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Just a quick note to say thanks for being part of THATCamp@Penn yesterday – we had a great time, and hope you did as well. Please take a second to give us feedback at www.surveymonkey.com/s/thatcampeval

We are collecting the results of our conversations at tinyurl.com/thatcamppennnotes – if your session notes are not already there, please send us an email or share them with us via a Google Doc. We’ll continue to post up photos of the day as they come in, and send a note when our storify is done.

We will organize workshops here in June to follow up on the items that we discussed. So, please send us an email if you want to be added to our weekly workshop email list. It looks like Omeka and Zotero training is definitely on the list – email us with other topics of interest.

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THATCamp@Penn staff
penn2012.thatcamp.org

When Amanda invited us to reflect on THATCamp@Penn, my mind started working almost as fast as it had during an extraordinary day of learning and collaboration. Today was my first experience with a THATCamp and with the “unconference model,” and I think that I’m leaving with the near-Messianic enthusiasm that I think was cautioned against in our opening session—or at some point in the day, perhaps in the Critical Editions session.

As the day progressed, I collected links to new tools in my diigo.com library, and I’m including that list at the end of this entry. I don’t know if I learned what I had hoped when I applied to THATCamp, but I definitely feel as if I’ve found a pathway toward discovery that is going to enhance my own scholarship and teaching and that will make me a better citizen of my own campus and academe.

Two sessions really stuck out to me in provoking an examination of some of the underlying assumptions that make entry into the digital humanities more difficult for faculty: the Critical Editions session and the Credit/recognition for digital scholarship session.

The Critical Editions session provided a wonderful opportunity to explore various online and packaged digital editions, including the Carlyle Letters collection, the Jonathan Swift archive, the Brown Women Writers Project, and the Electronic Beowulf project. Although we struggled with the question of “where to begin” in a digital critical edition, I think that we began to address the paradigm shift that might be underway and that might complicate our understanding of digital critical editions. In my own field, Historical Linguistics in general and Old English studies in particular, critical editions are solitary projects, the result of years of contemplation of a manuscript or set of manuscripts. Many years ago, the critical edition was the classic dissertation, because it extended the possibilities for scholarship in a field where texts were unavailable. Since the work of a critical edition–collation and comparison of manuscripts, collection and annotation of lemma, noting of variants, bibliography, glossing, and indexing–was something that an individual scholar could accomplish (with the support of briefly acknowledged undergraduates, graduate students, and librarians), it didn’t require much knowledge apart from that generally aquired in graduate programs or in research libraries, or through the example of textual scholars.

A digital critical edition seems to be something entirely different: first of all, it requires the digital architecture through which the text is mediated. And then we have to address the question that Rebecca Stuhr brought up in our session: shouldn’t a digital critical edition provide something specific that a standard, print edition cannot provide? If an edition also includes a facsimile of original materials, how should it train the reader to use them? If it’s a text in a language other than English, should it also provide translations, and, if so, what is the purpose of the translations? At what point does the edition become a pedagogical tool rather than a base text that can be used for the production of new scholarly work? Should a critical edition aspire to serve as a reading edition? If so, should it provide a variety of interfaces? Who designs those interfaces?

The questions exceed the amount of space that I should probably fill, and have likely been addressed in more thoughtful ways by textual scholars such as Jerome McGann, who also serves as the editor for the Dante Rossetti Archive, which we referred to in the session. Nonetheless, since one of our participants was from Penn Press (I believe Stephanie Brown, although I can’t verify it with her picture), we also started to discuss the future of digital monographs and publishing. In this case, we had to address whether we expected that ebooks would need to provide greater and more various content in order to justify their status as electronic texts rather than continuing as traditional books. We looked briefly at an enhanced ebook published by the University of North Carolina Press, Freedom’s Teacher, thanks to Alex Beaton for directing our attention to the Long Civil Rights Movement website. The key issue at play seemed to be the model that would allow for economically sustainable publications. If the market for monographs and critical editions is driven by library sales, and library sales become increasingly limited by licensing agreements, then authors face increased constraints on their publication options. Of course, this summary doesn’t nearly address the richness of the session.

