South Jersey Digital

If you have creative ideas on civic engagement through new media, then the Looking@Democracy contest offers a great opportunity to try them out. Sponsored by the Illinois Humanities Council with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the competition will offer $100,000 in prizes to short digital media pieces that illustrate either why government is important to our lives or how to strengthen democracy in America together. Formats for digital media they mention include videos, audio clips, animations, music videos, infographics, and Facebook and iPhone apps.

The call for proposals is here.

The competition begins February 4, 2013 and closes April 30, 2013.

Today is Day of Digital Humanities 2012. Since 2009, faculty associated with the program in Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta have asked members of the digital humanities community to spend the day blogging about their activities as a “Day in the Life of Digital Humanities,” to familiarize people with what digital humanities scholarship looks like and to foster bonds within the community. This year, the Day has become allied with CenterNet, and international consortium of Digital Humanities Centers, of which SJCDH is a member. A recurring feature of the Day of DH has been for participants to answer the question “How Do You Define DH?” The responses now form an impressive repository of reflections on what DH is — which is a topic if seemingly endless fascination.

As I write this, there are 298 people signed up to participate. Since it is a global network, entries started more than twelve hours ago. I noticed one entry from an American scholar working in Vietnam. This is my second year participating in Day of DH. I announced my participation in last year’s day here. My stream for this year’s Day can be found here. This year, I am joined in participating in Day of DH by Stockton colleague Adeline Koh, whose stream can be found here. I think it is still possible to join the discussion, but even at this point, it’s probably enough to just follow along to see what the digital humanities community thinks it is up to. You can follow along on Twitter at @DayofDH @adelinekoh @jtheibault and hashtag #dayofdh.

Colleagues Adeline Koh and Laura Zucconi participated in THATCamp Games at the University of Maryland, College Park in January. Adeline is now an experienced THATCamper while this was Laura’s first time at a THATCamp. And the focus on Games was particularly apt, since Laura is one of the co-creators of Stockton’s entry into the digital humanities/serious games community, Pox in the City.

I am pleased that Laura agreed to write about her impressions of THATCamp games. Here is her report:

THATCamp Games Blog

My first THATCamp brought a mixture of anxiety and anticipation. Although I was looking forward to the creative spontaneity of an “unconference,” not having something prepared (like I do for every conference) left me a bit worried about how I could make a meaningful contribution.
I opted for a morning session on introductory programming in Unity that kick started my brain to ponder exactly how a game world looks and acts – game physics, a useful skill for my digital archaeology project. By the afternoon, the more theoretical sessions on designing RPGs and ARGs for educational purposes had me chatting away with new friends as we created a live action scenario navigating immigration procedures at Ellis Island. History lends itself well to RPGs but other campers noted disciplines like literature tend to be more problematic. Students can recreate a passage from a novel reinforcing plot elements but how do you get them to understand literary theory terminology? At this point, I noticed a good number of campers who want to use RPGs in the classroom have only experienced on-line gaming; they never played the ol’ pen-and-paper style of RPGs. This limited their notions of RPG use in the classroom to issues like the mechanics of leveling characters while fueling anxiety about plotting every moment of the game.
Throughout the day, campers tweeted ideas discussed in one session that led to them being bandied about in another. This “on the fly” aspect fascinated me. I never felt that I missed out on a session even though it was held two floors below my chair. People sought me out between sessions asking if I was Laura the Archaeologist, chatting and taking photos. I assumed my tweets were popular but the alternate truth would soon manifest. Through twitter and Google Docs, Adeline Koh and I organized an impromptu session of RuneQuest, a PnP fantasy role playing game that uses percentage dice rolls to determine skill success; it ran intermittently on the second day.
Experience with RQ since the mid-80s allowed me to quickly mock up and GM an adventure without all the rule books tucked under my arm. My hope was to show people the fluidity and adaptability of a pen-and-paper RPG for a classroom setting. On-line games suffer from strict preprogrammed parameters; it’s the nature of computers to only do what they are told. A live GM can change details in response to player actions creating a more dynamic environment. The instructor does not have to pre-plan or restrict student options using PnP games as a model. Key points or concepts that the instructor wishes to highlight need to be sketched out but the path connecting them can meander as the class sees fit with only slight nudges from the GM to prevent them from wandering too far afield, a skill akin to guiding a standard classroom discussion.
Additionally, the PnP model provides a solution to the earlier problem of using RPGs to teach literary theory. The world is whatever the GM wishes to make it, at that moment, characters sheets can have skills added to them at any time during the game. If the class focuses on Gothic Literature, they don’t have to play characters within a specific novel such as Victor Frankenstein. Instead, students can play character archetypes like the 19th c. scientist or novelist. Their skill sets can include literary terms such as “metaphor.” A student wishing to use the metaphor skill must construct an actual metaphor and/or explain how it advances the game action. The GM can then adjust plus or minus to the skill roll depending on how well the student understands and applies the concept.
We didn’t finish the game by the debriefing session at the end of the second day but a plan was in place to continue over the coming months with Google Hangout. Feeling pretty good and popular, I listened to the debriefing which announced the winner of the ARG. THATCamp Games was an ARG?? The clues hidden in our t-shirts and the signs posted around the building directed players to seek out, collect, the badge avatars of specific campers. That explains why everyone wanted me to hold up my badge in the photos, an icon of Laura Croft adorned it. As the session broke up, a camper approached me with the familiar line “You’re Laura the Archaeologist?” I politely told him the ARG is over. “No no” he said, “you’re the one working on the Pox and the City game. I want to talk to you about using video games in history of medicine.”

