Here is the Open Source Session notes link:
docs.google.com/document/d/10xTHtcvMMtebJYpAf7FwmbQweu6KtlSlj0cc82odkl0/edit
Archive for the ‘Session Proposals’ Category
-
09 Nov
Category
Link to Data Dump/Analyze/Display Session
Hi ThatCampers,
Here is the link to the document where we gathered recommended programs to approach this problem with modular solutions.
docs.google.com/document/d/1axIiEKHwDErIDB_4lv4iEz0JFAmaWScQfDGW4brE0Q8/edit
At this point there is not one overall program that we could come up with to do all these things at once.
I am interested as a person squarely in the humanities to partner with an IT/library science people to help to develop something that would be usable and very user friendly for humanities-types.
-Kelly
-
Digitally inflecting a class
Jeff McClurken’s terrific pedagogy workshop made me want to sneak in one more session proposal. We spent a fair bit of time in the workshop talking about Jeff’s remarkable digitally-focused classes, but not as much time talking about how to digitally inflect more traditional courses. This might fit into the session Susan proposed about teaching critical thinking with the digital humanities. I’d like to propose a hands-on discussion of ways that participants are digital inflecting their classes–sort of like the small group exercise Jeff pointed to in his document but that we didn’t have time for this afternoon. By the end, I hope that we’d have some tentative plans for ways we could digitally inflect our own traditional courses.
-
Teach Session Proposal: Intro to Omeka
If anyone wants to learn the basics of Omeka, I’m happy to teach a workshop on it — I’ve done so many times. Here’s a fun (advanced) example of an Omeka site — the Grateful Dead Archive Online: www.gdao.org/
Here’s a description of said workshop:
***
Building Scholarly Online Archives with Omeka
These days, any scholar or organization is almost certain to have a collection of digital material from research and teaching: scanned texts, digital images, original syllabi, even historic songs, oral histories, or digital video. Omeka is a simple, free system built by and for scholars and cultural heritage professionals that will help you publish and interpret such digital material online in a scholarly way so that it’s available for researchers, students, and the public in a searchable online database integrated with attractive online essays and exhibits. In this introduction to Omeka, we’ll look at a few of the many examples of Omeka websites built by archives, libraries, museums, and individual scholars and teachers; define some key terms and concepts related to Omeka; learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects; and go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka at omeka.net and the self-hosted version of Omeka at omeka.org. Participants will also learn to use Omeka themselves through hands-on exercises, so please *bring a laptop* (not an iPad).
-
08 Nov
Category
Play / Make session: Listen to Wikipedia Guided Meditation
Recently a student in the “Digital Past” class I’m teaching posted a link to our Diigo Group which she described as “not very informative” but “interesting.” Listen to Wikipedia be edited: listen.hatnote.com There’s a map, too: hatnote.com
I thought we could do a session where we take 10-15 minutes to just watch the site together, 10-15 minutes to interact with it (choose a different language, click on some of the links, visit the GitHub repo, whatever), and then use the remainder of the time to do some collaborative reflective writing on what we thought, saw, felt, learned. Participad would be a great tool for doing the collaborative writing part if you don’t mind my using my admin privileges to activate it on this site.
Having had the site open in a tab for quite a while on a couple of separate days, I think it actually is very informative — about visualizations, about whatever the audio equivalent of visualizations is, about Wikipedia, about knowledge, about the world. I’m also generally interested in similar sorts of interactive art / games / projects built on functional internet tools: GlobeGenie and Twistori come to mind. We could have a discussion, of course, but for some reason I’m keen on the idea of a completely silent session …
-
Teaching Critical Thinking via Digital Projects
Hello Campers – I’m proposing an informal “Talk” session on the intersection of the digital realm and teaching critical thinking. I’m interested in exploring teaching strategies with this aim in mind. I thought we might exchange stories from the classroom or workshop, brainstorm projects, and consider the complexities.
In the THATCamp spirit, I’m anticipating the conversation as wide-open, workshop-format, and look forward to a diverse range of perspectives and experiences.
Among my own lines of thought, I’m intrigued by the ways in which the digital realm may help to complicate the category of “critical thinking” itself, and esp. interested in new kinds of knowledge creation through digital projects (as well as more common invocations of critique itself.)
A second, and closely related topic, might be that of audiences for this broader project. My immediate interest is in undergraduate pedagogy, but we might explore early graduate training, and also the ways in related projects might be extended beyond the university for collaborative projects with a broader community.
p.s. One question that I found myself chewing on earlier this fall, inspired by the excellent “RailsGirls” event at GMU in Sept: what’s the relationship between teaching code and teaching critical thinking, especially to an undergrad audience in the humanities?
