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.

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.

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