Let’s Put on a Show

April 16, 2014 – 8:20pm
James Marten

“I am hardly an expert in the digital humanities, although I was the director of a fairly early example of the projects that characterized the field during the first phase of the movement, when content tended to trump technology and many of us had romantic and ultimately naïve notions of what it meant to “democratize” history, in the words of Ed Ayers, the developer of the iconic The Valley of the Shadow.”

Read more: www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-beta/let’s-put-show
Inside Higher Ed

Here’s the April 2011 American Historical Association blog post
100 Film Reviews by Historians blog.historians.org/2011/04/100-films-reviewed-by-historians as referenced by the mashup (via YouTube playlist) of yesterday’s 9 decades in 3 minutes Dork Short.

Drop by Todays TALK session on the SWOT of digital and traditional newspapers.
Lets consider issues and opportunities likely to arise when assembling primary source news references to these same films across the same 9+ decade lifespan. Lets share current and emerging practices for interacting with this history and these sources in the online space.

As someone who works on Sound Studies, I am constantly looking for new ways to effectively incorporate sound into my teaching. In the past I have asked my students to listen to podcasts like Radiolab and This American Life and use them as models to create their own. I have asked them to analyze music videos, practice “close listening” with thematically relevant songs, and consider the complex relationship between written and oral modes of communication. In this panel I am interested in discussing how sound is used in the classroom and what kinds of benefits students gain from these multi-sensory projects. One of the problems I have faced with my own students is that they are often unfamiliar with software like Audacity that allows them to manipulate and edit recordings. On an even more basic level, I had students who were unaware that their computers had microphones capable of recording their speech even though they were long time Skype users. Hopefully this panel will allow for a productive exchange of ideas regarding the role of “sound,” broadly speaking, in humanities and the potential for digital technology to enhance that role.

Kinds of Sound
Podcasts
“Soundscapes”
Archival Sounds
Music Videos
Music
Lyrics
Interviews
Found Sounds
Readings
Experimental Sounds
Field Recordings
Live Performance
Sound Effects
Speech
Radio
Soundtracks

Resources
Pennsound
Poets.org
YouTube
Audacity
Smithsonian Global Sound
Judaica Sound Archives

This proposal is in the PLAY category, as we will play some games.

One genre of games that is popular in the tabletop games space, but not in the digital space, are social deduction games.  Growing out of the public domain game Werewolf/Mafia, these games are team-based games where you don’t know who is on your team.

Players in these games are assigned secret roles and have different goals based upon what role they have.   The core mechanism in the game is roleplaying, as players attempt to deduce what sides people are on.

During this PLAY session, we will play several of these social deduction games, and then talk about how they could be re-skinned in different domains to be used as a training or learning activity.

I would be honored to facilitate a session where ideas are discussed that might lead to grant applications for the following:

NEH has announced a new funding program titled “Digital Projects for the Public:”

“The Digital Projects for the Public program supports projects such as websites, mobile applications, games, and virtual environments that significantly contribute to the public’s engagement with humanities ideas. Projects must be analytical and deeply grounded in humanities scholarship in a discipline such as history, religion, anthropology, jurisprudence, or art history.  While these projects can take many forms, shapes, and sizes, you should apply to this program primarily to create digital projects or the digital components of a larger project. NEH is a national funding agency, so these projects should demonstrate the potential to attract a broad, general audience.”

Awards are up to $30k (Discovery grants) or $100k (Prototyping grants).

Details below.  First applications due on June 11.

www.neh.gov/grants/public/digital-projects-the-public

Proposer: Thomas Beebee (tbeebee@yahoo.com)

I can present for discussion a recent attempt at Colgate to apply the concepts and technology of Social Network Analysis (SNA) to data in the Humanities. We use NodeXL (Hansen et al, 2011), a relatively recent addition to SNA software, remarkable by is simplicity of user interface, based on MS Excel. While not as powerful as, e.g., Pajek (De Nooy et al. 2011), NodeXL is best suited for introductory projects because the base of competent Excel users is huge, and any such user needs only conceptual foundations in SNA and no new software skills to start experimentation. This is not to belittle the intellectual challenge of acquiring such foundations, but the learning curve to initial competence is short and relatively painless: many interesting concepts and almost no drudgery.

So what I would do is briefly present the concepts and illustrate on simple examples; describe the pedagogical materials for learning and practicing those concepts; and present two humanities projects currently underway at Colgate and one project outside Colgate that I’m involved in.

Much of this has been supported by Colgate’s Faculty Development Council.

References

De Nooy, Wouter, et al. (2011). Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek. Cambridge University Press.

Hansen, Derek, Ben Shneiderman and Marc Smith (2011).  Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World, Elsevier/Morgan-Kaufman.

The goal of this session is to explore the different ways that Games are being used for change in Central New York.  During this round table, attendees will be invited to talk about how they have used games for change, serious games, or educational games in their institutions or about projects that they are aware of.  As we share what we have been doing, it will set up some networking possibilities to help people connect around similar challenges, and perhaps lead to some grant writing partnerships or interesting programs.

Bird Library, Syracuse University

On April 11 and 12, we will be hosting a THATCamp at Bird Library on the campus of Syracuse University. Additional details and registration information will be available soon. For now, just save the date!

In the meantime, if you have questions don’t hesitate to get in touch at thatcampcny2014@gmail.com

Meanwhile, read more about the THATCamp movement and browse other THATCamps at thatcamp.org.