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

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

I work for a local history museum that has only a rudimentary social media presence, and uses social media as an extension of traditional marketing methods. The staff is also interested in using social media and blogging to 1) engage our audience with behind-the-scenes stories and sneak peeks into artifacts, spaces, and other content that’s not featured in current exhibits and programs and 2) collect stories of the community’s history (the museum’s mission stretches from the community’s founding to the present day). Which strategies foster visitor engagement online in social media? What are the nuts-and-bolts issues of collecting oral histories and other user-generated content online?

1. Contrary to what I had once thought, most entering history students at my midrange institution are not yet “born digital” in terms of their approach to history or writing. History almost seems to draw in the analog-oriented. Our students are on Facebook, they can Google things, and maybe they have seen JSTOR, but so far they are not generally any more comfortable with blogging, tweeting, or website-building, for scholarly purposes, than most of my colleagues, which is to say, very uncomfortable.
2. An especially compelling reason for upgrading the digital history skills of students in my field, early American history, is the rise of online research resources, including various Founders’ papers, Early American Imprints, various newspaper databases and the large swaths of source material Google Books and the Internet Archive? Personally I have found these resources very convenient — every old book I ever checked out of Widener Library seems to have been digitized — but I have found it quite hard to manage the resulting profusion of pdfs and image files and such. The instant access to so much material also affects the research and writing process in profound ways that need to be considered. What are the best strategies for dealing with such abundance?

I’d like to propose a session that covers some of the options, guidelines, and pitfalls of using focus groups to provide feedback on digital history sites at various stages of the development process, from early planning to beta testing. How can we do this in a useful way that doesn’t derail the project schedule? How do we maintain the proper tension between our goals for the site and simplicity/usability so that we make room for audience feedback and participation without devolving into watered down “groupthink?”

Because this got buried in my other comment, I am posting it separately here.

I would love to talk about what and how we should teach our students about digital archives. I launched a session in my history methods class last week to uneven results. I would like to talk with others about how we fit digital history into the history methods class.

Hi everyone,

I have had a logistical problem arise that means that I will arrive late to THATCamp and won’t be able to “facilitate” or run this session.  However, I would like to put the idea out there in case it might interest someone else who could facilitate it.

I would like some help in thinking through issues of how to incorporate work on digital history projects into public history teaching.  Since 2009, I have been the scholarly advisor for Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway, a digital collection co-developed with the UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries.  I also teach Introduction to Public History each fall — UNC’s only dedicated public history course, which enrolls both undergraduates and a few grad students.

In the past three years, I have had students in the PH class working on projects related to Driving Through Time — in hopes of introducing them to digital history in a public history context and in hopes of harnessing some of their labor for the project.

My problem is that I have yet to scaffold their work on this in such a way as to fully realize these goals.  The technological learning curve is often steeper than I would have expected, and it’s been a challenge, too, to bring them up to speed on content quickly enough to have them produce quality work.  (All this is going on while they are also learning generally about public history.)

I’d love to hear ideas people have had that have worked well for incorporating technology-based, project-oriented work into public history teaching.  How can I scaffold effective tasks?  How can I best evaluate their work?  How can I manage the “teaching the technology” parts without overwhelming everyone?

If this fits in with interests that others have and someone else can facilitate, I’d love to join in when I arrive.  Look forward to seeing/meeting everyone!

As scholars, even digitally-minded scholars, even blogging scholars, we tend to ask ourselves how we can make our blogs more scholarly. We wonder how the blog can come to approximate the scholarly journal, or at least how it can reproduce its core values of evidence, citation, narrative argument, and peer-review. Even when acknowledging the inherent differences between blogs and journals, we still tend to argue for the former on the latter’s turf.

I’d like to take a session to step back from this discussion to look at public history blogs [full stop]. I’d like to take a step back from the prevailing discourse of “scholarly blogs” to talk about how the inherent affordances and values of blogging can benefit public historical work, absent any pressure to reproduce traditional forms and values. How can straight-up blogging–minus the baggage of “scholarly” aspirations–work for public history and its audiences? Is straight-up blogging enough? Or should we really be thinking about “scholarly blogging” after all?

