, terminus ante quem, and circa dates? How can we represent a scholarly debate that locates someone in multiple cities for a given date, depending on whom you ask?

I can share my own successes and failures representing uncertain data on the movements of sixteenth and seventeenth century Netherlandish artists in Google Earth (using KML), but from there I’d love to have a wide-ranging brainstorming and sharing session that could encompass lots of other types of data and representational methods. What technologies, visual strategies, workarounds, hacks, gimmicks, or cheats have you used to wrap your computer’s mind (and your own) around troublesome data sets?

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