<strong>Let's Build an Inventory of Services and Resources Needed to Support Digital Humanities and/or Curricular Technology</strong>
<p dir="ltr">What are the core services and/or resources that are needed to provide support for digital humanities? What are the core services and/or resources need to provide support for curricular technology? Which of these are common, and which are unique? What needs to be local to a particular campus, and what could be shared amongst campuses or through other creative partnerships and sourcing arrangements?</p>
The results of this work will inform the planning efforts on our campus (Middlebury College). I suspect other schools that are looking to either begin programs in digital humanities and wonder what overlap exists will find this analysis useful. It may also help those who are trying to develop collaborative models wherein multiple campuses each develop specific services or resources and then collectively provide their campuses with these shared services.

This can be done in-person at a session or on-line at a wiki page I've set up at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0ArN5fppR9qT_dEZfaFJib3BURjJnME90c05tcklYcVE&amp;usp=sharing  . If this work has already been done, there is a tab on the wiki page to add links to relevant articles.

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— mike

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When the grant funding for the THATCamp project runs out at the end of March 2014, my position as THATCamp Coordinator will also end. I personally am not too worried about the future of THATCamp: it’s already sustaining itself very well, and to some extent I think that even if people cease to organize or go to THATCamps, it won’t be a tragedy — the spirit of THATCamp cannot die, and I think THATCamp has already had some highly laudable effects.

So it’s getting near the time when we’ll need to give the THATCamp community an even greater degree of ownership than it has already. I’m proposing a session here to figure out how to set up a THATCamp Coordinating Council to take over the (very few) tasks that I’m currently performing as THATCamp Coordinator. Let me make one thing clear: I don’t want to use this session to actually *appoint* said Council; I want instead to use this session to figure out the best *process* for setting up such a Council. Should I call for volunteers and appoint the people I think would be best, or should we hold some kind of elections? How would we hold such elections? And if that turns out to be an easy decision, then we can also talk about what the demographics and duties of such a Council should be. I want this to be a highly-tweeted session as well, one that involves the virtual #THATCamp community as much as possible.

I did think about pre-scheduling this session at THATCamp Leadership, by the way, but I was actually worried that planning a particular session about the THATCamp Coordinating Council would be, well, un-THATCampy. So if you have ideas about how this should go, please comment here, tweet @thatcamp, and/or (if you’re coming to THATCamp Leadership) speak your mind in person during the initial scheduling session tomorrow.

I’ve got a very very drafty set of thoughts about the demographics, duties, and processes of the THATCamp Coordinating Council, which I will create a Notepad for and attach to this post. Anyone with an account on thatcamp.org (not just this site) can log in to edit that document. To get a THATCamp account, go to thatcamp.org/signup.

Just a few minutes ago I posted a “talk” session called Carpentry as a Way of Knowing. As an alternative to that session I want to propose actually doing the thing we’d be talking about in that other session: building a bot. This would be hands-on session in which we would collectively—or as individuals—build a Twitter bot. No experience required. I’ll say that again: No. Experience. Required. I’m no programmer, but I’ve built my share of bots, often in order to better understand the source material I’m working with. (See? See?—I am making as a way of knowing!) And if I can do it, anybody can.

I’m labeling this a “make” session instead of a “teach” session because I’m in no position to teach this subject (though apparently I do), but I can at least “coach” it. If this sessions runs, bring a laptop. I recommend installing node.js, a server-side Javascript engine, but that’s only because I’m most comfortable working in node, and I can provide a lot of node.js templates for Twitter bots. If you’re already familiar with another language, run with it. Python is a favorite among digital humanists, but frankly Python scares me. Node scares me too, but at least I’ve developed some coping mechanisms over the past 9 months of working in Node.

So what do you say? Shall we build a bot?

THATCamp has opened up many opportunities for participants to share and develop skills in areas such as text mining, project management, material culture, and digital pedagogy (to mention just a few of the topics I’ve seen in browsing past THATCamps). But I want to take a step back and ask what are the skills important to digital scholarship?  My interest in the topic comes in part from my work with colleagues on a Mellon-sponsored global benchmarking study examining the skills and competencies necessary to support (and practice) digital scholarship.  I think there are some important commonalities between this proposed session and Rebecca Davis’ proposal to explore “Learning Outcomes for a Globally Networked World,” but the focus here would be more on scholars/librarians/technologists/professionals than undergraduates. (It might be interesting to compare lists of skills and competencies important to these different constituencies.)

