Hi folks,

A lot of people have been asking and I’m sorry for the radio silence.  I wanted to give a quick update on where we’re at for THATCamp Project.  We had an open organizing meeting in December and had a good turnout.  What we came up with is a rough framework of geotagging various events, photos, oral histories, etc and feeding them into an open,  publicly accessible database like Freebase, and then making map tiles out of those.

If that sounds a little complicated, that’s because it is.  But that doesn’t mean you need to be some geohack or coder or something to have fun with this or learn from it.  That’s kind of the backend.  The frontend would be having several stations that we would use to learn and utilize different tools, like recording oral history, mapping historic photos, lining up old Sanborn insurance maps, creating an iPhone app to display historic maps, using Open Street Map, Google Maps, or Layar to come up with various presentations and stories of local history.

That’s the idea.  It will still take a bit of doing to get this off the ground.  I had a great space almost lined up in Dogpatch, but it fell through.  We’re now talking to folks at the UCSF Mission Bay campus to see if some place there could accommodate us.  Obviously, we’d really love to be in Dogpatch somewhere, and we don’t have a ton of money left over to rent someplace, and we need good internet access.  For my part, my contribution right now is trying to nail down that place.

As of dates, we’re looking at Saturday, February 26th, but obviously, we can’t commit to that until we confirm the space.  I’ll certainly let you know as soon as we nail something down, and by all means, feel free to reach out to your connections in the area.

Hopefully we’ll have more news soon.

I have a music therapist friend named Craig who once penned a clever little ditty called “Book about Zen” which contains this delightfully snarky observation:

I go to all these workshops, they’re always ending up the same.

Hug everybody, then go home forget their name.

I get where he’s coming from: it’s very easy to go to conferences, get really excited, make big mental plans and then…

Nothing.

Let’s avoid this. Following an email exchange with Jon Voss, and a meeting with Barbara Hui, I’m proposing that we come together to work on a collaborative Digital Humanities project, a proposal for which follows.

Please have a look, and if you’re interested in working on this, please let me know, either in the comments, or by email to john at memoryminer dot com.

—

THATCamp Project

I was one of those kids, who, during long car trips would often ask “are we there yet?” Now that I’m a more or less fully-formed adult, I often find myself asking “how did I get here?” The fact that I ask this may be due to being a big fan of Talking Heads, particularly their song “Once in a Lifetime.” During my teenage years, the video for this song was shown with surprising frequency on the then nascent MTV. I can vividly recall my excitement over David Byrne’s crazy dance moves and bemused wonderment while asking: “Well, how did I get here?!!”

Next time you’re out and about, I invite you stop on a street corner in any urban area, then ask yourself how did we get here? Though not a uniquely American phenomenon, nowhere else in the world are cities so radically transformed in so short a time as they are in the US. Right here in the SF Bay Area, the twin cities of Oakland and San Francisco have seen their fortunes rise and fall by the tides of great social and economic changes.  Think Gold Rush, think Transcontinental Railroad. Think Dot fucking Com.

These great historical phenomena reshaped the two cities, sometimes in an odd, zero-sum kind of way. Here’s one example.

If you were to take a walk in the Dogpatch neighborhood of SF, you’d see many rusted remains of San Francisco’s once bustling port. Look across the water to West Oakland, and you’ll see an army of mechanized cranes unloading massive container  ships. While San Francisco’s port benefits from naturally deep water, the port of Oakland must be constantly dredged, so why move the port activity across the Bay?  There are many reasons, but a major one had to due with the battle between mechanization and unionized manual labor. Mechanization won. With the death of port activity, the Dogpatch neighborhood feel in to decay for many years, only to see its fortunes rise again in recent years.

Looking back in time, if you were a unionized dock worker who had a nice house with a nice family up on Potrero Hill but saw your job move across the Bay to be performed by machine, you probably weren’t too happy. Even without the benefit of MTV, you might have had occasion to dance a crazy dance while asking yourself “How did I get here?”

