THATCamp Austin 2009

We’d like to share our experience organizing THATCamp Austin with people interested in putting on their own regional THATCamps.  I’m not sure we know enough to put together an authoritative how-to, but we can certainly explain what we did.

Organizers: We had four talented co-organizers who volunteered their time.  Ben and Peter live in Austin, while Lisa and Jeanne are in Maryland but were attending SAA.  As you see in the timeline, there was plenty of work for the off-site organizers to do.  Each of us have full-time jobs and children aged between 3 and 6, so most of the work was done late at night or early in the morning.

Budget: $845 (around $490 for shirts, ca. $300 for pizza, remainder spent on office supplies, web hosting, and postage).  Initially we planned to fund our costs by asking participants to contribute around $20, but we were able to get commitments for as much as $900 from our sponsors in the week before the event.

Participants: We counted about 50 participants at 7:00.  A majority of them were attending SAA, and only 20 hands went up when we asked how many would have attended THATCamp Austin if they weren’t attending SAA.

Tools: We used WordPress for the blog, Google Docs for the applicant spreadsheet, Doodle for the timing survey, Google Groups for both the planner mailing list and application tracking, and a GMail account for correspondence.

Read more »

THATCamp Austin was the first regional THATCamp, but at least two more are being planned before the end of the year.  We’re trying to put together an account of how we organized the Austin event to pass along to those organizers and we need your help.  If you participated in THATCamp Austin or followed it online, please leave a comment with ideas for improving it.

So far, participants have given me these suggestions:

• Explain how sessions will be scheduled in advance. The unconference format is new to most people, and models for scheduling sessions vary from BarCamp to OpenSpace to THATCamp.  If we had explained the need to combine session ideas into presentations, or what DorkShorts was, participants could have spent more time making those combinations themselves, and we might have spent less time at the scheduling session.
• Post answers to applicant questions on the blog. Some participants told me that my post about what to prepare was extremely helpful.  That post was a public reply to a question I’d gotten from a participant.  The only other similar question I got was about how the scheduling process worked.  If I’d posted that answer to the blog as well, it would have addressed the previous point.
• Four hours is too short. We only had two slots for sessions, and because we started so late in the day, our hack-fest/bonus sessions ended up adjourning immediately to a bar.
• Ten days to discuss session ideas is too short. New session ideas were being posted in the hour before THATCamp Austin began, and really didn’t get a hearing in the scheduling process.  Some participants suggested that with a longer lead time–perhaps involving a deadline for schedule ideas–the entire scheduling process could happen on-blog, and we could have skipped the half hour spent arranging a schedule at the conference.
• Participants were insufficiently diverse. Because we scheduled THATCamp Austin for SAA, we had a large pool of digitally-minded archivists to draw from.  However, probably two-thirds of participants were archivists, and discussions tended to be archives-heavy.  I remember hearing inclusive “we” equated with university faculty a couple of times at THATCamp 2008 — I heard it equated with archivists a lot at THATCamp Austin.  If we’d had more than 20 days from announcement to event and if we’d publicized more aggressively among the Central Texas DH community, we might have achieved more balance.

What other advice we should pass along?

Here are some of the notes I’ve been taking on my thoughts this past weekend around a rich web 2.0 archival experience, qua jazz.

Implications for a passed-down and mutable history in an internet/web archival schema. In ever-changing web environment, veracity of web information (i.e. message boards, blogs, wikis) can be difficult to track down, nevertheless collecting snapshots leads to a narrative history.

How does the archival experience retain the mutable/ever-changing quality of history? Especially in the context of a particularly flux-laden narrative, such as Af-Am/oral historical tradition, specialized interest/subgroups, or even contemporary web groups?

If we are concerned as a profession about how to engage digital records/digital history, perhaps the application of a framework that retains the inherent flux of the contents is what we need. As in jazz music, which is inherently improvised, there is still an overarching structure of a tune in which improvised information occurs, different each time but for the compositional whole. Or in free jazz, letting the improvised information determine the structure (a little more difficult).

Are there structures for information in the archival profession that allow for continually changing archival data / improvising responses? How can an archives remain unfixed as a concept and still retain value as a reliable source of networked information?

Of course, to be true to the materials & their structure, not all materials/groups of information are in flux nor should the archiving practices as such be made to reflect continual change.

