Where everybody came from

Cousett put together this map of all the participants’ locations. Man, some of you travelled a long way.

View THATcamp 2012 All Schools in a full screen map

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DH + DA = YAY! happy hour

Howdy all,

If you are hanging out in Austin for a few days, come by the historic Scholz Beer Garden* on Wednesday at 5pm for an impromptu joint happy hour with DHers and archivists (hopefully) in attendance.

* We aren’t reserving space, so if, for some reason, there isn’t any, we’ll be at the nearby Dog & Duck Pub instead.

www.scholzgarten.net/

www.dogandduckpub.com/

 

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Digital Humanities, Digital Teaching, Digital Pedagogy

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

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More Hack Guide

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.

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THATCampLAC2012 Folder in Google Docs

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

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Official THATCamp Folder for Google Docs

There is an official folder to put google docs generated in our sessions.  Here is the main THATCamp folder.

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Collaboration on campus

I hope the sessions will include exploring the possibilities for collaboration within a liberal-arts campus. Jacque’s call for working with DH centers and other institutions is right on the mark, because we at LACs get leverage for our own projects from working together with those large efforts. But I believe we also get leverage from working with our colleagues on our own campuses.

Full disclosure: I’m a collaborator, not a humanist. Also, it may make perfect sense for a humanist to master some key form of technology that is essential to his/her work. But I suspect there are many cases in which a colleague in my field (Computer Science) could work together with a researcher, saving that researcher from an unnecessary digression away from what he or she does best, and taking advantage of the technologist’s expertise.

I am finding that my undergraduate CS students and I can feasibly work together with lots of diverse collaboration projects, given appropriate support for that work, without anyone having to become an expert in the other person’s field. This lowers the entry bar for both humanists and collaborators interested in interdisciplinary projects.

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Useful list of Austin Restaurants, Bars, Coffee Shops, etc.

For those who have a bit of time to spare, I’ve put together a list of places to eat, grab a cup of coffee, or sit back with a stronger beverage. Folks have found this useful in the past, so please feel free to take a look at the Google Doc.

Paul’s Austin List

Best,
Paul

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Data visualization tools

Simply put, I would love to talk about and share ideas related to data visualization tools.  I’ve used Gephi lately, and visual.ly is intriguing, and would enjoy talking about other tools and how we could demonstrate their value in a humanities or inquiry-driven context (i.e., visualization tools are summative displays of information, but how can we show students how they might produce new knowledge or ideas and how can we discuss their value in terms of sharing information digitally?).

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eTexts and eBooks

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-

Categories: Collaboration, Copyright, Open Access, Proceedings of THATCamp, Publishing, Session Proposals | 2 Comments