THATCamp National Council on Public History 2012 | The Humanities and Technology Camp

Software for Digital Collections Strengths and Weaknesses

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Tom Scheinfeldt

Here is the link to the Google Doc Trevor set up to catalog strengths and weaknesses of various software packages for digital collections.

Posted in General, Proceedings of THATCamp | Comments Off

Tell us what you thought of THATCamp NCPH

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Amanda French

Please fill out an evaluation form for THATCamp NCPH — only two required fields!

THATCamp Evaluation

There’s space, of course, for you to say more, so feel free to wax loquacious. All evaluations are anonymous and are publicly available at j.mp/thatcampresults. Evaluations help future THATCamp organizers see what mistakes to avoid and help THATCamp funders judge whether it’s a worthy cause to support. Thanks for your help.

Posted in Administrative | Comments Off

Debriefing from today’s THATCamp NCPH

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Cathy Stanton

I’ve just posted something (with a few pictures) on “History@Work” about our collective debriefing conversation from today’s camp.

Thanks for the great day, everyone!

~ Cathy Stanton

Posted in Proceedings of THATCamp | Comments Off

Proposed new format for scholarly publishing: A “perpetual history”

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Jeffrey Pasley

Here is new format for digital scholarly publishing I an considering for my new “book” project : a “perpetual history” that would be released serially and then refined and expanded for an indefinite period, rather like a one author Wikipedia article. Is this good idea? How could such a work be made interesting and useful for both scholars and Internet users, and legitimate as a form of scholarly publication? What platform should be used to create it? Citations would be the big problem. They have to be there, and it would be so exciting to have readers be able to click through to actual sources, but how could that be accomplished?

Discussion of this idea could easily be grouped in with other people’s idea for new formats.

Posted in Blogging, Publishing, Session Proposals | Comments Off

2nd workshop idea: Constructing a WordPress site

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Jack Dougherty

In my first post about a series of 10-minute tutorials, some people commented that they would like a separate workshop on starting & constructing your own website. This workshop will feature WordPress tools because they are some of the most simple, popular, and powerful to use today. Some steps might include:

choosing WordPress.com (free service on WP’s server, with limited choices) vs. WordPress.org (freely downloadable software to run on your institution’s server or a for-hire external server, with more flexibility) — see how WordPress explains the difference
understanding the WordPress dashboard and user roles (admins, editors, authors, contributors, subscribers)
organizing the architecture of posts vs. pages, themes, menus, and widgets — see also WordPress Lessons
seeking out and installing themes & plugins (for WordPress.org)
making it up as you go along (that’s pretty much what I do. . .

Here are three different types of WordPress sites that I have created, each for a different purpose:

a course website, with content by instructor and students
a public history web-book, with long text and digital features
a scholarly edited volume, w CommentPress plugin for open review

This workshop idea is more than what we can accomplish during the first 10-minute tutorial session, so that’s why I’m suggesting it here as a separate one, to see if there’s sufficient interest. If yes, I’m willing to start it up (have projector, will travel) and anyone is welcome to learn, share, and teach (since there are several people at THATCamp with more experience than me.)

Posted in Blogging, Digital Literacy, General, Open Access, Session Proposals, Workshops | Comments Off

Is there room for provenance in the digital world?

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Maura Coonan

Although I am not as experienced as some in the world of digital history, as a grad student in both history and information science with a concentration in archives, I have had trouble grappling with the concept of provenance and original order within digital collections. Thanks to the amazing accessibility the web offers, students and researchers (especially us historians) will often be looking at images and documents far out of the context (and order) that they are situated in within the safety of a physical archives. With this change in presentation of records and documents and focus from a collection as a whole to single, free-standing documents, the digitization of collections has prompted the questions: Is there room for provenance and original order in the digital world? I would like to see a session that addresses the changes collections go through when digitized and placed on the internet, and what that means for provenance and original order. Most especially, I hope to discuss how researchers and archivists alike (in their respective manners) should/can adapt to this new(er) challenge.

Posted in Archives, Libraries, Research Methods, Search, Session Proposals | Comments Off

Session Idea -ThinkUp: Archiving and Analyzing the Value of Social Media

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Monica Drake

I am really curious about ThinkUp which is a relatively new open-source application that archives and analyzes data from social media sites such as facebook, twitter, google+, etc..

The implications of an app that can organize this information (tweets, retweets, “likes”, archived posts and comments, dashboard projections of use) seems far-reaching for organizations that are beginning to rely more and more on social media outlets to project their image and mission out into the world.

I thought it would be interesting to discuss this apps potential use in digital history projects, museum institutions, historical societies and grass-roots historical organizations that rely heavily on social media platforms.

We could also talk about how people use other content aggregators to advance their organizations: What they use and how they use them.

Posted in General | Comments Off

Intergenerational media

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Elizabeth Haven Hawley

I work with many older immigrants and newer refugees, and I’m interested especially in exploring ways to design digital experiences in a way that welcomes people across generations, technical skills and levels of technical access. (This is not to say that older means non-technical — but too often it means that they do not have access to newer technologies, even though they’d like to use online resources.) Kind of cultural Universal Design.

Posted in General | Comments Off

Session Idea: Mobile Phone Apps and Tours

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Jenn Edginton

More and more places seem to be producing mobile phone applications. With the rise in technology, and the decrease in costs to produce the technology, it makes logical sense to start seeing mobile phone apps in cultural institutions. I am interested in finding out how to utilize a mobile phone application to benefit the institution as well as the people using the application.

I am really interested in seeing how applications are being used correctly, and how they aren’t. Using technology allows museums to reach a new audience, so how can museums embrace that with applications.