Posted on March 18, 2014 by Dhanashree Thorat

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!

Categories: General | Comments Off on

MassMine: One year later

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Aaron Beveridge

Last year at THATCamp there was an informal presentation about humanities software development and MassMine. At that point we did have functional code written that could systematically collect data from Twitter, but MassMine was more concept than fully developed project. A year later, the MassMine project has received start-up funding from the NEH, has completed almost a full year of on-going development and testing through UF’s supercomputer cluster, has been tested in humanities and social science classrooms at two universities, and is being used for on-going data collection in numerous research projects.

This presentation will quickly show some of the newest developments for MassMine, and discuss the use of MassMine through Research Computing in the humanities classroom at UF.

Possible topics for discussion after short presentation:

  • How to use MassMine or get involved with the project
  • Humanities software development
  • Text mining
  • Data visualization
  • Grant writing
Categories: General | Comments Off on MassMine: One year later

Teaching and Learning with Apps

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Cari Jimenez

I propose a Talk and Play session to discuss, share and play with our favorite free apps. We will talk about how we use them for learning, teaching, research and assessment.

Bring your favorite device, list of apps and uses, and best practices/tips. Let’s share!

I will discuss how I use apps in my language classroom to engage students fulfilling the National Language Standards- the 5’Cs (Community, Connection, Comparison, Communication, Culture)

World-ReadinessStandardsforLearningLanguages

I will share how I use

  • Socrative
  • Snapchat
  • Apalabrados *word with friends
  • Groupme
  • Tellagami
  • Threering
  • Zite
  • Duolingo/Memrise

I would like to create a centralized location where we can share list of apps, best practices and uses. We can discuss the best platform for this location in this session.

 

Categories: Teaching | Comments Off on Teaching and Learning with Apps

Impromptu Proposal: What do our students know about technology?

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Jennifer Coenen

During any discussion I have about social media or other technology as a pedagogical tool, I get excited and start imagining lots of possibilities. Then I try to apply them in class. One challenge I’ve faced is that students don’t always know as much about using technology (i.e., computers, the Internet, applications, etc.) as I expect. I would like to open up a discussion with others about this issue – what are your experiences? how have you handled these challenges? what tools do they know that you don’t?

Categories: Administrative, Blogging, Collaboration, Digital Literacy, Diversity, Social Media, Teaching | Comments Off on Impromptu Proposal: What do our students know about technology?

THATCamp Gainesville Notes

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Kadesh Lauridsen

Welcome!

THATCamp Gainesville is underway!

Please add notes to our shared Google Doc here: docs.google.com/document/d/1U6EuUW1TvI1z8KL2yefbCBO-eoczgEAPU0n3iJ0XxVQ/edit?usp=sharing

Please Tweet notes and comments. Our hashtag is #tcgnv

Categories: General | Comments Off on THATCamp Gainesville Notes

PhilPapers: Supporting Volunteer Initiatives for the Long Term

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Abby Scheel

Last week PhilPapers, “a comprehensive index and bibliography of philosophy maintained by the community of philosophers,” sent letters to academic librarians asking for financial support to sustain their work. As a recipient of such a letter, I would like to invite philosophers, librarians, and others interested in volunteer-run digital projects like PhilPapers to talk about issues raised by the organization’s call for support.  Among other topics, we can consider such questions as what is the value of such a service for scholars? for graduate students? for undergraduates?  Is asking for subscriptions from libraries the most appropriate method for supporting resources like PhilPapers?  Should libraries regularly factor funding for such services into collections budgets and how should libraries prioritize such funding with traditional journal and database subscriptions?  All are welcome to bring their opinions and their questions to the table.

If you are unfamiliar with PhilPapers or their call for subscriptions, here are a few links to more information:

Check out PhilPapers here: philpapers.org/

See PhilPapers public notice calling for institutional subscriptions here: philpapers.org/post/8146

For an overview of the response from librarians see this post from Wayne Bivens-Tatum, philosophy librarian at Princeton University: blogs.princeton.edu/librarian/2014/04/a-last-bit-on-philpapers/

Categories: Crowdsourcing, Funding, Libraries, Metadata, Open Access, Project Management, Research Methods, Session Proposals, Session: Talk | 1 Comment

RICHES™: SEARCH. ANALYZE. VISUALIZE. LEARN

Posted on April 22, 2014 by Connie Lester

RICHES™ (Regional Initiative for Collecting the History, Experiences, and Stories) of Central Florida introduced RICHES Mosaic Interface™ (RICHES MI) 2.5 at THAT Camp Florida in February 2014.  We provided a survey for THAT Camp participants to evaluate the site and make suggestions for changes before going live.  We listened to your suggestions and incorporated several changes that improved the searchability and presentation of the site.

