I have been looking at the intersection of games, MMO’s, virtual environments and art for a few years now.  It would be interesting to have a conversation about the future of the form as desktop game development continues to take hold and under-represented populations see it as a viable form of storytelling.

It would also be interesting to play some games from the show learn.toplay.us (games as art)

—update with notes—

Notes from Memory:

If you have not played it yet, look at passage by Jason Rohrer (download and play), it takes no more than 5 minutes and expresses the idea of an aesthetic experience in the game play, it is not the same as reading about it, watching video of it or watching it being played.

If you liked the game I demo’ed during the Dork Shorts it is called Every Day the Same Dream by Molleindustria.   On top of being beautiful the process of playing teaches and facilitates the aesthetic experience.

Game Development tools are cheap and run on low end machines for examples see Scratch by MIT (which is also a visual programming language but lends itself very well to moving and interacting with sprites on the screen) and Game Maker which is now available for the Mac and the PC and provides a simple development environment that can be introduced to young audiences as well as non-programming audiences.

In curating the show Learn to Play there were several basic lessons regarding art and games.  The subject is still somewhat contentious among both groups (artists and game developers) and there has always been a degree of crossover. L2P specifically looked for art at the point of interaction, one of the side effects of this is similar to that of conceptual art in that the experience is not always visual or obvious.  Game Developers seem (like many creatives) to want to see much of what they do as culturally relevant and artistic, artists have long employed game like features in both interactive and other work.  Our greatest takeaway was that the fundamental stories in games are still essentially controlled by the hegemony, or in this case by the white male game developers.

This is unfortunate for two reasons, the first is that the tools are so simple and the skills used in creation of games so valuable that essentially everyone should practice them at some point (and in fact my art students will all be required to make video games this semester). The second is that this is such a powerful medium for expression of stories and transmission of understanding.  The industry feels like it is gridlocked and stuck in blockbuster mode where it cannot deviate from the stories that have been told. This is sad and unnecessary.

Moving forward we want to reach out to underrepresented communities and teach the tools that will encourage them to put forth their stories.

Once a person sees the possibilities of mixing tech & humanities what’s a realistic avenue for acquiring the skills necessary to do digital humanities projects and research? Is it worth it to go back to school for a computer science degree? What about one of the new digital humanities undergrad programs? Is open courseware/iTunesU a viable option for acquiring skills and ways of thinking? What about just jumping in with an idea?

Starting a new project with insufficient resources (like skills) can quickly get you overwhelmed/putting things on hold/walking away. DH Answers and twitter are good places to go for help but how does one become a digital humanist?

There are links between this proposal and the ones on mentoring and failure that I proposed earlier, but here I’m really asking about traditional vs. non-traditional pathways to learning.  After this weekend, how do we keep learning?

I would like to dedicate a session to creating a conceptual map of the digital humanities, both as we represent them at THATCamp Bay Area, and as we collectively understand them.

This particular THATCamp is unique in that it’s the first not hosted at an academic institution, the first to consciously try to include not only non-academics, but also cultural workers from many different sectors.  I think it’s a rare opportunity to make a map of the Zeitgeist.

We could map not only the disciplines we represent (literature, history, geography, dance, music, art, etc.), but also the “modes” in which we work (academic, museum, library, non-profit, for-profit).  And perhaps there are other coordinates we could bring to bear as we try to draw The (or A) Big Picture of DH.

I don’t have a particular mapping technology in mind: as far as I’m concerned, a cool-looking doodle on butcher paper (maybe captured by a cell-phone camera) would be good enough, as long as the ideas are good.  But with all the mapping savvy I suspect we have in the group, maybe someone can offer something more high-tech.

We’d like to talk about user research in the nonprofit context.

We hope to have a straightforward and productive conversation about effective user research — without going into too much industry jargon or elaborate procedure. We’re thinking it would be useful to have a beginner’s session for people who have a nagging sense that you “should be” doing user testing on your website or web apps, but aren’t sure exactly what that really means.How much does it cost? What is the most effective way to get feedback about a site? How many people do you have to talk to? Do you really have to write down everything they say?

This session will cover techniques of free and low-cost user research, including the use of tools for remote screensharing sessions with participants. If appropriate we could have a more technical session that really gets into the details of the interview procedure.

In the wake of a turn away from nation-based frameworks and toward more regional, transnational, and/or comparative approaches to literary studies, a number of literary critics have proposed alternatives to close reading, a fundamental part of literary studies in the United States since the rise of the New Critics to prominence in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Franco Moretti’s and Peter Middleton’s calls for “distant reading,” the championing of “not reading” by Martin Mueller and Pierre Bayard, and the search for “communications circuits” pioneered by Robert Darnton are signs that people interested in books are actively working to develop approaches that can bridge a gap between New Critical fidelity to the page and the vast amount of material now available to be read.

If others are interested, I would enjoy the opportunity to discuss this work. Is something like a theory of “not reading” useful or is it only leading the humanities further down the path into obscurity and irrelevance? Where does technology fit in? What kind(s) of skills does one need in order to successfully “distant read” a text? The ability to construct visualizations seems to me to be useful. I’ve been exploring Processing, SIMILE Timelines, GoogleMaps, and ArcGIS in order to see what I might be able to learn about literary history using these tools. How have these tools worked for you?

