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.

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?

Meredith Stewart and colleagues from the National Archives will be running Transcribathon and Tagathon sessions on Friday, June 7. Here’s her description:

Staff from the National Archives will lead participants in tagging and transcribing historical records through the agency’s Citizen Archivist Dashboard. Participants will be able to provide feedback and suggestions on improving tools and ideas for how to further leverage citizen participation.

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.

I'd like to bring PowerPoint back to THATCamp. No, not like that. Many THATCampers will know that I'm interested in performance and deformance in digital humanities, something I've written about <a href="http://www.foundhistory.org/2012/02/15/game-change-digital-technology-and-performative-humanities/">here</a> and Mark Sample has written about <a href="http://www.samplereality.com/2012/05/02/notes-towards-a-deformed-humanities/">here</a>. In a <a href="http://www.merlinmann.com/roderick/ep-71-everybody-has-a-hamburger.html">recent episode of the podcast Roderick on the Line</a>, John Roderick described being asked by a conference organizer to provide slides for a talk he had been invited to give. Not knowing PowerPoint himself, Roderick asked a friend to make the slides for him — without, beyond mentioning the title of the talk, telling the friend what he was going to say. As the subject of the talk was punk, it was actually, if accidentally, about the most appropriate use of PowerPoint possible.

I'd like to experiment with using PowerPoint in this way at THATCamp. What I'd like to do is put together four teams of two campers. One partner would choose a topic and write a ten minute talk. The other partner–knowing only the title of the talk–would build a deck of 20 slides. At THATCamp, the first partner would deliver the talk, and the second partner would advance the slides. At the end of each talk, we'd use the Q&A to explore what, if any, creative tensions, serendipitous insights, and hilarious hiccups these accidental PowerPoint presentations-cum-Mad Libs reveal.

Please use the comments section below if you'd like to jump on board, ask questions, and help organize. If you already have a partner in mind, great. If not, people should pair up ahead of THATCamp. Each pair will probably need to settle on a title a couple weeks ahead of time in order to have enough time to write the talk and prepare the slides in time for presentation at THATCamp. Topics and titles don't have to (and probably shouldn't) relate to digital humanities topics. In some ways, I think the more traditional the topic and title, the more vanilla the humanities content, the better. 

UPDATE: I think we will deliver these presentations as part of the Maker Challenge on Saturday afternoon. That will give everyone a little more time to organize. Please use Friday to pair up and write your talks/assemble your slides. Continue to use this space for connecting and coordination.