RICHES MI is an interactive database for historical research and also serves as a platform for students, museums, and community members to publish their digitized data and create digital exhibits.  RICHES MI connects students developing classroom projects, museums and archives, and private collectors to the larger digital world.  Class projects can become multi-semester endeavors as the work of one class can be expanded by the next.  The work of each individual student is credited and provides a digital publication for future resumes and vitas. Museums, archives, and collectors create greater awareness of their collections for research purposes and encourage visits to their repository through the “Search Source Repository” feature installed at the suggestion of a THAT Camp Florida participant.  Finally, RICHES MI offers an array of tools to enable researchers to analyze their search results and see the connections between items housed in the database.

Join us for a presentation of RICHES MI 2.5 and discussion of the following topics:

  • How to create user communities
  • Using RICHES MI for student projects
  • RICHES MI as a research tool
  • Using Google Analytics to understand site usage
Categories: General | 2 Comments

“Making Meaning through Online Media: Pedagogical Possibilities for Social Media Platforms.”

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Kadesh Lauridsen

I propose a hybrid Talk-Make session focused on the creative and effective uses of social media platforms in the classroom. The humanities share a core knowledge structure that is both narrative and dialectical; therefore students of the humanities can benefit from experiential understanding of these structures. As some of us know (depending on our level of engagement), social media platforms engage and enable this same style of dialogue. Most students, however, engage with social media in a comparatively “shallow” manner—focusing more on people than knowledge. I’d like to explore the ways that we, as educators, researchers, and knowledge-makers, can help our students use what they know to discover what they have yet to know. As they do so, I believe they become active participants in new ways of meaning-making.  

Talk

For the Talk portion, I would like to share briefly a project my students did this semester that utilized Storify <www.storify.com> to bring together digital information in a narrative format. I believe the framework of the project has applications across multiple disciplines. The Storify format allowed students to engage course materials with outside materials, placing them in dialogue with others while asserting their own voices. Along the way, we also utilized Twitter as part of the larger classroom landscape, which served as a springboard for ideas, a platform for discussion, and interactive gateway to the outside world. On every level, these technologies enhanced student involvement in the classroom, student learning, and – that thing every instructor seeks to achieve – student desire to pursue more learning. I’ll bring copies of the assignment and post a link to it and some student projects on our website prior to the conference.

Make

For the Make portion, I want participants to

  1. Bring ideas, questions, and desired outcomes for classroom social media projects in the works;
  2. Share any successful projects they have developed;
  3. Leave with finished (or fleshed-out) products and a variety of useful materials from colleagues.

Some Platforms I am interested in hearing more about: Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Vine, and Google+. I hope participants will add others.

Preparation & Follow-Up
I encourage participants to arrive pre-registered with a Google account for the use of joint Google docs; be prepared to collaborate and share. Bring your work on a flash drive and be prepared to Make! (Listening contributors are welcome, too!)

I’d like to create a centralized location online for continued collaboration on these, and future, digital/educational projects. We can discuss the best platform for this location in the session. One of our THATCamp coordinators has offered UF’s Digital Humanities Project Showplace <cms.uflib.ufl.edu/DigitalHumanities/UFDigitalHumanitiesProjects&gt; as one viable option.