Imagine if we were to organize the considerable skills that exist in the THATCamp Bay Area community and bring them to bear on a Digital Humanities project that seeks to answer a “How did we get here?” type question. We could tie the question to a relatively localized geographical area, but trace the threads to any number of different areas on the globe. We could look at the question from any number of angles, using any number of techniques from oral history, augmented reality, text mining, etc.

I’d like to propose that we act on this as a community by choosing a date in the near future for a THATCamp Project where we agree in advance on a topic, do our best work, then assemble for a show and tell, the result of which will be shared with the world.

The ground rules would be simple:

* Use whatever technology you want, but the data has to be mash-able (e.g. RSS feeds can be consumed by any number of other applications and services)

* No spectators: to attend the show & tell, you have to be prepared to show & tell

* Be willing to get your hands dirty so that we may create a model for other THATCamp Project

So, fellow happy THATCampers, what say you?

In withdrawal from the THATCamp experience?  Longing for radical humanities and technology collaboration?  Wanting to learn how to organize a great unconference?  Now’s your chance to get involved in THATCampLite Bay Area, a one day THATCamp experience to take place in the San Francisco Bay Area some time in February.

The event will be contingent on volunteer organizers (I’ll be one of them), who will need to find a suitable space, arrange a date, determine if there should be a theme, publicize the event, and deal with logistics.  The event will be of the first come first serve variety.  As an organizer, you will enjoy rockstar status for a full day.  At least.

I propose three optional face-to-face organizing meetups, from 9:30-11am 11/17, 12/15, and 1/19.  These are really just for fun.  Most of the work can be done via email and conference calls as necessary.

I’ve heard some great ideas for this already, now’s your chance to get involved.  Post a response here, drop me a note (jon at lookbackmaps dot net), or email the Google Groups list if you want to help change the world with THATCampLite Bay Area.

THATCamp Bay Area now has a Google Group!

Please feel free to sign up and spread the word to anyone you think would be interested in future THATCamp Bay Area meetups, unconferences, news, discussion or other events related to the humanities and technology in the area.  The list will be open to the public, and the group application just has a simple question to filter out spammers.  Just click the link below to go to the group page.

groups.google.com/group/thatcampbayarea

It took about a week for me to recover/relax/catch-up and normalize after THATCamp Bay Area. But the exhaustion was worth it. I was so happy with how the weekend turned out, and am hopeful that this kind of collaboration will continue to grow in the Bay Area in months and years to come.  I’m extremely grateful to the many generous people worldwide involved in THATCamps, and for their support in helping us pull off this local rendition.

Now that the organizing is behind me, I wanted to share some of the ideas that worked and didn’t work with this, some of the things I learned, and break down the actual costs of a non-university hosted THATCamp, looking at money, time, emotion, and politics.

First of all, some of the things we did that I think really worked.

• We took it outside. I was insistent that THATCamp Bay Area be held anywhere but a university, and having the Automattic Lounge space donated for our use was a huge boost.  Aside from just being an open and inspirational space, it allowed us to include, but not be limited to “digital humanities;” it gave us a very fresh space to break out of our industry cliques and normal meeting routines; and it provided neutral ground for the various academic and corporate institutions we were drawing participants from.
• We had a party. To me, the whole weekend was a celebration–of life, of passion, of intellectual pursuit, of hobbies, etc.  But we also had the very fun Dork Shorts element along with some very smart entertainment by Megan and Rick Prelinger together with drinks on Saturday night.  The night ended in fireworks (a total accident by the way!), Scottish country dancing led by Candace Nast, and music curated by Jordan Gray.
• We did it ourselves. This was a completely volunteer effort.  No one got paid a cent and any time we committed to it was squeezed in amongst our other jobs and projects. We set out folding chairs, brought donuts, had lunch catered by a local grocery store, chipped in to get a keg.  It was a DIY event from the get-go, and like other THATCamps I’ve been to, that constructive atmosphere was very pervasive throughout the weekend.
• We had widespread support. We had a great core team of volunteers, and we also had a larger organizing committee that volunteered to spread the word, reach out to their respective communities and help solicit sponsorship (thanks!!).  This was the key to our success in bringing in a great group of sponsors and having so many different sectors represented in the applicant pool.
• We used Open Space. As the principal organizer, I relied heavily on my experience with Open Space Technology and stuck pretty close to the main organizing elements (organizers, I highly recommend checking out this book).  I was careful to open and close with a circle and make clear to participants that a lot of work went in to providing the space, but that it was entirely up to them what to do with it.  The result was fantastic.

