Digital Humanities @ UTA

We have started a site devoted to Digital Humanities at UT Arlington (it also includes some general info about DH). Please check it out and make suggestions for additions about ideas or projects you are working on. If you’d like to be an editor of the site, please contact Rafia Mirza (rafia [at] uta [dot] edu) or Jody Bailey (jbailey [at] uta [dot] edu).

TitanPad: Theorizing a Programming Course for the DH

Notes from the session and other useful links!

titanpad.com/bKSXG8t9J3

 

Twitter Archive

Here’s an interactive archive of all our tweets from the past couple days.

Congrats to @jessicacm for winning the biggest tweeter contest!

 

Google Docs from two of Saturday’s sessions

Here are the links to the Google docs created during Pedagogy and DH session this morning, and the Copyrighted and uncopyrighted materials session this afternoon. They are open to public editing, so feel free to add in. (These were first circulated on Twitter under the #thatcamptx hashtag.)

Please take the brief survey

Thanks for coming to THATcamp Texas 2012! Please take a few minutes to fill out the brief evaluation form — it will help us and future THATcampers!

Here’s the breakdown of Saturday’s sessions and rooms

AM: E-books/Crowd-sourcing transcriptions/Text encoding 315A
AM: Pedagogy and DH Parlor
AM: Intro GIS and Humanities B20

PM: Intro Programing for DH/(annotating video, large data sets) 315A
PM: Inclusivity and DH Parlor
PM: Reusing Copyrighted Material/ Royalty-free multimedia B20

Session Proposals on a Google Doc

Here is my version of the session proposals plus some other ideas all on a Google Doc that anyone can edit.

Dork Shorts @ 1:30! Sign up now

“Dork shorts” are a THATcamp tradition in which participants deliver a 3-minute talk about a project, a web-site, or some other work you’d like others to know about or even join. Think of it as an “elevator speech” for fellow Digital Humanities people.
Google “dork shorts”to see examples from other THATcamps.

Please go to the “SCHEDULE” tab and click on the “dork shorts” area on the calendar to sign-up. If you have a PowerPoint file and can get it to the organizers in advance, you’ll be able to show it. Something that will show in a web browser is preferred, however.

AR for art and humanities projects

Part of a project I’m designing about the psychogeography of North Central Expressway in Dallas involves an augmented reality (AR) layer for smartphones. I’m placing historical, personal memoir-derived, and archival images (and maybe a soundtrack) at various locations along and around the freeway. The AR server I’m using is Layar (www.layar.com/ ), which requires coding sophistication well beyond my ken. So I’ve turned to a service called Hoppola (www.hoppala-agency.com/ ), which uses Google Maps and a few simple GUI commands to automate the coding and so serves as an interface for the less than 100% nerdly among us. However, near as I can tell, Hoppola does not support Layar Vision (www.layar.com/browser/layar-vision/ ), a new service which attaches AR content to images – bits of graffiti, e.g., or a building façade – instead of geo coordinates. Since the Google Maps interface is not entirely accurate, causing AR content to sometimes land around the corner from my target, making use of specific images would allow me much more precision in the AR layer.
I would like to propose a working session on the technical aspects of AR projects and on the general ideas associated with the use of AR in the humanities and visual arts. I am not expert in the coding necessary to use the Layar service directly. Learning from what others in the field have to offer would be of immense help.

A Programming Course for the Humanities?

As projects such as the William Blake and Walt Whitman Archives testify to, the digital humanities have worked hard to preserve and freely distribute literary texts. Creating places to store high quality electronic reproductions of original works is great, but what form will the next developments for such sites take?

How can we apply the problem solving, analytical, and searching tools of computer science to the specific needs of humanities scholars? How can we use programming to improve comparative and contextual analysis of archived texts?

Following that line of thought, I would like to discuss what an introductory programming course geared towards the humanities, that is, non-computer science majors, would look like. Should it be focused on searching methods and text analysis? What programming language would be most appropriate? What would your expectations for such a course be?

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