Category Archives: Session Proposals

Proposals for unconference sessions from THATCamp participants.

Building Scholarly Online Archives and Exhibits with Omeka

These days, any scholar or organization with a collection of primary sources such as photographs, drawings, paintings, letters, diaries, ledgers, scores, songs, oral histories, or home movies is bound to have some of this material in digital form. Omeka is a simple, free system built by and for cultural heritage professionals that is used by archives, libraries, museums, and individual scholars and teachers all over the world to create searchable online databases and attractive online exhibits of such digital archival collections. In this introduction to Omeka, we’ll look at a few of the many examples of websites built with Omeka, define some key terms and concepts related to Omeka, go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects. Participants will also learn to use Omeka themselves through hands-on exercises, so please *bring a laptop* (NOT an iPad or other tablet) if you can (if not, you can follow along with someone else). Learn more about Omeka at omeka.org and omeka.net.

Note: I’ve taught this workshop many times at various THATCamps, and my lesson plan is online for you to use at amandafrench.net/2013/11/12/introduction-to-omeka-lesson-plan/. See also how Virginia Tech’s own Special Collections uses Omeka at omeka.lib.vt.edu/.

Digital Humanities Projects & (Library) Partnerships

[Apologies for posting so late–I forgot my password and never got a reset link, so I’ve asked a colleague to post for me. So, look for me (Kira Dietz) if you want to talk!]

Special Collections at Virginia Tech has been involved in a few digital humanities projects, usually helping to provide original materials, scanning equipment, training, or some combination of those. However, the University Libraries’ staff and faculty here (and at other academic institutions) have a wide variety of skill sets and interests, including some that go far beyond their daily jobs! I’m interested in talking through some questions relating to the idea of partnerships and collaboration. While my particular focus is on libraries and archives, I’m curious to know where else those of you working on DH projects might find collaborators or partners. So, hopefully we can try to answer questions like:

  • Do you look for/have you worked with collaborators outside the main field of your project? If so, from where?
  • What do you look for in a partner/collaborator?
  • What resources, tools, and skills do you need or want access to that you may not have?
  • Do you know what potential partners (like libraries, for example) might be able to bring to your project?
  • How can potential partners let you know they are out there and open to opportunities? How can potential partners best share/promote what they can do?
  • Why should people creating/running DH projects be interested in collaborators? Why should potential partners be interested in DH projects? (In other words, for both sides, what do “we” get out of it?)

I see this primarily as a “talk” session, but it will also be a great opportunity for all of us to “teach” each other what we might bring to a project!

Crowdsourcing and Engaging the Public

Update: Here are our notes from the discussion: docs.google.com/document/d/1qKnwi–Y867jrIZECgNnyyCE8RhW67g_ChR_bxvxQ1k/edit

I’d like to propose a session on crowdsourcing and engaging the public in digital humanities efforts. My background is in computer science, so I’m especially interested in discussing how folks from the humanities are (thinking about) using crowdsourcing or otherwise soliciting public participation in their work. Possible discussion topics include:

  • How can we involve novices and amateurs in contributing meaningfully to DH projects?
  • What are examples of compelling crowdsourced DH efforts we should know about?
  • What technical and social challenges are we experiencing in engaging the public in our DH projects?
  • When is crowdsourcing a good idea? When are automated approaches more effective?
  • How can we build a critical mass of participants? How can we sustain that participation?
  • What ethical issues should we consider when planning crowdsourced DH projects?
  • What are fruitful ways for novices and experts (e.g. scholars) to support each other in a DH context?
  • What lessons from crowdsourcing in other domains (citizen science, etc.) can we bring to DH, and vice versa?

Musicplectics: Digitally Ranking Musical Complexity for Educators

000000">Musiplectics: the study of the complexity of music

We are in the middle of a collaborative research project here at Virginia Tech (in the departments of music and computer science) and ICAT, creating a web-based software program that automatically ranks the complexity of written music (music scores). The idea is that, by scanning a music score, using a pre-existing pdf, or an xml file, users would be able to use our application to determine the skill level required for the performance of a musical work. We have developed a working prototype to explore music written for clarinet, but are planning to expand its utility to include use for all other common musical instruments.

 

Pedagogical Value:

I. To Increase the utility of existing digital archives. With the growing availability of digitized scores (both from historical works in the public domain and xml that is being uploaded daily to the web), musicians and music teachers are overwhelmed by the amount of musical works newly available to them at the click of a button. We feel that if there were some way to rank and categorize these works by their complexity, these vast digital resources would become less daunting and more widely used by educators.

II. For competitions and festivals. Often times, educators must make highly subjective, and time-consuming decisions regarding the difficulty levels of the music that is chosen. This ranking system could clarify and objectively facilitate these often-debated choices.

 

Future Research Projects:

We would like to explore collaborating with existing databases, libraries, or digital reserves to rank as many scores as possible and explore other possible applications of our technology. Further collaborations and suggestions or ideas from our colleagues would be wonderful!

Questions:

– How can we use crowdsourcing, surveys, or other methods as a tool to set the parameters for judging exactly what is difficult on various instruments? Is there a way to get input from a large number of participants so that our parameters could represent a good average for what people believe?

