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

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/

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.

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

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.

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

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?).

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-

I wanted to add another voice of support in favor of the ideas expressed in Allegra Gonzalez’s post on Nuts and Bolts.  I couldn’t get the comment feature to work on this post, so I’m adding a new posting.

I think a session that delves into practical support for DH would be great, particularly if we can develop a set of core needs and best practices to support those needs.  This might involve skill sets for staff, physical and virtual spaces for working, tool kits to equip and encourage DH work, and implementable solutions for the grand question of how we encourage experimentation and provide support in ways that ensure success.

I think any of these topics could warrant sessions of their own, but starting as a mashup of previously proposed ideas might be a way to get started.  I appreciate the interest expressed by the other session proposals.

As we break our way into digital humanities, we run into more and more computer code. But do I need to know what it means? Or, better yet, how much of it do I need to know?

This has been a hot button question lately – do digital humanists need to know how to code? My take is that the answer is pretty nuanced and idiosyncratic. We must know how to understand some of the simple parts of the language that we use the most. And I think that we should know how to do some simple html/css – it’s too ubiquitous.

I’d like to see a session that talks about a few different things

1. What kind of code do I need to know for what I do?
2. How do I learn it?
3. What don’t I need to know? How can I tell?

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.

At the very first THATCamp, the registration page required a participant’s Twitter handle.  The effect was to force all of the attendees who didn’t already have a Twitter account–which was most of us–to sign up.   Afterwards, the obvious next step was to follow the other participants, since maybe this Twitter thing would help us get to know each other before the unconference.  I don’t know if this was intentional on the part of the organizers, but I suspect that that one required field has played a role in making Twitter such a vibrant place for practitioners in the digital humanities.

THATCamp LAC has two hashtags (#thatcamp and #lac) for participants to use in addition to the THATCampLAC account used for organizational announcements.  It turns out that you can search for both hashtags at the same time, so it’s easy to follow discussions about the unconference.  I’ve also created a public list from all the participants who listed handles (all but me, actually, since I wasn’t able to figure out how to add myself to a list) which should track all the breakfast- and cat-related tweets from participants as well.

I’d like to consider The Directory of Open Access Journals among other examples of portals to/repositories of open access texts. I’m hoping that this discussion can push beyond even traditional academic journal sites. What might these spaces offer us as teachers, librarians, students, practitioners of DH, etc. as sites of resistance to the ever-escalating commodification of knowledge?

Then again, how do we examine the structure of a site like DOAJ carefully and critically, as a text itself? There is an easy tendency to impart a heroic narrative to this movement (to which I certainly have felt prone), but if we were to look for its limits and omissions, what might we find? How can our discussions of open access engage more closely with materiality of technology, education, austerity? If we were to start to historicize the open access movement, what would inform the stories we tell ourselves and others? Engagement with queer, postcolonial, Marxist, and feminist theorizing around knowledge is especially exciting to me as I approach these questions, and imagine different futures for OA.

I’d like to propose a session around questions of how mapping & design tools can help us both create and represent research on narratives and sociocultural structures whose impact is very real and significant but is often ‘naturalized’ as to be invisible. I can think, for example, of instances in which films and novels address how memory narratives are overlayed upon existing physical spaces, calling our attention to or intervening in the signification of these spaces. How could mapping tools help us visualize, analyze and communicate these intangible aspects of culture and society? How have maps been used to undermine or challenge certain intersections of narrative, power and place rather than to reinforce it in the “objective” tradition of mapping?

What is out there for mapping & presenting maps–or could be?

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.

Let’s crowdsource a glossary of digital humanities jargon.  One of the challenges for digital humanities newbies, is all the jargon. Help the DH community figure out what it’s jargon is. When you hear a term you don’t recognize write it on a sticky note (we’ll have a place for you to submit them) or add it to this glossary I’ve created in a google doc. If you are up on the jargon, please go to the glossary and help us out by adding the definition: Digital Humanities Glossary

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.

I’d like to spend some time thinking about the ethical considerations of asking students to use various online resources as part of the coursework.  By ethics, I mean two things:

1. Access– what hardware, software, and sites can we reasonably expect students to have and/or use?  (Are we leaving out students who don’t have as many resources?)

2. Creating an online persona (or adding to an existing persona)- should we be troubled by the ways in which services– for example, GoogleDocs– collect data in exchange for the free use of their services?  When I require students to sign on to these services, I want to make sure I’m not asking them to sign on to be tracked across all their web activity.

I’m eager to learn more about the best tools and practices that have been developed.

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.

The term “digital native” often does not seem a particularly apt description of contemporary students, implying that they are comfortable or proficient with a variety of digital tools and formats. I’ve often thought that the term is really a polite way of saying something about older generations of faculty and administrators, that our students are comfortable with digital media by comparison. I’d like to hear about what kinds of best practices have been used in liberal arts institutions to develop general faculty and administrative familiarity and proficiency with digital practices and social media–not on the level of “How to Use Moodle” but aiming for the more abstract, intellectual understandings that inform our work with other media and other competencies or skills.

Students graduating from liberal arts colleges should be able to write about complex ideas clearly, succinctly, and gracefully. How can writing centers and academic supports centers best focus web-based tools and resources (screencasts, handouts, podcasts/audio, OWLs, presentations, IM, others?) to aid those students who require writing help beyond the early composition courses and perhaps through their graduate coursework? What is most valuable to different groups of students? What is most valuable for faculty who, hard-pressed for time to discuss writing issues beyond the composition courses, want to refer students to valuable resources that students will actually use?