It’s likely that this session will overlap with David’s session on the future of digital scholarly publishing.

So we’re on Twitter, Facebook (some of us are on Google+), We blog, use Tumblr or  post on Pinterest. But as historians, how do we use these tools to tell our story, our vision of the past in a very public realm?

When we do research or write a paper we use a variety of sources to tell a particular history. Each of these sources gives a different perspective supporting or negating each other.

In our work in the non-profit sector, the federal government, as consultants, students and educators, how do we make these tools work for us–how do we use each element to create a personal/organizational brand?  How exactly do we brand ourselves as historians online?

I would propose that we spend this session talking about lessons learned, and figuring out what the best way is to set up a digital brand dealing with history. I recently attended a conversation on personal branding for the DC Social Media club and I thought that it might be worth having a similar conversation at THATCamp about what works, what doesn’t work, and how to avoid obvious pitfalls.

Greetings!

I am interested in the issues involved in managing large scale digital projects (such as the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, which I am co-editor of). Questions that have my attention today include: how much technical knowledge do I need to develop? What are the advantages and disadvantages of going live with a project before it is complete?

On the pedagogical front, I just last week ran my first-ever session of Introduction to Digital Archives with my history methods class. I would be happy to talk about that experiment as well, and to learn from what you do in your classes to teach students about how to think about the digital world from historical perspectives.

I am also very interested in the Places that Matter proposal, which seems to fit very nicely with my own project.

Mostly I want to experience THATCamp, so I am perfectly open to going along with other people’s agendas and learning from that rather than pushing any of my own.

I see a lot of overlap with many of the topics already posted here. For me, the question of how to manage and what to do with digital assets in collections is huge.

My interests are in how digital media resources are being searched, delivered, and consumed. In my own work as a consultant dealing with mapping digital collections, I find there are tensions between creating access to everything and the public’s desire to have digested stories, or “just give me the highlights.” If organizations are spending time and resources in creating access, is this access being used fully for a variety of audiences and in different kinds of delivery systems? Can you browse a collection and what are the points of entry? How do you develop classifications and taxonomies to represent various dimensions of the content and the interests of the potential users? Can you crowd source the metadata mark-up and how reliable will that information be? And then how do you control how that media is delivered? To have dynamic media resources opens a huge area of potential uses for often content-packed collections that I think we are only starting to scratch the surface of.

I’d be interested in hearing/discussing how others are dealing with these and other issues related to media asset management and methods of delivery.

There a lot of different tools at this point that serve a range of different purposes for organizing, storing, preserving, presenting, exhibiting digital collections. My quick initial list would include, DSpace, Omeka, Greenstone, ContentDM and Viewshare. I would likely also include more generic content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, and some sites like Flickr and Historypin that can be used to serve similar purposes. Libraries, Archives, and Museums are using any and all of these tools (and more) and it can get a bit overwhelming and a bit confusing. Which tools are useful toward what ends?

I would be interested in talking through what tools participants are using and to what ends. We could make good use of the time by trying to talk through the situations in which one would want to chose each of these tools. As a result, I would love to leave with a straightforward short document, or draft of a document, that lays out what each tool is best used for and which tools can play nice with each other. Alternatively, we could work through pulling together a set of examples of successfully uses of each of these tools (and any others) as a kind of tour of these different software tools in use. My hope would be for everyone who participates to learn more about these (and other) tools for working with digital collections and that we could share some of the things we learn with anyone else who might be interested.

I am particularly interested in the potential for developing guidance on how these collection tools can be used to complement eachother. For example, see this draft documentation I am working up on using Viewshare and Omeka together.