Categories: Collaboration, Digital Literacy, Session: Make, Session: Talk, Social Media, Teaching | 5 Comments

The Pedagogy of the Archive as Intervention

Posted on April 18, 2014 by rosenber

We are in a critical moment because many materials from the colonial and imperial archive are being digitized. I therefore propose a session to talk about if and how we can avoid reproducing the colonial structure of existing historical archival materials as they are migrated into digital archives. Further, I would like to discuss how to integrate this question into the classroom and to use as an example an assignment that I developed with colleagues in Caribbean studies and librarians at UF. In this assignment, students analyze a historical photograph which has minimal metadata, place it in its historical context, analyze its existing metadata and make suggestions for enhancing that metadata in ways that would counter the limitations, particularly the colonial assumptions, implicit in the existing metadata. Students analyzed photographs from the Panama Canal Museum Collection, which might well be described as an imperial archive as it contains the materials collected by the white US employees of the US Canal Commission. Many of these photographs document the construction of the canal and in so doing include images of Afro-Caribbean workers; however, the workers are rarely mentioned. Students added subject headings and notes to the catalog record to identify the Afro-Caribbean workers and explain the context of their labor. Students have found this assignment rewarding because they see that their work can change how the subjects in the photographs are defined. The photographs were listed under construction (“The Gatun Locks,” “Widening the Pavement in Panama City,” etc.); with new subject headings and notes, they can be found by researchers looking for race, labor, and Afro-Caribbeans in Panama. The Students have all signed permissions for their work to be included in the dLOC/UFDC catalog records and their work will be included in the UFDC metadata where relevant.

Categories: General | 2 Comments

Tour of the Map & Imagery Library

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Carol McAuliffe

I’m proposing a session that is an open invitation to all participants to tour the Map & Imagery Library (first floor of the Smathers Library, right across the hall) to hear about our physical and digital collections, prior grant projects, collaborative projects and activities, new opportunities, and more!

Categories: General | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

DHer as Designer

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Lindsey Harding

In this talk session, I propose a look at design in DH projects. Matthew Kirschenbaum suggests in “‘So the Colors Cover the Wires’: Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability,” “just as interface cannot – finally – be decoupled from functionality, neither can aesthetics be decoupled from interface.” This “lesson here for the digital humanities” seems to point to the critical roles design and beauty play in the production and use of DH projects.  Kirschenbaum concludes his article with a glance to the future: “One of the major challenges for the digital humanities in the coming decade will therefore be designing for interfaces (and designing interfaces themselves) outside of the 13- to 21-inch comfort zone of the desktop box.”  With this challenge in mind, I would like for us to consider the following questions:

1. How do we talk about design in DH?

2. How do we teach design in DH?

3. How do we do design in DH?

In addition, I’d like for us to look at a number of interfaces for DH projects to critically reflect on design as it influences how we approach and use the various projects.  Participants will be invited to work in small groups to analyze interfaces and then share their conversations with the whole group.  From these shared discussions, we will strive together to make visible how design and aesthetics work to direct attention, guide action, and affect emotion.  The conclusions that arise will hopefully point to new opportunities and challenges related to the development, composition, and display of DH projects and scholarship.

Categories: Session Proposals, Session: Talk, Visualization | Tags: , , | 3 Comments

Digital Curation: Adding Value to Digital Collections

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Suzan Alteri

Facilitated by Suzan Alteri and Dan Reboussin

Digital curation is the “active management of digital resources over the life-cycle of scholarly and scientific interest.” We will discuss several activities that can be undertaken once a collection is online in order to improve scholarly access. State of the art access depends on the acknowledgement of both social and technical aspects of the way information is indexed by online search engines. Effective curation allows researchers to discover relevant collections they weren’t already aware of prior to conducting an online search. Examples of curation activities to be discussed and demonstrated include: creating detailed metadata, building a rich scholarly context on collection landing pages, creating useful subcollection divisions, and contributing to appropriate sites in ways that support online discoverability.

Categories: Archives, Collaboration, Digital Literacy, Libraries, Metadata, Social Media | 6 Comments

Fair Use Strategies for Digital Humanities Projects

Posted on April 16, 2014 by Christine Fruin

In rendering its judgment in the case of Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, the court was persuaded by arguments raised in the “digital humanities” amicus brief. The court expressly stated that the transformative uses of the digitized content, as highlighted in the brief, was the very definition of fair use. This endorsement of fair use in transformative digitization projects informs the articulation of strategies or best practices to employ when building new digital humanities projects. During this session, we will talk about some well-accepted fair use strategies and best practices for digital humanities projects — and maybe articulate some new ones!