-
Hacking Role-playing & Storytelling Games
Love a good game? Join us for hacking and prototyping apps, games, props, and web resources for role-playing and storytelling games. This session is an open time for prototyping all sorts of physical-computing props and web resources for games you play – or for games you invent on the spot. Bring an idea or be on the lookout for a project that needs your help. While the proposer doesn’t quite know how to pull off everything imagineable, we might…
- Make 3D campaign maps that use miniatures and MaKey MaKeys to trigger encounters animated in Scratch.
- Program interactive game-master Twitter bots.
- Prototype and publish remixable game rules and resources like character sheets using HTML5 and CSS in webauthoring tools like Webmaker Thimble.
- Write and share random campaign and adventure engines in coding languages like JavaScript.
Bring your dice, games, ideas, expertise, hot glue, and cardboard – along with your favorite coding languages and any physical computing stuff you want – to hack and remix role-playing and storytelling resources out of ingenuity, circuitry, and the web. Extra experience points for community members who lend their hands to help others realize their wild and wacky game-making dreams.
I can bring: a couple of MaKey MaKeys, cardboard, hot glue guns and hot glue, some LEDs and batteries, short jumper wires, and basic HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript skills.
We might also need: Twitter bot overlords, web wranglers, designers of all ages, more stuff with which to build, and you and your imagination!
-
Tools for exploring big sound archives
Brandon Walsh has already proposed a session about tools for curating sound, so what I’m proposing here might well fit into his session, but in case what I’m proposing is too different, I wanted to elaborate.
At THATCamp VA 2012, I proposed and then participated in a discussion about how digital tools could help us not just think about tidily marked plain-text files, but also the messier multimedia data of image files, sound files, movie files, etc. We ended up talking at length about commercial tools that search images with other images (for example, Google’s Search By Image) and that search sound with sound (for example, Shazam). A lot of our discussion revolved around the limitations of such tools–yes, we can use them to search images with other images, but, we asked, would a digital tool ever be able to tell that a certain satiric cartoon is meant to represent a certain artwork. For example, would a computer ever be able to tell that this cartoon represents this artwork?
Our conversation was largely speculative (and if anyone wanted to continue it, I’d be happy to have a similar session this time around).
Since then, however, I’ve become involved with a project that takes such thinking beyond speculation. As a participant in the HiPSTAS institute, I’ve been experimenting with ARLO, a tool originally designed to train supercomputers to recognize birdcalls. With it, we can, for example, try to teach the computer to recognize instances of laughter, and have it query all of PennSound, a large archive of poetry recordings, for similar sounds. We might be able, then, to track intentional and unintentional instances when audiences laugh at poetry readings.
The project involves both archivists and scholars–the archivists are interested in adding value to their collections (for example, by identifying instances of song in the StoryCorps archive), and the scholars are interested in how this new tool might help us better visualize and explore poetic sound and historical sound recordings.
My sound-related proposal, then, is this: to have a conversation about potential use cases for this and similar tools. Now that we know we can identify certain kinds of sounds in large sound collections, how should we use such a tool? Since Brandon’s already interested in developing sound collections using Audacity, I thought we might also add this big-data/machine-learning tool into the mix of the conversation.
-
07 Nov
Category
Data Dumping, Data Analyzing, Data Displaying
Hello fellow ThatCampers, I am in the field of Religious Studies and a big portion of my work involves gathering lots of data from contemporary settings (such as sermons from Christian churches, archival data, interviews, etc.; Drupal seems like one program that is good for this), analyzing the data (looking at patterns of logic and hermeneutics) and then mapping this analysis visually (I’ve used prezi to do this before). I’d like to propose a session that would brainstorm the best program(s) and way(s) to do all of this digitally. I think that such a session should be interesting to anyone that gathers, analyzes and displays data, not just folks from Religious Studies, but perhaps Anthropology, Sociology, Geography, etc.
-
Brainstorm some ideas for 3D printing the past
3D printers today are like HTML in the early 1990’s. We just know something big is going to come of it, but what? I propose a session on sitting around and thinking up ways to use 3D printing for the humanities (history is my field, but any and all are welcome). How can we use 3D printers in the class room (practical experiences, fantastical ideas, lessons to learn)? How does 3D printing help us understand humanities now? Let’s prophesy what the future may bring for 3D printing and humanities. How will it evolve, as did HTML, to be a tool for disseminating knowledge and facilitate learning?
Sponsors
THATCamp VA is sponsored by the Scholars' Lab at UVa Library, with support and partnership of faculty from Virginia Tech and University of Mary Washington.
All text and code on
THATCamp Virginia 2013 is freely available for you to use, copy, adapt and distribute under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License as long as you link to THATCamp.org and the Center for History and New Media. The name "THATCamp" and the THATCamp logo are trademarks of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Theme based on the Furvious theme, by KreativeThemes.
