My colleagues and I at MathWorks are in the process of designing and building an interactive digital exhibit for the Ecotarium: a science museum in Worcester, MA. I would like to discuss my experience as a designer and code developer on the project. Some questions I would like to discuss with the audience are:

• Where does the design process for an interactive exhibit start?
• How do you simplify a complex concept to work as a children’s exhibit?
• What goes into the software engineering of an interactive exhibit?

I would like to propose a session about the ethics of data visualization. How, given new digital tools, can we honestly represent our research? What are the obligations as a researcher in conducting collaborative research and project development with people whose lives we are representing digitally? How do we construct a methodology(ies) in the field of digital humanities that does not do violence to the subjects of our research? What are key new tensions that emerge between researchers and subjects when using data visualization?

I am totally new to DH and to THATCamps; still figuring out semantics of workshops, sessions etc. But would like to propose a session or two.

First, I briefly mentioned in a response to the workshops post that one that offered a comparative overview of the potential and limitations of different tools such as drupal and omeka for different types of projects would be helpful. Deb Sarlin commented a similar request here that  is worded more fully and clearly (and appropriately addressed to session topics). I bring it up here to make sure it gets put in the pot with the other session proposals.

I’d also like to propose a session on how DH scholars and practitioners are using sound and music in their projects and/or how sound and music scholars are participating in DH. As a director of a music archives and a jazz scholar with a pretty traditional background, I’d like to learn more about the tools that are available, how are they being put to use, and to what ends.

In the context of a humanities classroom, students can engage with ideas and culture in a hands-on way as they figure out how to arrange and interpret digital objects. Curating digital material into meaningful collections has become a critical skill, not just for libraries figuring out how to organize and preserve digital content, but also for each of us trying to deal with information overload and filter failure in our own lives.

I propose a session in which we discuss how digital curation, broadly conceived, can be used in teaching. Our goal will be to assemble a collection of assignment case studies and tool reviews that can be shared with the larger group.

Participants will be invited to share:

• Assignment Case Studies: What are good examples of assignments that involve organizing digital content, and what challenges can they sometimes present? For example, a case study could feature an assignment based around student-contributed content that requires an instructor to figure out ways to manage it so that it serves a pedagogical goal and doesn’t just end up becoming an overwhelming mass of disjointed material.
• Tools: What tools are good for creating digital collections in a classroom setting?  This could included tools for curating social media and other web-based content (Storify, Scoop.it, Diigo, etc.) or other tools that draw on library resources (Artstor, for example) or digitized primary sources. For example, at Boston College we are using MediaKron, a tool we developed to help faculty collect and organize multimedia content for teaching that has created new opportunities for students to gather material as part of the learning process.

In discussions about DH in my department, one of the concerns about DH that often surfaces is that digital history is considerably more difficult when the sources are, far from being digitized, not even in print. Where some scholars can grab huge amounts of data from digitized sources to create their networks, for instance, my colleague is building his network one manuscript at a time. Thus, some scholars shy away from DH because it makes research even more complicated rather than simplifying it.

I’d like to discuss how DH can be used for research even when the sources aren’t digital. Perhaps this manifests itself in a different method of using the tools; perhaps it’s merely a different analytical approach. Is there value in doing DH when the data does not fit well into the DH wheelhouse? If there isn’t, what then is the role of DH in researching “older” history?

It’s a little ironic that, despite the sizable quantity of conferencing technology available, we’re all bussing and training and carring and planing in to Providence to meet about the Digital Humanities. The situation illustrates how technology, from GPS’s to projectors to iPads, is located as a supplement to physical space. What happens when we look at it from the opposite angle? How does physicality have the potential to enhance, diminish or otherwise inform a technological experience? For example, consider geographical areas with limited internet access (or conversely, Silicon Valley), or technology that responds to your location and proximity to particular items, or the difference between a book and a Kindle, or an acoustic concert vs. computer music. How does information translate across the divide?

What excludes visual artists + designers from digital humanities discourses? Is it an external view of art + design as a surface activity, applied only after research, development and conceptualization? Is it a lack of interest from within art + design to engage in humanities-based thinking, despite traditional practices’ inherent connections with historical and text-based content? Is computer programming and data-mining too unattractive, despite contemporary art + design’s intimate relationship with the digital media and the web? What are some examples of collaborations within the digital humanities that have included artists + designers? What knowledges can artists + designers bring to the digital humanities? What can the digital humanities bring to art + design practice?