By all counts, the weekend was a great success, but it was not without some challenges:

• We did it ourselves. There was certainly a downside to doing it all ourselves on a volunteer basis without having institutional support: it was exhausting.  Of course, part of the success was due to just how much love and energy we put into this, but I’m not sure that’s a sustainable model–nor is it entirely necessary.  It was the first THATCamp in the Bay Area, so personally, I wanted to set the bar high and put in a lot of extra effort to make sure we started off strong.
• Sound was a problem. The majority of our space to work with was a big open room, in which we made space for three breakout sessions.  We had a fourth space outside on the patio and a fifth smaller place in a cubby on the way outside.  The good part of this is that we had a very dynamic energy and space in which people could easily drift in and out of sessions.  The down side was that it could get pretty hard to hear or focus on your sessions.  Uh, not to mention Blue Angels and Fleet Week–though that also added to the excitement in a way.
• Bigger space? I thought we’d be lucky to get 75 applicants, so figured that was plenty of space to plan for.  But we had 110 applicants and could not accommodate everybody.  I think if the space was permitting, 110 people would have certainly been manageable, though a bit more expensive.

Financial Costs

I’ve provided a full accounting of our income and expenses for the event. On the income side, we had 4 presenting sponsors who gave $500 each, and 6 supporting sponsors who gave $200 each (we had two in-kind supporting sponsors, LookBackMaps and Prelinger Library).  I did not include the value of the space, which would be about $3,000, and was generously donated by our hosting sponsor, Automattic Inc.  About 76% of participants who weren’t volunteers or direct sponsors contributed $25.

On the expense side, the major expenses were t-shirts and catering, which included coffee, bagels, pastries, and donuts Saturday and Sunday, and lunch on Saturday.  Catering also included juices, sodas, ice, and lots of fresh fruit (great idea Cornelius!), etc.

We have a surplus of $522.04, which I propose be used to support future THATCamp Bay Area events during the next year that continue to widen the circle of participants (somebody said something about a November 7 event?).

Investment of Time

I’m not sure how accurate this is, because I did it in hindsight, but thought it was worth doing as I got a lot of questions from potential THATCamp organizers about how much time I spent organizing this.  This is just for my hours and doesn’t include time that other folks helped out on, and it’s for what I would consider “billable” hours, not time I spent doing research, bringing THATCamp into various conversations and meetings, or just thinking about it.  I think this is a pretty fair guess though, and should give you a good idea of what kind of work to expect and when to plan for things.  For THATCamp Bay Area, the key dates were June 1, when we decided on space and officially announced the date and venue, applications opening on Aug 1 and closing Sept 1, invites sent out Sept 7, and the event on Oct. 9 & 10.

Emotional Costs

I already mentioned the exhaustion factor.  I love the photo at the top of this post that Chris took of me laid out on the couch on Saturday afternoon. I was so wiped out!  Mainly, by the time Saturday started to come together, I could actually relax and enjoy the gathering, which for me entailed laying low and listening in on the various sessions and conversations (though I was drawn in to a couple of Linked Data sessions).  Of course, after that photo, I got some food and rallied for Saturday evening and had a blast!

Another thing I want to point out that definitely weighed heavily on me and my team was the emotional cost of having to choose who made the first round of participants and who went on the wait list.  Of course, we wanted everyone to come, but that just wasn’t possible.  It was tough for us to have to choose one colleague or another, despite having agreed to our methodology and informing folks of that.  For the most part, applicants were very gracious, and many attendees let us know right away if they couldn’t make it so that we could offer spots to others on the wait list.

