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).

Notes from the session and other useful links!

titanpad.com/bKSXG8t9J3

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

Congrats to @jessicacm for winning the biggest tweeter contest!

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.)

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!

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

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

“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.

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.

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?

There is a new software tool called “MINE” (Maximal Information-based Nonparametric Exploration) that is specifically designed to mine large datasets for novel, i.e., not human selected, connections (the software essentially hypothesizes connections among disparate pieces of data, which connections humans may or may not have considered/identified). How useful does this seem for humanities research? I’m specifically thinking of how to integrate this tool with GIS to analyze distributions that may not have been considered before.

Check it out online at www.exploredata.net/

I would like to propose a session in which we explore together the potential for humanities scholarship and teaching in tools emerging from the HTML5 movement. Popcorn (mozilla labs, for example, enables interaction with video as never before. Our project (Remixing Rural Texas: Local Texts, Global Contexts”) utilizes this open source tool to annotate original context of source materials included in three short videos –each remixed almost entirely from existing archival materials and featuring critical race narratives emerging from my research.

Of course the applications for (and implications of) popcorn and other innovations for webmademovies extend far beyond our use. I wish to demo the tool as we are using it and explore with participants a broad range of other uses we might discover together. We are in only the earliest phase ourselves yet eager to explore potential with others.

Three minutes on RRT here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv4az2sonnI#t=41m56s

I learned of this open source tool for data source annotation less than a month before NEH ODH applications were due and was inspired.

My original inspiration (“Right Wing Radio Duck”)

As I reframed it for RRT:

Remixing the Archives:

I am interested in exploring rich, interactive mechanisms to link locally-driven projects (with national/global significance) with other, similarly local projects across nation–neighborhood storytelling projects (etc).

What might be the potential in digital humanities for a Federal Writers Project 2.0–American Guide Series? (writingdemocracy.org)

What are your favorite sources for royalty-free or public-domain multimedia (images, music, video) when you are putting together a presentation or brochure? I have a couple that I like and turn to on a regular basis, but perhaps there are other great ones out there that I don’t know about? Maybe it would be fun and helpful for those of us who want to find and use multimedia on a fairly regular basis to get together and brainstorm about what we use, how we make sure we are using these media legally, and where we find great stuff!

I would love to extend conversations started by Bethany Nowviskie in her Storify/blog, “What do girls dig?,” the #transformdh group presentation at last year’s ASA, and Miriam Posner’s blog post “Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code.” Namely, how can we open up the already-collaborative and collegial spaces of DH to be more welcoming and encouraging of traditionally underrepresented groups? In addition, how can we bring issues of identity and inclusivity into DH pedagogy?

Most people I talk to have a Kindle or iPad or other device for reading electronic books, but claim “it doesn’t really work for teaching” or “I can’t really use it to do my research.” As someone who relied pretty heavily on Early English Books Online for my dissertation, I am always struggling to make the best of what is available to me in my teaching and research. EEBO, for instance, is difficult to use in the classroom and in research because of its slow loading time and ridiculous navigation buttons. The Kindle should be an obvious improvement on that, but people still argue that the lack of page numbers is a limit on its utility. I would love to see a session devoted to best practices in the uses of electronic texts in teaching and research.

This session idea is one that I’ve proposed during THATCamp Austin 2009 and THATCamp Texas 2011, so if it seems semi-familiar, that’s why. In any event, I propose holding a session where we can discuss the challenges of getting students to learn how to approach and engage with technology in a risk-taking and creative manner. I’ve noticed more and more over the past few years that there’s a large disconnect between the popular cultural discourse of “millenials” and their actual tech-savviness, and the reality of how many students are fairly tech-phobic when it comes to new programs, resources, or unfamiliar platforms.

