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

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.

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?

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

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/

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

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.

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!

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.