I am interested in how sound is shared online and in examining its status in the social media arena – beyond the commercial and promotional purposes connected to the music industry. What are the most effective tools (soundcloud? IA? youtube without images? etc.) and what metadata sets can be used for this?

I’m interested in hearing/sharing ideas regarding the structure of online linked data from the point of view of (historical) narrative theory. Some of the questions that I find relevant in looking at how historical sources are available online, disseminated across institutional repositories, commercial enterprises, and the social media jungle, are:

• What are the main “narratives” underlining the presence of digital cultural heritage content online?
• How is “official history” challenged? And, is it really?
• What are the implications of a fragmented authorship model that social media and collaborative tools seem to embody (or at least, suggest and make possible)?
• What are the implications of an expanding use of Creative Commons licenses?
• How do digital literacy and the conditions of online access worldwide  relate to the democratization of knowledge that linked data aims at achieving?
• In other words, “who” is telling “what” (and to whom) in making linked historical data available online?

My main theoretical references are very much rooted in the modernist tradition (Phenomenology, Frankfurt School, Structuralism, but also Dada, Surrealism, Situationism and Punk), and my practices are eclectic and very media-oriented. I am deeply interested to learn of different approaches and problems being faced in a variety of fields, since I do not believe that theory can only exist closed off in a seminar room.

Would there be interest in a session on mentoring? I had been looking forward to notes from the “virtual mentoring” session at THATcamp New Mexico last weekend, but I guess that session didn’t happen.

Maybe something like a list of people and projects that would welcome help – something that would make it possible for the less-experienced to gain some, and then then pass that on?

I’m interested in the intersection between geographic analysis and text mining large, messy data sets. I know that a fair amount of work has been done on this in various private and public sectors (maybe the CIA could hold a Bootcamp session for us!), but I’m not sure how much has been done specifically in humanities research. I also want to move beyond metadata-level analysis and into the actual mass of text. How can we map not just the places mentioned in, say, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but all the places in every Irish novel published during the 1910s, along with their relative frequencies and contexts of nearby words and other places?

Think of Google Books, and their automatically-generated map in the About This Book (see an example here) section that gives you a geographic sense of what places are being named. I’ve always found this only superficially interesting, since I have no idea how it was generated and it makes no qualitative distinction between the various places (whether they occur 2 times or 2,000 times for instance, or in what context). Especially in the case of historical research, the quality of the data can often be a limiting factor in applying Named Entity Recognition or place name extraction (to say nothing of disambiguation between identically-referenced places/names/words). What specific techniques are being used most effectively right now? Do we need to use more advanced Natural Language Processing or can we use more inelegant blunt force? How can we apply these techniques in the context of raw, messy, humanistic data?

I want to talk about failure!

It’s the thing that keeps us (i.e. me) awake at night: fearing it, replaying past mistakes, obsessing over couldawouldashouldas. So many people (i.e. I) have a negative attitude towards failure when there’s so much more to it. Bumps along the road teach us what didn’t work – and if we’re paying attention, what not to try again. I hate the idea of failing and I know I’m not alone.

Everyone has a fail story to share – whether it’s a project, a manuscript, a relationship, an education… Let’s talk about getting past the fear, getting over the past, and moving towards success in incremental bits. And because sharing my failures isn’t embarrassing enough, I’d like to propose we end with some (low-aerobic) Scottish Country Dancing (link is to youtube). What session on failure is complete without a chance to dance with your colleagues?

Of course, if there’s no interest in #fail we could just dance the whole time. I’d like to find a project linking dancing and digital humanities and maybe something will come up?

[Who am I? Today I’m a sessional (i.e. adjunct) instructor in History and Women’s Studies at the University of Windsor, a social media specialist for Grad Studies and Public Affairs, and a web developer on the side. By training and passion I’m an historian with emphases in feminist, gender, and oral histories. I may be someone else tomorrow.]

As someone who works for the largest library cooperative in the world, and a THATCamp sponsor (OCLC), I’d be happy to do a session on how anyone can search our database of over 200 million book and serial records for items in libraries around the world and get the data back in RSS and Atom XML formats for mashing up. This might tie in well with Raymond Yee’s suggested mashup session, either as an example or as a follow-on. Raymond and I go way back.

This same service can also return HTML-formatted citations in all the major citation formats, so users of your local service can simply copy and paste the text into their paper.

We call it the WorldCat Basic API, and it is a machine view of WorldCat.org but without the journal articles (contractual obligations prevent us from making the journal article data available). I will have handouts on it if anyone is interested.

I will also be happy to find out how libraries can better serve the needs of tech-savvy humanists, which I can take back to OCLC Research where I work. With about 50  research scientists, program officers, and software engineers, we are the closest thing there is to a library Xerox PARC.

There have been a lot of questions about Bootcamp sessions, so I thought I’d weigh in.  Rather than pre-define these, we’re going to try treating them just like other sessions (the main difference is that they are introductory workshops in digital skills), and they’ll be proposed on Saturday morning, unless folks have the chance to post them here first (please do!).  There will be a chance to combine them with others or break them apart based on interest, skill level, etc., just like sessions.