In addition to understanding what skills and competencies are important to digital scholarship, I’d also like to explore how best to cultivate these skills. How do digital humanities centers and programs help their members to gain the skills and knowledge to do innovative, significant work? I love the spirit of exploration, collaboration and play embodied by THATCamp, but I also see the need to enable digital humanists at various levels of experience to hone their skills over a longer period of time than a day or a day and a half. (Ryan also points to the need to go beyond 101 in some THATCamp sessions.) Could we imagine new variants of the THATCamp model? Are there possibilities for online/ hybrid training, mentoring, local reading groups, partnerships with DH centers, iterative THATCamps, etc?

One of the key attractions of digital humanities in the undergraduate curriculum  is the promise that it offers a to teach skills needed for the 21st century student.  But, what are those skills? What are the essential learning outcomes needed in a globally networked world and how might digital humanities or, more broadly, digital scholarship help meet those outcomes?  For this session, I propose we look at some suggested lists of learning outcomes and use them to stimulate our thinking about what learning outcomes our institutions might offer to undergraduate students.  Then we will generate our own list(s) of learning outcomes.

This exercise and the lists of learning outcomes comes from Tanya Clement. You can find the lists of outcomes and references here: rebeccafrostdavis.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/learning-outcomes-for-a-globally-networked-world/

Here is my original description from when I conducted this exercise in the past:

Digital technologies and the Internet have changed the context for civic, work, and personal life, forcing the production and exchange of knowledge into an increasingly public, global, collaborative, and networked space, and increasing capacity to tackle complex questions across disciplines. How do we prepare students to be lifelong learners who are adaptive, networked and engaged citizens in this context? While the essential learning outcomes of liberal education promise to prepare students for ever-changing contexts, should we consider additional learning outcomes for the liberally educated student? In this session, we will debate literacies and skills required for today’s knowledge ecosystem, critique proposals for learning outcomes that reflect these new abilities, and formulate essential learning outcomes for liberal education in a globally networked world.

As a member of the #transformDH collective, I want to propose a session where folks can discuss some of the transformative work in DH that is addressing issues of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nation, etc. Additionally, I hoped that we could create a zotero Library of these sources. Adeline Koh created a wonderful google doc that highlights many projects but I wonder if putting it into Zotero will help folks to consider citing and referencing these projects in the future?

Like Jeremy, I’d like for issues of diversity to be more embedded in the way we do the work of DH and part of that means more acknowledgement of the ways all these intersecting aspects of identity are at play even when there isn’t an obviously marginalized body present. Can we create strategies for our work that make it specific so as to make it more accountable?

Would welcome all kinds of thoughts on this!

I’d love to talk with folks about the opportunities arising from the paradigm shift afoot in education, culture, technology and how we can work together to ride the momentum with our shared ethos. I’m particularly interested in THATCamp/OpenGLAM/LODLAM overlap, and how we might leverage common tools for organizing, overlap on some events, and basically build a better world together.

There are many complicated debates about open-access, peer review, and the economics of publishing. It’s complicated, and many ideas have been proposed. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to summarize two of them. The conservative position is that pre-publication peer-review is essential to good scholarly work. It’s fair to say that this is the default position of most scholars and scholarly institutions. The radical position is that scholars should “liberate” their scholarship and publish only in open-access venues. As you would expect, these two ideas frequently antagonistic. Most of the concrete proposals are essentially competitive, as in attempts to replace existing journals with open-access journals or to move peer review to post-publication.

But there is no reason that the scholarly value of pre-publication peer-review and the scholarly value of open access need to conflict. What the academy needs is a solution that is realistic, and recognizes that the entrenched system of corporate publication and tenure review is unlikely to go away, or at least unlikely to change quickly. And it needs a solution that is optimistic because it tries to take advantage of the internet’s low marginal costs and rapid distribution that makes open access publication possible.

Our colleagues in physics, mathematics, computer sciences, and the like already have such a solution in the arXiv e-print server. arXiv hosts pre-prints (or “e-prints”) of articles that will be published in peer review journals. Scholars upload these documents which are then freely available to the world much sooner than they will be available in gated journals. (There are many descriptors for levels of open access: let’s call this “good enough” open access.) For those who need them, the peer-reviewed version of the articles will still be available in the traditional venues.

I propose a session that will bring together people who are interested in bringing about a pre-print server for the humanities. Make no mistake: the problem is not technological, it is institutional. What is needed to change academic publishing is the will to put such a solution in place—in a word, leadership. These are the kinds of people at THATCamp Leadership who could help such a session:

• scholars who could explain what they would hope to gain from a pre-print server,
• leaders of professional organizations (AHA, OAH, MLA, ACLS, etc.) who could make the idea palatable to scholars in their disciplines,
• grant writers and university administrators—especially in libraries—who would be willing to underwrite such an experimental project, and
• coder-scholars who would be able to build a prototype, or at least to discuss what would go into a prototype.

