We created a storify of the definitions we published via twitter from the session at #THATCamp #LAC 2012 on defining and distinguishing between Digital Humanities, Digital Teaching and Digital Pedagogy: storify.com/FrostDavis/digital-humanities-digital-teaching-digital-pedago

We, the #feralcats of THATCampLAC 2012, want to support the motto of more hack, less yack at THATCamps. To help THATCamp participants hack, we’ve compiled this More Hack Guide both as a handbook for hacking but also as an example of what four focused people can produce in 40 minutes after going rogue at a THATCamp.

Minus sermonis, operis plus! (Less yack, more hack!)

We created these guidelines in just 40 minutes.  Think what you could do in 75.

I created a THATCampLAC2012 Folder within the THATCamp folder in Google Docs.

It goes without saying that eTexts or eBooks (there are important differences here) are an increasingly appealing option for both faculty members/instructors and students.  Mary Meeker has recently documented how 29% of adults in the US have tablet devices, up from 2% only a few years ago.   Publishers will/ do/should feel enormous pressure to create texts that are available in a variety of formats, at a reduced cost (which presents its own problems, one might say) and platform agnostic, even as companies such as Courseload, working in conjunction with publishers of all stripes, start to offer services in which pdf versions, etc., of textbooks can be embedded in a dynamic interface that seems to be nothing so much as a competitor of learning management systems.

So, all of this seems to suggest that the age of the eText or eBook or eTextbook is upon us.  To that end, it seems that definitions very well may matter here: while publishers or other companies may be making eTextbooks for our consumption in the future, faculty/instructors and students can very, very easily create an eText or eBook either inside or outside the classroom, using information that they either generate or use from elsewhere (a good opportunity to discuss internet and copyright with students who probably haven’t considered who owns what online).  What, then, would be the value of creating or producing these artifacts in our own classrooms and what should they look like?  How can we help to make these kinds of initiatives grown on our campuses with faculty members who may be quite averse to everything I’m talking about here?  How should liberal arts institutions talk about the value of eTexts (both as products and the process of constructing them) to students who have certain expectations about liberal arts colleges, to others outside the institution (such as the local community), to administrators?  Should we even identify artifacts of this kind, such as really cool archives of either born-digital items or non-digital texts, videos or collections of images (is a collection in the Google Art Project an eText), with the imprimatur of ‘eTexts,’ and if so, with whom would we use this title?  To end this long post, I would ask, maybe we shouldn’t define eTexts, but rather, ask where or how we draw the line between eTexts and things that cannot be eTexts, since everything, it seems could be one? Perhaps a book sprint is in order here-

Digital Humanities covers a wide breadth of disciplines, methodologies, and interests, but one thing all DHers seem to have in common is a set of digital tools, apps, and websites that help us in our work.  While we may have discovered these tools from reading about them on sites like Lifehacker or Profhacker or by trolling the Internet on our own search, I suspect we mostly learn about them through conversation with colleagues.  What if we could speed up the serendipity by having a tool kit exchange where we share some of our technology tools for doing our work?

Categories we might consider include:

• If you were stranded on a desert island, what two or three tools would you most want with you?  What can you absolutely not do without?
• What are your favorite tools for pedagogy and to engage students?  Why do you like them?
• What do you use for your own research?
• Do you have a favorite repository site for images, digital texts, maps, etc.?
• What do you wish someone would develop?

Here’s the catch:  the tools must be free.

We could have a lightning exchange where we share the tools, how we’ve used them, and why we like them. In the tradition of “open mike” time, we could have a laptop connected to a projector (if the room allows) and let anyone step up to the computer and show the site, subject to a 5 minute limit.

It would be a quick and fun way to learn if there are a standard set of utilities that form the core of our collective tool kit and well as to discover that new tool we might have been looking for all along but didn’t know existed.

Let me first say that I’m very interested in the general topics (1-5) you proposed to get us started!  I’d like to see us discuss all of them, if possible.  A few thoughts and links to these topics:

Critical Code Studies

There is a group called Critical Code Studies, under the direction of Mark Marino, which looks at the effects of code on a wide range of rhetorical acts.   Here is their website–with their introduction following:  criticalcodestudies.com/wordpress/

As digital humanitarians continue to turn their attention to the software and hardware that shape culture, the interpretation of source code offers a rich set of symbols and processes for exploration.

Critical Code Studies names the practice of explicating the extra-functional significance of source code. Rather than one specific approach or theories, CCS names a growing set of methodologies that help unpack the symbols that make up software.  

Academic Library and/or Digital Learning Commons?

Secondly, a large issue of debate around academic libraries seems to center on the move from being primarily a print book and journal repository to a physical and virtual site for networking, a hub for digital content, and a learning commons geared toward the 21^st century user.  Some people are reluctant to see the print repository go (or decline) while others are embracing the dramatic changes underway in the form of e-books, online journals subscriptions, and libraries designed primarily as meeting/working spaces teaming with wireless and mobile technologies.   Our library at WWU is hosting a series of talks this month with nationally recognized librarians, library design teams, and directors of learning commons.  It’s been eye-opening to see the range of responses to these dramatic changes taking place in the academic library.

Redefining the Academic Library Speaker Series at WWU:  library.wwu.edu/dean/dean-cox-talks-about-redefining-academic-library-engaging-campus

Disappearance of the Literary Canon?