—————————————————————————

Expression / Architecturally – could use Rich Media software, GLIFOS or IEEE P1599 (music), multileveled experience – (cf. Baggi, 2005). I’ve written Denis Baggi in the hopes that he might have some further ideas on whether an improvisational protocol could be written for a rich-media (or rich-content) archival experience.

—————————————————————————

Anyway, these are some of the thoughts swirling around in my head. I make no claims as to whether such an approach is realistic or possible, but it interests me, precisely because I’ve always had a personal tug-of-war between experiential time as I see it, and fixed notions of archival materials & historical relationships.

Hello all!

Sorry for the late post. I am writing from a Denton hotel as I speed back to Austin for THATCamp.

In my work at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities in Lincoln, Nebraska, this summer, I focused some attention on authorship attribution, and I’d love to learn more about & chat about this process and the methodology. I’d particularly like to know more about Matthew Jocker’s influence study of the Book of Mormon, which measured authorial signals using Nearest Shrunken Centroid. Any attribution campers in our midst?

The future of the archival profession! The role of the university! EAD! I would happily turn my head from attribution to engage in these issues.

See you all soon!

Those who want to navigate with a crowd from the Hilton Austin, please meet in the lobby at 5pm with 75 cents in your pocket by the big wall-o-rock fountain. We will depart promptly at 5:15 to walk 4 short blocks down 4th street to Congress Ave to catch the #5 bus.

Can’t join the group? Many methods of navigation are described on the Location page.

Half of the fun of an unconference is in watching and participating in the backchannel discussion.  While we don’t have a back-back-channel like some conferences, we’re off to a pretty good start with these:

• Twitter: We’ll be using the hashtag #thatcamp to identify our tweets and scour the net for other folks who like to weigh in.  Those tweets will be archived at Twapper Keeper.
• Wiki: The THATCamp wiki is ready to go.  Put your links, your notes, your photos, and anything else you can think of in it.  The THATCamp09 page provides a good example.
• IRC: There is a #thatcamp channel on freenode.net.  ChatZilla and Pidgin are both decent IRC clients.  Type /j #thatcamp at the prompt once you’re in.

We haven’t made any plans for A/V recording, but if you’ve got equipment to set up, you’re welcome to bring it.

THATCamp Austin is officially over at 10:00 PM on Tuesday night, but you don’t have to go home right then. While some campers will be heading to the Dog and Duck Pub for a libation and others will start their trek to the SAA hotel, any souls brave enough are welcome to hang around Mezes Hall for the Hack Fest and Bonus Sessions.

We’ll all be kicked out of the auditorium at 10, but we can keep going in the three classrooms until Peter starts to yawn.  I suggest that we hold a hack fest in the larger room and put bonus sessions in the two others.  For the hack fest, bring a problem you’re trying to solve:  I’ll bet that we’ll have some software gurus to help out on technical problems, and I hope that we’ll have folks willing to help out with purely humanistic problems.  (I’ve got a problem that’s probably fairly basic for an archivist, so this may be a selfish wish.)  The bonus sessions can be anything we didn’t have time for in the two main slots — perhaps you didn’t get to discuss a topic, or spent your DorkShorts demo fighting with laptop dongles.  Maybe there was a great topic you’d like to revisit.  We could put sign-up sheets outside the doors at 10, letting people organize then.

These are just half-baked ideas for what to do with the space while we have it, not a schedule or a program.  What do you think?

This is really two topics, but they’re related, so I’ll throw them out together and see what happens.

One is to consider the future of the archival profession as a whole–can it evolve and succeed, will it continue to exist but be largely irrelevant, or will it just die out?

We will reach a tipping point in the future when more records suitable for “archiving” are digital than not, and if the majority of our profession isn’t prepared to deal with those digital records, others will come forward who are. Imagine a future when most archivists aren’t responsible for digital records, when all the important text and image collections have been digitized (and nobody cares about the rest), and when almost no one will travel to an archives to do research. Why pay a full-time professional wage to someone who manages a largely irrelevant collection of paper? It’s a doomsday scenario, but I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine (for organizations other than national and state archives). Is the archival profession going to succeed by evolving, or is it facing irrelevance or virtual extinction?

A related but separate topic is what value small professional organizations (small in comparison to groups like ALA) like SAA can offer today and what hope there is that they (in particular SAA) can evolve and succeed, or will continue to exist but be irrelevant to most archivists, or will just die off?

What do we need something like SAA for? To organize conferences, publish a journal, provide networking opportunities, and (in theory) advocate for us. How many of those functions will most of us continue to need and what would SAA need to do to meet them? What other options do we have for achieving those goals? (You might have seen this blog post back in June, which discusses these issues in relation to the Records Management Society in the UK.)

