I propose to have an April 25 Talk session to discuss and share how Basecamp and Qualtrics can be used to develop and manage courses.

Basecamp is a project management tool that allows teams to manage workflows, track time, and share project-related resources. Qualtrics, a data collection and analysis survey tool, supports a variety of research both in the business environment and at every major university in the US; it can also be used to create robust surveys, assignments, assessments, and other course tools.

I will share how a busy undergraduate and graduate course design and support team at the University of Florida uses both tools to not only develop courses, but also manage them. I will also detail our best practices and learnings for using both tools. I hope that this sharing leads to a discussion of how Basecamp and Qualtrics can be used for other facets of course development and management, as well as additional ways they might be used to support and manage other types of projects.

What are the needs for infrastructure that researchers in the humanities have?

What problems do they encounter that they cannot resolve on their own?

What would help collaboration with “outsiders”, i.e. the engineers and scientists who have been using computers for a while?

What infrastructure is available?

Where do you find out about it?

What is the role of the libraries in connecting researchers in the digital humanities with the machinery of computers, networks and disk drives?

Find out how to avoid wasting time preparing proposals that may not be feasible. This session will breakdown the process developed to support librarians in their pursuit of grant funding, and to build a successful grants program at the Smathers Libraries. You’ll learn how to interpret grant guidelines, facilitate brainstorming, and determine feasibility prior to writing the proposal—all of which will save hours of struggling and heartache..(1 hour)

CoLAB Planning Series® workshops have been facilitated since 2002 and have served over 1740 participants in nonprofits and academic institutions. Learn the keys to creating engaging and creative connections using methods that build on asset-based community development, appreciative inquiry and other methodologies. We will experiment with a short demonstration of how quickly you can get to know what’s most important to the mysterious colleague sitting next to you. (45 minutes)

Move Around the Room is a fun facilitated ice-breaker to meet participants during short 1-2 minute conversations. This session is best used at the start of a conference to assist participants in getting acquainted with each other in an engaging and interesting way. While moving around the room, each participant will find a partner and exchange answers to a question provided by the facilitator. After five rounds (5 different questions with 5 different people) participants then help to introduce participants at the beginning of the conference. (1 hour-if we do introductions for 30-40 participants?)

Welcome to THATCamp Gainesville, a Digital Humanities unconference.

THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) is an informal and free unconference where you can discuss digital projects, learn skills, and brainstorm DH initiatives.

Browse through the list of session THATCamp Gainesville proposals below this post! If you are ready to propose your own session, please go to the Propose page, and follow the link included there. After you publish your post through that link, your session proposal will appear below. Session proposals don’t have to be sent to the organizers for review. Each session lasts for an hour, and usually involves a short presentation and then a group discussion.

If you are not yet ready to propose a session, please feel free to comment on other posts here. Comments let session organizers know that others are interested in that conversation.

You don’t have to propose a session in order to attend THATCamp Gainesville.

If you are attending THATCamp Gainesville to learn about something, please use the link on the Propose page to let others know. THATCamp is about pooling together our resources and skills.  Fellow THATCampers have expressed an interest in learning or talking about these topcis. Please a post a proposal if you can facilitate a session on these topics!

Tools for mark up, text mining, analysis/modelling, how visualizations are used to present complex materials, effective hybrid course tools, use of Twitter in and out of classrooms, how are libraries contributing to and shaping DH, incorporating technology in teaching and research, the “digital scholarship office” model, SEO, incorporating cultural significance into the tech sphere, TEI, public scholarship, Omeka, Drupal, Zotero, Linked Data, crowdsourcing, design in DH projects, software that converts metadata, data analysis from a mathematical perspective

Please don’t forget to Register!

Even simple projects in digital humanities involve complex decisions at many different levels of granularity, and managing those decisions adeptly is an art in and of itself. What encodings will work for your documents and keep working when conditions change? What editors will you use to prepare the documents? What metadata tagging and storage systems will bind those documents into collections? How will human users access the collections? What interfaces can other projects leverage to interact with this project? Even before those questions, what needs does the project address, what is its scope, what controls govern its progress, and how does it draw in and keep stakeholders? After the go-live date, how do you determine whether your project was a success? How do you keep everything in focus without losing track of either the details or the big picture? Managing a project means not just getting-it-done but providing for goal-setting, planning, guidance, and evaluation, and doing so without getting in the way of the research. What are the current best practices for managing a digital humanities project? What frameworks and tools help you define, meet, and evaluate your goals?

I’m proposing that we use THATCamp Gainesville to continue an important discussion began at THATCamp Florida 2014, namely: how can institutions across the state of Florida (the 3rd most populous state in the U.S., with a “high tech corridor”) join together to support and promote DH work and collaborations? Such a collaborative could have a number of benefits, such as: sharing the unique resources and expertise at different FL campuses, demonstrating the wealth of DH work in Florida for policymakers, directing K-12 educators towards class resources, and showcasing the importance of the humanities in building robust structures for online education. What kinds of projects would the FL DH Commons support (e.g., yearly graduate training intensives, peer review of DH projects). Please come and share your thoughts about what you need, and how we can band together across the state to provide it. The network could be launched at THATCamp Florida 2015.

I’m proposing to have a session discussing and sharing about the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dLOC.com) in terms of the dLOC community, example work and activities for research and teaching with dLOC, and ways to be involved with dLOC specifically as well as how to apply lessons learned from the dLOC model for other digital humanities and humanities activities.

THATCamp Gainesville: April 24-25, 2014
University of Florida, Smathers Library (Smathers Library, formerly Library East, on UF Campus Map) and Library West (Library West on UF Campus Map).

THATCamp Gainesville will be based in UF’s Smathers Library (1A and the new Judaica Suite, which can be accessed through the Grand Reading Room on the second floor) and Library West (rooms 211, 419, and 429).

Please see the campus map for getting around UF’s enormous campus.

See the travel page for more on travel.