Have you been longing for more Ohio-based THATCamp fun? Well, wait no more! THATCamp returns to Columbus in 2012 as THATCamp OSU.

Learn more at: osu2012.thatcamp.org/

Much has happened in the intervening months since THATCamp Columbus was held.  This past weekend saw another successful regional camp in Great Lakes THATCamp, there have been announced upcoming camps in London and Paris, and yesterday the Center for History and New Media announced that Amanda French would be taking on a new role as Regional THATCamp Coordinator in order to “assist local organizers with whatever aspects of planning and hosting a regional THATCamp (logistics, technology infrastructure, application procedures, publicity, evaluation, etc.) they require, making it vastly easier and more cost-effective to establish and maintain a new regional THATCamp.”  It looks like CHNM will also be providing support for regional camp websites, as well as “micro-fellowships” for younger attendees.  For more information on today’s announcement, check out Tom Scheinfeldt’s post at Found History, as well as the new section for Regional Camps at THATCamp.org.  But putting all this great news aside for the moment, the real reason for today’s post is to follow up with some final notes and impressions about THATCamp Columbus as a whole.

For those of you who completed our post-event feedback survey, thanks very much.  Without getting into excruciating detail, we do have some quick results to share.  In general, it appears that the event was perceived to be a success.  We received plenty of positive feedback about Jim and Erin, the organizers/emcees, as well as for the facility, which was provided at no cost by Columbus State Community College.  CSCC did a great job getting us set up, were quick with support needs, and were extremely gracious with our last minute requests.  Thanks again to the staff at CSCC, especially Paul Boaz!

All respondents commented positively on the unconference model.  For example:

“I liked the flexibility of the overall program.  I think that that allowed an authentic dynamic to develop among the attendees.”

“I was truly amazed at how the structure of the unconference emerged organically on the first morning, thank in large part to the careful — but flexible — planning of the organizers.”

Further, several people commented on the benefits of having a “collaborative” and “cross-disciplinary” audience.  Most importantly, many of you stated that you found the event not only enjoyable but also professionally and intellectually engaging.  Many campers stated that as a result of attendance they would be incorporating new ideas, people, or technologies into either existing and planned projects.

But there is still room for improvement.  Not surprisingly, the catered food was acceptable to most but not especially wonderful and there were one or two glitches in the (generally excellent) wi-fi.  Some noted that they had trouble pinning down the exact location of the event.  Others thought we could have done a better job of publicizing the event in the weeks and months before the registration deadline, and one suggested we reach beyond the usual humanities crowd to bring journalists and others “wrestling with new media projects” into the discussion.  These are all things we will work to improve upon.  (We have our own list as well since we know that you all are far too generous to mention all of our flaws.)

A few people were very clear about their distaste for all things Twitter, feeling that it was impersonal and even “elitist.”  There is some validity to the claim that using Twitter as a venue for meaningful discourse is clearly limited (the old “140 characters” argument) and that it is not for everyone.  We were aware of this argument (and many people’s generally negative perceptions of the service) going in and, although we did encourage campers to join and interact on Twitter, we viewed Twitter as just one way among many in which participants could interact.  On the other hand, we did see plenty of tweets coming out of the sessions and saw some clear interest both inside and outside the conference walls from the swelling ranks of THATCamp and Digital Humanities “twitterati.”  It is notable though that THATCamp Columbus was markedly less “tweet-centric” than most other regional and national camps.

There was another recurring concern we heard not only in our feedback but in the run up to the event and during the first hours: almost everyone was anxious about the schedule; particularly, they were worried about how it would work and when they would be presenting.  From our perspective this is one of the hallmarks of THATCamp.  It’s not that we want to make you sweat (okay, it is a little bit of that), it’s that this serves a few actual purposes.  For one, it keeps people from “showing up to present” and then leaving – something that really detracts from the quality of larger academic conferences.  But more importantly, it helps set an exciting, informal and conversational tone at the outset and encourages unexpected connections between people and ideas.  We did our very best to arrange the schedule in anticipation of those connections (for example, never scheduling one “technical session” in conflict with another) and we were almost able to accomplish that.  Nevertheless, there were inevitably campers faced with tough choices during some session slots.

Overall, we are really pleased with the turnout for THATCamp Columbus and with the quality of the participants and their presentations.  Happily, most attendees expressed interest in attending another THATCamp (whether regional or national) and found their participation to be relevant and beneficial to their personal, academic and/or professional goals.  We had a great time and hope that was the case for all campers (not just survey respondents).  Thanks once again to to all attendees and to CSCC, the History Department at Cleveland State University, the graduate students and staff at the CSU Center for Public History + Digital Humanities, the Ohio State University Goldberg Center, and the Ohio Humanities Council.

As always, keep your ears to the ground for news about the latest regional and national THATCamp events by checking in on thatcamp.org and thatcampcolumbus or by following @THATCamp and @THATCampCbus.  And of course, feel free to drop us a line anytime in the comments or at thatcampcolumbus@gmail.com.  We welcome further comments, suggestions, and ideas.

Jim and Erin

UPDATE: By request from @BenWBrum, here’s a link to our rudimentary budget sheet!  We need to double check our donation amounts so if you’re interested check back or drop us a line.

Our ambition at the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities, and mine particularly as a digital scholar, is to “curate the city,” to organize it as a living museum exhibition, understood in the broadest terms. (My colleague Mark Souther and I have written an essay that we are about to submit on this question.) Most simply, this concept builds on the practices of urban and public historians working at universities, expanding it and making that role explicit and digital, but also using the model of a curator, as opposed to the scholar.

We have been exploring the process of doing this in a particular place–Cleveland.

In 2009, we debuted the Euclid Corridor Project, in which we explored the region’s history and identity through the lens of Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue.  The project created a “virtual” Euclid Avenue that runs parallel to the “real” Euclid Avenue; it is located on 22 touch-screen kiosks placed along Euclid Avenue.  Like our earlier project on the Cleveland Cultural Gardens, the notion is a crowdsourced interpretive approach to curating the city and its history. At the same time, we have been building Teaching & Learning Cleveland, working with teachers, students, and the community. We also have great digital resources in Cleveland, much of it associated with the excellent library of own home institution and its Cleveland Memory Project.

What I am interested in is discussion models of doing this work; sites like CityLore’s City of Memory and the City or the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s PhilaPlace.

So, I would propose a session of questions about the tensions inherent in this, as well as the digital possibilities and challenges, especially the tension of collecting verse interpreting. What are the “objects” that we are curating? What to collect, what to document, what to interpret? Also, what is the role of maps. What sorts of digital tools–especially open source tools are available? What are the costs/benefits of those? How do you capture the physicality of place and connect people to those landscapes? How to meld the work of different interest groups? Finally, what is the role of the map in the project, ala Hypercities, and the “Web 3.0, the birth of the geo-temporal human web.”

Or, not; let’s have a discussion predicated on our vision of what is involved as a digital curator of landscape.

Hey, THAT Campers, looks like we’ll be meeting at India Oven tonight at 7:30pm.