A related topic in my field seems to involve the disappearance of the literary canon (whether traditional or multicultural) as digital processes/skills/creative content production appear to be valued more highly than traditional literary content.   As professors and students work with an increasingly fragmented literary curriculum, what is lost and what is gained?  Does literary studies require the shared knowledge of texts, literary paradigms, and literary history?  An excellent essay that details some of the issues at stake is William Paulson’s “The Literary Canon in the Age of Its Technological Obsolescence,” which is available as a Google book:  books.google.com/books?id=SlPLo1ZElfUC&pg=PA227&lpg=PA227&dq=the+literary+canon+william+paulson&source=bl&ots=so4wBkujk1&sig=nsN0QtciXroRN0yMx2zkQs99RyQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gSO8T9-AJPCu2AXTvu2LDw&ved=0CE8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=the%20literary%20canon%20william%20paulson&f=false

Copyright Issues

I recently gave a campus talk on plagiarism as a form of art.  It certainly seems as if the culture of remixing is at odds with traditional notions of intellectual property and copyright, but does it have to be either or?  What if there were modified copyright restrictions, with creative content moving back into the realm of the public domain within a limited period of time?  I’d also be interested in talking about the innovative ways that creative content producers are offering versions of free content along with enhanced “versions” that are for sale, often constituting something like collectibles, one-of-a-kind-art, or versions that offer an annotated form of the working process (or material not included in the free content, etc. ).

E-books

It seems obvious that within a short period of time our students are going to be downloading their textbooks on their personal e-reader, probably for a fraction of the cost of print textbooks, even with the e-reader thrown in.  I’ve seen some of the amazing textbooks that now contain videos and interactive material.  I’d like to know more about how to re-think textbooks within a digital framework and how they’re essentially becoming a different learning tool.  Does anyone have experience with this topic?

This seems to tie in with the idea of flip teaching, too, where the instructor creates podcasts of any lecture material and uses classroom time for interacting with students or having students interact with each other.  Students  “see” the lectures outside of class.

Looking forward to meeting everyone!

The imperative of the age is not only to keep everything, to preserve every sign (even when we are not quite sure what it is we are remembering), but also to fill archives…The sheer mass of material changes the significance and status of the archive. It is no longer a more or less intentional record of actual memory but a deliberate and calculated compilation of a vanished memory.    –Pierre Nora, “Paper Memory,” 1984

Stuffing the archive indiscriminately because of the facile nature of data storage, we do so with the expectation that images, songs, stories, manuscripts, film, will all be easily retrievable. It’s difficult to know what gets lost, and equally difficult to know how to sort through what remains. In the frame of the memory/history binary, I’d be interested in a conversation about the roles we might play in making sense of digital archives in the hope that meaningful documents remain not only accessible but also of interest. Where history was once told by the victors, in what ways might history now be told by search terms and their top results? If the archive becomes unmanageable, how can we know what to preserve and point to? How is this dilemma different from a pre-digital era, and are there tactics from the past that can be recovered and adapted?

One of the perennial jobs of humanists is the annotation of older (usually canonical) texts with notes and information for readers about cultural context, interpretive perspectives, grammatical elucidations, etc. I am a classicist interested in commentary on ancient texts presented digitally, but the issue of annotation, it seems to me, extends well beyond that discipline. The wikis on the novels of Thomas Pynchon,  Open Utopia, are Pocket Torah are a few non-classical examples. Some questions I would like to discuss (and some of these are more relevant to classical texts):

1) how is the content supposed to be created? Is it to be crowdsourced? Machine generated through encoding of scholarly knowledge into the text through XML? Single author? Some combination of these? 2) What kind of annotations do we need?  Explicate every proper name and geographical reference? Audio recordings?  Interviews with the editor?  User-generated content? Word clouds and graphs of relationships between characters? Data from computational linguistics? Is more always better? 3) What is the product supposed to look like? A single long page? Multiple frames in one page? Several tabs on one page? Hyperlinks on every word? Side bars? Pop-up windows? User-comment features? Embedded players? What is the role of visual design? How exactly is all the information supposed to be delivered to the user in a way that will serve the user’s needs and is attractive, rather than bewildering?

We’ve finalized the workshops to be held.

ARIS Video Games

Have you ever wondered how to make an educational game for your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch?  ARIS games offers a free platform that you can use to design immersive, interactive, mobile experiences.  Come join this workshop and learn the basics about how to use this application to create games on the iOS platform.  Participants will learn about what is possible with ARIS, play ARIS games and work in teams to create a simple, mobile-based game.  See: arisgames.org/ for more information.

Taught by: Jason Rosenblum, St. Edward’s Emerging Technologies R&D

 Ebook Authoring

Take your manuscript from Microsoft Word to the Kindle, Nook, iPad, and other eReading devices in a few easy steps.  In this session, you will learn to create PDF and EPUB eBooks using the free Calibre eBook creation software.  No experience required; we will provide example materials to use and a variety of eReading devices to try out.

Taught by: Eric Frierson, Head of Library Systems and Kady Ferris, Collection Development Librarian

Beyond Wildcards: Fundamentals of Regular Expressions

Regular Expressions are a basic part of most textual technologies, and are built into most editors, programming languages, and frameworks. Though cryptic, they’re a powerful tool for anyone who needs to perform complex searches on text or clean and manipulate textual data. This workshop will explain the fundamental concepts behind regular expressions and provide hands-on examples of how to use them. A computer capable of running Flash is required for running through some of the examples.

Taught by: Ben Brumfield, Software Engineer (and back by popular demand)

Fundamentals of Teaching with Social Media

From Twitter to Facebook to Pinterest, everyone seems to be talking about social media tools and what role they should play in the classroom. In this workshop, we will experiment with a wide variety of social media applications, but rather than focus solely on how to use these tools, we will consider why and when you might want to introduce new approaches to social media in your classes. Come ready to share your favorite social media tools and discuss specific pedagogical problems that might be resolved, in part, by trying a new tool. We will focus on browser-based applications, so no special software is needed to attend this workshop.

Taught by: Quinn Warnick & Drew Loewe, both St. Edward’s English Writing faculty