With high adoption rates for mobile devices, specifically iPads and the iPod Touch, efforts to support these devices continue to evolve.  Management of the devices, app recommendations and purchasing, loan programs, and general integration into Preschool-12 and Higher Education faculty practices and curriculum are all topics under the lens of support.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of these devices outside of portability? Which apps are useful in the humanities? What are your experiences with iOS devices?  This session is intended to garner answers to these questions through participation from the group. I can also share some of my experiences with a pack of iPads used by faculty in the College of Education and Social Services at the University of Vermont.

In many ways, my proposal echoes that of my new Northeastern colleague, David Smith. I’m working with David and others to discover and map reprinted texts in the nineteenth-century American press. As we’ve develop this project, I’ve delved more and more into network analysis as a way to make sense of the thousands of texts we’re uncovering.

I’d like to think with the THATCamp NE community about how network analysis—a methodology borrowed from the social sciences—could better serve humanities projects. In some ways I want to turn the typical DH conversation around. Instead of asking how the computation tool of network analysis can shape humanities research, I want to ask What unique perspectives on network analysis might emerge from the humanities. What kinds of networks can we map in literary studies, history, or other humanities fields that might not be apparent to researchers trained in social science methodologies? Are there ways that network analysis tools could better serve humanities research? What changes would we imagine for network analysis software if we could?

I am interested in integrating online digital media into the storytelling process for Journalism students. My focus is on applying Journalism skills using video, audio, photography, interactive design and social media tools. Identifying the qualities of each media and applying them appropriately to individual stories.

However, not everyone is interested in such a narrow focus, so I’d like to share ideas and experiences on the topic of digital media/social media storytelling in general, as well as in depth.

The production skills for these tools are quite dense and I want to present them in such a way that students aren’t unevenly burdened with the technical process at the expense of the storytelling process.

Coming from a school that is fairly traditional when it comes to scholarly work, some of our faculty express interest in DH projects but often do not end up pursuing these projects or work on them as side projects in addition to the traditional scholarship they must do for appointment and merit-based review. Generally it seems as though the departments are not opposed to DH projects, they simply won’t evaluate them during reviews because they don’t consider them comparable to publications or don’t know how to evaluate them. I think it would be valuable to have a conversation about how to approach DH projects in this type of environment, specifically:

• Balancing DH projects with other scholarly work,
• Approaches to gaining department support of DH projects,
• Best practices in evaluating DH projects during the review process.

It might also be useful to discuss how IT and library staff can help to facilitate this process.

As exciting as new university DH Centers are, as much as they open up new methods of scholarship, I wonder how much their reach extends beyond universities to K-12 education and the general public.  How have digital humanities projects involved our K-12 students?  Our senior citizens? Our local government?  How can university DH centers, museums, and public libraries work together to include those outside university walls?  Should we / could we crowdsource geneaology, create internships for high school students, capture disappearing local history, create a TEI MOOC, more?  What sort of projects like this already exist?

I see some overlap with the Techno Haves and Have Nots session, in that I’m interested in how digital humanities projects are a vehicle by which the intellectual methods of the humanities can be brought to all that are interested (regardless of digital savvy or place in university.)

I’d like to have a conversation about how we plan for the future of digital humanities projects, especially the web-based components presenting contextualized data. I’m concerned about sustainability when we lose so many on-line resources each year. How can we build a reliable scholarly body of digital work when we risk losing the foundations?

My own work is focused on building a platform that allows reliable citation: citations that point to a given version of a resource, that reproduce that version of the resource, and do so for a long time.

I’d also love to demonstrate and discuss the code I’ve been working on.

I’ve noticed that most of the DH conversations center around how the humanities can use and benefit from  technology. I’d like to discuss how technology can benefit from/be influenced by the humanities.

Some ideas/questions:

• Forums,  tribes and online friendships
• Cyberbullying, trolling, stalking- ways to prevent, ways to cope, ways to respond
• Social mores and customs online
• The Academic Twitterazzi – the role of twitter/liveblogging/social media at conferences
• Privacy, freedom of speech, censorship
• To expand on the workshop Building an academic and professional persona online – what do our online identities say about us as people. What do we reveal and what do we keep private

I’d love to learn about how people are customizing their Omeka sites with a session along the lines of this one (“Making Content Shine with Omeka”) led by Amanda French at THATCamp Philly 2011.  On a broad level, I’d like to learn how people are re-purposing the organizational categories that Omeka comes out of the box with, such as “items,” “collections,” and “exhibits,” and what theoretical outlooks are informing the decision to say, change “exhibits” into “lesson plans.”  On a technical level, I’d like to see how people are customizing the “show items” php file to re-name and re-order some of the Dublin Core Fields.