Here’s a link to India Oven’s website

Here’s a link for directions

And here’s the address: 427 East Main Street, Columbus, OH 43215-5349

Please leave a message in the comments or twitter (@thatcampcbus) so we can confirm the number who will be joining us.

We (in Cleveland State University’s History Department and the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities) have developed Teaching & Learning Cleveland as a way to transform the region into a learning laboratory for upper-level university courses, as well as regional K-12 classrooms. We use Omeka as the basis for our collecting, archiving, research, and storytelling process.  Among our teaching partnerships are two Teaching American History Grants: a) Sounds of American History and b) Constructing, Consuming, and Conserving American History; we’ve also partnered with the Ohio Historical Society on the Ohio Civil War 150 project.

Also, we developed Cleveland History Blogs as a way for faculty and community partners to blog about and document their work, from building course syllabi to developing project-based blogs. I use the blogs for my lower-level and upper-level teaching, for example my United States History Survey, History 111.

My questions, relative to these projects run the gamut, from the following: How do we build collaboration with students and communities, especially at the upper level? How do we develop spontaneous classrooms, that are not linear, at the lower level? How much is too much–meaning how do we direct an appropriate amount of resources to facilitate best practices teaching?

THATCAMP    Is education simply for education’s sake?  Is the new master’s degree the old bachelor’s degree?  Why pursue a PH.D?

I’ll be discussing and demonstarting Google Wave as an instructional tool using a Wave constructed from two lesson plans and integrating a variety of widgets and gadgets.

One last thought as I dash to CSC: I’m interested in a panel about the incipient formation of the Google Research Centers, both how wonderful it is that scholars will be given the opportunity to do “nonconsumptive” reading of copyrighted texts (aka datamining) and how hard it will be for those scholars who are not at the big ten or the ivies to be excluded from use.

Posted a rough idea for a couple possibilities earlier.  Now that I’ve gotten some feedback here’s what I’ll focus on.

Over the summer, Amazon deleted copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from Kindle owners with no prior warning.  Though Amazon apologized for the incident and said this would not happen again, the fact that it did happen raises troubling questions about digital book ownership.

When we purchase an electronic copy of a book, do we lose ownership rights that are inherent to the book’s physical print form?  What does it mean to “own” a book on a proprietary device?  How will these issues evolve in the future?

More generally, how much control does the creator of a book have over how that book is distributed?  What future business models for distribution and ownership will affect the way we read?

How do scholars, activists, tourists, neighbors, city planners, and preservationists find and share information about historic places in their communities, in their cities, and in their regions? How do they identify relationships between places or understand the context within such places were constructed, occupied, or even destroyed? In most cases, anyone interested in these questions might rely on a wide range of tools and resources, such as calling a local historical society, finding a walking tour brochure at a local visitor center, visting the local history section of the neighborhood library, searching a web-based database provided by a State Historic Preservation Office, or simply searching online in the hope that someone might have already investigated the location. The latter is often productive but resources are currently fragmented both topically and geographically, as well as suffering from an absence of essential features such as mapping, sorting or filtering. If you are searching for information on historic theaters Cinema Treasures is indispensable, roadside architecture can be found at RoadsideArchitecture.com, the Labelscar retail history blog has documented hundreds of shopping malls but none of these sites allow the consideration of the unusual buildings within their local contexts. For example, what African-American neighborhood did the Comet Theater serve? What was located at the site of the Westland Mall prior to  its construction in 1969?

In addition, while a few websites offer a rich user experience, the web services provided by State Historic Preservation Offices are often severely limited by accident or by design (as some local and state governments license their data on historic places to private contracts if they maintain an updated database at all). Take a look at the National Register database provided by the Maryland Historical Trust or the basic PDF list provided by Virignia to get a sense of the limited services provided by government institutions in this regard. Even more effective examples, such as the Pennsylvania Historical Markers website or the National Register NPS Focus database, are often closed and provide few opportunities to even make comments, let alone access the underlying database for mashups or analysis. Regrettably, few preservation organizations even at a state or municipal level, let alone small museums, nonprofit preservation advocacy organizations, neighborhood and city historical societies, have sufficient technical expertise or capacity within their organizations to build and maintain new and effective web applications.

Even with the issues I’ve identified with both independent and publicly supported websites sharing data on historic places, the most serious issue is the great extent to which our knowledge of historic places is limited to the minds of a few individuals in our communities, in a box of documents sitting in a damp basement, or a drawer full of unlabeled photos at a neighborhood church. I’m curious to explore the potential of building websites that support sharing our knowledge of historic places, capturing new knowledge from those who hold it, and allowing scholars, activists, and interested citizens to explore this data at local, regional and national scales. Possible models for this approach may lie with smaller projects such as the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Database, the North Carolina Architects & Builders project, the University of Berkley’s California’s Living New Deal project, Teaching + Learning Cleveland, the Community Almanac from The Open Planning Project, the Open Plaques website, and dozens of others. I’d be very talking with anyone who has an interest in the intersection of place and new media to explore these questions further, but I’m especially curious how my questions relate to those presented by Elizabeth Schultz, Candace Nast, Marjorie McLellan, Andrea Odiorne, Justin Hons, Stephen Titchenal, Doug Lambert, Jonathan Tarr, and Phil Sager. For a quick bit of background, I currently work for Baltimore Heritage, a preservation advocacy organization. My past experience includes work with the DC Historic Preservation Office and a number of small museums and historical societies.

Through the Buckeye Council for History Education we are going to be taking our K-12 teacher professional development seminars and modifying them for a webinar format.  One of the most successful aspects of our PD are our primary source activities.   The PSAs are engaging and interactive, requiring the teachers to do primary source interpretation in small groups and then share with the larger group.  I know there has to be a great way to translate these to the virtual world, I just can’t seem to figure it out.  I’d be interested to hear if any other people have experience with webinar participants doing something like this, or other types of collaborative work through webinars.  Also, any software recommendations would be helpful.  Right now we are playing around with DimDim.

In my day job at the Ohio Historical Society I spend a lot of time working with online collections systems (primarily CONTENTdm). However, most of these systems come “pre-staged” with a particular look and feel and set of behaviors. These days, we want the ability to work with our digital treasures outside of their prefabricated digital homes. Moreover, we’d like to repurpose our digital resources, and do new and interesting and dynamic things with them. Assuming the collections system offers some method of working with its contents (e.g. via API or RESTful web services, etc.), the way should be open to providing new online experiences for a wide range of purposes. I’ve experimented with using several javascript frameworks to “produce” a couple of different “restagings”, and can talk about those experiences. But I am broadly interested in hearing about any other ideas, technologies and toolkits that are able to further leverage the contents of digital repositories. I’d love to hear from THATcampers!

I’d like to to talk about building an online local history collection of audio and video interviews, photos, written narratives, recipes, records, etc. What is doable when there’s lots of interest but no budget or time, tech resources and skills are limited, and people are geographically dispersed?