So please suggest any of the following in the comments:

1. Your general interest
2. Other tools we should consider
3. Ways you would like to categorize or organize these tools
4. Examples of the tools in use that you think exemplify their best use cases
5. Other approaches to organizing the session

In the most recent issue of The Public Historian, editor Randolph Bergstrom writes: “As part of placing historians in public, the profession, and each of its members, must push the public to create and sustain the places for history’s practice…Graduate programs in public history have long recognized that making rather than assuming positions for historians is integral to the practice of history in public.” [Emphasis added. Bergstrom’s comments are one of the many responses public historians have had to Anthony Grafton and James Grossman’s article, “No More Plan B“].

I propose a session where we discuss how the digital humanities could present an opportunity to “make” new positions for public historians. Although many public history programs have well-established ties to related fields –archival work, library science, museum studies, public policy, and advocacy groups– relatively few (I believe) have reached out to computer science and web design. I’m not sure why. Looking at the job market, I suspect that a public historian can build a website, program an app, or lead a successful social media campaign has a huge advantage over other candidates, and, even more importantly, could create new positions in almost any cultural organization. And of course, the benefits of substantive technical training go beyond the job market; public historians with these skills should be able to pursue projects that, at the moment, only a few well-established DH centers can complete.

To be sure, some public history programs have started down this path, but I don’t think they’ve been bold enough. A single semester of training in new media or digital history (the norm, I would guess), while useful, does not provide the kinds of hands-on, keyboard-to-codes skills these professionals really need to both compete in the market and, in the long run, foster new forms of public history. With this session, I’d like to discuss what technical (and theoretical) skills public historians need to develop, how we could do a better job integrating DH into the established public history curriculum, and where we see these transformations already happening. (For the more theoretically-inclined, this may be a great session to discuss whether digital public historians should be trained in ways that differ from digital historians in general).

Are QR Codes the historical markers of the future and has the future already arrived?

My proposal involves the creation and use of QR Codes to enable visitors at an historical site or museum to easily access an on-line historical resource, such as a related blog post, a Wikipedia article, or a smartphone app that enables users to explore additional digital content.

This QR Code (generated by the RedLaser Classic app) will link your mobile device to Lower Scioto Blog and my recent post on Picnic Point, a scenic overlook in Ohio's Shawnee State Forest.

I imagine that this session could fall under the genre of a “general discussion.” First off, let me say, I only yesterday figured out how to create QR codes on my iPhone (see the code on the left) and besides an NPR story about the use of QR codes on headstones for on-line memorials, I’ve not heard or read about how QR codes are being used in public history projects.  I’m just interested in learning more and thinking creatively about what uses QR codes can be put to in the practice of digital history.

To illustrate a possible use, imagine that you are in an art gallery, which is exhibiting documentary images of local points of interest in your community.  Next to one set of images, affixed to the wall, is a QR code directing any interested party who happens to have a smartphone to a historical blog or some other digital resource about the documented historical site.  Imagine physically imbedding QR codes on signs at historical sites.  Imagine QR codes as modern-day historical markers.

Perhaps a general discussion of the possible uses of QR code and GPS mapping technology in the marking of historical sites could be the topic of general discussion?

I think the proliferation and acceptance of digital publication is the defining issue of higher education right now. We all know that libraries are cutting down on paper journals and paper books, and we also know that electronic books and journals are gaining acceptance. And yet, there is surprisingly little dialogue amongst most members of the academy about what this will mean. I would like to promote that dialogue, with an open discussion about the future of digital publications in the humanities. Some possible questions to get us started:

How can academic journals succeed using digital content? What are the financial implications of digital journals for institutions and libraries? How can we as producers and consumers of these journals guide the transition in ways that work best for our discipline?

What standards should be established for interactive books and journals to assure that reading does not turn into casual browsing/watching?

Are digital textbooks a better value for students? Or, is this format being pushed as an attempt to eliminate the used book market?

What are the challenges to maintaining high academic standards in a digital world?

My idea is for an open discussion, with each participant proposing a question that we discuss for a few minutes before moving on to the next question.

Best,

David Trowbridge

This idea came to me when I was working with City Lore’s (New York) Place Matters project. Can we re-imagine our cities through interactive and shared stories? And how could “ways of seeing” and “ways of employment” of these stories contribute to new ways of reading, understanding and valuing our built environment?

