As a contribution to the Day of Digital Humanities, I’ve stopped procrastinating and editing in my head to post about my participation in the first THATCamp Southeast, March 4-6, 2011, at Emory University. This was also my first time participating in any THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp). Although I knew THATCamps are “unconferences,” I thought sending in session ideas beforehand then deciding on the schedule by voting on the first day would be tricky logistically. There may have been some friendly chaos, but the process was smoother than I expected, and THATCamp itself was great. Also, limiting the number of campers to 100 helped. Now I want every meeting to be an unconference.
Because I’m just starting to learn about digital humanities, I decided to sign up for BootCamp Southeast held the day before THATCamp. BootCamps are day-long introductions, including hands-on training, to various topics related to digital humanities. Of the three tracks (Digital Humanities Project, Programming, and Pedagogy), I chose Pedagogy because the THATCamp session idea I submitted related to digital humanities and teaching and learning.
The Pedagogy BootCamp was led by Wayne Morse and Chris Fearington from Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching. Session topics were Teaching with the Cloud, Visualizing Course Content, Engaging Students through Digital Storytelling. Although I was familiar with most of the tools covered during the pedagogy session, I appreciated talking with other participants and the session leaders about different ways of enhanching teaching and learning by using digital tools including Google Docs, wikis, blogs, prezi, Google Gadgets, and digital storytelling. Some of the Pedagogy BootCamp participants shared tips for using some of these tools in the classroom.
A big takeaway for me was our group discussion about evaluating how well students use the technological tools versus how well they know the subject. How do you balance the two skills? Group consensus was that students should be expected to learn good presentation skills as part of any discipline. Being clear about expectations and modeling best practices at the start of a class or project are important so that students know what is expected of them technologically. (my notes)
Also learned about some great digital humanities projects with pedagogical applications:
- Brian Croxall’s Interactive Timeline – create a timeline that students can then fill in with text, audio, video, images related to a topic
- Emory University English Department faculty member who will be teaching a Shakespeare class with students using iPads to access content and do assignments
Take a look at Emory’s Center for Interactive Teaching, they have some great resources on their site.
For the second half of BootCamp, we combined the pedagogy and programming tracks for an Introduction to Content Management systems (WordPress, Drupal, and Omeka) and Creating a Web Presence for Yourself or Your Projects. I’d never heard of Omeka, which is a platform for displaying artifacts as well as a digital exhibition space. Also, I’m expanding my Web presence by creating this personal blog. (my notes)
Saturday was the start of THATCamp with the full group of 100 or so participants. I attended the following sessions and include links to my notes. Notes and summaries from these and other sessions, as well as reflections from other campers, are available under the Post-Camp Sharing category of the THATCamp Southeast site.
Saturday
Digital Humanities in Higher Education: Exploring the Combination of Techniques of Instructional Design, the Humanities, and Digital Media in an Archival Format
David Phillips, Ann Cunningham, Lauren Pressley from Wake Forest University convened this session where they introduced their project to create a digital archive of what is happening in the communities surrounding the university. (my notes)
Open Access Publishing
Best part of this session was having an editor of an open access journal in music and an editor of an archaeological journal that is considering moving online (also a number of librarians there). I have organized a number of open-access related events at UAB, some involving journal editors, but it was good to learn more about the challenges journal editors are facing in the move to electronic publication. (my notes)
Kindles in the Writing Classroom
Caroline Barratt and Phoebe Acheson from University of Georgia Libraries described their collaboration with an English department professor on using Kindles to access texts for an environmental literature class. (my notes)
Leveraging Social Web Crowdsourcing
I was interested in this session because I’d like to develop a project involving students crowdsourcing a bibliography for a class, either from scratch or by adding to and commenting on a research guide I develop for a class. Takeaway here was that such projects have to be integrated into course assignments in order to get students to participate. (my notes)
Sunday
Crowdsourcing and Teaching
This session focused more on using crowdsourcing tools as part of courses rather than for scholarly projects. One camper had used the crowdsourced bibliography project successfully in one of his classes, so that was encouraging. Much of our discussion was about pedagogical issues, including learning styles and the need to stress the importance of the process and exploration aspects of an assignment. Documenting and analyzing your process is as important as the final product. (my notes)
Envisioning Librarian/Scholar Collaborations
For the last session of THATCamp, I actually started in the Digital Pedagogy & Digital Humanities discussion but then “decamped” to the Envisioning Librarian/Scholar Collaborations session after seeing some of the tweets by campers in that session. I think everyone in this session was excited about the chance to talk openly about misconceptions and possible collaborations between librarians and scholars. (Here are my sparse notes, but also read group-edited notes and a summary from Miriam Posner.)
There was also a designated room for campers who wanted to have spur of the moment sessions that were not on the whiteboard.
Personal takeaways: I probably tweeted more during three days at thatcamp than I have in a month previously. Tweeting during sessions was common, and I even posted an idea brought up in my crowdsourcing session to the people in a libguides session. This type of interactivity was great, but I had to get up to speed on catching and responding to tweets addressed to me. Awesome camper Adelle Frank gathered our tweets by session and posted them on her blog.
The variety of personal and scholarly interests of the THATCampers was energizing, and I also appreciated that everyone was expected to contribute to sessions. You usually don’t get a chance for the type of back and forth discussion (and even starting projects) in regular conferences.
THATCamp Southeast was a good introduction to different aspects of digital humanities (pedagogy, programming, collection building, community building), but I still need to do some more reading to get a better idea of it as a field of study.
Defining digital humanities came up many times during Camp, and I can tell from the discussions there and elsewhere that the definition as well as the moniker itself are up for debate. I’m wary of setting digital humanities aside from humanities disciplines, but after meeting other THATCampers, I can see the draw of digital humanities as a place for scholars who want to use technology to work across traditional disciplinary lines. As an elevator-question response, I like Brian Croxall’s, our THATCamp MC and the Emerging Technologies Librarian in Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, definition posted on twitter: “My #dayofdh definition: When I’m asked, I like to say that digital humanities is just one method for doing humanistic inquiry.”