For the past 7 years I have been working with oral historian Michael Frisch, Ph.D., at The Randforce Associates in Buffalo, NY. With no formal background in public history, oral history, or really any history I followed my curiosity into a realm I often call “Information Cartography“. I now work full time as Director of Technology at Randforce. What we do here is an evolving artform and science that lies somewhere between cataloging, indexing, and thesaurus development, as well as content management and multi-media production for oral histories and other types of recordings. In attempting to define this uncharted territory of research we find ourselves constantly inventing new metaphors, analogies, and general “raps” to explain our work process. Mapping our own ideas linguistically is perhaps the most important information cartography we do, for ourselves and for others. I look forward to explaining this so-called day job of mine here, as I’m sure I’ll learn new things about who we are and what we do through exposure to the new (to me) environment, perspective, and vocabulary.

Although Randforce has been built around Frisch’s work in oral history, I want to learn from and apply our practice into other fields, including library science and (eventually) civil and environmental engineering, in which I hold a master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon. I enrolled in a class at the University at Buffalo in the Department of Library and Information Science (LIS) this past semester (Fall, 2009) to learn their vocabulary and theory and begin to articulate better what we do at Randforce.  Here’s an early attempt to put it in technical and/or library terms: we are creating databases containing discrete records representing passages of audio and video content, which we label and annotate, which then themselves are represented by multi-faceted, easily visualized, thesauri/indexes directly linked to the source recording.

Aspects of organizing a catalogue or collection and creating abstracts are also integral in what we call “digital indexing”, which has mostly been built around the strengths and limitations of a particular piece off-the-shelf real-time audio/video recording software called Interclipper. That software, coming out of market research, has been invaluable in exploring an effective non-linear back-end content management and content display system, combined with a unique, truly non-destructive editing environment all in one interface. The skills, methods, and approaches we’ve learned continue to be applied across any number of custom or commercial software, database, and web tools.

I am excited about the possibilities of continuing our work exploring the boundaries of direct audio or video indexing, hopefully moving towards fulfilling the promise and power of true random access in digital/web environments. Oral history is fascinating in LIS terms particularly because the size and nature of audio or video segments are not usually pre-determined. Indexing within and across interviews requires adjusting not only the precision, specificity, and exhaustivity of the collection of terms, but the frequency, length, and duration of the units being indexed themselves. I hope to explore further (with help from graphic designers, artists, computer geeks, and librarians) the implications of oral history on methodologies for recorded narratives in any number of fields. One specific interest I have is to integrate the quality, physicality, and general power of printed text with the digital parallels–creating seamless semantic and artistic consistency between a concrete physical publication form (like a book) and “more dynamic” interfaces on glowing, rectangular screens. I will present some brief examples at THATcamp Columbus of how all this work is just beginning.

The Ohio Historical Society, in collaboration with the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities at the Cleveland State University Department of History, recently launched a website, www.ohiocivilwar150.org, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The website serves as a hub for Ohio communities to promote their commemorative events and share their knowledge of Civil War topics. We have a timeline, calendar, discussion forum, teaching resources and we are continuing to add collections items and Omeka exhibits.

One of the challenges we’ve run into is increasing public discussions and comments on our site. We also want to make the website a platform for new ideas and research by continually garnering public scholarship in the form of short essays and articles. I’m glad to see that people will be sharing ideas about working with local communities and/or students to produce digital projects.

I look forward to learning more about current digital humanities projects and discussing ways to increase participation and collaboration.

I’m interested in talking about the evolution of crowdsourcing in a digital sense, and in hearing about solutions, problems, and pie-in-the-sky future ideas.

Staff at the Library of Congress and NARA posted images to Flickr Commons, and have found that users enjoy adding metadata and interacting with the materials. Museum efforts such as the Brooklyn Museum Posse and the Steve project have attempted to provide users with a way to actively interact with their websites.

I’d like to talk about other things that we could do to engage users, and to go beyond the traditional model of “users taking information from archives” to a “two-way” model where users can give us their photos, tweets, GIS data, podcasts, pictures from their iPhones, etc in more of a conversational structure than has previously existed between archives and end user.. Can we use this as a way to meet users where they are? Will both parties receive something of “value” from the transaction, and how do we figure out what that “value” might be?

How can a repository incorporate some of these ideas within the current boundaries of “collection” and what would need to change in order to add other ideas? How might institutions collaborate– locally, regionally, nationally, or across disciplines– to accomplish some of these things?

In some sense, I’m most interested in talking about the user or patron as an active creator and participant in the experience of using archives, museums, libraries and other humanities resources.  I’d love to sit and chat about this in groups small and large, and I’m looking forward to talking with everyone in Columbus!

I have been reading fellow attendees posts on digital literacy and teaching/learning with technology with interest, and I’d like to collaborate on at least one session talking about these topics. In the past two years, I’ve taught two fully-online courses as well as a seminar with a significant online component (required blog participation and a DH final project). What I noticed, especially in the seminar, is that it forced me to consider a third level of teaching, not only the actual course content and communication skills like writing and discussing, but also the technical skills necessary to participate in the course requirements (starting with registering as a user on the course blog). As with anyone else attending THATcamp, I tend to focus on the benefits of technology in teaching and learning. However, I would like to discuss with other attendees how they have have encountered and overcome these barriers in their classrooms.

I’m also in the middle of a transition from web designer/graduate research assistant, working on many different projects, to instructor/professor responsible for teaching and publicizing my own research. I still have an interest (and several years of practical experience) in the former, and I hope to get a chance to check out some of the institutional projects that others are working on, especially the museums.

(I just discovered a wonderful “data mining as literary criticism” presentation, and so recycled an earlier posting on datamining to offer this instead).

Digital Artist Ira Greenberg developed for me a poetry visualization tool using processing.  All kinds of interesting issues come up in the field of data visualization.  Too much of what we seen as the result of datamining is what Edward Tufte would call “Chart Junk.”  Do visualizations that are aesthetically pleasing improve our understandings of what we see, and if so, how?  If much digital visualization has a cognitive or ludic provocation, what are the effects of aesthetic provocations?

This visualization shows positive and negative emotional words in Felicia Hemans’s poem “Domestic Affections.”  I will show a few other poems and a few other ways of visualizing them.

Case Western Reserve University’s Kelvin Smith Library is in the first year of a five-year project to digitize and text-encode books on this area’s history. The project, Cleveland, Ohio and the Western Reserve Digital Text Collection, contains over 100 texts on the history of Cleveland and its surrounding area, which date from the early-nineteenth to early-twentieth century, and cover a wide array of subjects, including: ethnic groups in and around Cleveland; Cleveland charity organizations; and historical homes and landmarks of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. This project has presented a few challenges, two of which are:

• Training staff, who have different skill levels and other job responsibilities, in text encoding.
• Finding ways to make use of the encoded text to deliver a web-based environment that allows for in-depth research and analysis.

I hope to explore these two challenges at THATcamp. Specifically, what are some training tools and resources that institutions currently use to train staff? Who exactly comprises staff for such projects? Would there be an interest in pursuing a collaborative online open source training environment, and if so, what would be the details? In regards to the second challenge, we are encoding both typewritten, book-length material and handwritten manuscripts, each of which have their own encoding nuances. What are some ways to create a data structure that can accommodate such diverse materials? How do institutions determine an effective infrastructure to account for text encoding projects?