Political Risks and Rewards

THATCamp was started by “digital humanists” to create what has become a pretty radical space for open dialogue and conversation, largely within the academic environment (I use the quotes only because I’m still not sure what a digital humanist is).  There has been a very conscious effort to not limit THATCamp to the digital humanities or to the academy, for which I’m very grateful.

But it turns out that it’s no small feat to create a space in which humanists and technologists, from professional to enthusiast, feel welcome.  The best way I could think of to do that was to make sure that we were not in an academic setting, not let any organization be over-represented, and have a diverse enough representation of sectors to prevent a focus on internal bullshit.  The downside: I pissed some people off.  The upside: I heard from a lot of people how excited they were to have a chance to pursue issues from a variety of perspectives, how happy they were to not be bogged down in the politics of their industry (be it digital humanities or the tech sector), and how rewarding it was to explore collaborations with people they would not have otherwise reached out to.

This is not to say that you can’t reach beyond a largely academic audience when having THATCamps at universities, *if* you want to… it just may take a little extra work.

Thanks

I hope this post is of some help to organizers of future THATCamp or other similar open space style events.  You certainly don’t need to be an expert to pull off an excellent unconference, though I’m sure it gets easier with practice.  I know I had a lot of help from other THATCamp organizers throughout, as well as my fellow organizers, the organizing committee and the participants themselves, who put together one great event.  To sum it up in a word: Thanks!

A very good and comprehensive overview of some of the issues discussed at some of THATcamp, as they affect museums, can be found in this report: www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Museum.pdf. The report identifies and describes the 6 new technologies that are likely to have an impact on museum education in particular, over the next 5 years, including augmented reality and the semantic web. Major trends and challenges impeding adoption are discussed and benchmark projects incorporating the technologies and key readings etc. There’s a free webinar on Monday that may be useful to participate in. midea.nmc.org/event/horizonreportmuseumwebinar and go.nmc.org/midea-connect-signup.

ThatCamp Bay Area opened on October 9 and October 10 in an open-space loft with much excitement and energy. In the Bay Area, Silicon Valley looms large and the organizer Jon Voss was able to attract the likes of Google, Yahoo, OCLC, and the Internet Archive, as industry partners. Graduate students, faculty, librarians, programmers, archivists showed up to construct Saturday’s schedule, which was quickly and quietly revised as the afternoon went on. The green post-its are bootcamp sessions while everything else was an intriguing session. The only downside to the unconference are the choices! I proposed a session on pedagogy and digital humanities but had a difficult time setting the slot because every hour had something that I wanted to attend.

But, I attended ThatCamp to gain some understanding, and, well, to feel uncomfortable. I wanted to immerse myself in areas that were not so familiar to me, sessions where I couldn’t be an authority. The invigorating aspect to the two days’ of sessions was that no matter how hard I tried to avoid familiar topics, I found myself reflecting on the intersection between my work and all of the cool, interesting work being discussed. Steve Ramsay was right; I was prepared to be the dumbest person in the room, and that prepared me for being inspired by the cross/multi/extra-disciplinary work that so many people came together to discuss.

Those are the generalities. Big questions plagued me during and after sessions, even at the bootcamps. But, these weren’t questions of despair; rather they were invigorating because they required that I think about pedagogy and curriculum in a different fashion, but they were there nonetheless: How can this apply in the classroom? How can I teach my students some of this technology without sacrificing content? Is this the content then in a Digital Humanities course? What kind of Humanistic inquiry comes from integrating tools with literary studies? How can I educate my colleagues about Digital Humanities using georeferencing as an example? How can GIS impact my work on history of the book. But mostly I just wanted to play with all of the toys in order to explore what kind of Humanistic inquiry is possible. I wanted to see what happened when a major corpus of work was available; what questions could I come up with, because I don’t have any to start with. Perhaps if I had a chance to play, though, I could find something. And this is the crux of the entire weekend – playfulness and imagination is perhaps something that academics and scholars have moved away from, something that is stolen from us as we move into full time positions. The demands of the position and the service steal that moment. I wish ThatCamp were really Summer ThatCamp. I definitely needed more time to work with and digest. I got just a smattering of everything that makes me uncomfortable.