It’s a particularly busy time of year for Stockton faculty attending digital conferences. Last weekend, THATCamp Philly took place at the beautiful conference center of the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. I was there, along with Stockton colleagues Adeline Koh and Deb Gussman, and Burlington County College instructor and Stockton alum William Wend and around 75 other participants from the Greater Delaware Valley. The first day of the conference consisted of “BootCamp” sessions. I missed the opening session on Data Manipulation for Non-Programmers, but got there in time for an excellent Introduction to XML presented by Terry Catapano of Columbia University Library and Jordon Steele of Johns Hopkins University Library. Their overview was a model of clarity, though we didn’t wade into the waters of actually writing our own XML code. Introduction to XML was one of three concurrent sessions; the others focused on Tools for Oral History and Online Exhibit-building with Omeka. The BootCamp sessions ended with a good overview of tools and techniques for Project Management in creating digital projects by Delphine Khanna of Temple University Library (and if you are noticing a trend in institutional homes of the presenters, yes, there were a lot of librarians and archivists in attendance).

The “unconference” part of THATCamp Philly started early Saturday morning. Usually four sessions ran concurrently and it was often hard to decide which to choose. In the first round, I joined folks from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Humanities Center at Rutgers-Camden to discuss strategies for developing an Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. The essays written so far focus strongly on the city itself, but the editors have a strong interest in viewing Greater Philadelphia in broad terms, including most of South Jersey. My next session was discussing the idea of a Greater Delaware Valley Digital Humanities Center. There seems to be a strong interest in maintaining connections between the digital community that came to THATCamp and to sharing knowledge and resources with smaller institutions to help them cross a digital threshold. I will look to the MARCH website to see if steps to consolidating the discussion continue. I finally ran into my Stockton colleagues at the third session, on small scale digital editions and collections. This session was proposed by Deb Gussman in relation to her own work creating a digital edition of the works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick. A lively discussion on the merits of creating “an edition” or “an app” for a work ensued. I finished up my THATCamp experience with a session on Linked Open Data. I was straying a bit beyond my area of familiarity there, but found the session very enlightening. The central theme of the session is “why don’t more scholars know about LOD?” The challenge is to prove the value of it to uninformed or skeptical scholars. To learn more about Linked Open Data check out the LODLAM website.

Many participants at THATCamp Philly covered the conference in blogs and on Twitter. To learn more, go to philly2011.thatcamp.org or @THATCampPhilly and #thatcampphilly on Twitter.