Again, this could either be an idea for one session or two . . .

Hi,
I’m an assistant director at the Computer Writing and Research Lab, where we use an array of technologies to teach writing and critical thinking. While it is widely accepted that social media applications offer rich educational opportunities to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally, these new communication tools also challenge traditional teaching and research strategies and erode disciplinary boundaries. I would like to invite THATcamp attendees to join a conversation about the new educational landscape and to think about the implications of learning strategies that break down the walls of the traditional classroom. With these issues in mind, how does an increasingly remixed public sphere effect or disrupt our ideas of what a university should be?

I could talk on a couple issues surrounding the Archivists’ Toolkit namely:

1. A background of the project, leading up to a discussion of the challenges in sustaining open source program in small communities. It would be great to talk present this talk with someone else involved in an open source project.

   The second topic is one I’m super excited about:

2. Using the AT as the official record for descriptive metadata generation of archival discovery standards such as MARC and EAD and DC. I’m currently working on this project at NYU, and it involves the integrating EAD and MARC into one ILS end-user display (using Primo)  and also ensuring correct DC metadata harvesting for OAI.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Archivists’ Toolkit, it is basically an open source CMS for archival data (www.archiviststoolkit.org).

Mike Rush asked the organizer list, “What’s protocol re: PPT? Should I have slides prepared for my talk or is winging a live demo acceptable?” I responded to him via e-mail, and he encouraged me to post my response on the blog:

Regarding talks, I can only speak from my own limited experience. I never spotted a single slide deck at THATCamp 2008, perhaps outside of the DorkShorts. I think that in general people winged it in the sessions, and had something at least halfway-rehearsed at DorkShorts, lest they spend their entire 3-minute slot fighting with wireless connections and video adapters.

At the crowdsourcing transcription/annotation session I presented at, the other person with something to demo and I arrived in the room a bit ahead of time to figure out how to connect our laptops. Once the session started, our organizer turned the floor over to me to lay out some background on existing tools. I then spent about 10 or 15 minutes running through a demo of my software, with frequent interruptions and suggestions from the other participants. The other developer spent a bit more time on his demo because his software was more mature, his interruptions were more frequent, and also because we were all interested in some of the details of how he’d implemented overlapping markup. A general discussion followed which included folks hooking their laptops up to demo how some commercial packages handled visualizing document transcription.

At Dork Shorts (one of three Dork Short sessions we had that year), I had prepared a 5-minute introduction to GraphViz, which included an intro to the dot language, a well-prepared demo of generating dot by parsing a static TEI document, and a blink-and-you-miss-it display of how I’m using dot/GraphViz to visualize dynamic data within my own software. Because that session was lightly attended, I got to interact with the other participants more than I anticipate for THATCamp Austin. For this event, I plan to prepare a solid 5-minute demo, in the event that I get to demo at DorkShorts but don’t get to demo at a regular session.

None of this should be interpreted as prescriptive, however — it’s always hard to figure out how representative your own experience is, or how helpful it might be when transmuted into advice.

Here at the Hoover Institution Archives,  I work closely with culturally rich materials and serve both a local and international community of researchers.  I would love to engage in dialogue about the representation of linguistically diverse historical content in the digital environment.   What tools have been developed and adopted by the global digital archives community?  Which institutions produce bilingual finding aids?  I’d like to explore the use of intelligent character recognition systems in the transcription of digital manuscript and the search/display of CJK, Cyrillic and Khmer text.   (For example, Taiwan’s National Digital Archives Program & the Digital Archive Architecture Lab have the 缺字系統 or “Missing Unencoded Chinese Characters API.”)

Other prospective al dente discussion topics that I’d like to toss around:

• Mobile devices and handheld technologies in archives (i.e., iPhone apps, QR codes, etc.)
• Using DRUPAL as a digital asset management system and content discovery tool
• Hyper localization as grassroots outreach to community-based archives
• Timeline tools

Please forgive my fragmented thoughts — I seem to have more questions than answers.  Look forward to meeting fellow campers!

Hello all –

We’ve run into a slight kink with the wireless access at the conference site – we’ll need to get all your mailing addresses (the kind where you get actual snail mail) in order to get you set up.  Please reply with your full address (home or work is fine) as soon as you can to your faithful planning committee (and don’t worry, this address won’t appear anywhere).