In 2006, the National Geographic Education Foundation and Roper Public Affairs published a report on geographic literacy. This report revealed a somewhat disturbing level of geographic literacy among Americans – both children and adults – citing a dramatic lack of understanding of geography, both local and world-wide. Internationally, despite the ongoing wars in the Middle East at the time, the study found that “six in ten (63%) cannot find Iraq on a map of the Middle East.” As a Teaching Assistant as OSU, I’ve seen proof of this study first-hand. In this session, then, I’d like to start a discussion that deals with creative ways for educators to confront – and attempt to solve – this educational deficit. I’d like to look outside the traditional maps used in classrooms, and examine ways to improve geographic awareness that exist outside of the textbook or overhead projector – for this session, the focus would be on popular social networking and media sites.

The majority of the students in our classrooms cannot code, build websites, or hack a computer. For some of them, the basics of Microsoft Office seem unknowable. But many of them know Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or LiveJournal, and understand the basics of Google’s box of tricks. Students who use these social networking tools rarely relate them to their schoolwork, beyond the basics of setting up study groups or complaining about coursework. Instructors interested in drawing these students into geography can, however, use these same social networking sites – often seen as frivolous and useless in the halls of Academia – as tools for the classroom. Many of them, however, use mapping widgets, used to connect users across geographic borders, while others offer real-time map-based posting tools.

For this session, I will present some examples of how mapping is used in popular social networking tools, and would love to hear some of your ideas on the theme!

For years, practicing planners have been seeking substantive input from urban residents on their plans for new roads, rail systems, housing developments, and shopping centers. Having abandoned a “build now, ask questions later” mode of practice, we now seek input from affected residents because the result is a better city.  The primary modes of citizen input include public comment periods at government meetings (e.g., planning commissions and city councils), and charrettes, where planners present mockups of the proposed changes and solicit feedback.  However, these fall far short of what we might call “democratic planning” because they do not reach all or even most people affected by the proposals and often fail to offer a realistic vision of what will be built.  To address these shortcomings,  planners need to look outside of our profession for better models, working from inspiration in technology and the humanities to build realistic, democratic, participatory plans that everyone can see and to which all can contribute.

Planners have tried promising experiments to move beyond the typical models for citizen input.  Participatory Chinatown, a project of Hub2, uses 3-D visualization to model potential changes to the built environment of Boston’s Chinatown, inviting residents to immerse themselves more fully in the future form of their neighborhood and provide comments on what they see.  For folks not conversant in Second Life or computers in general, local teenagers serve as guides to the technology.  Betaville, an open-source platform for partcipatory urban planning where users can submit their own designs for remaking city spaces, is another.   These tools have the potential to blow open the planning process and make it radically participatory, even democratic.

I am seeking ideas you can contribute to the practice of planning for substantive citizen input.  When a resident steps before his or her city council to speak about a development, the time is minimal and the council may or may not be attentive; when a charrette is held in a neighborhood about to undergo physical changes, planners usually fail to consider neighborhood context.  We usually begin with the assumption that anyone who wants to will speak their mind through these avenues; with demagogues taking up much of the allotted time and the inability of some folks to attend these events, it is unlikely that everyone who wants to comment actually does, or even that those who do are fully informed of what is changing.

Therefore, I propose that “substantive citizen input” depends upon 1) information about what is to change that is as complete and comprehensive as possible, including well-developed plans from planners and developers, 2) a decentralized process that does not necessarily depend on getting to City Hall or the community center at a certain time and day in order to provide input, and 3) someone on the other end that listens to and incorporates public feedback into the given plan.  In my experience, #3 depends on the planner(s) involved to take their role seriously and value public input.  However, I think we can enhance #1 and #2 through new tools and processes, like those described above.  These will then pave the way for democratic, participatory planning.

Why am I presenting this to you, an audience of digital humanists, when I work in the very social science-y field of urban planning?  The field of planning does not incorporate participation by many people very well into practice, even though it is necessary and valuable.  Because we strive to use our knowledge in the service of society, we must do better.  I am here to mine the knowledge of digital humanists—an interdisciplinary group innovating with technology and studying people at the same time—to find useful additions to the planner’s toolbox.

Traditional studio art education clearly defines artistic success. Creative efforts are considered validated by achieving gallery representation, receiving critical review and exhibiting artwork in traditional venues such as brick and mortar museums and galleries. But how relevant are these goals for most artists today?

These elusive goals have been challenged fundamentally by social media and the Internet. I wish to discuss how social media can be used by artists to promote and distribute their work as well as the converse shift in power this represents. Social media can provide an alternative to these traditional goals, but can it also replace them? How will we define artistic success is the 21st century?

Oral History is a complex information package that has not yet fully realized its potential with regard to internet access.  Content management systems still generally treat the different components of oral history as separate entities.  You can search the text or you can listen / watch the interview but the different components are rarely integrated.   The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries, in partnership with the Kentuckiana Digital Library, has designed a web interface to try to more intelligently and efficiently present oral histories online by enabling users to search at the word level and link from the text to the appropriate moment in the audio where those corresponding words occur. This capability is made possible through a process of digital preparation of the interviews audio, transcript and metadata in a web-based  application we have designed called OHMS.  Designed to mimic the workflow of a video game, OHMS has been constructed to inexpensively and efficiently encode transcripts for online delivery of the time coded transcripts and audio files.  One hour of interview can be marked up and submitted in a matter of minutes.  We launched the interface last year and have been filling it up with synchronized transcripts since.  We are currently planning to explore possibilities with applying this technology more broadly to include compatibility with other content management systems such as ContentDM (among others), and more immediately, to work with streaming video.  The front end interface can be accessed at the Kentuckiana Digital Library: here.

I want to explore this idea of more effectively staging and accessing oral history online and explore the advantages and disadvantages of our chosen method and discuss challenges we face in the process.

I am developing an introductory Women’s Studies class to be held in the metaverse of Second Life. The primary focus of the class will be gender identity and gender expression. I chose SL as the platform for several reasons.

• First is the immersion component; students can experiment with gender expressions in a safe and secure environment.
• Second is what I call the mask or actor affect: if a student can pretend to be someone he or she is not, he or she might be more willing to express an unpopular opinion or position.
• Last, there is a very pragmatic reason for choosing an online environment: our university, like many others, has a lack of classroom space and a lack of funds to create more. Meeting in a virtual classroom helps alleviate the space crunch while providing a more personal interaction between student and teacher then many other online platforms, i.e. WebCT.

What are the positives and negatives of teaching in SL? I would like to discuss several issues which relate to teaching in SL:

• Are the benefits of immersing oneself in an alternative world offset by the isolation some critics fear increases in SL.?
• When teaching in SL, how do you get over the learning curve of using the platform?
• Is it ethical for students to perform a gender with which they do not normally identify or, in other words, pretend to be something they are not?
• Also, any other issues which pertain to teaching in Second Life.

I just finished teaching a course as an Artist in Residence at the University of Dayton that offered an interdisciplinary approach to uncovering the history of  the UD Student Neighborhood, an area that was developed to be NCR worker housing in the early 1900’s.  The course was titled the Archaeology of a Neighborhood, and was designed to integrate arts into a S.E.E. program (Sustainability, Energy, and Environment) offering.      For the environmental component of the course, we looked at the environmental infrastructure of the area, and at UD’s connection and responsibilities to regional and global communities.

