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?

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.

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.

Glenn Willumson, School of Art & Art History;  Richard Freeman, Smathers Libraries

Supported by a library mini-grant, this project is a collaborative venture between the library and the School of Arts and Art History to make the photographs of the construction of the first transcontinental railroad available to the public.  Professor Glenn Willumson digitized the original large-format (10 x 13 inch) glass-plate negatives made, by Andrew Russell, photographer of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868 and 1869.  Richard Freeman, University of Florida’s anthropology librarian, oversaw the creation of the website, which makes approximately 190 of his 240 photographs widely available for the first time.  Equally important, the website will be dynamic, encouraging interactivity with its viewers in hopes of gathering knowledge associated with the photographs–about photography, railroad technology, the mid-19^th century West, the growth of cities, the extent of Russell’s documentation, and the location missing photographs from this body of work.  It is hoped this digital photographic archive will be a first step in a larger digital project that will make the almost 1000 stereographs of the railroad construction available to the public and prove to be a model for future collaborative efforts on campus and with users throughout the world.

I get the digital humanities. I like and support the digital humanities. What I’d like to explore is when does “DH” work start to cross over into science and social science work, and if that is the case, when do we start to talk to scientists and social scientists about transforming some of their work into digital projects? (What is the standard product of a scientific research project? The final published article in PDF? There must be more…)

I think it’d be really helpful to the continued growth of digital scholarship broadly defined if we began to think about ways to apply traditional humanities skills (critical inquiry, close reading) to research problems and questions in scientific fields. Or, when could we, instead of becoming hackers and big data guru’s ourselves, pull a scientist into our DH research groups as a partner? What would make this collaboration valuable to all parties? Is this even probable? I think we’re often halfway there with GIS and visualization, but there may be more.

My point of view is obviously thinking about where the library could situate itself as a connector between the two sides of the academy, and how might a “digital scholarship center” involve itself in more than just digital humanities projects. Partially inspired by this post in DH Q&A, and the fact that I’m the Psychology Liaison at Florida State and really want to work with those researchers on new, cool, interesting things.

Inherent challenges? Tenure.

Inherent opportunities? Actual interdisciplinary work (not just historians working with English folks and librarians).

This session could be an addendum to these from other THATCamps:

• Creating an Introduction to Data Course (or, perhaps, Data Translation for Working on Data Science Teams, “Digital Literacy with a Maker Spirit”)
• DH + Social Sciences

Maybe some readings?

• MOOC on Scientific Humanities
• “Science’s Humanities Gap”, NYT, 9/18/13

What is TEI? What can you do with it? How can one get started with TEI editing? What avenues exist for publishing online with TEI encoded projects?

TEI (or the Text Encoding Initiative) is a way to prepare archival documents to be coded and searched electronically.   This session aims to explore TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) through an examination of two mark up projects:  the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition www.brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/   and a digital edition of Virgil’s Aeneid (dissertation).

In addition to understanding how one can use an XML editing tool like <Oxygen> www.oxygenxml.com/, the session will illustrate the process for coding texts in basic structural ways along with more in-depth interpretive ways or tagging.

Time will also be spent exploring traditional publishing platforms such as XTF xtf.cdlib.org/  and more recent initiatives such TAPAS  www.northeastern.edu/nulab/tapas/    It will also examine the state of cutting edge XML tools such as Juxta Editions.

Participants will learn basic processes of creating exhibits, including content selection, best practices, design and presentation considerations, and guidelines for writing labels.

Original content created by presenter will be shared, including label writing tips and templates, sample timelines, and exhibition proposals. Both physical and online exhibitions will be discussed.