Here’s some specifics on the bootcamps:

Adita Muralidharan offered a bootcamp session on text mining, an area that I’m familiar with and can perform, but one that is mystified behind linguistic computing and encoding. Using n-grams as a model, Adita took us through parsing parts of speech and plotting changes over history. Some of the participants pushed further to ask about irony, metaphor, humor – the things that literary scholars are interested in. Adita told us that it was a dream to be able to do that but we aren’t there yet. A musicologist however alerted us to the use of this type of parsing on sound files in search of melodic formulas. We lead each other into discussing dance and preservation of American dance culture, especially since some of the greatest choreographers have died recently and with it, shortly, their companies and style of dance. After my brief lamentations about marking up poetry in TEI for poetic elements, Matt Jockers jumped in to talk about a recent program his students have written to mark up metrical poetry. Wow! This applies directly to a collaborative project, The Poetess Archive

At the next bootcamp, Mano Marks offered help on Google’s new Fusion Tables, a beta Google Maps app that allows users to upload, store (up to 250mb) and visualize data, even more robustly than Google Docs. It’s in Google Labs now: www.google.com/fusiontables/Home. From that one, I was left with questions about the bootcamp itself; what did it teach me that I couldn’t teach myself from playing with the tool?

Worldcat representatives offered a bootcamp on using Worldcat but I think the presenter was not used to a non-programming crowd and was a bit stymied about how to discuss the product. The final point he made was to demo Worldcat/identities – a chart that depicts the number of publications for authors. This was incredible! It visualizes all of the publication data of materials entered into WorldCat – I wish he would have lead with this one.

The bootcamp lead by biologists on georeferencing and mapping was immensely interesting if only because of the attention to exactness capable in using georeferencing. Again, though, I asked the question of the group in general how it could apply to Humanists’ study. The biologists were there to talk to Humanists about how to adapt the tool for them. We were all a little stumped and ran out of time. But mention was made then (and later over Twitter) about some projects that use georeferencing quite successfully, Barbara Hui‘s being one as well as Visualizing the Rural West project at Stanford. This is the moment that’s always frustrating; I know I have questions, but I’m not sure about what I know and don’t know. I mean, I know I need to learn things, but I’m not sure what they are.

I didn’t expect to walk away knowing a program language, but ThatCamp certainly pointed me in the direction of being able to articulate what I need to learn and how I can expand my own limited style of thinking. Now, I need to attend a TEI workshop or the DHSI University of Victoria’s week-long seminars. Whatever it is that I need to know, I’m so gloriously stupid and uncomfortable that it’s restored my faith in learning!

While I didn’t blog through the weekend, I did tweet prolifically. Those can be found archived with TwapperKeeper. 

What’s the result of all of this, other exorcising my existential professional ennui? I’m reporting back to my Dean about ThatCamp and potential for collaboration with industry partners. I met with other San Jose State faculty and students (several from our Library Science program were in attendance) – no small feat considering we’re all so fractured. I learned that San Francisco State University Literature faculty are attempting to create a Digital Humanities certificate (and we’ve now all been in contact). The representative from the Internet Archive has offered to work with me in scanning those 30,000 pages remaining in my digital project. Glen Worthey, from Stanford, made a great suggestion to review some Digital Humanities Conference proposals in order to help me understand the vetting process (and I’ve now been invited to do so). The Gap archivist, Google developer and a dance archivist all introduced me to new possibilities for collaboration. Another SJSU faculty, James Morgan, and I rarely have a chance to chat about DH curriculum and how to create project-centered courses; we had 3 hours in the car to do this and plotted some amazing curricular changes to be slowly developed over the next 5 years at SJSU. Based on my tweets Doug Reside invited me to attend a symposium in New York on digital preservation of dance (and my amateur enthusiasm for dance).