Clarissa Ceglio has a thoughtful post on this site that doesn’t seem to have made it to the session proposal page.  Clarissa writes:

One of the items I’d like to propose for discussion among fellow graduate students attending THATCamp NE is: what are your needs and interests regarding academic preparation to pursue work in the digital humanities field? This informal input, plus any blogging on the subject that fellow campers might be inclined to pursue on the topic, will be used to supplement a session at the American Studies Association Conference called, “Digital Dimensions of Graduate Education in American Studies.” Also, because digital humanities work is highly collaborative, I’d like to propose a session in which attendees can share their ideas about how to work together on project teams more effectively.

I agree with Clarissa but think graduate trainers would be interested as well in both topics.

I’d like to propose a session on exploratory data analysis. While it’s also useful to consider “confirmatory” analysis and visualization when making an argument, I’m interested in the messier, earlier stages of research. The first thing we might do when getting a new text, or corpus, or dataset is to graph/visualize it, map it, cluster it, and so on. What then? We might do a close reading of some of the intriguing passages or concepts turned up by the initial phase. But how can we redo our analysis and visualization in light of this close reading? This isn’t a process that I think any field, in the humanities or social or natural sciences, does very well at teaching. Could digital humanities perhaps become a leading field in practicing — and teaching — this cycle of playing with and remolding data and models?

Technological power is political power in the modern world.  Yet many activists, humanists, artists, and disenfranchised social groups not only don’t wield technological power, they feel alienated from it.  What can we do—as academics, researchers, and citizens—to close this gap?

I’d like to have a discussion regarding our concerns about social/political disenfranchisement and its relationship with deep technological/empirical ability, and to work as a group to develop strategies for outreach and education that bring more diverse voices into the technological discourse. Success stories are welcome; bring your teaching tools, URLs, and syllabi!

This may be something that can be discussed as part of the session proposed by Jean Bauer, especially if Omeka is one of the platforms that people are interested in using to visualize data. Or a stand-alone session for people who are already using Omeka with the Neatline plugin with a  focus on how to best provide access through metadata and geo-location information that will be useful to scholars, students, librarians, other audiences who will be viewing, searching, and using the content created/visualized/posted in Omeka.

Our world is run by programs written in code in one or several languages. We increasingly use data that we visualize to interpret, read trends, and “drive” decisions. Code, data sets, and databases are themselves observable, culturally determined objects, often even observable as aesthetic objects. It’s time for us to start thinking about the cultural aspects of code, databases, and other “under the hood” digital manifestations: How are they written, in what conditions? How does code circulate?  Where is the creative gesture in programming or developing a database? What kills programming languages? Etc. Let’s talk about what it means to start reading our culture in its increasingly digital, raw materials.

The Naval War College is in process of digitizing the 4,000+ page Command Summary of Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, also known as the “Nimitz Gray Book.” This is one of the most important primary sources for World War II in the Pacific.

This is our first major digital initiative at the Naval War College. I hope to brainstorm with participants on how best to optimize scholarly use of these documents and perhaps allow us to work toward a more expansive portal that includes other war diaries, deck logs, dispatches, memoranda, etc. from this era. The Nimitz Command Summary has potential to serve as a “hub” document for such a portal, which would facilitate the type of cross-searching, analysis, and referencing that is presently so tedious for researchers using these sources in dispersed archives or online sites. We would also like to facilitate downloading/reuse by researchers for their own encoding or analysis projects. Beyond that, I’d like to gather any other creative ideas for timelining, visualizations, student engagement, etc. We will be incorporating this project into a World War II elective this fall.

I recently saw several databases created with KORA, including the Quilt Index, and felt something like Kora might meet our needs with minimal staffing/technology infrastructure requirements. But we are open to all ideas!

The academy needs open-access. As Bethany Nowviskie has pointed out in a memorable (and revolting) phrase, much of the intellectual product of the academy is “fight club soap.” We produce scholarly work at great cost to our institutions and the donors and governments that fund them, only to hand them over to for-profit publishers, who sell them back to our libraries at ruinous cost. This cost is exorbitant for the wealthiest universities and prohibitive for everyone else, exacerbating the divide between haves and have-nots, and locking our scholarly work behind paywalls where hardly anyone reads it.

Thankfully, there is no reason why we need to continue in this way. The economics of publishing that favored the printed, bound, and distributed academic journal are now untenable, and instead we have the opportunity though the internet for open-access publications, that is, publications which are available online, for free, regardless of the user’s affiliation. Open-access scholarly publications are the academy’s chance to cash in on the idea that “information wants only to be free.” But like anything worth doing, creating open-acccess publications will take a lot of work.

