Thanks to all who participated in THATCamp New England 2014!  It was an excellent weekend.  We’ll look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Thanks to Vika for providing the following link:

mapsengine.google.com/map/edit?mid=zstgM3VdqmDc.k_-dxGpSvJrU

This is a discussion session about One Week One Tool and Serendip-o-matic (serendipomatic.org) Specific discussion topics can be driven by the participants, but possible options:

– leveraging the DPLA and Europeana APIs
– challenges maintaining product development with remote collaborators (who all have other primary job functions)
– advantages and disadvantages to an interdisciplinary team
– lessons learned from building a product in a week that can be extrapolated to the real world

We will have representatives from project management, outreach, design and development.

I’ll be mentioning some digital humanities projects and tools during my opening comments tomorrow.  Here are the links for all:

Voyant Tools: www.voyant-tools.org

Bomb Sight: www.bombsight.org

Visualizing Emancipation: dsl.richmond.edu/emancipation

Digital Dos Passos: www.digitaldospassos.com

Murder on Beacon Hill: www.parkmanmurder.com

Serendip-o-Matic: www.serendipomatic.org

A talk session, all about archives.

Archives house and carefully curate untold wonders that come along with accurate, reliable metadata ripe for your next DH project.  Let’s have a free-ranging discussion of successes and failures, ongoing projects or opportunities, complaints and praise of scanning projects, web archives, digital preservation, big data, permanent retention, and where to find stuff.  Ideally, this conversation would culminate in a brainstorming session of “I think it would be sooo awesome for my research if we could/had access to/ had a tool for/ etc. ”

About me:  Head of Special Collections and University Archivist at Northeastern, I’ve worked in various libraries and archives since 1997.

If anyone wants to learn how to use Omeka in a classroom (and/or talk about the benefits/challenges of doing so), I could lead a session on this.  I have had good luck using Omeka to start “Writing of Indigenous New England,” an archive of literature written by Native American people in this region (indigenousnewengland.com).  My students have partnered with local museums and historical societies, basically helping them to digitize their physical exhibits; they have also worked with contemporary Native authors, giving them personal pages (including Wikipedia pages–another topic I’d be happy to discuss). Using Omeka, humanities majors can learn a great deal about public writing, public history (including literary history), and public engagement. ..and come away with greater confidence about their “marketable” skills, as well.

With THATCamp New England 2014 just days away, it’s time to start floating session proposals.  If you’re a little hazy on how the process unfolds, just click on the “Propose” tab centrally located on the top of this page.  But if you’re ready to go, go!

Last, if you’re casting about for ideas, know that College of General Studies prizes interdisciplinarity and strong pedagogy, so we’d love to see sessions on either of those themes.

I am about as neophyte as they get regarding DH. I assume that a session on what exactly DH is would be redundant for most attendees. In any case, I am wholly unprepared to teach one or provide a presenter.

SO, my QUESTION is, are there sources you all particularly like for gaining a sufficient foothold on concepts in preparation for THATCamp?

One that I am going to try to follow is this one recommended by a lit colleague (see below). But I may find that it isn’t basic enough.

Andrea

Programming for Humanists: A Continuing Education Course offered by the
Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture at Texas A&M
University.

Teachers: Laura Estill, Laura Mandell, Matthew Christy, Violeta Ilik (for
TEI and XSLT), Quinn Dombrowski and Dave Rettenmaier (for Drupal), Luis
Meneses (for Processing).

*Course Description*: We will explore the role of XML (eXtensible Markup
Language) and XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations,
themselves XML documents) in digital library and digital humanities
projects. We will be teaching best practices in the process of building
digital editions and their metadata:

The current class Syllabus is available at

www.programming4HUManists.org/XSLTClassSchedule.html

*Course Requirements and Results*

Anyone can attend the course *for free* through videoconference or google
hangouts.  However, to receive a training certificate in the areas covered,
one must enroll via the Texas A&M Continuing Education Program at the
following costs:

THATCamp New England 2014 is the last weekend in May.  Register now to claim one of the last spots!  Just click on “Register” in the bar above to get started.  We’re approaching our registration cap, so sooner is better.

If you have any questions as the dates approach, feel free to contact me directly at pederson@bu.edu.

We hope to see you in Boston later this month!

THATCamp New England 2014 will feature about a half-dozen workshops designed to introduce/teach basic digital humanities tools and strategies, e.g. Omeka, Neatline, Voyant, Sketchup, etc.

If you have a tool or strategy you’d like to see workshopped–or if you’d like to run one of the workshops–definitely drop me a line at pederson@bu.edu.