I am a documentary photographer, and have been learning how to create projects that have an audio component.    What I offered in the course was a look at the particular history of the neighborhood, and technical skills to create documentary images, research existing archives, record interviews with former residents using student laptops and reasonable quality microphones, edit audio in Audacity, and construct five to eight minute stories using Sound Slides.   Students came from a diverse range of academic backgrounds, including engineering, sociology, visual arts, and biology.  Most students in the class had a surprisingly easy facility in learning editing programs and constructing compelling projects.   In the process of designing and participating in this course, I learned about Dayton’s early history of innovation and invention, the very rich archives that exist at the U of Dayton and Dayton History, Inc. that includes the NCR archives, and got to hear the stories of multiple generations of people who lived in a particular place.

These tools are powerful.  Every community has a history to uncover, ideas to research, and stories to tell.  I am looking for creative ideas about discovering networks, access to funding, and collaborators, to continue this work in other places.

I am interested in digital story telling.  I would like to discuss issues of presentation, interaction, argumentation, narrative and non-narrative structures.

Teaching at a small liberal arts college means that most of my digital humanities work focuses on the classroom. During the fall 2009 semester, both my Colonial Latin American History course and my Global History course built digital history exhibits using Omeka: Colonial Latin American Material Culture and Global History before 1000ce.  Both of these projects involved students curating a range of primary and secondary sources to build a larger historical argument.  During THATCamp, I’d like to share ideas about student learning through digital history projects.

I have always been fascinated by maps, photos and old documents depicted in history books. These primary source materials can bring historical research alive for students. I always wished I could easily view and share them at the original full size (or larger) rather than the tiny or incomplete reproductions often available. Digital technology now makes that possible. I have spent many years digitizing resources and experimenting with methods of sharing them online in high resolution. Recently I have begun georeferencing these resources so they can be viewed in geographic and historical context. The new smart phones with web and gps will be another interesting way to share digital history in the field. I look forward to sharing what I have learned, and finding out more about what others have done. We need to find better ways to coordinate digital projects so they are easier to find, use, preserve and collaborate on.

To view some of the high resolution maps and other resources I have scanned in cooporation with many libraries and historical societies,  check out railsandtrails.com. You will need to install the free DjVu browser plug-in and the Google Earth application. These will allow you to quickly view and navigate these resources full screen at high resolution. I have recently begun georeferencing historic maps of Ohio in high resolution for Google Earth.

I had a couple of ideas for exploration, so I’ll post them both and see what people gravitate toward.

1.  Yahoo! closed down Geocities this past October.  In the 1990’s, Geocities was the introduction to webpage design for millions of users.  Its ease of use gave the average web citizen the chance to share vast amounts of new creative work.  Pictures, poetry, short stories and general ranting abounded alongside slews of “Under Construction” signs.  This talk would explore digital preservation concerns over the death of Geocities, and examine the tireless work of some creative individuals to preserve those documents.

The Internet Archive, Reocities, and Internet Archaeology are among the preservationists who took it upon themselves to save these early websites.  We could talk about how and why they achieved this, and perhaps have a fun look at some of what was saved.

2.  Over the summer, Amazon removed copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from users who had purchased them via the Kindle.  While Amazon apologized for their treatment of this copyright issue, the incident raises a number of questions.  What does personal ownership mean when it comes to digital works?  How will these issues evolve as electronic media devices become more prevalent?

Hello! I am the Museum Education and Tour Coordinator at the Oberlin Heritage Center.  We are a small historical society / museum in Oberlin, OH and we just a launched a new website.  I have three big questions I’ll be asking at THATcamp:  1.  How can a small musuem/archive such as ours connect with educators to facilitate student digital projects (I like the sound of Mr. Gutowski’s 72 OVI project)?  2. How are small non-profits using web 2.0 and social networking to their greatest advantage?   3. What are some of the digital information management systems that people are using that would be appropriate for musuems of our size? 

We use our website and the database program FileMaker to post historic images, city directories, architectural inventories, and various historical information.  Are there better ways to do it?  Of course!  I know there are some great systems out there.   But what will work for us – an organization with 5 staff members, a really great volunteer force, some tech-savy college interns, and a wealth of history to share?

I’d be happy to discuss the development of our website, our new cemetery database, our admitedly weak attempts at blogging, and the many challenges any small history organization faces when expanding their web presence.  But in reading other posts I get the feeling that many of you are beyond that stage.  So, I instead offer to serve as “little guy” at THATcamp, asking pointed questions about cost, resources, and sustainability, and shamelessly stealing ideas to share with fellow small history organizations, many of which have even less of a web presence than we do.  And I will alwasy be ready to encouragingly say, “Don’t be afraid!  It’s okay to think big and start small.”

Since this blogging itself is intended to shape the interaction at THATcamp, I will use it to sketch out my interests allowing us to hone in on what I am going to talk about as the event approaches. As a stake in the ground, “information cartography” captures a lot of what I do professionally, and exemplifies how I think generally. (Or at least how I think I think). The mapping metaphor has been very helpful in characterizing and/or communicating the work I do indexing oral histories, and the title itself conjures aspects of my personality, including but not limited to my general obsession with organization and my love of real-time synthesis of driving directions using a collection of appropriately scaled road atlases. (To skip ahead, scan the bullet points below and just respond if you’re into anything I’m into.)

So, as a rudimentary example of information cartography, I will map out the scope of my interests using a four-quadrant model—which came out of a recent conversation with my sister about balancing artistic endeavors with “real work”. Though I am lucky to have to great balance and even cross-over between what are generally thought to be separate worlds of work and play, defining them here is has a two-fold benefit of helping me inventory priorities and giving strangers a tour of what I think I am all about. My intention is to define four aspects of my interests loosely here, then blog separately on some or all of them subsequently and co-hone my talk with the help of some blog-loving campers. So…

“My Thing” Map, Version 1. This should actually be a Venn Diagram because these should not be mutually exclusive, however, at this phase I am specifically defining them so the separation actually appropriate:

Work Work | Work Play
Play Work  |  Play Play

Work-work – My contractually obligated, revenue generating work conducted generally 9-5 weekdays here: www.randforce.com. The big threads of interest we might want to talk about in this realm include:

• Oral history as a Cultural, Technical, and Organizational Node in the Digital Age
• Cataloging meets thesauri meets back-of-the-book indexing
• Database/Software Tool Hybridization
• Digital Literacy and/or Fearlessness
• “Anecdata”, or What Civil Engineering and Oral History have in common

Work-play – Development-oriented highly uncertain but interesting things I keep tabs on for my employer and myself. Related threads are:

• Visualizations
• Human/Computer Interface Advancement
• Luddite Confessions of a Technology Director (a.k.a. “Real work” quality check)

Play-work – are my personal/artistic non-revenue self-improvement endeavors. For me this has included:

• Music lessons / Band Practices
• Tai Chi Chuen, “Religion” Research
• Chiropractic, Dietary, and/or Interrelated Health “Arts”

Things I wish I could devote more personal development time to include:

• Computer/web programming
• Indexing and Curation of Personal Digital Photo Collection
• Cooking
• Sewing
• Construction of custom sing-along lyric-aid for play-play (digital or paper)

[Since I enrolled in classes fall of 2009, the entire Play-work category of my life has been overrun by a new category, which could be aptly labeled “work-work-work”.]