The goal of the session will be to produce a brief document that will describe the essentials of a humanities pre-print server. And hopefully the session will forge connections between the people who can make this idea happen.

I’d like to propose a show-and-tell session for people who are making maps or want to get started with them. Anyone who wants to participate can spend a few minutes showing a map they made—and preferably, actually rendering the map in front of everyone else. Hopefully we’ll have a diversity of mapping methods which will give us a quick overview of the possibilities. Then for the remainder of the session, we’ll talk about what was interesting in the maps we saw, and how to make them. Perhaps we’ll break up into smaller groups so that mapping masters can give impromptu tutorials to beginners. By bringing together all the mapmakers into one place, I hope people will also be able to find someone who has already solved some of the problems they’re facing.

Last August, Kate Losse wrote a brief post about how “breaking things” is a white male privilege. I’ve kept coming back to this post the last month or so. For years, I’ve been telling people to not be afraid to break stuff. That’s how I learned how to much much of the work I’ve been doing in the digital humanities for over a decade now. I still break stuff, and still learn from it. I’ve always thought it’s a good way to learn, but I had never considered it a privilege of being a white man to be able to break things until I read Loss’s piece. It never occurred to me that such an approach could be a privilege for a particular race and gender. It never occurred to me—and I’m embarrassed to admit it—that someone could not take this approach because of their race or gender or class or any other number of reasons. (Of course, like most white heterosexual men, I’m quite unaware of all the privileges I have. I willfully acknowledge it, and am in no way proud of it.) Knowing what I do know about our society and culture, it’s blatantly obvious to me that this would be true. But being able to break stuff, being able to try things out without permission and fear of criticism or backlash was one of the reasons we started THATCamp five or six years ago. I still think its a great approach, but its one THATCamp needs to work harder to open up to more people. THATCamp needs to grapple with who gets to do it, and more importantly who feels like they have permission to do that.

Similarly, earlier last month, someone on Twitter noted they were hesitant to attend a THATCamp that lacked a public anti-harassment policy. This also had never occurred to me (and once again I’m embarrassed to admit it), and made me sad and angry and disappointed that anyone would feel they wouldn’t be welcome at a THATCamp or would be harassed. (To be very clear, I’m not at all sad and angry and disappointed with the person who first posted this.) Amanda and I chimed in with interest to begin composing an anti-harassment policy, and Amanda forked the Code4Lib anti-harassment policy as a starting point. That policy itself contains links to other policies, all of which I think should be required reading for anyone organizing an event, and required reading for anyone who thinks a policy is unnecessary). But it seems like this is only the very tip of the very large iceberg that is diversity and THATCamp that we should more deliberately and sustainably address. No one should feel like they can’t attend a THATCamp out of fear of harassment or unwelcomeness.

Both of these stories to me highlight a need for THATCamp to develop policies and spaces that foster comfort and confidence and diversity within and beyond THATCamp, and I can’t think of a more important and relevant topic for THATCamp Leadership to take on. I’d like to help organize a session or set of sessions that address ways THATCamp can contribute positively to already ongoing conversations on diversity, tolerance, and DH, and even begin developing documentation the THATCamp community can use for their own individual camps. I won’t claim to be the best person to lead these sessions—I have tons to learn, and I want to learn—but I want to help organize them, or at the very least strongly support having them at THATCamp Leadership.

These sessions should go beyond developing formal policies for things like anti-harassments, and more deliberately consider how the tone and language and character of camps can be safe and inviting and fun for a variety of people. In my experience, digital humanities as a whole, and THATCamp more specifically, is one of the more tolerant and accepting communities that exist, but there is plenty of room for improvement, and I’d hope these sessions would focus on those ways to improve, to take seriously any points from any person to consider for improvement. It doesn’t seem enough to me to develop a one-page document that more or less says “You can’t harass people.” Language and tone and character of everything THATCamps produce is more important, and should be obviously contribute to making THATCamps safer and more encouraging.

In the end, I want to help make it so every person who attends a THATCamp leaves more confident in themselves, and has more friends who value their ideas and perspectives, than they did before they attended THATCamp. The scope of these sessions is vast, but that shouldn’t deter us from having them and trying to nurture some positive outcomes.

I hope we can discuss some specific topics to cover in the comments, and possible outcomes of such sessions. Please feel free to share any ideas, links to stuff we should read/watch/hear for the conversation, in the comments below. If you’d like to talk to me directly, feel free to email me or ping me on Twitter.