Meanwhile, at another conference, Lisa Rosner was one of 60 recent recipients of grants from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities to present an overview of her work at the Digital Project Leaders’ Workshop in Washington on Tuesday. I experienced the success of Lisa’s presentation vicariously through Twitter, where many tweeted about the clever title of her game “Pox in the City” and the engaging design that will eventually make it possible to play the virus as well as the doctor trying to suppress it. Lisa presented along side scholars doing crowd-sourced transcriptions of old restaurant menus, editable iPad apps of the works of Shakespeare for performance, gazetteers of the ancient world, and translation and transcription tools for Spanish paleography. The meeting garnered a lot of attention, which you can follow at the Twitter hashtag #sug2011.

And finally, today is the start of another fascinating conference being held at Stockton at the Seaview, the 43rd annual International Visual Literacy Association meeting. A number of Stockton faculty are scheduled to present at the conference, including me. Indeed, I’m kind of nervous that my presentation on Visualizations in history is in the first round of papers on Thursday. I’ve not attended the conference before and don’t know what to expect. But organizers Jung Lee and Frank Ceretto have assured me that it is a supportive and interesting audience. Among the keynote speakers is Stockton’s Wendel White, who will talk about “Hidden in Plain Sight: African American Artifacts and Architecture in the American Landscape.” It will be interesting to see the various forms that visual literacy will take in the conference presentations.

Not really… though it might seem that way, even though I did not follow through on my promise of a follow-up post after THATCamp Jersey Shore, last April. Fortunately, several participants at the conference contributed their own observations at the official THATCamp Jersey Shore website. Thanks to Travis Kirspel and Dael Norwood for their detailed and enthusiastic comments. Lisa also conveniently drew together comments about the conference on our SJCDH News and Events page. She linked to the positive observations by Sarah Brown at her own blog and Stockton alum, William Wend’s extensive notes for all of the sessions he attended: online collaboration, open source tools, games, engaging with massive humanities data sets, and Omeka. Many thanks to Bill for sharing that information for everyone. It is possible that any or all of these posts may eventually be published as part of a new publishing initiative from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University called PressForward, which has announced a Proceedings of THATCamp as part of its initial publications plan.

If all of that piques your interest in THATCamp once again, you might consider attending THATCamp Philly, scheduled for September 23-24. There is still one more day to register. Registration closes on September 8. Adeline Koh and I have already registered. I have also already registered for THATCamp Pedagogy, which will be held October 15-16 at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Unfortunately, registration for THATCamp Pedagogy is already closed. They are full. I just barely got my own registration in under the wire. I will be sure to report on the sessions there, which will focus on how best to integrate new media into the undergraduate classroom.

The day after Labor Day is Stockton’s traditional first day of the new year. The upcoming year should be an exciting one. At the very end of last school year we opened a grand new student center, which changes the landscape of the college, mostly to the better. This year marks the 40th anniversary of instruction at Stockton. A number of events are planned to celebrate the anniversary. An online catalog of the celebration may be found here. Stockton is also in the running to host one of the presidential or vice-presidential debates in 2012. We should here the results of that plan some time this fall. In the spirit of New Years’ resolutions, I will try to post more frequently at South Jersey Digital in the coming year.

While things were pretty quiet here at the blog during the summer, Lisa was very diligent about updating news about digital humanities and ARHU at the main SJCDH website. Posts there include a brief summary of THATCamp Jersey Shore from Lisa Rosner, a link to Stockton alum William Wend’s further observations on THATCamp, news about ARHU R&PD grants, images from Hannah Ueno’s digital portfolio, news of Lisa Rosner’s and Laura Zucconi’s NEH-ODH Start-up grant for “Pox and the City,” the launching of SHIGS, the Stockton Historical Geolocation Service, and news of various summer and fall activities from SJCDH affiliates. I’ll be updating some of that information here, but I encourage you to check out the news there first. It’s a testament to the vigor of digital humanities activity here at Stockton.