I’d like to discuss what pedagogical approaches, assignment structures, particular resources, or other strategies people have for getting students to become more willing to embrace risk and willingly challenge themselves to learn and master resources with which they are unfamiliar. Moreover, I think it’d be interesting, given the likely academia-heavy audience, to learn what colleges and universities expect of entering students in terms of tech-knowledge. Gaining a sense of these expectations I hope will allow the conversation to address the issue of how secondary school teachers (of which I am one) can help students become more confident and resourceful in navigating and employing the ever-changing landscape of technology.

Here’s my first session idea: I’m compiling a corpus of both old and new media vernacular texts as part of a semantic/anthropological examination of American beliefs about health. (It’s called CADOH—Corpus of American Discourses on Health). I’ve been using the pilot stages of it to look at the distribution of terms such as fat, stress, cold, and oil. I’m envisioning its final form as a mix of vernacular discussions. While good corpora exist already for contemporary magazine, newspaper, and fiction (e.g. COCA), I’m aiming to capture more transient conversations about health, including blog posts and their comments, listervs, online forums and wikis, letters to the editor, and radio transcripts. To make it useful for others, I will need copyright approval for sharing the texts. So I’m proposing a helpathon in order to hear from others who have dealt with compiling current materials. What ways to request copyrighted info have been helpful? For those items not under a Creative Commons license, are the costs prohibitive for re-using current material? And, once the copyright issues are dealt with, what’s the best way to make the corpus accessible? Would this be a good Omeka-type project?

Please click on the log-in button and post your own ideas for Saturday sessions. We have a program of
Workshops for Friday, but Saturday is wide open. That’s the way THATCamps work!

I would like to propose a session for Saturday on working with GIS in the humanities classroom. GIS [Geographic Information Systems] raises interesting teaching opportunities and dilemmas for humanities faculty. I’d like to be part of a discussion with other folks who are interested in these issues to share experiences and brainstorm about GIS pedagogy techniques for the humanities disciplines.

On the one hand, the dominant player, by far, in the GIS world is ArcGIS, by ESRI. Their software is the gold standard and they have developed some excellent teaching materials. They have also been good about publicizing how humanists [or at least historians like me] use their technology. And they do make 90-day trial disks quite readily available for students and faculty.

On the downside, an installed license version of ArcGIS is quite expensive and setting up a full teaching lab could be quite expensive. My institution can afford this but I’m teaching graduate and undergraduate students who will be teaching in institutions — high schools, community colleges, and small private colleges — that will probably not be able to put up such a lab. And on a philosophical basis, I’d like to be turning students on to more open-source software.

There is open-source GIS software like Quantum GIS, which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux systems. These would be easy to set up in an existing lab or to have students install on their own computers. Has anyone had experience teaching with these?

And there are also all kinds of new GIS-lite applications, with a lot of potential for teachiing. Some, like ArcGIS explorer and other ArcGIS on-line products, are relatively new while others, like Google Earth, have been in the teaching arena for a few years now. What should we be doing with these tools in the classroom? What are people doing with them?

How do I propose a session?

Once you register for THATCamp Texas and are approved, we’ll make you a user account on this site. You should receive your login information by email. Before the THATCamp, you should log in to the site, click on Posts –> Add New, then write and publish your session proposal. Your session proposal will appear on the front page of this site, and we’ll all be able to read and comment on it beforehand. (If you haven’t worked with WordPress before, see codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts for help.) The morning of the event, we’ll vote on those proposals (and probably come up with several new ones), and then all together we’ll work out how best to put those sessions into a schedule.

What do I propose?

Session genres

Here are the kinds of sessions people generally propose at THATCamp: general discussions, writing sessions, hacking sessions, working sessions, workshops, or “other.” See below for more details.