Recounting stories of everyday places where we live and work can spur active engagement with others who share these spaces with us, revive interest in our built environment and encourage stewardship of our patrimony. The need for collaborative storytelling to create a public culture takes on a sense of urgency when established traditions and ways of life disappear and new ones emerge. This is true for many US cities where old demographics and culture have given way to new inhabitants, economic practices and cultural life. Merely telling stories is not enough in these cases – rather citizens should be inspired to participate and contribute in a collective retelling of stories thereby producing a public discourse that is invested and engaged.

Such a project is truly interdisciplinary and collaborative because it allows us to expand horizontally using a website as a portal to experiment with multiple forms of place-storytelling. It involves multiple modalities of dissemination – local residents uploading their stories, scholarly searches, stories curated by specialists, media and multimedia stories.

I will bring in multiple examples of similar projects done is different cities. It seems like scholars have already WRITTEN such place stories. I am more interested in discussing alternative (to brochures, monographs and book) visual and digital forms of dissemination that may actually be more democratic and may reach more diverse audiences than the traditional University Press scholarly books.

As public historians who use the web to collect, collaborate, and share, much effort goes into organizing, researching for, and designing the sites we create for universities, museums, and cultural resource centers. However, personal experience in doing public history online has lead me to believe that project promotion – online and off – helps determine a project’s success as much as content development, methods of collection, and the incorporation of functional design elements. Public historians frequently rely on an “if you build it, they will come” mentality that fails to account for how targeted audiences engage with and become interested in historical content online. Without first figuring out how to generate interest in an online project – which (hopefully) leads to active participation and collaboration – public historians will fail to realize key long-term goals and objectives.

I propose this session in hopes of discussing what works best in promoting online public history projects. In particular, I would like to address engagement and promotion within communities traditionally silenced by celebratory historical narratives.

What types of social media campaigns have you launched and how successful were they? What differences exist between project promotion on PC’s and mobile devices? What role does e-marketing play in the development of online public history resources? What online tools work best in promoting web-based public history projects?

At last year’s NCPH in Pensacola, some of the standout panels were on museum collecting and collections.  It’s surprisingly unusual for colleagues from history organizations to have a chance to come together and talk about the practical and philosophical issues we run into every day of working with objects.

I therefore propose a session for an unstructured discussion on museum collections.  Some issues we might address:  dealing with donors, provenance issues, found in collections items, collecting strange/controversial/unwieldy things.

First NCPH conference, first THAT camp, so not sure what’s expected of ideas but here goes. I do social media for a living, and oral history in my spare time. I’m interested in talking about, playing with and experimenting with using social media (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, others?) to both collect and even more exciting, disseminate oral history interviews and artifacts using social media networks.

Let’s discuss how we can (or can we?) use social media to crowdsource subjects, collect stories (in a very public space) and disseminate them. What are the “informed consent” ramifications of collecting/disseminating in this space? What can-o-worms am I proposing we talk about here?

If the group decides to make time during this discussion, I’d love to see what others are doing (bring your laptops) or maybe we can create a social media space to experiment with.

I’ve got some ideas, would love to see what you’re doing/thinking/trying.

When attending my first digital history/humanities workshop two years ago, I felt overwhelmed by all of the tools that other people were using. While everyone kindly shared advice, the initial learning curve was steep. I needed some friendly hands-on tutorials to understand some basics before feeling comfortable exploring further on my own. Now, with more experience, I’ve begun teaching basics of digital tools in undergraduate classes (as first steps toward semester-long projects) and faculty workshops (to enhance their teaching and scholarship). One goal is to create a series of 10-minute hands-on tutorials to introduce just the right amount of information — not too much, not too little — that build up skills and encourage new users to take the next step forward.