In the final session of the day, on attribution, acknowledgement, and the role of digital materials with the structure of the academic workplace, we had to address economic issues again, although I’m not certain that they appeared economic when we began to discuss them. After the conference was over and I repaired to the train, I had an epiphany (or at least a fleeting insight): the academic tenure and promotions process is built upon the assumption that intellectuals within the academy need to have some method to be recompensed financially by their institutions, because they will not receive financial rewards directly as a result of their scholarly contributions. Moreover, publication costs have traditionally been borne by academic institutions (in the form of university presses and the journals those academic presses produce). Thus, the academic system of publication is built upon a system of limited, yet distributed, financial awards. Institutions themselves receive financial awards because of the prestige their faculty and staff publications lend the hosting institutions in the form of government funding (grants and state funding), tuition dollars, and donations from corporations and alumni. Academic presses, in turn, receive funding through institutional libraries and professional associations, in the form of higher than market prices for library editions of monographs and editions. No one gets rich in this model, but intellectual production has traditionally become monetized in some modest way, which gets translated into “value” in deliberations of tenure and promotion.

What happens, however, if intellectual work is publicly available and non-monetized? What if “information wants to be free” and scholars respond to that impulse by sharing their insights outside of monetary frameworks? What happens if the intellectual work of faculty is brought to “market” via the electronic resources of their own institutions? If I were to produce an edition that was hosted on my own institution’s web server, all of the traditional modes of valuation, both monetary (although slight), and intellectual, disappear. Without outside editorial intervention, or peer review, or the promise of monetary rewards for the hosting entity, the edition ceases to be “valued scholarship” and becomes “service to the profession” or “service to the community” instead. The same is true for other modes of electronically mediated discourse, it seems. We discussed some of the issues at play in academic blogging. For example, Carolyn Cannuscio mentioned the databases that she and other institutional colleagues have created and maintained. Those resources represent the best values of academic citizenship—presentation of massive amounts of data that can advance our understanding of important health phenomena, resulting in genuine and meaningful interventions that can improve public health. Nonetheless, they aren’t “worth the time” (my words, not hers) because they seem to defy the model of provincialism and isolation upon which academic rewards are built.

The consensus among all the participants in the session was that junior faculty across the region (if not the country) are pressured to abandon interests in digital scholarship because institutions lack the vocabulary to reward it in the tenure and promotion process. I wonder if graduate students, who are pressured to enter the increasingly competitive publishing track, are unable to take advantage of the resources that research institutions provide to learn about coding, encoding, and various standards. I was lucky enough to have some experience with materials that certainly fall within the umbrella of digital humanities, through the Indo-European Documentation Center at the University of Texas, and the Undergraduate Writing Center at the same institution, but I do not know how to build something. I can figure out how to use tools, but I can’t do more than dream something up and turn the dream over to a developer. When I taught Old English years ago, I was able to collaborate with an extraordinary developer, John Kuiphoff, who is now one of my faculty colleagues in our Interactive Multimedia Program, on a paleography tool to learn how to read Old English manuscripts. It’s a beautiful widget, but I have no idea how he made it work.

Which brings me back to the tensions that I felt in the digital critical editions session. Textual scholars, I would assert, are to the restorer of a classic automobile as a devoted reader of a literary text is to a classic car enthusiast. Textual scholars (or those who aspire to be textual scholars when they grow up) want to know what’s under the hood. We want to be able to take what appears in manuscript form and move it around, relate it to other similar materials, see how they compare, and present them in the format most useful for literary enthusiasts.

As a result, when we use digital tools, we also tend to want to know what is under the hood of the tool. I’m sure the same could be said about any number of types of scholars, and perhaps it’s a personality type that I really want to describe. Perhaps what I really want to know is not “how do I become a digital humanist,” but how can a humanist become a hacker, or (more politely) a coder, who can manipulate the interface that the user experiences when coming to the materials that I’ve presented for them. That desire might be over-reaching. Perhaps there’s only intellectual room enough for the digital humanist to imagine the interface, and she has to turn the mechanics over to someone else. But then she also needs to know how that collaboration can be rewarded within the academic context.

Overall, the “unconference” was one of the most intellectual stimulating programs I’ve participated in in the last ten years.