Finally, ThatCamp demonstrated that I know what I’m doing, that Digital Humanities is valid and authoritative. While encouraging me to dive into the unknown, the meeting restored some confidence in my abilities and offered a level of collegiality that is often missing from my daily work. This is because of the generosity of each and every “camper” to entertain and explore ideas in a truly free environment.

Thanks ThatCamp.

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.

I’ve put up a rough spreadsheet of the sessions schedule, please refer and edit away:
spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AnFmsvkDXKFddE9tMDNxMFc1SDFubHlXVExITjhCVWc&hl=en

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 just came from Disneyland’s California Adventure, where I was “under the Golden Gate Bridge.” Now I am off to THATCampSF, thanks to Jon Voss, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge…more like under the Bay Bridge, but…

Right now I am a bit overwhelmed by concepts of narrative theory, as Francesco Spagnolo highlights and “games, art and Story Telling.”

I am feeling very “meta” right now, and looking forward to THATCampSF.

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.

Freebase is an open, creative-commons-licensed repository of structured data about over 12 million entities. Freebase has information about people, places, organisations, historical events, books, and all kinds of other things.  As an open database, we encourage data contributions on any subject from the community. And you can use Freebase’s data and API to build mashups or connect disparate data sets together.

We’d like to run a bootcamp to show off Freebase’s data and what you can do with it.  We’ll start with an overview and then get our hands dirty with some practical how-tos.

Some of the areas we can cover include:

• overview of Freebase’s data (what do we have, where do we get it, what’s our coverage and quality)
• MQL (our query language) and how to use it to ask Freebase questions
• the Freebase API and hosted app development platform (Acre)
• Freebase as ID/key repository, using Freebase to connect different data sets
• Google Refine (previously known as Gridworks), using Gridworks to clean up, visualise, and reconcile data
• how to create schema/vocabulary and add data to Freebase
• Freebase and the semantic web/linked open data/RDF

There are two Freebase people attending (Kirrily and Jamie) so we’ll do this together and between us we should be able to cover just about any Freebase-related topic! Please come with questions or ideas and we’ll try and tailor our bootcamp content to what you want to know.

I’d like to contribute to the One Day On Earth project which overlaps with THATCamp, but the themes run close enough.

www.onedayonearth.org/

If anyone else is interested in collaborating on this at THATCamp, speak up with how you see yourself fitting in!

I’m willing to talk taxonomy for 90 minutes, so who’s with me?  Let’s talk as much as we can about:

What are taxonomies? Who are taxonomists? Terms and relationships; software; human and machine indexing; taxonomy structures, displays, planning, design, creation, implementation and evolution.

And: why it is good for the THATCamp crowd.

Lori

You’ve been collecting data for months – and now you have text files, Excel spreadsheets and database tables filled with numbers, names, dates, and relationships – what do you do with it all? How do you make it all navigable?

I propose a Visualization BootCamp in which I’ll cover the basics of information visualization: why it’s effective and what kind of data it’s best suited for. I’ll introduce basic graphic design principles – how humans visually percieve difference, relative order, and togetherness, and use them to explain what kinds of visualizations work best for numbers, relationships, categories, timelines, and other kinds of data. All through, we will see real life examples of these principles at work in existing information visualizations, drawn from the humanities where possible, compared and contrasted with each other.

Lastly, I will cover the visualization tools available non-programmers, and give pointers to the huge number of  toolkits for programmers with varying degrees of experience.

Got a lot of digitized text? Not sure what to do with it? Try text mining!

I’d like to hold a Text Mining BootCamp for those interested in using computers to extract information from raw text. At one level above messy OCR, I will first introduce the teriminology and  possibilities – when we talk about the “information in text” what do we mean? What kinds of things has computational linguistics made it possible to extract from words, sentences, and document collections?  To make it concrete, I will work with example scholarly questions from real humanists, and show how to they are translated into computational terms.

Then the tools: I will introduce and demonstrate the text mining toolkits accessible to scholars with no programming experience, and touch upon other tools, suitable for more experienced programmers.

