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

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.

Teaching Digital History

This workshop (Friday at 1:30) will be aimed at working through the practical and pedagogical choices about creating a digital history course. We will explore sample syllabi, discuss potential projects, survey various tools, and identify obvious and not-so-obvious pitfalls to constructing a class that engages students in the scholarship and practice related to digital history.  [Not an historian?  Come join us anyway.  Most of these ideas and approaches apply to incorporating technology into any course.]

Note: while there are no formal prerequisites to this workshop, please come with ideas for a course that you can discuss with the other workshop participants.

Visualizing Uncertainty

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?

Introduction to Omeka

Instructor: Sharon Leon
Requirements:

  1. A laptop
  2. Sample materials (several images, pdfs, and audiovisual files would be great)
  3. 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

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?

3D Modeling and Printing Workshop

In this workshop, we’ll help participants get acquainted with tools and techniques for 3D modeling objects and spaces, editing their models, and hopefully have some viable models to use for 3D printing. We’ll have at least one 3D printer to play around with—a Makerbot Replicator 2—and a few different colors of filament to print with. We might have more than one printer, which’ll mean more printing! Participants should bring a laptop if possible, a digital camera of some kind (a camera on a smartphone should be fine, but bring a fancy DSLR if you want), cords or other paraphernalia for transferring pictures from a camera to a computer, and any objects they might want to use to create a model. I’ll try to bring a couple of cameras in case some folks need to borrow something. If the model we create in class isn’t viable for printing by the end of the workshop, participants can find a model somewhere like Thingiverse, and we can download and print that model. Heck, even if you do have a viable model to print and still want to print something off Thingiverse, we can try to find time. At the end of the workshop, we’d like everyone to be comfortable making their own 3D models, and have printed something on the 3D printer to take home.

This’ll be a pretty open workshop in terms of structure. We’ll go through basic camera usage, and strategies for taking pictures for 3D modeling. We’ll cover a couple of different software options for creating and modifying your models. We’ll also go over basics of 3D printing, and discuss the features and process of the 3D printer, maintenance and debugging strategies, and print some stuff. I’d love to leave time for discussion and reflection, and hope that through the process of learning how to do the modeling and printing, we can have some good conversations about how folks could use 3D modeling and printing in their scholarly work.

Atoms to Bits and back again

There have been sessions at past THATCamps that have explored the use of 3D design to envision historical sites or perhaps to demonstrate relationships of words in a concordance or index. In those cases the examples in most cases were a transference of Atoms (papers, manuscripts, notes from conversations) to bits (program design, programming, data entry, user interfaces). For this session I would like to explore your ideas and mine about the impact of Making, Tinkering, Physical Innovation to create 3 Dimensional Objects in the Digital Humanities.

One quick example: 1) Analog — a historian discovers description, perhaps with an illustration of a piece of table ware or furniture. She notes that it has certain qualities that she’d like to explore more. This is where the project moves into 2) Digital space. The object is sketched, then rendered into a 3D representation. Then that file is may need to be translated into a format that can be used by a 3D printer. The object can be scaled down or up to fit the 3D printer that will be used to “print” the object. Once the object is “printed” it has returned to an 1) Analog object. Now the object can be closely observed to better understand those curious qualities. There are many variations on this theme. Let’s share some of them.

A true story. At the San Diego Super Computer Center at UC-San Diego there was a Laminated Object Modeling (LOM) lab. Their printer used thin paper layers pasted then cut with lasers. They created a small model of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachian Mountains in the same scale. They were small, hand held objects. A ninth grade class on tour was shown the models and asked what did they learn from seeing these two objects. A young woman was the first to raise her hand. Her answer, “The Appalachians are older than the Rockies because they are worn down and smoother than the Rockies.” She was correct.

So, how could 3D tools and resources for Making or Tinkering be applied to ideas, questions, or the work in the Humanities you are doing?

Full up (for now)

Just a note to say that we’ve reached our quota of 150 participants, so from here on out we’ll be running a wait list. In past years we’ve gotten a lot of cancellations in the week or two beforehand, and almost everyone from the wait list has gotten in, so if you or a friend would still like to come to THATCamp (especially now that there are such a lot of great pre-planned things on the schedule), why, go ahead and register.

One additional note: there will *not* be a Rosenzweig Forum on Thursday, June 6th — a couple of speakers didn’t work out, and in any case there was a spring instance of the Rosenzweig Forum at the Library of Congress back in April on the topic of digital preservation.

Don’t forget to update your profile by logging in to the site, and keep those session proposals coming.

What the Shell? Hands on with the command line.

A hands-on, participant-run workshop for understanding and using the command line (shell) to get things done. I’ll give a very brief intro to using the shell, and then we’ll work on answering questions and doing things!

Some ideas for hands-on instruction:

  • Managing files.
  • Creating small scripts to do things.
  • Manipulating text in files.
  • Transferring files from your computer to another computer (server), and vice versa.

These are just a few ideas, come with a problem you want solved or solutions you have found to share with others!