Potentially linking in with (perhaps preceding) Thomas Beebee’s session on new projects for the NEH grant, I would like to hold a session on current digital projects. I am contributing to a couple of (open access) web resources within my field and would be interested in hearing about digital projects that others are involved with. I think it would be fruitful to discuss the benefits of collaborating on such projects—both on a larger scale and best practices from specific examples. Then we could troubleshoot the challenges—namely obtaining funding, new modes of working (as scholars in the humanities frequently have less experience with collaboration than scientists), and balancing the pressure to publish in more traditional forums with the various draws of digital projects.

As you may have seen on the tentative schedule, we are planning to have a session of Dork Shorts concurrent with our lunch session on Friday. What are Dork Shorts?

Dork shorts, known in some corners as “lightning talks,” are brief (2-minute or 3-minute) presentations in which attendees discuss current or upcoming projects, demonstrate new tools, or call for collaborators. Like most of THATCamp, Dork Shorts are meant to be as informal as possible… Dork Shorts let you learn a lot in a little bit of time.

Dork shorts will also allow us to get to know each others’ interests quickly. If you would like to present to the whole group on a THATCamp-y project, tool, or idea you have, we’d love to hear from you. No need to prepare an elaborate presentation, but you’ll have a computer and projector and can show a web page or a slideshow– just remember: you’ve only got 3 minutes.

We’ll have a sign-up sheet for Dork Shorts at registration Friday morning, but feel free to chime in in the comments to this post if you already know you want to participate.

They have been called a first rough draft of history.  They relied upon child labor. They have seen advertising dollars and established business models erode.   They have transformed from offline to online artifacts, leading to both newer formats and issues of excitement and challenge tied to access, preservation and observation.  They are relevant for all disciplines.  Newspapers continue as key information bearing entities collected by physical and digital libraries and examined by scholars and students in the humanities.   Some of you also may contribute to them as author, journalist, archivist, editor, entrepreneur, publisher, technologist, blogger, photographer, videographer, designer, advertiser or subscriber.

I am proposing a ninety minute session (one hour if scheduling consensus recommends) called SWOTing at Humane Newspaper Based Research Practice – A Three Act Dialogue. 

Our “Playbill” for this talk session will employ a loose dramatic metaphor, with conversation in three parts. This talk will include a few game-like cue card elements meant to enable brainstorming.    Any directorial guidance will feature a light touch, and participant actors at this session can contribute not only activity within the three acts, but suggestions on re-shaping the acts entirely.  Borrowing from the management field, we’ll employ a twist on the framework for a SWOT analysis (“strengths,” “weaknesses,” “opportunities” and “threats”).  Along those lines, our chat will consist of these two meta-questions.  These will not be the only questions we explore, but they will animate our back-story. 

1)    What are strong & the weak attributes tied to your interaction with newspaper sources originating from any historical time period? If you prefer to think in terms of an extended dramatic metaphor, one might ask, what characteristics exist within our protagonist and antagonist?  What abilities and obstacles, excellence and flaws reside in our main character, which character may be “you” the scholar, who personally intersects with newspapers online or offline? Alternatively, that character may be a newspaper title itself, or perhaps all newspaper titles past and present, both extant and extinct.

2)  What points of view might our collective share about opportunities and threats linked to newspaper creation, dissemination or preservation? If you prefer the dramatic metaphor, once again, what factors external to our drama, and the literal mounting of our work today, impact our expectations and experiences pertaining to newspaper based information and research practice, including economic, historical, social, educational, military, political, technological and personal influences?

What might we think if Facebook owned or generated a newspaper?  Perhaps they already do?  Or Amazon?  Is YouTube a newspaper?.   Does privacy decrease with an overall online news increase?  We may find ourselves brainstorming ideal newspaper information systems or creative projects to take place at future THATCamps meant to further address these issues.  We’ll consider technological elements, in light of the humanities and perhaps even some social justice factors.  We shall also address our posture as to news environments we have never experienced, and those quite familiar, and will reach for conclusions tied to the two meta-questions at the heart of the session.   As newer technologies continue to intersect with this very well-known format (or need that be re-examined as well), we’ll chat about what works and not within established and emerging news environments.   How do humanities scholars and students wrestle with the ontology of what we now call “newspaper?”

I’ve become interested in the scholarly possibilities of Twitter bots. From bots that tweet a line from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, “over and over” (@TweetsOfGrass), to generating tweets that sound like Buddhist koans (@Horse_ebooks), to automating the writing of Modernist poetry (@MoPoBot), Twitter bots have invaded our timelines faster than we can block them. I’m proposing a session where participants can discuss ways in which scholars could use bots for our own pursuits. This would include using bots to isolate lines from longer pieces of literature, creating algorithmic methods for writing poetry, randomizing highlights from a collection, helping with vocabulary learning, or just making witty comments to amuse ourselves during office hours. If interest exists, we could also try to hack together a Twitter bot of our own.

I am interested in how the Digital Public Library can be used (in your teaching, for an assignment, or in your own research) and am in search of folks who want to experiment together. Let’s explore the DPLA through multiple kinds of searching. I am interested in exploring New York State history, but am open to all kinds of topic suggestions—ballet, vaudeville, shipwrecks!   Perhaps we could work as a team to search 1 or 2 topics as deeply as we can think to do so across all the ways of searching. How would you use the content of the DPLA and its search interface for gathering historical and cultural materials and images? We all have a touch of the curator in us.  Let’s work on one another’s research areas and have a mass search of the DPLA to uncover content.  I continually find big surprises in it.

If the group wants to we can also take a look also at OpenPics Application (free via iTunes): dp.la/apps/6  to gather a personal “collection.”

Anyone who is interested in DPLA can come!

Resources:

A librarian’s guide to DPLA: resources.library.lemoyne.edu/barnello/DPLA
Howard, J. (December 3, 2013). “DPLA: Young but Well-Connected,” Chronicle of Higher Education. chronicle.com/article/Digital-Library-of-America/143489/

–Inga H. Barnello, librarian, Le Moyne College & DPLA Community Rep.

I’m very interested in how people research, read, and write together, and I”m also an avid user of Zotero. I’m proposing a session where Zotero users (both new & old) talk about ways to use the tool to do more than just collect and manage citations.

This would include strategies for using Zotero in writing and collaboration, approaches to using Zotero in the classroom for projects and for syllabi, practical tips and tricks for reading & note-taking, and ways of visualizing, understanding, and enhancing Zotero libraries. I’d also like to discuss the plugins that extend Zotero and, time permitting, provide a brief introduction to how one may write a Zotero translator to import citations from a source  not currently supported by the tool.