During the Saturday night festivities, we’ll be doing live Dork Shorts, or 2 minute talks in which participants can wow the crowd with their projects, in whatever form they like. You’ll have access to a mic, a projector, the a/v system, and the dance floor for exactly 2 minutes. Bring it!

Sign up to present your Dork Shorts here, and view the lineup of presentations and links to more details here on Saturday night.

Photo: Robert Bejil Photography on Flickr.

the bookshelf.  In case I forget on Saturday morning.

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?

If anyone would like to roam the aisles and scout the shelves of Prelinger Library while the jets scream overhead, we’d be delighted to welcome them for an extremely informal tour and visit. Bring cameras and flash drives! We’ll figure out the best time together at the meeting.

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.

Fleet Week 1919, from Jesse Brown Cook Scrapbook, The Bancroft Library

I may have neglected to mention that Columbus Day Weekend (this weekend) is also Fleet Week in San Francisco.  The majority of the festivities are on the Fisherman’s Wharf side of the Embarcadero, but Piers 30/32, near us, will have ships docked and open for tours, so please expect a bit more traffic than usual.  If you’re driving, you may want to look at the lots closer to the ball park (good news is the Giants are in the playoffs, but NOT at home this weekend!).

We’ve also pulled some strings with the US Navy and have a very special immersive multimedia presentation for you from 3-4pm Saturday.  We’ll tell you more about that Saturday morning.

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.

Julie Meloni will teach a Bootcamp workshop on programming for Humanists at the NE meeting. Can we have one of those as well? I’m not even sure what it is that I need to learn but I know that I need to learn it.

My archives is located at 2 Folsom which is on the waterfront near Automattic Lounge (Google Maps says 1 Muni stop, .7 miles, 12 minute walk).

Since it’s a corporate archives that is not open to the general public. But I would be willing to do a tour for THATCampers this weekend if anyone is  interested in popping over.  I can just do a general overview tour or focus on some specific aspect of our archival/records program – whatever people are most intested in.

Not sure what time would work best…maybe Sunday after lunch? Or some other time that works for the most people?

Let me know.

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?

I have an interest in creating exhibits or collections with Omeka both for my project and in the classroom, so possibly this bootcamp session might have a dual focus or perhaps there’s another way to insert pedagogy into another bootcamp session?

• Using Omeka to build digital scholarly editions.
• Using Omeka in the undergraduate classroom — how to integrate into the curriculum with learning goals, assignments, etc.
• Introducing Omeka to the library staff — how to best explain this in terms that the library will value.

Here’s my proposal for a hands-on bootcamp workshop: I’d like to teach interested folks how to create their own mobile augmented reality experiences quickly, easily and with no programming skills required.

Mobile augmented reality (AR) turns your mobile phone into a magic lens that reveals hidden stories about the world. In this workshop you will learn the basics of building mobile AR experiences for the iPhone & Android phones, using easy web-based tools that do not require any programming experience. The specific tools I’ll teach are the Layar mobile AR platform and the companion Hoppala authoring tool. The two requirements you’ll need are a laptop with web access, and an iPhone 3Gs (or later) or a 3G Android phone with internal GPS and compass (most of them).

Sound like fun? Here’s an example screenshot from a layer we did for the 01SJ Biennial last month:

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.

I’m excited to announce that camper bios for the Fall 2010 THATCamp Bay Area have been posted on the site.  I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of sessions and bootcamps will come out of this group, but I’ve no doubt they are going to be incredible.

With only two days remaining to apply to THATCamp Bay Area, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at a breakdown of our applicants by sector.  These are pretty broad sectors of course, and some people may fit into more than one, but I think it’s useful to break it down.  As we have close to 100 applicants at this point, and only space to accommodate 75, we’ll be looking at sectors as an important factor.

Our three bigges sectors, respectively, are academic, commercial, and library.