Play-play – is my fully non-work time. This includes basically socializing and music. On a good day, I have a core group of trusted friends with whom I can non-emotionally and productively discuss (in person) such topics as:

• Evolutionary Biology with a Darwinian Dialectic Deconstructionist bent
• “Performance” as an Essential Element of Human Existence

Music is really big in my life, but I prefer to do rather that talk or define. Here are some things I like to do:

• Recording original music
• Sing-along hosting/accompanying
• Coaching / arranging vocal harmonies

But to take my mind off of things, I enjoy

• Photography
• Longboarding
• Motorcycling
• Snow Shoveling

So, if anyone wants to talk about any of these things, I’m game. I’m hoping (and assuming) that there are some unidentified connections between some of them too. Thanks for reading!

At THATCamp, I will be displaying Distant Readings I (text visualization, 2009), an installation that explores the aesthetics of data mining.  “Distant reading” is the term invented by the literary critic Franco Moretti to mean the opposite of “close reading,” which is the very focused analysis of the elements of a single text.  With “distant reading,” Moretti means identifying—and visually depicting– larger patterns in a text, and also patterns among a large group of texts.

“Distant reading” is a kind of data mining, if we understand that latter term to mean extracting patterns from data.  For my installation, I will use Wordle to “read” a number of classic texts as word clouds; in arranging the words in a text according to their frequency of occurrence, we will be reading in another manner.  The installation will juxtapose several such data-mined texts  next to each other, in order to see at a distance patterns in these texts that we otherwise could not see/read; extracting new levels of meaning from these texts by reading them in a distant fashion. 

I will ask all readers/viewers of the installation: what patterns do you see in the data?  Is this reading?  I will be eager for your feedback after you have read the installation.

ColumbusNeighborhoods.org and Ohioana Authors

Many nonprofits and public institutions are constantly challenged to demonstrate collaboration and innovation. However, local examples of success are rare, and even more so when it comes to collaborating for online experiences. WOSU Public Media and the Columbus Metropolitan Library have stepped up to the challenge by working together on a new community site, columbusneighborhoods.org. Columbusneighborhoods.org is a significant component of a community engagement project featuring the special qualities of neighborhoods throughout Columbus. The online component is designed to provide a space for residents to interact and share their stories; past, present, and future. It serves as an repository for CML and a mechanism for telling and sharing local stories, images, and video for WOSU. Another successful project we spearheaded was ohioana-authors.org, a joint venture with the Ohioana Library and the Humanities Council. A 52-week radio series (three-minute radio stories) was paired with a website featuring our finest Ohio authors. Our three organizations worked together to choose the authors, and the WOSU Book Reviewer, Kassie Rose, recorded a three-minute piece on each author. We directed folks to the web site for more information including a biography and a bibliography. Ultimately, each institution we’ve worked with has applied what they do best in the new interactive age.

These projects demonstrates how nonprofits and the community benefit through collaboration. They successfully leveraging resources (time, talent, networks, promotion channels, and finances) to create a long-term, local resource for the community. Our presentation will define our process for collaboration and our plans for rolling the site out to the community in Feb 2010.

Have you seen the Modern Language Association’s new Evaluation Wiki? It’s “an ongoing project initiated by the MLA Committee on Information Technology (CIT) as a way for the academic community to develop, gather, and share materials about the evaluation of work in digital media for purposes of tenure and promotion.” One of the suggested questions for evaluating digital work is “Is there a deposit plan? Will it be accessible over the longer term? Will the library take it?” (Read more) If you are like many digital humanists, you have created innovative projects that exist in a fragile, distributed state, or are dependent on your university computing accounts for their continued existence. Maybe you have never given a thought to their long-term preservation, or the idea is so daunting that you quickly shelve it in favor of more manageable problems.

For the past year and a half, Louie Ulman (OSU Department of English) and I (OSU Libraries) have been working on an NEH grant-funded project to create a lifecycle model for electronic textual editions. Integral to this model is a preservation plan to ensure the long-term survival of such editions, and we have developed a number of tools and processes that can be applied to other types of complex digital projects as well.

Preservation starts with description, and we will show you how to use two of the tools – a content manifest (PDF) and a semantic map (PDF) (examples taken from an electronic text edition of a manuscript journal from the 1800’s) – to describe your project. The resulting descriptions will help you – most likely working in partnership with your library – to create an archival version of your project. We will also offer guidance for librarians working with digital humanists, and provide strategies for working with preservation repositories.

In the meantime, we would like to hear from you. What kinds of projects are you working on? What steps are you taking – or not taking – to ensure their longevity? What kinds of challenges do you face in doing so? (E.g. multiple software platforms, dependence on a benevolent systems administrator, etc.) Does your library play an active role in the support or preservation of digital humanities projects on your campus?

I spent a few years as a graduate fellow in a Writing Across the Curriculum program, and in my current full-time position as an instructional technologist I continue to collaborate frequently with WAC. In the time I’ve spent in close contact with the WAC program, I’ve come to find great value in some of the principles that lie at its core:

1. The ability to write is of central importance to nearly all fields of study
2. The various kinds of writing that are valuable in different disciplines can only be taught by practitioners of those diciplines
3. There is a close connection between the way one writes and the way one thinks, such that explicit focus on writing techniques can result in increased academic clarity in general
4. These considerations demonstrate that the position of writing is too integral to academic study for the teaching of writing to be the responsibility of composition programs and English departments alone

WAC programs are then organized in such a way as to provide tangible support for the teaching of writing, in the form of lesson plans, faculty development, pedagogical resources, and so on. And WAC’s mission is explicitly pan-departmental: one of the central tenets of the WAC philosophy is that students will only really learn to write if writing is meaningfully integrated throughout the entire curriculum.

I want to take seriously the idea that the WAC point of view can and should be applied, more or less wholesale, to the teaching of digital literacy.

There are a lot of problems to be worked out. First, I’d like to explore the extent to which the argument behind WAC can be adapted for digital literacy. Different disciplines require different kinds of engagement with the written word; likewise, we should be prepared to enumerate the different ways that the disciplines will require digital fluency (ranging from software know-how to programming skills to content filtering to multimedia composition to comfort with networks). I’d also like to flesh out the kinds of concrete support systems that would be required to make a digital analog to WAC function, be it faculty development or technology-intensive sections or whatever. And there will be the problem of politics: how do you argue to reluctant faculty and administrators that digital literacy education is as important as writing education? Here too I hope that we can look to WAC for strategies.

I have been using the Zotero plug-in to Firefox, developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, as my primary computer tool in my dissertation work at The Ohio State University. My research is about quality and its meanings in distance education at colleges and universities. The study uses qualitative methods and revolves around a case study at one institution.

