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.

“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?

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