– How can we find the most advanced OCR (optical character recognition) software that will help us to make sense of music, which is sometimes hard to decipher?

– Are there other applications of our software that might be unexplored?

– Who would like to collaborate with us?

 

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Telling Stories

I’ve a burgeoning interest in Digital Storytelling as a way to learn composition, history, place, technology… parts or all in one assignment. I’d also like to explore using GIS data as part of the metadata about the stories, especially if the stories can be combined to help recreate a sense or history of a place.

We could do a discussion of tools, then move on to technique / assignment construction / and assessment… or we could figure out how to tie it all in to an environment ripe for Oculus Rift / Google Cardboard type exploration.

Tools to think about, in no particular order:

iMovie
MovieMaker
Audacity
GarageBand
CartoDB
Mango
SketchUp

Mobile apps:
iMovie for iOS 
GarageBand for iOS
Andriod Audio apps

“Do you even code, Bro?”

I would like to talk about bringing coding into humanities classes by responding to questions like these:

  • Why should we learn to code?
  • Why should we teach students to code?
  • How can we integrate coding into our classes in construcitve and beneficial ways?
  • Could we use coding to facilitate transfer of concepts from the general education humanities courses to major-specific courses and the workplace?
  • What kinds of programs can be used to help students learn enough coding to develop basic literacies?
  • How can we have time to do all-of-the-things?

I would love to hear from anyone who has done this before, but I would also like to play with some possible solutions during the session (contengient on time). If someone else has had expereience with this and would like to lead this session, that would be awesome. However, I would be happy to moderate/lead or co-lead this session if people are interested. I have a very basic understanding of HTML and CSS, so I am certainly not an expert. I am hoping to further develop those literacies through my own work, and I am very intersted to think about the ways basic work with websites, wikis, and other Web 2.0 (and beyond) applications can help students develop and practice literacies that have the potential to improve their overall communication skills for the future.

 

**Update** This is the Google Doc we created during the session. docs.google.com/document/d/1x_93YdvlqqMWZ333qVB4gAGMf4sMG4CzAkxs6TTVqrs/edit?usp=sharing

Connecting qualitative + quantitative in social media research

Three people texting using smartphonesTHATCamp happens to fall in the middle of a project I am working on involving the social media app Yik Yak. So far I have had no trouble pulling user posts from the app (I have done similar projects with Twitter and Reddit), but I want to supplement this textual data with ethnographic interviews with users, similar to danah boyd’s social media research. This is a new approach for me, and so I am interested in discussing, collaborating, and learning more about this type of research at THATCamp. I am open to discuss any aspect of social media research projects, including:

  • Using APIs to access social media data
  • Tools for quantitative analysis of textual social media data
  • Recruiting participants from online communities for in-person interviews
  • Interview strategies for contextualizing social media data
  • Grounded theory approaches to coding and analysis
  • Ethical issues in online community research
  • Social media research projects in the classroom

Digital humanities + design records

Hello everyone! I’m interested in getting together with some like-minded scholars and practitioners to talk about how architecture and design records in archives can be incorporated into the digital humanities. This is just a simple blurb. I’m excited to see where the conversation might take us. Some ideas for discussion:

  • How do DH folks use architectural and design records?
  • What keeps them from using architectural and design records?
  • What prevents archivists and other cultural heritage professionals from making these records accessible?
  • What can we do about these barriers?
  • What would our ideal future look like? Would it have emulation environments for CAD drawings? 3D printing? Virtual reality viewers?

We produced a Google Doc to capture the salient points of our discussion. Check it out here:

docs.google.com/document/d/1-T869zvjb0MiYimb-R-EZ4BQxyEQi5dfqgS1XcdgJgA/pub

 

 

 

Mobile Apps for Teaching Digital Humanities

This is my third THATCamp, and I’m really looking forward to some great conversations on the 10th and 11th. One topic I’ve been interested in recently is how we can make better use of mobile apps in the classroom, and I hope a few other people will want to join me for a “Talk” session on this subject.

For the past few semesters, I’ve had the good fortune of participating in Virginia Tech’s iPad project, which loans iPads to students in particular classes for a full semester. In my undergraduate Writing and Digital Media class, we tested several apps for digital storytelling on mobile devices, and in my graduate seminar on the Digital Self, we used the iPads to experiment with various tools for taking notes and organizing scholarly research. These class projects have been fascinating (and a lot of fun), but I know they can’t be replicated on all campuses (or even in all of my classes). And some of my students have grown frustrated with adding yet another device to their already heavy backpacks.

So I’ve started thinking about how I could take advantage of the devices that my students already carry with them — their own cell phones and tablets. Taking this approach adds a few new layers of complexity (finding apps that work on a variety of platforms, dealing with tech support issue for not just one but several different devices, acknowledging that not all students own or have access to such devices, etc.), and it’s those issues (and others I haven’t even considered!) I’d like to discuss at THATCamp Virginia.

If you’re interested, let me know in the comments — or just find me at the camp. I can’t wait to see everyone in Blacksburg next week!

UPDATE: Here’s the Google Doc we composed during our session.