Like many THATCampers, I’m delighted to see Participad running on THATCamp.org (yay Boone & Amanda and everyone who made this happen!) Now we can create collaboratively-authored documents inside WordPress without Google Docs (or our friends at the National Security Agency). If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check it out at http://chnm2013.thatcamp.org/notepads/

But Participad is a bit of a challenge to install. See wordpress.org/plugins/participad/ and http://participad.org/faqs/  I did not succeed in getting it running on my own self-hosted WordPress.org site a year ago, and would like to collaborate with others who are trying to do the same.

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.

Again on the performance/deformance tip, I’d like to propose a second session: a collaborative writing experiment using Participad. What I’d like to do here is engage a group of people in an attempt to co-author, in real time, a journal article with the title “Looks Like the Internet: The Structure of Digital Humanities.” I’d pick a couple dozen familiar digital humanities references relevant to the title and place footnotes for them at various points in a document. The group would try to write around them to create a coherent piece of new scholarship. We’d start in the morning and see how far we get by bed time.