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

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

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

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.

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!

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?

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.

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?

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.

We will provide a short introduction to the software project called MassMine–an open source software, developed by academic/humanities researchers, for use within the academy. The software has been used to data mine Twitter and this data is being analyzed as the basis for a publication about trends, media ecology, and the concept of cybernetic “attention.” Our short presentation will explain how the software project resulted from limitations in currently available tools for conducting academic research on social media. The goal is for introduction to lead to engaging and innovative dialogue about the prospects for humanities software development, the ongoing task of understanding how/why data science/mining may present useful methods for research in the humanities, and/or how software development and data science may be integral to the research of “writing” (any form of inscription or multi-modal composition) as it occurs within an ever-changing and restructuring media ecology.

–Nicholas M. Van Horn will be co-presenting/collaborating remotely for this session

www.massmine.com

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?