Digital Tools/Digital Humanities Projects mentioned at today’s THATCamp:

• taporware.ualberta.ca
• citeline.mit.edu
• iweb.museum.upenn.edu/solr/working/index.php
• drupal.org
• sites.sas.upenn.edu/openscholar
• brynmawrcollections.org/greenfield
• brynmawrcollections.org/traces
• dsl.richmond.edu
• cdrh.unl.edu/articles/eval_digital_scholar.php
• digitalhumanitiesnow.org/how-to-2
• creativecommons.org
• digitalhumanitiesnow.org
• www.curatorscode.org
• ulyssesseen.com
• xmlns.com/foaf/spec
• www.w3.org/RDF
• mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/ShakespeareQuarterly_NewMedia/hope-witmore-the-hundredth-psalm/2-gloop-and-the-banality-of-digital-reading
• rdfabout.com
• pressforward.org
• www.tei-shop.org
• www.nitle.org/help/anvil.php
• lcrm.lib.unc.edu/blog/index.php/2012/04/16/celebrating-freedoms-teacher-the-enhanced-e-book
• www.lib.umich.edu/mpublishing
• www.dhsi.org
• www.wwp.brown.edu
• imageweb.zoo.ox.ac.uk/pub/2008/plospaper/latest
• www.rossettiarchive.org/about/credits.html
• dirt.projectbamboo.org
• www.tei-c.org/index.xml
• info.omeka.net/showcase
• chnm.gmu.edu/
• thatcampgames.org
• a.nnotate.com
• www.omeka.net
• www.mendeley.com

I’ve been using OMEKA this semester to produce a class website that includes a digital facsimile, transcript, and readerly edition of a manuscript.  Additional materials produced by students have included GoogleMaps & GoogleEarth maps, a Glogster page, and a Flash exhibit.  It’s running on an Amazon AMI, and can be seen at 23.21.246.240/ . As part of this I’ve started using a variety of plugins, and had to start playing around with Omeka’s style and plugins.  I’d love a session that talks about how to get your feet wet with plugin organization, development, changing the Omeka themes, adding fields to the MySQL database that backs Omeka up, etc.

One of the notions that I’ve been mulling over after last weekend’s THATCamp Virginia 2012 is how credit, recognition, and attribution for work on digital humanities projects are integrated into the work itself. (I’ve tossed in a few bon mots from #THATCampVA colleagues into a very rough Storify thread.) There is clearly a broader discussion about these ideas already–with several examples of statements of principles and practices–but I’ve been wondering to what extent these principles/practices are infused into project life-cycles. Moreover, some of these practices might force some of the more vulnerable segments of digital humanities scholars (e.g., graduate students) to be ‘iconoclastic’ rather than ‘traditionalist’ (as Kuhn might argue), which could have implications for how hiring, promotion, tenure, etc. are approached. I would like to propose a session where we talk about these challenges and try to make some progress in our/my thinking about how to recognize and assess contributions to multi-scholar digital humanities projects.

If anyone’s interested, I’d be happy to teach an introductory workshop on Omeka, which is a system for easily creating digital archives and online exhibits from those archives. I’ve used it in teaching, before, as well, and could talk a bit about that. See omeka.org and omeka.net to learn more. Here’s the description for the workshop I taught on it at THATCamp Kansas last year (I’ve taught this MANY times):

***

Omeka is a simple system used by scholarly archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts; to put such digital objects online in a searchable database; and to create attractive web exhibits from them. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll create your own digital archive of images, audio, video, and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and we’ll learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects. We’ll also look at some examples of pedagogical use of Omeka in humanities courses and talk about assigning students to create digital archives in individual or group projects.

I’m currently working on a project with a retired librarian and the Edna St. Vincent Millay society to catalog Millay’s books, which have been in her library at her home Steepletop in Austerlitz, NY since her death in 1950. You can see a description of the project on Digital Humanities Commons at dhcommons.org/projects/edna-st-vincent-millay-personal-library-catalog, and you can see the preliminary result of our data entry from an existing inventory on Zotero at zotero.org/groups/steepletop_library. (Note that this hasn’t yet been checked against the actual books.)