There are a lot of great things about being involved with THATCamp, and I’m super excited about having the opportunity to help organize THATCamp Bay Area October 9-10, 2010.  Not least of those great perks is meeting all kinds of super smart and motivated people who are using their intellect, expertise, and contacts to do something for each other and for the common good.  But there are other aspects which are typical of a growing community or network that require tough decisions that can’t please everyone.

One that we’ve struggled with at THATCamp Bay Area is the question of a curated or crowdsourced gathering, a question very relevant to those in the library, archives, and museum space already!  What I mean by that in this context is whether we should open our rendition of THATCamp to anyone and everyone (crowdsource) and let the chips fall where they may, or should we use an application process to vet invitees to create purposeful cross-disciplinary dynamics (curate)?  I’ve had the opportunity to be involved in both types of unconferences, as have some of the other organizers, and we’ve certainly seen some of the pros and cons of both.  This is something that deserves more discussion amongst the THATCamp community to be sure.

While every regional THATCamp has the ability to organize things their own way, there are several key characteristics (listed on THATCamp.org/about) that we wanted to be sure to abide by. Granted, these are not set in stone, and as THATCamp seems to be a growing movement, some of us have gotten together at THATCamps and other places to talk about these kinds of organizing and network weaving questions.  But one of the key elements here that helped us make the decision of curate vs. crowdsource was that THATCamps have no more than 100 participants.  Since there has never been a THATCamp in the Bay Area, 75-100 seemed like a reasonable number to shoot for, and we began the search for a (non-academic, different story) space to accommodate about that many people, and sponsors to support it.  Once Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, got behind us and offered to host THATCamp Bay Area at their space, we were on.  We figure we can accommodate about 75 people, and we decided that if we got more applicants than that, we’ll need to do some curating.

Now, just over a week and a half into our month long application window, we already have over 75 applicants.  Assuming there will be more, we’re going to have to make some tough decisions.  So, to the extent that we have to, we’ll be making decisions based on several factors that are intended to extend the reach of THATCamp and inspire more cross-disciplinary events like it in the Bay Area and beyond.  For the sake of transparency and in the hope that our process can help inform other organizers, these are the things we’ll be taking into consideration as we curate this gathering.

• Your applications matter.  We are not asking for a lot of information, but we’re trying to make sure that the people that attend have a passion for their work or vocation or hobby and want to share their experience with others as well as learn new things.  You don’t need technical skills or academic credentials.
• We’re aiming to create cross-disciplinary connections across a wide array of sectors, and so are looking for applicants from as many diverse fields as possible–with not too many from one organization, institution or sector.
• We’re looking for catalysts to keep this conversation going.  We hope that people will take what they learn from this and share it widely, act on it, build collaborations, pursue ongoing conversations, and include others.  Because we have more people interested than we can facilitate, we have an added responsibility to continue opening the conversation.

Clearly, in future THATCamps in the Bay Area, we’ll need to either plan for more participants, or take a FOOcamp model of having nominations.  It will be worth discussing, and in the meantime, there’s great excitement over the demand!

Applications are now open for THATCamp Bay Area. Unfortunately, we can only facilitate about 75 people for THATCamp Bay Area, so we’re asking prospective participants to fill out this short application. If you’d like to attend, please complete the application, and keep in mind that your name, website, twitter handle, affiliation, and short bio may be visible to the public on an attendees page on this website. Based on applications and availability, invitations will be emailed no later than September 9. If there is a waitlist, invitees will have a limited amount of time to accept before the spot is offered to someone else. We will do everything we can to accommodate as many attendees as possible.

Please print, post, email and otherwise disseminate the Call For Participants for THATCamp Bay Area, October 9-10, 2010. Applications will be open from August 1 – September 1, 2010.

A PDF of the CFP may be downloaded here.

We’ve added an About and Logistics page to the site, and have announced that applications will be open from August 1 – September 1, and everyone will be notified no later than September 9.

THATCamp Bay Area will be held at the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco, October 9-10, 2010. Stay tuned for more information here, and follow @THATCampSF on Twitter for updates.

Special thanks to Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com for sponsoring THATCamp Bay Area and hosting in their space!