In the past year and a half, the THATCamp phenomenon has mushroomed. THATCamp Jersey Shore is the first to be held in the mid-Atlantic region, but a THATCamp New York City has been announced for the fall and there are plans afoot for a THATCamp Philly. Like THATCamp Jersey Shore, those conferences will be regional in focus. Although we are happy to attract participants from the whole country, it is only logical that most will be from the region. The regional focus means that THATCamp Jersey Shore will include a range of constituents for Digital Humanities, from people working in local libraries, archives, and museums to people working in R1 universities. This mixing of different kinds of practitioners is one of the strengths of the THATCamp experience.

A handful of THATCamps have been organized as much around a constituency as around a place. For example, the first regional THATCamp in Austin was held there to coincide with the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists. Immediately after THATCamp Jersey Shore, there will be a THATCamp at the National Council on Public History held in Pensacola, Florida.

I mention all of that by way of introducing a THATCamp to be held this summer expressly to consider issues in digital humanities affecting small liberal arts colleges. THATCamp LAC will be held at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin on June 4-5, 2011. It is scheduled for the same time as the fourth annual Ur-THATCamp at George Mason University, which is already filled to capacity, and there will be some opportunity for virtual conferencing between the two conferences. In many digital humanities settings, the particular interests and experiences of people working at liberal arts colleges often get swamped by the sheer number of participants from R1 universities. THATCamp LAC will provide a forum for discussing questions of infrastructural support for doing digital research and best practices for integrating pedagogy and technology. It actively solicits participation from students as well as faculty and administrators. If you find the THATCamp concept intriguing and want to see how it works in a forum directly concerned with the kinds of issues that touch us here at Stockton, I urge you to consider attending. Deadline for applications is April 18. You don’t need to overthink the application process. Just tell them that you work at a liberal arts college and you are interested in digital humanities work and you should be good to go.

What does the Carnegie Library Center of the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Atlantic City have in common with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University, the iLab at King’s College London, the Residential College of Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, the Automattic Lounge on Pier 38 in San Francisco, and a boat on the Seine River in Paris? It, too, will host a THATCamp!

THATCamp Jersey Shore will take place at the Carnegie Library on Monday, April 4 from 9:15-4:45 and Tuesday, April 5 from 9:15-12:00.

What is a THATCamp?

THATCamp is an acronym for The Humanities and Technology Camp. It is an “unconference” open to all who are interested in the digital humanities. The first THATCamp was held at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in 2008. Shortly after the second THATCamp at George Mason in June, 2009 people began organizing regional THATCamps, drawing on the expertise of the original founders of THATCamp but taking on local characteristics. The first regional THATCamp took place in Austin, Texas in August, 20009. Since then, there have been twenty-two regional THATCamps, held throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. THATCamp Jersey Shore is the twenty-third regional camp and the first in the Mid-Atlantic region.

The home page for THATCamp identifies the following key characteristics of a THATCamp:

• There are no spectators at a THATCamp; everyone participates.
• It is small and intimate, having anywhere from 25 or 50 to no more than 100 participants.
• It lasts no more than two days.
• It is not-for-profit and inexpensive; it’s funded by small sponsorships (e.g., for breakfast) and by passing the hat around to the participants. Attendance should be free, but attendees can donate to cover expenses if they want.
• It’s informal: there are no lengthy proposals, papers, or presentations. The emphasis is on discussion or on productive, collegial work.
• It is also non-hierarchical and non-disciplinary: THATCamps welcome graduate students, scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers and programmers, administrators, managers, and funders; people from the non-profit sector, the for-profit sector, and interested amateurs.
• Participants make sure to share their notes, slides, and other materials from THATCamp discussions before and after the event on the web and via social media.

Most of the “panels” at THATCamp will be assembled in the first hour of meeting, as participants put forward ideas about what they are interested in and find fellow participants with the same interests. In addition to these open panels, THATCamp Jersey Shore will include a series of BootCamp sessions. BootCamp sessions are designed to be more introductory workshops on skills and concepts important in the digital humanities. Several Stockton colleagues have generously agreed to lead BootCamp workshops, including Linda Feeney on tools for multi-lingual environments, Dan Gambert on Photoscape, Roberto Castillo on digital camcorders, Robert Koch on GIS, and Lisa Rosner on VisualEyes. We will also have outside experts leading workshops, including Bill Ferster on VisualEyes and Amanda French on Omeka.