To start the conversation, here’s a *preliminary* list of tools & tasks that I commonly use in digital history/humanities work, with links to some of my 10-minute web tutorials:

• how to share a Google Document (requires free Google username) for collaborative writing and editing
• how to display points on a map using Google Docs tables/Google Fusion Tables
• how to create thematic map (boundaries & data) w Google Fusion Tables (tutorial)
• how to create a post on the WordPress
• how to capture a screenshot and wrap around text in a WordPress post  (compare with my video tutorial)
• how to manage, cite, and share citations with Zotero

This workshop is intended for participants with different skill levels:
If you’re a relatively new user, post a comment to vote for the topics you wish to learn (and/or suggest others) and we’ll teach those 10-minute tutorials during our session.
OR
If you’re a more experienced user, post a comment to suggest any basic tools & tasks not listed above, and/or link to a better 10-minute tutorial that you’d be willing to teach.

During and after the workshop, both types of users can post feedback about what worked — and what could be improved — for each of the 10-minute tutorials.

Thanks for registering for THATCamp NCPH (and OAH)! We’ve got 45 registrants so far, and will be continuing to accept registrations so long as we have space. If you are registering late, be sure to go by the registration desk at the Frontier Airlines Center at 400 Wisconsin before you go to THATCamp.

Now is also the time to start thinking about what you’d like to do or discuss at THATCamp. From now till THATCamp NCPH on April 18, you can propose one or more session ideas by logging in to the site and posting your idea(s) as a blog post by clicking Posts –> Add New, writing out your idea, then clicking “Publish” on the right to publish to the site. See Proposing a Session for more information about how and what you might propose, not to mention a little bit of explanation about why things work this way at THATCamp.

The registration desk opens at the Frontier Airlines Center at 8am on Wednesday morning. All registrants should come by the registration desk on Wednesday morning and pick up their name badges and registration materials before going to THATCamp. We’ll all work together to set the day’s agenda starting at 9am.

Write info@thatcamp.org with any questions, and follow @THATCamp and the #thatcamp hashtag on Twitter to see what’s going on at other THATCamps around the world. Hope you find THATCamp fun, productive, and collegial.

9 a.m. – 5 p.m., Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Hilton Milwaukee City Center

Join us for the second THATCamp NCPH, building on the success of last year’s event at the NCPH conference in Pensacola, Florida. The camp will take place on the day before the conference officially starts, on Wednesday, April 18, at the Hilton Milwaukee City Center. Registration is an affordable $30 for the day. The event is organized and facilitated by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, with support from the NCPH Digital Media Group.

The “unconference” format dispenses with formal presentations and allows campers to design hands-on sessions on the spot around projects, issues, or technologies of particular interest to them. As at the more than 60 THATCamps that have been held since the first one in 2008, participants will help create the agenda and share knowledge and questions. Last year’s THATCamp NCPH proved that this approach makes a productive mix with the collaborative nature of public history, and we’re looking forward to another day-long meeting of the minds. One participant last year called it “a really helpful and collegial experience,” and another talked about the “great mix” of who attended—grad students, scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and others. THATCamp NCPH is open to anyone with an interest in the digital humanities, although we expect that the disciplinary center of gravity at this camp will likely be around public history. Please forward this announcement to anyone in the humanities, technology, design, or related fields who might be interested in what promises to be a lively and inclusive event.

To apply to attend the camp, see ncph2012.thatcamp.org/register

After you register, you’ll get an account that will let you log in to the THATCamp NCPH website. On the website, you’ll be asked to write a paragraph proposing a project, topic, or skill that you’d like to explore in Milwaukee. Interested in incorporating digital history projects as a classroom activity? Want to learn more about collections management software? Curious about cell phone apps and digital walking tours? Tell us your idea and then come to the camp and help us figure out how to explore it in a way that will be most useful for you. Campers at last year’s THATCamp NCPH ranged from people just beginning to think about digital humanities to those with years of designing and programming experience—there’s room for everyone in the discussions.

Attendance is capped at 75 people and registration closes on April 1. Successful applicants for the camp will be notified shortly after April 1.

Campers will need to purchase lunch on April 18, but menus from a selection of nearby quick eateries will be available at the start of the day to streamline the process.

More details will be available here as the event approaches.