1. General discussion— Sometimes people just want to get together and talk informally, with no agenda, about something they’re all interested in. Nothing wrong with that; it’s certainly a much better way of meeting people than addressing them from behind a podium. Propose a session on a topic that interests you, and if other people are interested, they’ll show up to talk about it with you.
   • Jon Voss, Toward Linked Data in the Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010.
   • Nick Mirzoeff, An actual digital revolution?, THATCamp Prime 2009
   • Jeffrey McClurken, Archiving Social Media Conversations of Significant Events, THATCamp Prime 2009 (this session was combined with Nick Mirzoeff’s, above)
   • Eli Pousson, How do we share our knowledge of historic places?, THATCamp Columbus 2010
   • Frédéric Clavert and Véronique Ginouvès, Les archives orales et le web (Oral testimonies and the web), THATCamp Paris 2010
   • Zach Whalen, ARGS, Archives, and Digital Scholarship, THATCamp 2010
2. Hacking session— Several coders gather in a room to work on a particular project. These should usually take more than an hour or even two; if you propose such a session, you might want to ask that one room or swing space be dedicated to it for the entire day.
   • David Uspal, Hackfest: HTML5, THATCamp Philly 2011
   • Wayne Graham, Mostly Hack Zotero hacking session, THATCamp Prime 2010
   • Stéfan Sinclair, One Day, One Toolet, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
   • Ben Brumfield, Hackfest, THATCamp Austin 2009
3. Writing session — A group of people get together to start writing something. Writing can be collaborative or parallel: everyone can work together (probably in Google Docs) or by themselves (yet with a writing vibe filling the air) to write an article, a manifesto, a book, a blog post, a plan, or what you will.
   • Julie Meloni, “Project develop self-paced open access digital humanities curriculum…, THATCamp Prime 2010
   • Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, One Week, One Book: Hacking the Academy, THATCamp Prime 2010
4. Working session — You’re working on something, and you suspect that some of the various people who come to THATCamp might be able to help you with it. You describe problems you want solved and questions you want answered, and strangers magically show up to hear about what you’re doing and to give you their perspective and advice. This is notan hour-long demo; you should come with specific questions or tasks you want to work on with others for most of the session.
   • Aditi Shrikumar, Text Mining and the Digital Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
   • Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “how to transform something like CommentPress into a viable mode of open peer review,” THATCamp Southern California 2010
   • Sherman Dorn, The Ill-formed Question, THATCamp Prime 2009
5. Workshop — A traditional workshop session with an instructor who leads students through a short introduction to and hands-on exercise in a particular skill. Any THATCamp with three or more workshops that fit our workshop curriculum curriculum is eligible for the fellowship program, which means that its attendees can apply for a fellowship. (Note: the workshop series was formerly called “BootCamp,” a term we have now deprecated.)
   • Kirrily Roberts, FreeBase workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
   • Bethany Nowviskie and Bill Turkel, Hacking Wearables and E-Textiles Workshop, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010.
   • Aditi Muralidharan, Visualization workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
   • Note that some (even most) THATCamp organizers prefer to arrange workshop sessions ahead of time (see THATCamp New England’s workshop series, THATCamp Virginia’s workshops series, and THATCamp Southeast’s workshop series), but you can still volunteer to teach something at the last minute, or even put in a plea for someone else to teach something you’ve always wanted to learn (though if no teacher volunteers, it’s best to nix the session). That’s what’s great about THATCamp.
6. Grab bag— Ah, miscellany. One of our favorite categories. Indefinable by definition. It’s astonishing how creative people can be when you give them permission; performances and games are welcome.
   • David Staley, An installation, THATCamp Prime 2009.
   • Mark Sample, Zen Scavenger Hunt, THATCamp Prime 2010 (N.B.: The Zen Scavenger Hunt didn’t actually happen, but it was still a great idea).

No papers, no presentations

An unconference, in Tom Scheinfeldt’s words, is fun, productive, and collegial, and at THATCamp, therefore, “[W]e’re not here to listen and be listened to. We’re here to work, to participate actively.[…] We’re here to get stuff done.” Listen further:

Everyone should feel equally free to participate and everyone should let everyone else feel equally free to participate. You are not students and professors, management and staff here at THATCamp. At most conferences, the game we play is one in which I, the speaker, try desperately to prove to you how smart I am, and you, the audience member, tries desperately in the question and answer period to show how stupid I am by comparison. Not here. At THATCamp we’re here to be supportive of one another as we all struggle with the challenges and opportunities of incorporating technology in our work, departments, disciplines, and humanist missions.