Specifically, what I’d like is some advice from librarians, archivists, and (if any are around) preservation specialists and/or rare books folks. Suggestions for systems, procedures, readings, experts? It’s unusual for a personal library of someone renowned to remain together in this way for so long, and to me the collection seems like half a library and half an archive: the books have marginalia, of course, but I’m told they also have inclusions such as letters and photographs. Therefore it’s a little hard even to know whom to consult. So far the most helpful publication I’ve found about how to deal with personal libraries is this one: Nicholson, J. R. “Making Personal Libraries More Public: A Study of the Technical Processing of Personal Libraries in ARL Institutions.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage 11.2 (2010) : 106. Would also love to brainstorm some research questions that could be asked of such a catalog: I’ve got some already (how many books by women? etc.) but would be happy to hear more, since that could affect the final form of the catalog.

More broadly, of course, we could talk about other ways digital tools have been used with respect to personal libraries — possibilities and pitfalls. The Library of Congress did some neat stuff with visualizations of Thomas Jefferson’s library, and LibraryThing has a lovely project called Legacy Libraries where volunteers do data entry, sometimes from several different sources, to recreate personal libraries. Anyone else think this is, well, neat?

I’ve experimented a bit with using commercial database software—Filemaker Pro and Bento—to store the text of historical correspondence (i.e. letters) I’ve found in archives, making it searchable and sortable. I’d be happy to demonstrate my databases and would be interested as well in hearing from others working with correspondence digitally. We could also discuss grander projects like the Darwin Correspondence Project and open source tools that could be applied to such work.

We are hoping many of us will take notes at the unconference and these can be linked together from the main notes document at tinyurl.com/thatcamppennnotes – please do give access to thatcamppenn@gmail.com to your unconference Google Docs.

Over the past year, I’ve talked a lot with grad students in my own department (History) and elsewhere at Penn about digital humanities and how we can incorporate these tools and methods into our work as scholars and teachers. People are very excited, but one thing I’ve heard consistently is that it’s very hard to get any kind of training in the many varieties of tools that are out there. Instituting a Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate, along the lines of other grad certificates already offered at Penn, would appeal to many in the grad student community. I’d like to take the opportunity of THATCamp Penn to discuss the possibilities for developing such a certificate program: what would be the objective, how would it be structured, who would run it?

Not to be confused with the phrase, “thinking outside the box,” of course.

As Laurie Allen (@librlaurie) and I continue to build our support for digital scholarship at Haverford College, we are frequently asked by faculty and staff members to describe exactly what we mean by the phrase “digital scholarship.”  While the both of us are willing to speak theoretically on the topic all day long, we think a more effective strategy in “selling” our services to faculty is to show examples of what we’ve done and what we can do.  To this end, we have begun (with the help of our highly-skilled student workers) to develop templates for several web-based platforms like Omeka and WordPress for various types of digital scholarship projects that can be built quickly and simply.  I often refer to these as our “out-of-the-box solutions.”  Laurie frequently uses the phrase “digital toolboxes,” but whatever moniker we use, we feel that providing some parameters for our services will help encourage faculty to dip their toes into the digital scholarship pool.  Once we’ve worked with faculty members on simpler projects, the door will hopefully be open to more ambitious projects in the near future.

My hope is that our THATCamp@Penn experience will provide exposure to additional platforms or tools that would allow us to expand our suite of “out-of-the-box” solutions, and I would like to discuss the viability of this approach in general.  Does this seem like an effective strategy for building library support for digital scholarship, particularly at a liberal arts college?  Or do we run the risk of severely limiting the types of work we can do in the future?

I look forward to discussing these questions with fellow THATCampers in April!

Digital Humanities covers a lot of ground.  I often assume that each new project must be a highly customized creation for a specific research interest and will have little in common with other projects.  But I want to challenge that assumption.  I’ll be listening to identify ideas for new tools or services that can be applied to a variety of projects in the future.  For example, I sometimes hear about the need to create interactive maps, including those showing borders that no longer exist.  Or tools that allow researchers to create text overlays on high resolution images of historical documents – making it easy to see both the original and translated text.   So, what are the tools that would be really useful to a variety of interests?  That’s what I want to find out.