Thanks for your patience – we look forward to seeing you all soon!

I would LOVE to get into a discussion about correlations and possible interplay between archival theory and practice (what might be termed “traditional information technology”) and the work of thinkers and practitioners who are tackling similar problems in a purely digital realm.  I am see lots of potential connections between these two fields, but little actual cross-fertilization of ideas.

For example, there is an ever-expanding pool of practitioners who call themselves Information Architects, and I have been struck over and over again by how similar many of their methodologies and ideals are to those of archival processing.  One of the ways in which the Information Architecture Institute defines IA is as  ”The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities, and software to support findability and usability.” Replace “web sites, intranets, online communities and software” with “primary sources” and you’ve got a pretty good definition of archival processing, yet I am unaware of major collaboration between the two fields.

I’m particularly  interested in defining what usability (an idea borrowed from  human-computer interaction studies) means in an archival context. What are the qualities of a highly usable archival collection? What would it mean to make usability a goal of processing, and how might that change what archivists do?

I would be interested in beginning a conversation about concrete strategies for  electronically-forward-thinking archivists working with less-than-ideal technological support.

Some archives are blessed with dedicated staff for implementing and managing digital projects, but for many of us working in smaller institutions, digital projects often become an “extra” function that we juggle with enough other duties to fill a full-time job.  Even if our institutions have the manpower to tackle larger digital projects, we may struggle with communicating archival needs to IT professionals accustomed to serving other types of internal clients.  These real-life conditions necessarily places limits on what we can do, perhaps even what we responsibly should attempt to do.

Rather than just ranting, though, I’d like to identify principles and technologies that can help us make the most of sub-optimal technological circumstances.

For example, in my current position, I have inherited a large volume of non-standard metadata stored in a proprietary, closed database.  I am not in a position to migrate the data out of that database, but as its custodian, I have developed practices that — I hope — make that data more useful and will make it easier for my successors to migrate it forward.

I can also share success we’ve had at my institution using Greenstone, an open-source digital library software, to provide online access to the Edmund S. Muskie Oral History Project, a collection of over 400 interviews.

Finally, I also have recent experience with doing in-house (not outsourced) digitization of open-reel (aka “reel to reel”) and cassette audio tapes for preservation and access, which I am always happy to share.

Given the investment of time and money required to recreate useful EAD instances (for those uninitiated into Encoded Archival Description, see http://www.loc.gov/ead/ and http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/ead/.), it’s critical to squeeze as many derivative outputs from the data as possible.  HTML is the minimum (via XSLT), PDF is nice (via XSL-FO), but what else can be wrung from EAD, the clammy dishtowel of archival description?

I’d like to present on how to write XSLT style sheets for some combination of the following: generating tab-delimited text files for use in creating labels (or anything else friendly to forms) via Mail Merge; generating folder-level MODS records for an entire collection; and making batch editorial changes to a group of EAD instances.  My demos will be with EAD, but can be applied to any flavor of XML.

Here are a couple of things that have been floating across my brain that I’d like to talk about and at least could partially help lead a discussion about:

• Using Drupal as a CMS. I use Drupal pretty heavily; my primary interest these days is building it out as a digital library platform and using to build an integrated archival description and access system.
• The Semantic Web for archivists/humanists. I’ve been doing a lot of presentations on this lately, and I’ll be giving a talk on this with a slightly narrower scope during the EAD Roundtable at SAA (“Linked Data and Archival Description”).
• Document oriented databases and their applications in archives and digital humanities. This includes things like CouchDB and MongoDB.
• Why archives are conceptually different from x. In doing a lot of work with data modeling for archival projects I’ve come across some thorny issues with the nature of archival practice. Some of these are not newly recognized; in fact, some were understood even 20-25 years ago. I’d like to try to start finally hashing these out – a few papers are sure to be in the works.

The University of Maryland, College Park, offers a unique opportunity to particularly promising incoming undergads with specific interests: participating in (perhaps “residing in” is more appropriate) a Living and Learning Program.  What does that mean?

“What are living-learning communities?
Living-learning communities are specialized residential programs initiated by and having direct connections with faculty and specific academic units/departments within the University’s Division of Academic Affairs. In partnership with Resident Life staff and other student services staff at the University, these faculty and academic administrators link the curricular and residential experiences in ways that create opportunities for deeper understanding and integration of classroom material.”