My session proposal, then, combines both the large question of open-access with the specific issues I’m going to face over the next year or so. I’d like to talk with scholars, librarians, technologists (anyone, actually) about the best practices and new ideas for open-access publications. For example, we might try answering these types of questions:

• What new ways of publishing can an online, OA journal take advantage of?
• What are the technical requirements of an OA journal?
• What is the best use of web 2.0 technologies?
• Is there a better way to handle citations than footnotes?
• How can an OA journal keep its back catalog useable into the future?
• What are the best software options for running an OA journal?

It would be best if this session could produce a deliverable, probably in the form of a report or syllabus listing best practices, useful readings, and possible future directions for open-access journals. We could write this collaboratively during the time we have for the session. I also have the code for the Journal of Southern Religion available on GitHub, if anyone wants to hack around with it, though I’ve proposed a separate hacking session for a particular problem involving e-books.

If you have any ideas, links to open-access publications that are doing good work, or readings that would helpful, please leave them in the comments below. Thanks!

N.B. This is a revision of a session proposal from last year’s THATCamp New England, but I still think this question is worth talking about.

Pandoc is a utility written by philosopher John MacFarlane for converting files from one markup format to another. For example, you might write a document in a plain text format then convert it to HTML. I’ll be giving an introduction to Pandoc and Markdown in Saturday’s plain-text workshop. But for this unconference session, I’d like to propose a hacking session that will create some software to solve a problem using Pandoc.

If we have some people who know LaTeX, I propose that we create a Pandoc template to meet the requirements of the standard academic paper that undergraduates have to hand in. While the standard Pandoc templates are great, the general expectation for academic drafts are that they will look like a Turabian or MLA paper, so let’s make a template for that purpose.

If we have some people who know Ruby  or shell scripting, I propose that we figure out a way to make EPUB books from the files for a blog or website published using Jekyll. This might take the form of a Jekyll plugin written in Ruby, like Anthologize but for Jekyll, or a shell script that stands outside of Jekyll. I’m interested in generating EPUBs for each issue of a journal (code here), so I have a real world example we can hack.

By the end of the session we will have made a small but complete product to launch into the world.

What research services can the Digital Humanist expect from libraries, archives, and museums?  Accessing existing scholarly content and making new digital forms available are well within the realm of expectations.  But what do LAMS already do, and what services would be even more useful?

I would like to propose a session on data visualization.  How we do it (programs, techniques, etc.) and why we do it (data cleaning, discovery tools, visual arguments)?  The conversation will hopefully range from theories of information design (Edward Tufte/Ben Fry) to case studies brought by the participants.  What kind of data visualizations have you created or would like to create in the future?  What problems have you run into?

I would also like to spend some time at the end discussing the “ethics” of visualizing data. Images can come across as more “true” than text based explanation. How do we create visualizations that are honest reflections of our scholarship, making clear the limits and affordances of the data and tools we are using.

In the “Let’s make something!” THATCamp spirit, I suggest we compile a list of explanatory information that should be attached to data visualizations when they are published to ensure that people can “read” them appropriately.

I follow a set of bloggers on DH, I read Humanist, I try to catch up on Digital Library discussions, not to mention listening to the Digital Classicist, MITH and Scholars Lab, podcasts as I walk to work in the morning.  There there are all the people I follow on Twitter. Well, ok, I read, listen and follow to other topics as well, but a lot of timely information and energetic discussion comes to me in these formats. DHNow aggregates a lot of blogs, but what about podcasts? Which ones do you listen to? What else is out there?

A great outcome of this discussion might be a list of suggestions, but we should all at least discover some new material to follow.

Here is how THATCamp works. Other than the workshops, we don’t have anything planned—you’re the ones who do the planning. Over the next two weeks you should post your session ideas to the THATCamp NE website. Also over the next two weeks, you should read other people’s proposals and comment on them if you wish. On Saturday morning, everyone will get to vote for the sessions you want to participate in, which will then become our schedule for the rest of the day.

Obviously this works better if more people propose sessions that they’ve put some thought into. Here’s what makes for a good session proposal:

• It’s NOT a paper, or a talk, or a lecture, but an idea for a conversation.
• It proposes a topic related to technology and humanities that a group of people can discuss in an hour or so.
• And ideally, the session will produce something useful: a list of resources, or some hacked code, or a syllabus. Don’t forget THATCamp Proceedings.

There are more ideas and guidelines on the THATCamp website.

So please visit the list of session proposals, then add yours with your login to WordPress by  Just log in with your username and password, and add a blog post to the category “Session Proposals.”