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!

Updated for THATCamp CHNM session on Sat June 8th, 2013, 11am – 12:30pm

Here’s the deal: I’ll teach two key stages of creating a book with open-source WordPress tools, and in turn, will ask participants to post an idea or comment on our open-access book-in-progress, Web Writing: Why & How for Teaching & Learning, sponsored by Trinity College (CT). Sign up to receive free temporary admin account for hands-on PressBooks tutorial.

See demonstration of two tools in WordPress workflow: CommentPressBooks.trinfocafe.org

• CommentPress for developmental editing of draft texts at book, page, and paragraph-level
• PressBooks for publishing across multiple formats (web, PDF, Kindle and ePub readers)

Both tools can run on self-hosted WordPress sites (not WordPress.com), see basics here

See how it works page for system requirements, how to install back-end, and comparisons

Hands-on tutorial with PressBooks temp admin accounts to upload content & create your own book

What works, and what could be improved, with PressBooks? Login & share thoughts on notepad

How can authors and publishers work together to use these tools? See Anvil Academic example

Invitation: shape direction of Web Writing book by sharing essay idea or commenting on others

* * * * * * * *
Original session proposal, June 5th: This scholarly communication session idea expands on Sarah Werner’s proposal on building a repository of publishing contracts, and Joan Troyano’s suggestion to brainstorm new ways to publish humanities scholarship. Can we make a deal to learn from one another? In the spirit of legendary game show host Monty Hall, choose one of these doors to see what you can win at this session:

Door #1: Negotiating with Publishers about Paywalls and Open Access: I have more questions than answers on this topic, and would love to learn more from others’ experiences (see Sarah Werner, Working with a Contributor’s Contract). But in my view, scholars need better negotiating skills as publishers  continue to reposition themselves with respect to the web, and that means (1) understand the motivations of other parties and (2) know your next best option than the one you’re facing at that particular moment. A THATCamp discussion with rich examples might benefit from by my public dialogues with open-access publishers Anvil Academic and my recent exchange with Michigan Publishing/University of Michigan Press, in addition to correspondence, contracts, and reflections in the “how this book evolved” section of Writing History in the Digital Age (co-edited with Kristen Nawrotzki).

Door #2: Hands-on Tutorial with PressBooks: Looking for better digital publishing tools? Hugh McGuire and colleagues recently released the open-source PressBooks plugin for WordPress Multisite, which transforms your content into polished publications for multiple readers: PDF for print, web-book for online reading, Mobi for Kindle, ePUB for iBooks, Nook, etc. My colleagues Carlos Espinosa (Trinfo Cafe) and Korey Jackson (Anvil Academic) and I created a WordPress-based publishing workflow demonstration site at CommentPressBooks.trinfocafe.org. If THATCampers desire hands-on access, I can instantly create sub-site admin accounts and a 5-minute tutorial on creating your own publication in PressBooks, to compare with related tools such as Anthologize.

Door #3: Take a chance on the Mystery Door* (It’s a surprise, just like the game show. Read more about the related Monty Hall Problem.)

So what’s the deal? If you choose any of the doors above, then you agree to post a comment on a book-in-progress, Web Writing: Why & How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning. This freely accessible, open peer-review volume explores why & how faculty and students use web-based authoring, annotating, and publishing tools in the liberal arts. My editorial team and I are particularly interested in works that blend the “why & how” by making effective use of the open web platform to blend thoughtful insights with illustrative examples (including links, screenshots, images, etc.). The book’s sponsor, the Center for Teaching and Learning at Trinity College, will award $300 subventions to 5 outstanding proposals, with preference given to authors in greater financial need (e.g. students or faculty not in full-time, tenure-track positions). If you’re a prospective contributor, or just an interested reader, post a comment on our Call for Ideas & Essay Proposals page before June 15th. Full drafts are not due until August 15th, 2013. Learn about our editorial process and timeline for the Fall 2013 open peer review and freely-accessible digital publication, possibly with a scholarly press. See more at WebWriting.trincoll.edu

*Void where prohibited by law. Gambling is not necessarily endorsed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media, except for spending ridiculous numbers of hours to prepare and submit grant proposals that have very long odds of being funded.

“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?

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?