Last month, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities was invited to submit a proposal for a Digital Humanities L&L program – we’ve dubbed it “Digital Cultures and Creativity.” While still very much in its infancy – in fact, still being evaluated! – there is plenty to be discussed around developing a curriculum (be it an L&L program, certificate or otherwise)  for the digital humanities. Especially for incoming freshman, who are quite likely to have had limited exposure to the formal field.

• What topics and skills make up the core of DH?
• Do courses need to be specifically tailored to DH, or can you draw on other departments in order to offer more diverse options?
• If you do draw on other departments, how do you negotiate with the student and instructor to make sure the material maintains its relevance?
• Could/should a DH course replace a typical required IT course?
• Who teaches the courses? How are they structured? (Labs, lectures, discussion..)
• And, importantly.. how do we get the younger crowd interested in (or even aware of) digital humanities and entice the first pool of applicants to a DH program?

Definitely interested in the viewpoints of any prospective or currently practicing DH educators, especially at the undergraduate (or high school?!) level.

Origin Stories

The other idea I had is more on the squishy-feely side. It is awesome that a regional THATcamp came into being so quickly and efficiently (thank you, organizers!), but it’s striking that it was done as an offshoot of an archival conference. The number of archives and library presentations at DH09 surprised me as well. Maybe it’s just because I’m a total newb, but I though it might be fun to gather round the campfire and tell the story of how we came to this wondrous land of digital humanities.

I’d like to discuss an evolution in crowdsourcing as related to cultural heritage institutions. Staff at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian and NARA added images to Flickr Commons, and have found that some users enjoy adding metadata and interacting with the materials. Some museums (such as the ICA in Boston) allow visitors to tag art with keywords; exposing and filling a semantic gap between curators and the public. I’d like to talk about other things that we could do to engage users, and to go beyond the traditional model of “users taking information from archives” to a “two-way” model where users can give us their photos, tweets, GIS data, podcasts, pictures from their iPhones, etc in more of a conversational structure than has previously existed between archives and end user.

Can we use this as a way to meet users where they are? Will both parties receive something of “value” from the transaction, and how do we figure out what that “value” might be? How could a repository incorporate some of these ideas within the current boundaries of “collection” and what would need to change in order to add other ideas? How might institutions collaborate– locally, regionally, nationally, or across disciplines– to accomplish some of these things? I have lots of thoughts, and I’d like to talk with some like-minded people and come up with more ideas for reaching, engaging, and retaining users.

In my previous life as an English PhD student, I engaged in good old-fashioned archival research, traveling to a bricks-and-mortar archive to page through cartons of papers.  While mass digitization of these archival documents would have had the much-appreciated benefit of making the material accessible from home, saving my meager grad student funds, what I really yearned for as I sat alone at my reading room table was some way to connect with the other researchers who had made use of these collections.  As archival materials become available online, researchers’ relationship to their status as material objects that have passed through the hands of other researchers threatens to become even more tenuous – but the online environment also seems uniquely suited to facilitating connections among researchers using digital materials, if the tools are put in place for such networks to be visible and accessible.

I’d like to discuss how archives could shape their technological practices to promote networking among researchers, and archivists, with similar interests.  Potential topics include issues of implementation (What would these tools actually look like?  What specific functions would they serve?), ethics (What privacy issues would be at stake?), and context (How would such projects interface with the larger constellation of online social networks?).

These are ideas I’ve been kicking around in my head (ouch) for a while as I’ve been transitioning from professor-in-training to archivist-in-training, and I would welcome the chance to find out more about what others have been thinking, or doing, in this direction.

I’ve been working on using WP to present browseable, searchable collection level records for archival and special collection material. It is in beginning stages but I can demo and talk about some of the logic and choices behind it. It is largely inspired by Rob Cox’s work on UMarmot and a paper he gave at the PACSCL Something New for Something Old conference. I would be curious to hear how other people have been using WP as a CMS, rather than just a blogging platform. I’d also be interested in hearing about other open source CMS use to display collection information, particularly projects with Drupal.

Other things I am interested in hearing about, but wouldn’t be able to present on:  Oral history, particulary low cost, low tech barrier ways to present full oral history audio files online; discussions about oral history in general; outreach to and documentation of diverse communities; crowdsourcing.

