Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

The final session I attended at ThatCamp Philadelphia was run bu Janine Utell on integrating the digital humanities into regular literature classrooms.

• Amanda French defines the digital humanities as “open access”
• How can student work be put online? WordPress, PBWorks, etc
• Digital Humanities Quarterly given as example of open access
• Should give students option to take down work at the end of the semester
• I am going to try out commonplace blogs with my eng102 classes next semester
• Utell: Digital humanities is essential to keeping the humanities alive
• Some discussion about establishing comment policies
• Crowd sourcing comment policy to students
• Peer review is important before work goes online
• Instructor comments on blogs tapers off as semester goes on
• French and Siobhan Phillips bring out Google’s ngrams, wordles
• I’ve had students A/B an Obama speech to a Jefferson speech
• More incorportation of audio, video, etc into literary classes
• Modernist Journals Project
• Amanda French stresses the need to teach bibliographic software like Noodle, Evernote, and Zotero

I believe this panel on open source tools was the last one on the first day. We ended up going around the room and discussing open source tools we have found useful in the classroom.

• Joomla is a promising CMS that has many useful plugins. Someone showed one which integrates photo galleries and Google Maps.
• There was some discussion, since we were there, of Atlantic City. The Atlantic City Experience uses Joomla.
• AC is an easy city to forget because a lot of the living documents are gone.
• Deborah Gussman talked about a digital edition (I can’t remember the author unfortunately…Deb?) she is working on. She wants to supplement it with political and legal documents. And wedding dresses. There was some talk that Omeka may be more useful for this.
• A big issue we discussed was how there is no easy way to do backup on most blogging platforms. I also brought up Zotero as an example of that too. There needs to be a simpler way for non-techy users to do backup/move content.
• Nines.org has paid and open source content. A “guest pass” can be acquired. They also fund digital humanities archives like Herman Melville’s Typpe.

One of the highlights of the spring semester was being accepted to attend the latest ThatCamp, this time here at the shore in Atlantic City at the Carnegie Library. Even more thrilling was the fact that The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey was the sponsor and host for it. I did some work with Stockton’s own , vetting applications, and doing some general organizational work for the conference.

Over the next few weeks, along with NJCEA posts, I will post my notes from ThatCamp Jersey Shore. I made a point to heavily tweet my notes on the #thatcampjs hash tag. For now, however, here are some pictures.

(Amanda French discussing our written, voted upon, schedule for the conference)

One of the biggest highlights of ThatCamp was getting to meet my internet pal Amanda French. After meeting up with John on my way in, she was the next person I saw and we greeted each other with a big hug. Amanda explained that everyone hugs at ThatCamp, which I will keep in mind, and we spent some time together while she, as a representative of ThatCamp, worked on organizing some aspects of the first day.

By far, the coolest aspect of ThatCamp is that the session for the conferences are completely “camper” driven. At the beginning of day one, after Amanda introduced the conference, those of us who wanted to propose a panel wrote it in one of the squares on the board. Campers then voted on which they would like to participate in or view. I proposed a session on using wikis in the classroom, which is something I am doing as of the spring semester. My session got, I think, the most votes, which gave me a lot of confidence heading into it.

John talking to the assembled group of campers on the final day.

Amanda French speaking during a session.

A nice surprise at ThatCamp was running into and spending time with Deborah Gussman, my first ever literature professor at Stockton. She has gotten very interested in the digital humanities in the past few years.

I am happy to take part in this year’s Day of Digital Humanities. I had a very busy day of campus, and a lot of it involved various aspects of the digital humanities.

• My day on campus began around 8am in my office. I spent some time working on a writing project before a student came in for a meeting at 830am.
• This student and I spent about 20 minutes discussing their Wikipedia project for Composition I. There had been some difficulties with the group dynamic and brainstormed some ideas (A Google Doc!) for getting them all together in one place.
• My class at 9am was in the computer lab working on a paper. I spent time with as many students as possible and led them in a reminder of how to create a template for their papers.
• My class at 10am spent time on their course wiki, as this was an abbreviated course which I had picked up during the semester. Some students were still having trouble getting accustomed to it, but as a group we got them settled in as time went on.
• My class at noon spent some time in the lab learning how to use Portable Apps to bring their favorite applications we may not have in the lab to class with them on a flash drive.
• After my classes, I ate lunch in my office with a student who I needed to clear up some behavior issues with. They had been acting in a problematic manner during class, but there had also been a bit of miscommunication between us as well. We went over her group’s Wikipedia project, which was almost done at that point.
• After my office hours, I met with an adjunct who was trying to bring more technology into his classroom. We brainstormed some ideas and promised to keep in touch. We then went and met with a colleague of mine in their office to continue discussing these issues.

One of the best panels I attended was on the role of collaboration in the Digital Humanities. I got to meet up with some friends from Prof Hacker and Twitter like Jason Jones and Bethany Nowviskie, who were both on the panel. I also caught up with other friends who I have known for some time as well.

My notes aren’t really detailed, I suppose, but here is what I wrote down during the panels:

Jason Jones

• What does collaboration mean?
• Social media role
• Twitter is a crowd sourced search engine
• Institution based models of collaboration are 20th century

Laura Mandell

• Two point of views about collaboration
• Hybrid scholar: Interdisciplinary scholar who begins in English, but ends up in computer science
• Hybrid field: Experts in discipline come together (Example: An English professor and a java scriptor) to work on a project
• Hybirds don’t have fit in modern university
• Modern universities prioritizes those in ensconced fields

Bethany Nowviskie “Monopolies of Invention”

• Consider institutional status (staff, adjuncts, etc) “can’t afford to make trouble”
• Digital Humanities can fix intellectual property problems
• UVA must tell patent office about new patentable DH

For the past week or so, I have followed the tweets from two conferences: Digital Humanities 09 and That Camp (An “unconference”  Here is a good explanation of what that means).  Due to some monetary constraints, I was unable to attend but could follow what was happening in real time due to the massive amount of posts on Twitter by attendees via the hash tags and .  I was able to interact with them, comment on what was happening along side, and meet new friends and Twitter followers.

Twitter has really changed conferences.  For years I have always kicked myself when I miss an interesting conference.  Live blogging has made this less painful, but real time coverage on Twitter really changes how people not even at the conference can interact with presenters and attendees.  I was definitely not the only non-attendee commenting and asking questions to people in attendance.

Soon, I will have a number of posts commenting on topics I read about on the #dh09 and #thatcamp tags.  For now, the notes Digilib posted for various panels is a good place to start.  After this week’s discourse, I am more proud of the Digital Humanities than I have ever been before; clearly this was the right direction for me to take and I hope to begin a career in it soon.

• The Atlantic on the 1958 NFL championship game and the recent book and documentary about it.
• End of year record list from Dead Metaphor.
• Digital Humanities Quarterly on something called Digital Humanities.
• Nick over at Grand Text Auto’s review of Sentences makes it sound like a book worth checking out.

This week’s video is a series of news reports on the punk scene in Boise Idaho circa 1985. Two weird anomalies out of this: I’m pretty surprised that Septic Death is not featured at all. Even stranger is how the reporter seems to be pretty accepting of punk and pretty tolerant/fair about presenting them in a good light. When I was in high school during the nineties I would have to talk down my parents after every news report about punk, hardcore, and especially Straight Edge that made everyone involved seem like a freak or criminal. This report from Boise is pretty refreshing.