Categories: Copyright, Project Management, Session Proposals, Session: Talk | 3 Comments

Undergraduate Students and Digital Humanities

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Catelyn Cantrell

When I began my own research project as a second-year undergraduate, I set out to map the world of Dante’s Commedia through the use of GIS software. However, I eventually left that project behind and pivoted into a more traditional topic and goal. Although I am pleased with how my undergraduate thesis turned out, I would like to talk about undergraduates and projects in digital humanities. As the bar continues to be raised for undergraduate research projects, I wonder how digital skills can enhance and shape future work. This discussion will likely yield more questions than I can predict—here are some of my own to get us started:

  • What types of results do instructors consider digital humanities projects?
  • What kinds of traditional disciplines and courses lend themselves to these projects?
  • What type of skill set would students need in order to do these projects?
  • What resources and support can ensure the success of undergraduate work in the digital humanities?
  • How early is too early to get started?

Despite focusing this proposal on the undergraduate experience, I think the questions I have outlined could also be extended to other levels of students and instructors themselves.

Categories: Mapping, Project Management, Research Methods, Session Proposals, Session: Talk, Teaching | 3 Comments

Visualizing Time & Place with GoogleEarth

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Marcy Galbreath

How can GoogleEarth maps be used to the best effect in digital archive projects? Amy Giroux and I would like to continue the discussion on the use of digital mapping as a conversational feature in interactive digital archives. We have each employed GE map overlays to enhance our archive projects, employing the layering properties and tour feature with the intent of generating comments and feedback from site visitors, as well as providing visual guide points for historic processes (i.e., population and demographic changes over time, land use changes, etc.).

We are interested in hearing what others have experienced, and in exploring the opportunities and limits of this technology as a generative feature in interactive archives.

Categories: Archives, Mapping, Session: Talk, Visualization | 1 Comment

Beyond language: expanding the concept of translatability in digital studies

Posted on April 14, 2014 by Anastasia Kozak

This conversation will explore the concept of translatability that includes, but is not limited to, traditional language translation. As a starting point, we’ll take it as axiomatic that translation exists in every transfer of information (whether analog or digital) and that we can learn (and teach) a lot by engaging in and becoming conscious of this process. Essentially, we will try to come up with generative and creative approaches to translation in digital humanities, whether in the classroom or in our own research projects.

Discussion points may include the following:

  • analog to digital translation
  • human gesture, composition, and motion capture technologies
  • multimodal translation (visual, sound, silence)
  • visual languages in digital humanities
  • crowd-sourcing translations
  • cross-platform virtualization and binary translation
Categories: Session Proposals, Session: Talk | 4 Comments

Open Access and the Humanities

Posted on April 14, 2014 by Josh Bolick

So often in discussions about open access to scholarship, there is an implication that OA is for STEM, and that the products of humanities scholarship are fundamentally different somehow and therefore not appropriate for openness. I want to explore this (mis?)perception in a talk session about openness in the humanities. I’m most interested in the perspectives of practicing humanists, but also in the experiences of other librarians who’ve struggled to convince their humanities faculty to get their work out from behind the paywall. My goal isn’t to change anyone’s mind, but rather to have a fruitful discussion in a collaborative environment about the challenges humanists perceive from the OA movement, and brainstorm ways in which we (librarians and scholarly communications staff) can make scholarly communication programs work for humanities scholars.

Feel free to tweet at me if you have any suggestions for the session @joshbolick

Categories: Libraries, Open Access, Publishing, Session: Talk, Tenure and Promotion | 5 Comments

Staying up to date for academic needs on Twitter, in 15 (or fewer) minutes a day?

Posted on April 14, 2014 by Laurie

I find it difficult to stay up to date on Twitter, specifically because I find it difficult to use Twitter with any regularity.  I’m not ready to carve out much time from my existing schedule for Twitter because I don’t see how this would be a great return on investment for time. When I do use Twitter, I sometimes see it as beneficial and sometimes just feel like it takes time, so I’d like to learn to be a better Twitter user with a limited timeframe so that I don’t get frustrated as I learn.  I’d be happy to dedicate a few minutes each day to Twitter if I could understand how to ensure the time would be for successful Twitter usage (and I could use that to build into more time, if I could make it worthwhile).