At Dickinson College, my colleagues and I developed a Drupal-based archives reference blog as a way to better manage internal processes regarding external reference traffic while at the same time creating a new source of discoverable information. (For a little more description of the reference blog, see my guest post on Mark Matienzo’s blog.)  Building on the success of that project, we would like to use Drupal to develop a content management system for the presentation of archives/special collections material; one that is more flexible and is interactive – two things that CONTENTdm (which we use quite heavily) is not. I’d like to explore the crowdsourcing possibilities, allowing greater access to materials and allowing users the opportunity to further describe and interact with our materials (and, hopefully, with each other as well). I’d be very interested in hearing how others might imagine such a tool being designed to best serve our users and ourselves.

Hi, I’m Megan Winget, and I’m an Assistant Professor at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. I’m currently working on a grant-funded project focused on videogame collections (specifically archival collections from industry sources). I’m presenting some of the initial findings from this research at SAA (Thursday 10AM), but at THATCamp, I would like to present something a little more general, although still related to videogames.

In talking to videogame developers and players, I’ve run across people who create collections of materials with which traditional collecting institutions (like libraries, museums and archives) have no experience. Examples of these materials range from the relatively straightforward: hours of gameplay recorded on digital video, home made machinima, walkthrough files, and guild wikis; to the more unusual: terabyte-sized collections of in-game log and chat files, and “books” created and used in-game and “decaying” through mismanagement.

In my proposed session, I’m hoping to get a chance to discuss the ramifications that these kinds of materials will have on collecting institutions’ collection development policies. Not only are there challenges inherent in the materials themselves, these kinds of materials highlight the mutability of the ideas of “a collection,” and “collectors.”

Some of the specific issues I’ve been considering…

Related to the materials:

• Collecting institutions lack the vocabulary to define and describe new media materials
• Have to allow for a different model of collection-building (Internet allows for easy copying and storage) (collector does not go through traditional acquisition channels) (concept of authority almost entirely dismissed from process)
• Collected materials are not typically physical, and not necessarily made by authoritative creators (artists, musicians, directors, choreographers…) vs. (invested “amateurs” = guys in basements)
• How to determine value? Without vocabulary and model for creation, it’s difficult for an institution to tell if materials are “important” enough to collect

Related to the evolving concept of “the collection:”

• What does it mean to collect digital objects?
• Who is the collector and how is their viewpoint valuable?
• Why are the materials being collected?
• How are they being collected?
• How do people decide what to collect?
• Do the collected items need to be monetarily valuable?  (culturally valuable?) (contextually valuable?)
• How does the individual’s collection relate to the institutional collection?
• Are there any other eras where the idea of collecting changed? Where people tended to collect stuff that other, more authoritative sources eschewed? (visionary collectors, avant garde, futures trading in cultural objects)

Hope I get a chance to discuss this! If anyone else is thinking of talking about collecting institutions, the role of authority, and non-traditional materials, maybe we could have a session together. Looking forward to the THATCamp!

I’m the coordinator of the Texas Heritage Digitization Initiative at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. I’m inviting/challenging folks to help me find ways to include more resources in Texas Heritage Online, our federated search tool (www.texasheritageonline.org), which I’m in the process of redesigning. We use Z39.50 and SRU and OAI-PMH to gather materials, and I do some selective web harvesting for other resources. What else? Custom search, OpenSearch, API mashups — if you help me figure out how to add it in, I’ll do my darnedest to make it work!

My name is John Jones (more about me), and I’m a grad student at the University of Texas at Austin.

I’m planning to present on my current Twitter research. I’m investigating the way in which Twitter conversations are rhetorically embodied; that is, the ways in which writers in digital mediums depend on embodied features of communication like their identity or physical location and use these embodied features to establish authority and agency. In short, I will discuss the role of Twitter’s textual interface in creating our cybernetic selves.

I am also interested in doing a lightning talk about my work at UT’s Computer Writing & Research Lab (CWRL). The CWRL produces research and classroom assignments centered on technology use. This summer I’ve been researching iPhone application development for education and learning and I’d like to share some of the practical insights I’ve had during this project.

I am a certificate of advanced study (post-Master’s) candidate at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. I will present at THATCamp Austin 2009 on issues relating to the digital divide and digital humanities. I would like to discuss how (and if) digital humanities work can alleviate digital inequalities through social inclusion in the creation of online community archives. I am very interested in the community archives work coming out of the U.K. in the past circa 10 years, which because of Commanet, has largely been created and circulated via the internet. This grassroots movement has, in turn, shaken up the archives profession in the UK. See the Community Access to Archives Report, and notice also its emphasis on digital community archives. I wonder why the U.S. and the American archival community has not jumped on this program and its underlying philosophy of democratizing the creation of communal archives more aggressively. I argue that instead of digital humanities, which implies an elite project rooted in the university, we should be arguing for digital humanity for all.