Most of you are probably aware of this resource, but I highly recommend it, if you’re not.  HASTAC is the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technologies Advanced Collaboratory.  Here’s a link to their website.  They have a new Scoop It site that archives recent news material pertinent to the humanities, critical thinking, and digital technologies:  hastac.org/

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?

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?

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.

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’d like all of the THATCamp LAC participants to post any ideas for sessions that you’d like to see happen during the conference to this website.

Remember that a THATCamp is based on 2 different types of activities.
1. Workshops – skills based sessions where an expert teaches you new software, new tricks with existing software, or new digital humanities strategies.
2. Sessions – discussion based sessions most akin to a round table at a conference.

The four workshops are already planned. But we have a number of open slots for sessions. You, the participants, get to determine what those sessions are.

Saturday morning, our first task is going to be determining what the session schedule is going to be. To help us out, we’d like you to post ideas for what you would like to talk about. Note that you do not have to be an expert on the topic. If the idea interests you, and if you think others may be interested in it, that qualifies as a valid topic.

Some ideas to get you started:

• Do digital humanists need to know how to write code?
• How can we use GIS technology?
• What role does the library play in digital humanities?
• Are we ready to start using e-textbooks?
• How does copyright affect what we do?

When you post your idea, write up a couple hundred words describing what you’re thinking and why it interests you. If you can link to some background reading, that would be fantastic!

Go to this page to post your idea. Note that you’ll need to log in. You should have gotten a username and password with your acceptance email. If you’re having problems logging in, contact Ryan.

The USB drive freebies have showed up! All you’ve got to do to get your’s is show up Saturday morning.

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

We’ve reopened registration.

Due to overwhelming demand and a very benevolent Dean (thanks, Lou!), we’ve added 25 more slots for THATCamp LAC participants. That’s a grand total of 100 digital humanities geeks coming soon to St. Ed’s.

They’re going like hotcakes, so if you want to come, apply today

We’ve hit our absolute cap for attendees! Registration has been closed.

Thanks to all those who registered. You’ll be getting some more information in about a week.

We’re announcing a few new updates to the schedule.

Dinner has moved. We’re now going to Hill’s Cafe, an Austin landmark.
We’ll be having a chicken fried steak buffet (yum!) with some other options.
The cost will be < $10 – we’ll have more details on that soon.

The workshop schedule is almost finalized. You’ll have a chance to attend

• Regular expressions – extremely powerful text querying and mining
• Authoring ebooks and ejournals – create your own easily with open source software
• Creating iOS video games with ARIS – a free system for real world-based games with pedagogical possibilities
• Social tools in the classroom – an introduction to social bookmarking, wikis, photo sharing, and other social media

Didn’t have a chance to get your application in by the March 1st deadline?

Not to worry!

We’ve extended the deadline until March 23rd.

That’s 3 more weeks for you to put together that stunning application and join us in beautiful Austin for a great weekend of geeking out.

We’re rapidly developing the schedule for THATCamp LAC. And it’s looking like you’re going to have access to some great opportunities!

Saturday night

Dinner at Stubb’s Barbeque

It’s an Austin landmark on 6th Street.
You’ll have a chance for some darn good brisket, ribs, or smoked quail.

Workshops

We’re planning out the workshops that you can attend. No absolutes yet, but it’s looking like:

000000;">Regular Expressions: Take your text searching beyond simple wildcards. Learn some serious text querying possibilities from a seasoned pro.

Publishing e-books and e-journals: Learn how to create your own e-books and e-journals for a variety of platforms, all with opensource software.

Create iOS5 games: Learn the basics of creating a digital scavenger hunt game for the iOS platform using easy and intuitive software.

Social tools in the classroom: Discover power tips for using social media in the classroom. We’re not talking Facebook and Twitter – we’re talking social bookmarking, wikis, browser extensions, website overlays, and more!

Sessions

And, as always, we’ll have on-the-fly sessions about anything and everything you’ve wanted to know about technology, liberal arts, and the digital humanities.

Come ready to talk about

• social media for education
• e-book and paperless classrooms
• student-driven research
• digital humanities research in SLACs
• collaboration between institutions, departments, and non-academics
• whatever else may interest you about the digital humanities

From June 1-3, St. Edward’s University will host the 2012 THATCamp for Liberal Arts Colleges.

If you’re interested in the humanities, technology, or liberal arts colleges, you should attend.

But is THATCamp LAC right for you? Are you:

• A humanities professor who uses new technologies in your classes or research?
• A humanities professor who would like to try using new technologies?
• An IT professional at a university who works with humanities faculty and staff?
• A librarian who works in the humanities?
• A non-traditional humanist who is interested in new technologies?
• An IT professional in industry who is interested in the humanities?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, THATCamp LAC is right for you.

This particular THATCamp is titled for Liberal Arts Colleges. But that’s a bit of a misnomer. While we will primarily be academics at LACs, we will also be librarians, IT professionals employed by universities, IT-related professionals in industry, and people doing humanities work in non-academic settings. And we won’t all be tech savvy. Yes, a lot of us live and breathe through our iPads and Linux boxes. But a lot of us will be just starting into the technological realm. If you’re interested at all in using technology, you qualify to join us.

At THATCamp LAC, you’ll get to participate in an “unconference” where you can chat with others like you. The dynamic schedule, voted on by attendees, will let you decide what you want to talk about, and let you change those topics on the fly. As the main THATCamp site puts it, “An unconference is to a conference what a seminar is to a lecture; going to an unconference is like being a member of an improv troupe where going to a conference is (mostly) like being a member of an audience.”

At THATCamp, you’ll also have the opportunity to attend workshops – training sessions where you can learn new software, strategies, and theories.

For more information on THATCamps, visit the main THATCamp page at

thatcamp.org