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.

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-

One of the mottoes of THATcamp is Less Yack, More Hack. This means we focus on doing along with our talking, which distinguishes THATcamps from most other conferences. For example, DHCommons came out of a session at THATcamp Chicago 2010. This post is not so much a session proposal than a reminder to include a concrete outcome in your session. That could be anything from some coding to starting a new DH project to a blog post to a proposal for a Digital Scholarship Seminar. We are always looking for new topics for NITLE’s Digital Scholarship Seminars, so, if you have a great discussion and would like to take it further, consider proposing a seminar. Just write a title and description and come up with a list of potential speakers.

I’ve had a request for a Digital Scholarship Seminar on Womens Studies and DH. I’d love some help in planning this online seminar. Who would be a good speaker? Let’s write a description.

This could be combined with or complementary to Jacque’s suggestion for a Transform DH session.

Ben Brumfield led a great session on crowdsourcing at THATCamp Texas 2011.  I’d love to see that session again.  In addition to talking about it, we could try our hand at one of the many crowdsourced manuscript transcription projects.

Possible conversation mash-up of previously proposed sessions; “DH Swiss Army Knife: What’s in your tool kit?”,  Dawn Dietrich’s “Academic Library and/or Digital Learning Commons?”,  and dschnaidt’s “Beyond the enthusiasts and demonstration projects, how do you embed the practice of digital humanities in a small liberal arts college? What kinds of advocacy encourage experimentation? What kinds of support ensure success, and where should it reside?”

Conversation around focus for those looking to advocate, build and expand support, facilities, tools, staff expertise in the direction of Digital Humanities needs. Speaking of needs – at your LAC what is provided and works, what is provided and doesn’t work, wish-list on a budget or wish-list on a bottomless vat of cash, tools dreamt of, tosser tools, ideal support person job description … in other words what would be immensely beneficial to building new or reshaping existing DH centers?

Anyone thinking about/ planning for/ working on digital preservation and copyright issues?

Useful resource to compare who is doing what and how in terms of DH support and engagement
ARL SPEC Kit 326 www.arl.org/resources/pubs/spec/complete.shtml

Growing numbers of digital humanists don’t have access to digital humanities centers.  While they may get energized at a THATCamp, it’s hard to sustain that energy back on the home campus.  The vibrant online digital humanities community helps by keeping us connected via social media as seen in Digital Humanities Now.  I’m interested in exploring a more organized form of digital humanities development.

What would a digital humanities MOOC look like?  A MOOC is a massively open online course, where course materials and interaction take place online.  MOOCs thrive on networked learning; those participants  who learn collaboratively by networking around the material get much more out of such a course than those who take it in a silo.  Since the digital humanities community already has a strong ethos of online interaction, it seems ripe for participation in a MOOC.  Granted, such a course might not be truly massive like Sebastian Thrum’s course with 90,000 signed up, but I think we could get enough critical mass to generate some good discussion and interaction.  I imagine a target audience of faculty, grad students, advanced undergrads, librarians, technologists, museum professionals, and anyone else who is interested.

So, let’s get together and plan a MOOC.  Seriously.  My colleagues and I at NITLE plan to pilot this idea in the last two weeks of July.  This is your chance to request your choice of topics.

More and more faculty are offering Introduction to Digital Humanities courses.  What would a textbook look like for such a course?  What about an open intro to DH resource/textbook that would let you mix and match (or as Jeff McClurken suggested at THATCamp Kansas) even let your students decide where to focus in a given course.  What would you like to see in such a resource?

There are a growing number of resources and opportunities available to introduce academics to the digital humanities.  My colleague, Lisa Spiro has written an excellent piece for newcomers, “Getting Started in Digital Humanities“, which was selected for publication in the new Journal of Digital Humanities.  NITLE offers digital scholarship seminars which are intended to raise awareness of digital humanities at and for small liberal arts colleges.  THATCamps are another great option for plugging into this community.  DHCommons hosted a Getting Started in Digital Humanities pre-conference workshop at the 2012 MLA conference and will do so again at MLA 2013. I’ve taught a number of introductory digital humanities workshops, as have many others.