Originally, I approached Zotero as a tool for managing citations. But as I became familiar with it, I learned how to use it for data analysis using interviews, documents, and other source materials. I found it to be comparable to other tools for qualitative research such as N Vivo.

In the last two years I have incorporated a variety of concepts and ideas into my urban classroom in Cleveland in a unique manner. Traditional historical scholarship, historical thinking, 2.0 digi-mocracy, social networking sites, primary source investigation, diy styled methodology, dialectics, and engaged historical learning are amongst the tools utilized.   I have recently written about a past project that involved students constructing a historical narrative of the Little Rock Nine and posting it on a myspace page here: jeffersonsnewspaper.org/2009/experimenting-with-historical-thinking-and-web-2-0-the-little-rock-nine/

I have also created two websites with the help of the Erin at the Center for Public History and the Digital Humanities. Check those out here: Street Law and Global Issues.

I’d like to present a few of my projects and engage a variety of folks to generate both a realistic and visionary discussion on the usefulness of the above in an urban school setting.

In a recent report, “the edgeless university: why higher education must embrace technology” author Peter Bradwell compares universities to Robert Lang’s study of sprawling urban areas that produce “cities in function . . . but not in form.” Bradwell locates technology at the heart of the edgeless sprawl of higher education:

The internet, social networks, collaborative online tools that allow people to work together more easily and open access to content are both the cause of change for universities, and a tool with which they can respond.

Digital tools and resources enhance collaborative networks and partnerships, break down disciplinary boundaries, link institutions, connect universities with the public, and create new possibilities for both learning and research. However, the recent John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation report on digital media and “The Future of Learning” suggests that change is slow in coming:

Modes of learning have changed dramatically over the past two decades—our sources of information, the ways we exchange and interact with information, how information informs and shapes us. But our schools—how we teach, where we teach, who we teach, who teaches, who administers, and who services—have changed mostly around the edges.

At the same time, the Kettering Foundation here in Ohio has joined with others to call for new ways to imagine the relationship between higher education and public practice. Consider the potential for digital humanities in regards to the goals for public scholarship laid out in theImagining America initiative:

Scholarly and creative work jointly planned and carried out by university and community partners;

Intellectual work that produces a public good;

Artistic, critical, and historical work that contributes to public debates;

Efforts to expand the place of public scholarship in higher education itself, including the development of new programs and research on the successes of such efforts.

How do digital humanities enhance opportunities for public scholarship? What promising new pedagogies integrate civic engagement with learning? How can we expand on opportunities for both collaborative and self-directed learning that engages these goals? How can we assess these learning experiences? What new qualities or values regarding learning emerge from the practice of digital humanities? Should we take advantage of digital resources and tools to offer collaborative humanities learning opportunities across institutions?

I look forward to exploring ways to understand the significance of digital humanities for both public scholarship and learning.

The 72nd OVI Project is an ongoing development that allows my AP US History students and me to pool our skills to produce original historical research easily available to the learning community.  We are building a webpage dedicated to the history of the 72nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry which fought in the Civil War.  Using primary sources provided by the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center, I guide my students through the challenges of transcribing personal letters, gathering data from date from scattered resources and making reasoned judgements about conflicting information.  For their part, my students show me how to frame and present our findings in a format that is substantial yet effective for use by their contemporaries.  The greatest benefit, from my perspective,  is that our students get to “do history” (which can make the discipline come alive for them) and contribute to the general body of knowledge.  If you’re interested in learning more about this, I’ve established a blog on which I explain the project in great detail.

In February 2005, three former employees of Paypal created YouTube. The first video was available on the site on April 23, 2005. According to Google, YouTube now has over a billion viewers a day worldwide. In a relatively short time, digital video has become a significant source of not only entertainment but of information on the internet.

But sites like YouTube are primarily designed for entertainment and from my perspective lack some of the rigor I would expect for academic work. I am interested in discussing digital video scholarship, the use of digital video for the classroom, research and publication. For the last several years, I have been part of the Ethnographic Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive (www.eviada.org; media at media.eviada.org) which has been working with ethnographers to take their field videos, digitize them, segment and annotate them, and make these videos and annotations available on the web. As part of this process, these videos and annotations are also peer-reviewed and the annotations are copy-edited. One of the goals of the EVIADA web site is to provide not only rich, deep content but also the context of each video segment.

How can we take a medium like video and make it more than just accessible but also provide metadata, rich content, insight and academic rigor? What does it mean to peer-review such content? How should it be distrubuted? Who and what kinds of access should be given to this material? What about intellectual property? What about copyright?

How do we make video part of the classroom? part of research? part of publication?

My work at EVIADA and at the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (www.iub.edu/~idah) at Indiana University has given me a chance to grapple with some of these questions but I have not yet found answers to all of them. Well, ok. I might have answers to some. But I think the importance of video and moving images in general to 21st century culture will only increase and we should find ways to incorporate this into the digital arts and humanities.

For those interested, I can demo several tools we have developed at EVIADA and IDAH to help with the project, but these tools will be the start of the discussions rather the end.

How can digital humanities projects use social networking to expand their audience base and excite new audiences about content?  Hi, my name is Amanda Sikarskie, and I work in project development on the Quilt Index, www.quiltindex.org.  The QI is an online resource for scholars and educators, providing access to images and metadata for around 50,000 (and counting) historic and contemporary quilts held in collections across the U.S.

One common goal of many digital humanities projects (and we’re no exception) is reaching new audiences—especially younger audiences, audiences outside academia and K-12, and audiences outside the U.S—and exciting those audiences about the objects in our database.  I’ve used Facebook and Twitter to help the QI achieve these goals, and in this session, I’d like to talk about some of the specific strategies I’ve used with these sites (an object of the day, polls, galleries, etc) and also brainstorm other ways that digital humanities projects can make the best use of social networking apps.

I’d also like to talk about how I’ve used analytics such as Facebook Insights, WeFollow and Klout, and how any digital humanities project can use social networking analytics apps to see how they’re meeting their audience goals.  We learned that through social networking we’re reaching audiences in places from Ethiopia to Bangladesh, and that we have a huge following in Italy!

Come to this session if you have anything to share or learn about social networking and digital humanities projects!

Acceptances for THATCamp Columbus have been sent!  We’ve got a wonderful mix of people and are looking forward to a great gathering of humanities folks on January 15th-16th, 2010 in Columbus, Ohio.  For you stragglers, we’ve reserved just a few extra spots and some more could open up due to cancellations, but you’ll need to get those apps in right away!  For those of you that have been accepted already, here’s a quick recap of the email you should have already received.

The steps below will get you started with travel, networking, brainstorming and community building.

Step 1: RSVP
Take 30 seconds (literally) right now to RSVP.

Open the RSVP form

We really need to know if you are unable to attend so we can give your spot to another worthy applicant. We also need to know if you have any dietary restrictions, whether you will be using the hotel block we reserved, and what size t-shirt you would like, so those questions are included on the form as well.

Please keep in mind that you are expected to attend sessions on both Friday and Saturday.