We will be presenting an online application called Distributed Biography. This is an application that lets a group of people contribute their own stories about someone they all know, or some place they’ve all been, or something they’ve all experienced. What emerges from this collection of stories is a biography that offers a real sense of understanding this person, place or thing.

In the case of person-al biographies, firsthand accounts give you one view of that person, a view that centers on a particular relationship. For example, I knew a woman named Linda. She was my mother. And that’s how I knew her – as a mother. She died when I was a kid. When I’d ask people about her, they’d say things like, “She was a beautiful person” or “She had a great sense of humor.” These summaries don’t tell me anything about who she was.

So I’m managing her Distributed Biography. My dad is contributing stories that will help me understand her as his wife, my grandmother is contributing stories that will help me understand my mother as her daughter, and so on. This biography will let me, or anyone else, come to understand who my mother was.

Distributed Biography is kinda like a Chuck Close painting. A photomosaic. Each story is one pixel in the life of the subject. You can read those stories when you’re close up. But step back, and an image emerges.

During THATCamp Weijia Xu and I  will demo two in-progress interactive visualizations that show characteristics/contents/relationships/provenance/size/density of electronic records collections. We want to listen from the participants whether these representations allow them to “make sense” of the collections, to understand their structure and to identify parts and stories within. Also, if these representations are useful for describing a given collection and to plan for their preservation. We are interested in feed-back related to developing visual literacy  for abstract representations of collections and in finding useful visual metaphors to represent the myriad aspects of content, structure, and context of collections.

Maria Esteva

Here’s my half (or three-quarter) baked rant:

Tired of hearing yet another presentation on how to parse the SMTP header to preserve email? Don’t bother! Archivists and digital preservationists dealing with email need to realize that the email model as it has been traditionally deployed by institutions is dead. If nothing else, email is moving to the cloud. That shift creates a wholly different set of implications and challenges for archivists. But the larger issue is the shifting demographics of email users. While this rant is aimed at email, it can also be applied to almost any emerging technology as I feel a more than fair share of our professional archival colleagues aren’t really ready for the electronic records challenges of the 21st century.

I want to discuss these challenges and issues (to see if I’m not completely nuts)  and brainstorm solutions.

This is based in some research and writing I’ve been doing, but I’m also interested in long term strategies to bring the representation of voices in the humanities more in line with the societies they serve and come out of.  Of special interest to me are metrics for both diversity and social media and coordinated strategies for inclusion that take into account the larger than anticipated  segment of the US (and maybe world?) population that is uninterested in being online.  Areas of professional (archivists)  interest are ways to attract a more diverse base of professionals, the relationship of educational/certification on professional diversity, ways to interact with communities that have been traditionally ignored, and some way to connect the white, middle-aged, female profession with a digital native, multicultural/multiethnic world.

But this is a big topic and could take any number of tangents if people are interested in the general concept.

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has been encouraging Federal agencies to consider the use of “big bucket schedules,” or large aggregation schedules, to schedule records.

Flexible scheduling provides for concrete disposition instructions that may be applied to groupings of information and/or categories of records. Flexibility is in defining the record groupings, which can contain multiple records series and electronic systems. The difference from the traditional scheduling approach is that the unit to be scheduled is not the individual records series or an electronic system, but all records in all media relating to a work process, group of related work processes, or a broad program area to which the same length of retention should be applied.

Flexible scheduling using “big buckets” or large aggregations is an application of disposition instructions against a body of records grouped at a level of aggregation greater than the traditional file series or electronic systems. The goal of this type of flexible scheduling is to provide for the disposition of records at a level of aggregation that best supports the business needs of agencies, while ensuring the documentation necessary to protect legal rights and ensure government accountability. In theory, “big buckets” simplify disposition instructions in a way that may be more useful to agencies implementing an Electronic Records Management Application.

For a variety of reasons, NARA is cautious about the application of big buckets to permanent records. NARA encourages an agency to define the level of risk- i.e., the degree to which records are in danger of improper disposition- before proceeding.

However, agencies are submitting schedules applying the concepts of “big buckets” to permanent records, and NARA is approving these schedules. The National Archives will be accessioning records of all types that have been organized using big buckets.