I’m wondering if someone with Twitter savvy could share on best practices for making Twitter work in 15 (or fewer) minutes a day? Or maybe someone with Twitter savvy could help re-frame this into a more productive question and session?

Categories: General | 2 Comments

Applying Digital Archive Skills: The Birth Control Review as Case Study

Posted on April 12, 2014 by Aimee Armande Wilson

Gainesville THATCampers have proposed sessions on creating digital archives, making exhibitions for those archives, and learning TEI editing for documents within said archives. These promise to be excellent sessions and I hope they all make the cut. With that said, I’m sure many of us are hands-on learners who would benefit from a session in which we further apply our newly learned skills about digital archives with (hopefully) the benefit of some more-experienced individuals on-hand to help us think through the technical steps as well as any ethical, legal, and aesthetic issues that might arise.

Here’s what I propose: I’ll make myself a guinea pig and offer up my still-in-beginning-stages Digital Archive of the Birth Control Review (a little magazine run by Margaret Sanger from 1917-1929) for experimentation, critique, and play. By looking at an archive that is in the early stages of development – and designed by a neophyte – rather than one that is polished and exemplary, this session will provide a useful counterpart to those proposed by Patricia Carlton, Mark Kamrath, and Lourdes Santamaria-Wheeler.

I will begin the session by briefly introducing the archive, mentioning some of the questions and pitfalls I faced in getting the archive to this stage, and explaining the concerns I have going forward. Then, depending on the interests of the group, we could break into smaller groups to discuss/work on/play with discrete topics such as digital archive design (what works and what doesn’t about this particular archive) or TEI editing one of the magazine’s issues.

Full disclosure: I am not an expert in digital archives, coding, or preservation techniques. Yet I think my lack of knowledge is actually an asset here. In talking through the steps that led me to begin the Archive of the Birth Control Review, and getting feedback on the site from experts and novices alike, my hope is that non-tech-savvy individuals such as myself will gain inspiration for and insight into the process of starting up a digital archive.

The Archive of the Birth Control Review can be found at birthcontrolreview.omeka.net/. This archive aims to make the periodical more accessible by housing a searchable index of all issues (no comprehensive index currently exists), as well as guided collections of articles from the magazine on topics such as eugenics, race, suffrage, and WWI.

Categories: Archives, Session: Make, Session: Play | 3 Comments

“Magic Mirror Theater”: A Virtual Reality, Experiential Learning Environment.

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Eleni Bozia

Magic Mirror Theater is an open-source web application designed to facilitate the study of classical drama and potentially other forms of literature by enhancing the current teaching methodologies in higher education, using an experiential-learning augmented-reality environment. It allows instructors and students to use their classroom projector or personal computer screen as a “magic mirror” in which they can see themselves standing on the stage of an ancient theater digitized in life size, holding digital replicas of ancient props, wearing digital costumes, and interacting with virtual mechanical devices used during theatrical performance in the Greco-Roman world.  A library of 3D objects thematically categorized will be available along with options for selecting theatrical space, perspective, replicating user’s body on the stage in various arrangements (chorus/main actors), and other features. This system aims to help students and future scholars understand the circumstances of performance and comprehend the architectural and spatiotemporal logistics of Classical Drama.

Categories: Session: Play, Teaching, Visualization | 2 Comments

Connecting Florida: A Digital Initiative

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Jennifer Snyder

The Florida Humanities Council, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, is partnering with the Smithsonian Institute on a Technological Initiative called “Connecting Florida.” Building on the museum network already created by “Museum on Main Street,” which has now reached upwards of 20 states, the Florida Humanities Council will develop a digital system which will connect and integrate small town museums across the state of Florida. This digital system will capture and disseminate state and local stories and provide dynamic, interactive humanities content.

Once community pillars and repositories of local history and memory, small town museums are quickly becoming obsolete in the face of an ever evolving technological landscape. In fact, consultants for local museums have commented that small museums “lack all of the new technology platforms” and as a result these museums will “most likely fall further behind the industry and become less relevant to the intended audience.” We are looking to solve this problem.

I would like to propose a short presentation of the project and solicit feedback. Do you know any comparable systems? Do you see any pitfalls, partnerships, or potential?

Categories: General | 1 Comment