But, what’s the next step?  What kind of intermediate digital humanities professional development opportunities are out there?  (DHSI leaps to mind.)  What else would you like to see?  How can we help new digital humanists take the next step?  At NITLE we are exploring some ideas for filling in gaps for the intermediate digital humanist, especially at small liberal arts colleges or other places that lack the support of a digital humanities center.  I’d appreciate any input you have on what that should be.  To give us something to do in the session, I’d also like to develop a survey that I can send out to all those who’ve done those introductory events, like the digital scholarship seminars, to get a clearer idea of needs.

A number of different groups and individuals have pointed out the ways in which DH, as a field, could do more to include women and people of color. Similarly, there have been calls to encourage more engagement with theories of intersectionality, feminisms, queer studies, and similar ethical and political positions.

While it can be hard to transform a field even as we try to gain footholds within LACs, it might be the case that we are in unique positions to help address these issues within the larger field. This session would be a forum for brainstorming ideas for action within LAC contexts.

In light of the proposed topics regarding digital natives and digital aliens, I’m interested in a discussion about how to better engage students who don’t own devices (laptops/phones) or who aren’t comfortable with tools like Twitter or blogs into an interactive/digital classroom. When we bring digital and online tools into face-to-face (or even online) classes, what techniques can we use to create an inclusive classroom, especially when there is a large range of skills and technical backgrounds? How do we ensure we don’t alienate students who are not as tech-savvy or technically oriented, especially non-traditional students?

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.

A friend or two has asked me for advice on session ideas for THATCamp, and since I’m running a workshop at THATCampLAC I figured I’d post my response in lieu of an actual session proposal:

My advice is to take a look at the camper page and drill into the camper profiles.  It’s a really diverse group of people, from all levels of degrees, all kinds of fields, institutions, and backgrounds.  If you look at enough profiles, you’ll probably discover one or two people  who you’d like to have a conversation with.  Propose that conversation idea — even if there are only two people in the list you think it’d appeal to, I think more will come out of the woodwork once the session idea is up.  And if they don’t, that’s fine — some proposals don’t “make”, and many of them are merged with other proposals into the same session.

There will be about twenty different sessions at this THATCamp.  Most of those sessions will be fairly free-ranging conversations in which the session proposer just kind of acts as a moderator/facilitator.  (At the last THATCamp I went to, in one session people passed a whiteboard eraser around to talk, just like the conch shell in _Lord of the Flies_).  So you don’t have to stand up and talk for 75 minutes (with the exception of workshops, but those are already set).  It’s okay to propose a panel on a subject you’d like to learn but don’t know much about — so long as there are some experts around, quizzing them can be a very effective session, and you may be able to figure out people’s expertise based on their bios.

The flip-side to the Digital Aliens? session… Our students are digital natives, but not consciously aware of how to learn from, leverage or be critical of the technology they’ve grown up with. Often they perceive only the social and entertainment value of the web, mobile devices and digital services. What techniques can we use to engage students in a meaningful dialogue about the power and pitfalls of technology?

SoMoLo — social, mobile, local — is all the rage for tech startups trying to integrate the power of social networking, the mobility of our devices and the locales in our daily lives. In addition, the idea of gamification — infusing game mechanics into reality — seems to be present in many different contemporary contexts. What is the crossover into the humanities classroom? In this discussion, we can share ideas about mobile and/or gaming projects and the benefits to student engagement as a practical follow-up to the ARIS Video Games workshop.

I would like discuss how to make digital humanities more broad-based and central, its potential for research and pedagogy more apparent. Beyond the enthusiasts and demonstration projects, how do you embed the practice of digital humanities in a small liberal arts college? What kinds of advocacy encourage experimentation? What kinds of support ensure success, and where should it reside?

The 2008 CLIR report on Digital Humanities Centers suggested that Centers were risking silo-style knowledge and infrastructure development (www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub143/pub143.pdf). At the same time, major private and public funding agencies have begun to target regional collaboration, both amongst LACs and between LACs and other kinds of institutions. Additionally, the recent DH Commons project has begun to facilitate collaborative relationships amongst individual scholars.

I’d like to have a conversation about what kinds of collaborations are both possible and desirable for LAC faculty, whether in the context of a center or otherwise. Rather than thinking in terms of “what can X offer Y,” I’d propose thinking about identifying research/teaching/tech synergies and building collaborations in this manner. In addition to thinking about how to find like-minded scholars, we might also discuss the nuts and bolts, so to speak, of collaborative projects.