Step 2: Make your travel arrangements
We’ve reserved a block of rooms at…

Holiday Inn Columbus Downtown-Capitol Square
175 E. Town Street
Columbus, OH 43215.
(614) 221-3281
map | website

We’ll start a thread on the blog to help people connect for room and ride-sharing.  If you need – or want to volunteer – a shared room or ride, please leave your info in the comments.

Hotel shuttles and taxis are available for the two-mile ride to and from the event, as well as to and from the Columbus airport.

Each day’s gathering begins at 8:30am.  Friday’s sessions will be over by 5pm.  We’ll end the Saturday sessions around lunchtime, followed by an open panel discussion to end by 3pm, so plan your return trip accordingly.

Step 3: Twitter
Even if you’re not convinced that Twitter is right for your daily routine, it is actually an important part of THATCamp culture.  There is a thriving community of people who participate from afar by following the #thatcamp hashtag and joining in the conversation before, during, and after the event.  Your fellow campers and their twitter handles (if they have one yet) are listed at thatcampcolumbus.org/campers.  In addition to sharing notes and ideas about your session, this is a good way to connect with your colleagues before we all gather in Columbus.

Step 4: Complete Your Profile
You now have a profile on our site, accessible at: thatcampcolumbus.org/campers.

To retrieve your password, go to the login URL above and choose “Lost Your Password?” and enter the email address you used in your application – a confirmation link will be sent to your email account within a few minutes. Once logged in, you can go ahead and edit your user profile. By filling out your profile, you’ll let others know more about your interests so we can get to business when we meet face-to-face.  We have populated your profile based on your application info, but until you post to the blog (see step 5), only your Twitter profile will be visible.

Wondering why some users have photos, and others don’t?  The website aggregates profile photos using Gravatar, a universal avatar that WordPress and other popular blogging platforms use.  We encourage you to visit gravatar.com and register using the same email address you used to create your THATCamp Columbus profile.  Once you’ve added an avatar, it will be used not only on thatcampcolumbus.org, but whenever you post a comment on a WordPress blog, and will be printed on your name badge.

Step 5: Blog Your Session
Each participant is expected to post a thoughtful description of their session(s) at thatcampcolumbus.org.  Be as comprehensive or as concise as your topic demands.  The point here is to inform others about what to expect from your session.  Campers are encouraged to leave comments on posts that interest them.  Ask questions, make suggestions, share your thoughts, connect with other campers, and feel free to work out impromptu sessions and social gatherings.

Importantly, the blog is also the basis for the scheduling rush that will happen on the morning of Day One.  We will use your blog post to assign a slot in the schedule, combining sessions where appropriate.  Your fellow campers will choose whether or not to attend your presentation based on the information you provide so give them something to work with.

Lastly, please remember that although this is a great opportunity to share your work, we don’t want too much self-promotion in the sessions or on the blog.  That doesn’t mean you cannot discuss your research or project (you can and should!), but we ask that you do so by identifying the larger questions involved, and framing the discussion broadly so that it is as relevant as possible to your colleagues.

We are very much looking forward to meeting everyone at THATCamp Columbus in January.  Do not hesitate to contact us for any reason at all.  We want to hear your comments, questions, and ideas for making this the best event it can be.

A common question for prospective THATcampers is what to propose.  While we offer some general guidelines on our home page, I thought it would be useful to share some of my experiences from this year’s THATcamp at George Mason to perhaps provide some more assistance.

The most important thing I learned about THATcamp proposals, as both a presenter and an audience member, is that interactivity is essential.  No one wants to sit around and be read to, least of all us hip, fast paced Digital Humanists.  The best sessions by far had the feel of an engaging graduate seminar class, with contributions coming from everyone and where there was freedom for even the topic to evolve with the discussion.

Along with this, it cannot be stressed enough that big ideas are welcome at THATcamp.  Even if these ideas, as is often the case, are challenging to define, explain or put into practical terms.  Remember that because these discussions can be free flowing, there is no need to arrive at THATcamp with pre determined conclusions.  Simply asking the interesting question is all that we require.

On the other hand, some sessions were remarkably down to earth and practical.   This was especially true when talking about technicalities, coding, implementation, etc.  Sessions devoted to institutional barriers facing the Digital Humanities and how to provide Digital Humanities training provide examples of topics that encompass both “big ideas” and practical strategies.  The point is, while “big ideas” are encouraged, practicality and pragmatism are also important components to many excellent THATcamp proposals.

Finally, I would like to offer a word of caution.  While it is both natural and acceptable to talk about personal projects, its very important that presenters do not turn their sessions into an advertisement or infomerical for themselves, their institutions or even their (probably very interesting) Digital Humanities pet projects.  Thus, instead of basing a proposal on “I am doing this, and its really neat. . .” try “I’m doing this, and these are the wider ramifications, common problems, etc. and I hope the group could discuss. . .”  It is a seemingly minor, but very important distinction.  Of course, feel free to promote the cool things you or your institution are doing while at THATcamp, just not as the basis of session.

That’s all for now.  I hope this has been helpful for those with questions.  If you have more questions, please send us an email at thatcampcolumbus@gmail.com.

In the two years since it was established by CHNM, THATcamp has emerged as a phenomenon among tech-savvy and DIY-minded researchers, academics and professionals.  While there have only been two THATcamps at George Mason University, with four to five regional camps planned around the US, the event has had an impact that reaches beyond the confines of the event itself.   Before, during, and after each event, “campers” have helped create an ongoing backchannel community, wherein remote audiences are not only spectators, but also active participants in the online discussion.  With regional THATcamps sprouting up around the nation (we are very proud to be the third regional camp), a widely dispersed community is emerging that will carry the conversation year round.  Most importantly, that conversation is pushing toward a more innovative and collaborative scholarly community.

By sponsoring THATcamp, your organization can send a message to a wide audience that you are supportive of the cutting edge teaching and research that THATcamp represents.  Best of all, because it was conceived as a DIY, community-based unconference, sponsoring THATcamp Columbus is a great bargain!  If you are interested, drop us an email at thatcampcolumbus@gmail.com.

THATCamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp)  is a user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities inspired by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.  At the THATcamp 2009, CHNM floated the idea of holding regional camps around the country, an idea that quickly took hold, leading to events in Austin, Texas (THATcamp Austin) and Washington state (THATcamp Pacific Northwest), as well as a planned event in Michigan (THATcamp Great Lakes).  THATcamp Columbus, a collaborative effort of the Ohio Humanities Council and the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University, will be held in January 2010 in Columbus, Ohio.

We will begin accepting applications on Thursday, September 10th.  Need a little time to think about what you would like to present?  Don’t wait too long, we only have room for 50 attendees!

Apply Now!

We encourage all applicants, participants, organizers, and onlookers to sign up for a Twitter account and follow news, announcements, discussions, and general hype coming from our profile (@thatcampcbus) and the global THATcamp hashtag (thatcamp @ twitter.com" href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=thatcamp">#thatcamp).  And of course, subscribe to the THATcamp Columbus RSS feed.  Once applicants are accepted, they will begin posting their session ideas on this site, fostering a lively pre-conference community.  For more information, see the About page or drop us a line at thatcampcolumbus@gmail.com