The availability of new digital tools provides more opportunities to design creative course projects which would be helpful in developing students’ critical thinking skills. Not only would these kinds of projects make the research process exciting, but also more personal to the students. I am interested in learning about successful collaborations between faculty and subject librarians/ curators in using some of the freely available digital tools to promote learning and research in the humanities disciplines. How can they work together to make humanities research engaging and exciting for students? What would be some good approaches for successful collaborations?

Even though there are now countless example projects to point to in the world of Digital Scholarship, I’m still looking for more ways to encourage faculty to think about the opportunities for their own research and teaching on our own small campus. As we build a program to expand our capacity to partner with faculty and students in the creation of new forms of scholarship, my colleague (@MikeZarafonetis) and I have been working with our awesome student workers on creating “Digital Toolboxes”. I’m hoping these toolboxes will serve two functions. First, by providing a couple of models for each tool (Omeka and WordPress to start), we’ll help faculty see clear, local examples of the kinds of projects they can engage in (using material from our own Library Special Collections). And secondly, by experimenting in small sample projects and documenting our process, we’ll increase our skill and ability in working with those tools. I’m hoping THATCamp@Penn can help us discover more “use cases” for these toolboxes, maybe find some local partners, and/or throw the whole notion up in the air and help us discover something new!

THATCampers might be interested in this conference hosted by the Center for the Humanities at Temple, where I’m currently a fellow. It will be a great opportunity to listen to really smart people talk about the politics of digital representation from a different angle!

Through THATCamp Philly, I became interested in using Omeka as a platform for presenting my own research and gathering materials from interested readers to effectively create a user-generated digital archive. Since I work on a topic of public interest in the very recent past (my dissertation is on African American AIDS activism) I think this would probably be a good way to present my work online while producing the raw material for others to do history on the same topic. Recent examples of this approach that I’ve seen include the Bracero History Archive and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Historian’s Eye. Perhaps we could talk about the pleasures and perils of merging our own research with such a platform, or theoretical and methodological issues related to curating user-generated content.

I have read and am reading a few interesting books on critical thinking and critical editions in the digital environment. The critical editions can be more than texts, but can include artwork and music. What advantages do we have in moving from a primarily print environment to a primarily digital environment? In fact, does “primarily” even need to enter into the question? Perhaps the question is how do we take advantage of the best of print and digital in creating the critical edition of the future? I’d like to be able to think about not only the technological aspects of preparing an edition, but also think about how the person coming to that edition will read and think about it, how the edition and its various aspects will help those absorbing this new work make connections with what they already know and from there, spin their thoughts in new directions; how it will allow the calculations of “distant reading” and also the focus and consideration of “close reading.”

I would like to investigate attributes such as: how many encounters with a given technology are necessary before an individual becomes comfortable using it? Is this truly an individual characteristic or is it possible to identify a general threshold? In what ways should introduction to a given technology be tailored to increase individual self-efficacy? In cases, where a technology is adopted as a supportive tool for content knowledge, how do we know whether it is in fact increasing an individual’s understanding of the content? E.g., how does representation of knowledge through a web based medium change understanding of content? Finally, I am interested in exploring what makes people resist use of technology and why?

I would like to discuss at THATCamp@Penn ways to make better sense of the multitudes of tech tools we use at Penn. I can think of more than ten tools that faculty and graduate students use to create websites, and at least a handful of individual-use database tools. So many options are available for annotating PDFs, working with references, making screen videos, sharing files with students, helping students to create digital content, and presenting research. The number of tools keeps growing. Many tools do many things – the overlaps are complicated, and change over time.  When I encounter a new tool – Mendeley comes to mind – I would love to know of a local place to look up who at Penn is using that tool already, how they use it, and why they chose it. I would love to find examples of projects for that tool, so I know if it is worth my time to learn it and possibly switch to it.

Please take a minute to post on the THATCamp@Penn blog – introduce yourself to our learning community, and share a little bit about what you would like to discuss on April 25. What would make our unconference a success for you? Feel free to share links, images, videos, etc. See also THATCamp’s advice on and examples of proposing an unconference session for help.

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Welcome to the web home of THATCamp@Penn 2012. We plan to hold our THATCamp at the University of Pennsylvania on April 25, 2012. Register Now!