Session proposers are session facilitators

If you propose a session, you should be prepared to run it. If you propose a hacking session, you should have the germ of a project to work on; if you propose a workshop, you should be prepared to teach it; if you propose a discussion of the Digital Public Library of America, you should be prepared to summarize what that is, begin the discussion, keep it going, and end it. But don’t worry — with the possible exception of workshops you’ve offered to teach, THATCamp sessions don’t really need to be prepared for; in fact, we infinitely prefer that you don’t prepare.

At most, you should come with one or two questions, problems, or goals, and you should be prepared to spend the session working on and working out those one or two points informally with a group of people who (believe me) are not there to judge your performance. Even last-minute workshops can be terrifically useful for others if you know the tool or skill you’re teaching inside and out. As long as you take responsibility for running the session, that’s usually all that’s needed. See the book Open Space Technology for a longer discussion of why we don’t adopt or encourage more structured forms of facilitation.

Empty sessions

We also encourage organizers to leave a few empty time slots during the THATCamp so that attendees can propose new sessions during the THATCamp itself; if the organizers of your THATCamp have done this, they’ll tell you how to propose a session while your THATCamp is taking place. Sometimes, for instance, your discussion was going so well at the one hour fifteen minute mark that you hated to end it; if there’s a slot available, you should be able to propose “Training Robotic Ferrets: Part Two” as a session as soon as “Training Robotic Ferrets” ends.

Here’s a campus parking map [PDF] for THATCampers! On Friday attendees must park in lots 49, 50 and 52 and on Saturday we can park in lots F10 and 47, which are closer to the Central Library. Parking map for THATCampers

On Friday morning we will be competing with students for parking, so you may want to allow a little extra time.
One other option is to park in the garage in the middle of campus, but this is a paid garage and there’s no guarantee that spaces will be available.

Information on local hotels and restaurants is now online.

We’re setting up the 11 following workshops for our Friday session! We be back with sign-up details once we’ve finalized the schedule and rooms:

1. intro to GIS for humanities folks
2. Zotero, open source reference manager
3. XML for Text-encoding
4. Making and using e-books
5. Distance education with Adobe Connect
6. Machine translation
7. Video creation and editing (will probably be PC specific)
8. Screencasting
9. Regular Expressions
10. Scholarly communication and copyright issues
11. PowerSearching: new tools and techniques

We’ll be running them at the following times:

• 3 concurrent sessions from 10 to11:30
• Lunch break, with food provided by UTA [donations accepted!]
• 3 concurrent sessions from 12:30 to 2pm
• 3 concurrent session from 2pm to 3:30
• 2 concurrent session from 4 to 5:30

Hi! The organizing committee has been working on possible tech workshops for our optional Friday session. We’d love to get some feedback from those who have registered — and to hear your ideas! Please leave comments! Here are some of what we’ve talked about:

• Intro to GIS-for-humanities
• Zotero open-source bibliography manager
• Video Creation & Editing
• Teaching and using Search tools in the classroom
• Open-source screencasting
• Distance learning — pedagogy & technology, best practices
• XML and Text Encoding
• e-book creation
• Intro to open source content management systems — Joomla, Drupal, Omeka
• Institutional research repositories
• Machine-based foreign language translation
• New frontiers and technologies in scholarly communication
• Intro to R: Open-source Statistical Computing
• Intro to Regular Expressions
• Twitter for Academic Uses
• Developing tech teaching for K-12

The first 10 people have registered already!  Looking forward to a great unconference in March.

We’ve got our registration set up with some help from THATCamp Central. Go ahead and sign up — we’re accepting the first 125 applicants. Once you’re registered you can propose sessions. We hope to have some tentative workshops announced here in the next couple of days.

THATCamp Texas 2012 will be held on the campus of the University of Texas at Arlington on Saturday, March 10 with a BootCamp on Friday March 9. Watch this space for more information, including registration information and a request for session topics!