As a sneak preview though, here are some that have been offered in applications:

• How to use Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Fusion Tables
• Basics of Drupal
• Text analysis
• Creating taxonomies
• Linked Data: Creating RDF
• Linked Data: Using Freebase and ACRE Apps
• Digital music tools
• Using Flickr for collections

This is just a sampling.  There were just too many excellent ideas for general sessions and bootcamps to list, but I hope this gives a little better idea of what kinds of things will be on offer this weekend.

Finally, this is the reason that I’m going to THATCamp — to learn how to incorporate more digital into my undergraduate classes.  Most of my courses have this kind of component, but I’m wondering if we can also discuss how to create a project-centered course that focuses students on producing something.  In literary studies, we don’t do this very often. Do you have a model? How about those in libraries or industry? How does project-centered work begin, where does it fail, where does it succeed? I think we can take advantage of the Silicon Valley imperative for working together and translate that skill to the classroom.

There has been lots of talk over Humanist-L and in backchannels about the standardized mark-up language.  TEI is the one I’ve seen most used, and I can read most TEI.  It’s also becoming automated with some recently distributed program materials (or pseudo-automated).  However, my university library doesn’t use TEI. For this session, perhaps we can discuss mark-up languages for big digital projects (scholarly editions are my area) and how to facilitate working with the university library to create, maintain and sustain using these mark-up languages.  What other platforms are out there?  Is there something else out-of-the-box?

Title in need of work but for session suggestions I have two areas of interest:

I want to learn more about the possibilities of reaching under-served audiences and making new platforms more accessible for older users.  Feeling in need of conversation and brainstorming about – what, how, why, when, who for? etc. Very interested in the language museums and galleries use to communicate with their publics and their own perceptions and measurements for their level of success. Are the available evaluation tools any use? What is really being communicated? What do audiences really need?

Also, during the course of research for my thesis on multi-lingual interpretation I learnt that in 2008 only 9% of museum audiences in the US were from minorities and yet by 2034, the US will be a majority of minorities. According to a report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in 2010, African Americans and English-speaking Latinos use cell phones at a much higher rate to access the web than whites (wow I hate all these classifications). Is any of this useful information and if it is why is it? Or, are these statistics irrelevant and detrimental?

I’m looking for people to collaborate with to build linked datasets for history. Historical knowledge can be vague and uncertain. The form in which historical knowledge is communicated is as much a part of its content as the “facts,” yet typical approaches to open and linked data focus solely on facts and very little on form. What can the open and linked data community learn from the challenges of grappling with history? What new forms of public history might emerge if historians open up their research notes and intermingle them with those of genealogists, archivists, curators, hobbyists and tourists? What forms of “historical logic” are amenable to formalization, if any? How might “distant reading” techniques be applied to historical scholarship to find, for example, patterns of emplotment?

For more of my thoughts on some of these topics, see my recent article in the Bulletin of ASIS&T.

There are numerous topics that I’m interested in discussing at THATCampSF.  Here are a few:

• Rapid digital tool-building experiments.  I can share insights from my work on CHNM’s One Week | One Tool team.

• Using WordPress’ CMS features for building an online CV/portfolio.  Recently I used WP3.0 as a platform for Chapman University’s Faculty Promotion & Tenure ePortfolios, and can share my work on that project as well as suggest possibilities for future plugin/widget development that would streamline this process.

• Strategies for building local DH communities, via sites like DHSoCal, and also through creating & hosting a California-based DH summer institute that’s loosely-modeled on the work done by University of Victoria’s DHSI.

• The impact of social media on the terrain of humanities scholarship.  I can contribute my experience based on promoting and podcasting Yale’s “Past’s Digital Presence” conference.

• Also, I would very much like to attend BootCamp sessions on: writing WordPress plugins and open-source tools for mapping projects.

The title is silly, so free to change it.

Thank you, Jon, for suggesting I suggest this.  The basic idea is such — digital collections thrive and decline in part on the metadata, and there’s a lot going on in the area of data. Linked Data appears to promise the implementation of the Semantic Web that we’ve all been waiting for, and Open Data has becoming a rallying point in the private and public sectors. A session on what people are working on in terms of acquiring, enhancing and/or disseminating metadata for their library, archival and other collections would be very informative, I believe.  What successes have been seen/experienced, what attempts failed to yield results, what questions/doubts remain? Are institutions and vendors on-board?

Feel free to hone this, give it more focus, break it up …

Cheers, Eli

My bio:

A major reason why I went to law school is to learn more about legal issues that affect libraries, especially in the digital arena (copyright, cyberlaw and First Amendment/free speech). I’m interested in library technology, especially the use of Web 2.0 software and protocols to make information more accessible to  information seekers, students, users, etc. I see THATCamp Bay Area as a great juxtaposition of tech, formal and informal education initiatives, and open information flows (Creative Commons, Open Access, Open Content, Big Data). I hope to be able to contribute my legal and library knowledge and be part of the ongoing library/open content/tech community.