The goal of this presentation would be to present the concepts of big bucket scheduling to a group of archivists, discuss possible advantages of big bucket schedules, and to hopefully discuss (Web 2.0 or Social Media) tools that may help archivists to describe, preserve, and provide reference service to the records aggregates.

This presentation has not been completely thought out, and I am seeking the advice of archivists who may have suggestions for NARA as it moves toward the description of these record types.

My proposed session idea stems my experience as a secondary school history teacher and my efforts to incorporate social media tools and resources into my pedagogy. Specifically I’m interested in the use of Diigo to improve student research, how to use Twitter to foster collaborative work and more in-depth communication, how to incorporate blogs into the classroom as the primary means of student writing, and other similar topics.

Broadly, the session would focus on and discuss:
1) designing and implementing the social media classroom; and/or
2) using social media to improve and enhance student research and writing

I’m interested in defining memory institutions online instead of physically. I am particularly focused on keeping primary sources in communities for identity and evidential purposes. Since I currently work in a public library, I love to think about ways we can create crowdsourcing opportunities for the public to interact with our digital objects. I’d like to talk about ways that large (academic or government) memory institutions can work with community-based, local, as well as individual memory institutions to create amorphous digital archives. I will mention my experience with collaboration for digitization as well as the movement toward grant-funded state/regional scanning centers.

I will be watching out for discussions about crowdsourcing, oral history, digital curation and preservation, user-friendly online archival finding aids and tools, and other cool new stuff. (Basically I want to see and hear everything at THATCamp.)

I’d like to be part of a session on crowdsourcing work that has traditionally been led by scholars in an institutional setting.  My own effort along these lines has been FromThePage, a web-based tool for transcribing and annotating  handwritten manuscripts.

I demoed FromThePage at THATCamp 2008 while it was still under development, in private alpha.  At the beginning of this year, I started editing a transcription project in earnest and gained some passionate and talented users. These users have transcribed hundreds of pages, researched subjects mentioned within the texts, and even tracked down and scanned lost documents.  At the same time, however, I’ve discovered that many of the anonymous viewers of the site are actually researching the same subjects that I am.  Since even a passing comment can add valuable insights, I would love to be able to engage these fellow researchers, connect with them and draw upon what they know.

Would anyone be interested in a session on crowdsourcing; discussing how to motivate volunteers and engage with the online public to produce high-quality work?

Other conversations I’d like to have at THATCamp Austin are:

• How to integrate with standard exhibit management systems like ContentDM or Omeka, and whether OAI-PMH or OAI-ORE are at all useful for that.
• How to mine genealogy and census databases to identify connections between people in historic documents.  (Sometimes this goal is described as a “FaceBook of the Dead”.)
• How to get from project to product — when a piece of software is good enough for in-house use, how much more needs to be done to fit it for release as OSS?

We still have room for about a dozen more people at THATCamp Austin this year.  If you’ve got an idea and are willing to take your chances on leftover T-shirts, please send us an application.

Good news!

Acceptance emails have gone out and we look forward to seeing such an interesting and diverse group in Austin on August 11th.

Your email will contain instructions for signing up to post to this blog, so get registered and start posting your session and collaboration ideas. As always, if you have any questions at all, feel free to ask.

Many thanks for the fantastic applications we’ve received so far – we should have many interesting sessions taking place at THATCamp Austin. Please do continue to submit applications if you’d like to attend – and remember that active participants need not be ‘presenters’ per se – there is plenty of scope for collaboration and discussion, so you can send us a topic you’d like to talk about with other campers.

The cutoff date for applicants who would like a t-shirt is July 31st.  If you’d like to take your chances on the apparel front, August 8th is the absolute final day to get your applications in.  Beginning August 1st, attendees will be sent details on how to post to this blog so that session ideas can take root before everyone arrives in Austin.

Thank you for your interest thus far – and feel free to ask any questions!

Please use this thread as an initial resource to discuss THATCamp Austin planning or to pose any questions about applications or any other concerns you may have. All comments are welcomed.

THATCamp Austin is a user-generated “unconference” to be held in Austin, TX, on August 11, 2009. More details are available here, and applications are now being accepted. Just include your name, your email, your Twitter handle, what you would like to present or discuss and we’ll take it from there – you can see more details here.

Whether you are in town for SAA or a local with an interest in digital humanities (since this is ‘the humanities and technology camp,’ after all), we hope to see you at Mezes Hall on the University of Texas, Austin campus!

Please visit the open thread to kick off discussions or to post any questions.