Attending THATCamp is an ideal opportunity to find out what “Humanities 2.0″ (as featured in the New York Times is all about. If you are curious what goes on during the conference, Adele Frank, a participant in THATCamp Southeast, put together a wonderful stream of all the tweets that came out of the conference. And here’s a testimonial from another participant at THATCamp Southeast about “why he loves THATCamp.” Come see what all the excitement is about.

Although registration for THATCamp Jersey Shore officially closed on March 15, we still encourage members of the Stockton community (and, indeed, anyone interested in the digital humanities passing through the Greater Delaware valley for the Association of College and Research Libraries conference immediately beforehand or the Museums and the Web conference immediately afterward) to join us. Let us know you are coming by filling in the Application Form.

And if you can’t make it, I’ll be sure to do a follow up post once THATCamp Jersey Shore is over!

Back in November, I posted about the Re:Humanities conference held at Haverford College. That same day, I posted about the first New York Times article by Patricia Cohen in a series documenting new frontiers in digital humanities scholarship. The series continued under the title “Humanities 2.0.” The coincidental commentary on those two themes on the same day came together in a very interesting way today. The results of the Re:Humanities conference, and in particular the work by the main undergraduate organizer of the conference Jen Rajchel, were featured in a new article in the New York Times by Cohen with the title “Digital Humanities Boots Up on Some Campuses.”

The article focuses on how undergraduate teaching in the humanities is changing because of digitization. And although it starts with a description of how Bryn Mawr professor Katherine Rowe uses Second Life to show staging of Shakespeare’s plays, the article mostly skips how professors are adapting technology to the classroom. Instead, shows how students are engaging directly in digital projects. It describes undergraduate digital research that contributes to ongoing faculty projects such as the Early Novels Database at the University of Pennsylvania library. But it also touts the accomplishments of students like Rajchel who develop original projects of their own and present them digitally.

Stockton has outstanding examples of undergraduate digital work in cooperation with faculty too. Bethany Finn presented her website about Zora Neale Hurston and Polk County, completed under the direction of Adalaine Holton, at Stockton’s Day of Scholarship. Raina DeFonza, who described her experience presenting original research at a conference at this site back in October, contributed a section on “Kitchens and Domesticity” to Adeline Koh’s Post-Colonial Studies Project. If you look at Raina’s and Bethany’s contributions carefully, you will see that they embody precisely the opportunities that Cohen emphasizes about undergraduate research in her New York Times piece. Stockton remains in the vanguard of digital humanities work.

On Friday, March 18, I will join more than 200 scholars from around the world in contributing to the third annual Day of Digital Humanities. As the title implies, Day of Digital Humanities charts the range of activities undertaken by people throughout the world involved in digital humanities during a 24 hour period. Geoffrey Rockwell, the originator of the project calls it “an online collaborative publication.”

A tradition (if anything can be a tradition when it is done for just the third time) is for participants to address the question “what is digital humanities?” The answers range from the long and convoluted to the pointedly critical of the whole notion of definition. For example @redwards7 tweeted “My definition of Digital Humanities is an anagram of the words themselves “a delimiting hiatus.” @mkirschenbaum tweeted “a term of tactical convenience.” And, of course, a day devoted to digital humanities that generates a lot of data from digital humanists often lets loose the playfulness of researchers. John Christensen at the West Center at Stanford University subjected the responses to the question of definition to some of the analytical tools digital humanists use. The results are fun: The answers as a Word Cloud. The answers as a Word Tree. And the answers as a Phrase Net.

If you wish to follow my Day of DH, you can do so at the “my site” of the project. As I note in my first contribution there, the Day of DH coincides with Stockton’s spring break, so I won’t be able to speak directly about classroom issues related to my course Introduction to Digital Humanities, which otherwise would have gotten the day off to a very appropriate start. In fact, I’m going to be away from wifi access for my computer for significant parts of the day, so one can probably observe more of my Day of DH by following my twitter stream at @jtheibault. The main blog for the day is at http://ra.tapor.ualberta.ca/~dayofdh2011/. The day can be followed on twitter with the hashtag #dayofdh.