I’m new to twitter, so forgive any noob mistakes I’m makeing. But you can look at the twitter posts of anyone who is using the #thatcamputah hash tag by visiting this page: twitter.com/#!/search/%23thatcamputah
I’m posting more questions than comments, so lets make this a conversation instead of documentation

Is it a bad thing to periodically purge online spaces? In a session this morning, Gideon pointed out that everything from BYU on Blackboard is about to be erased as we transition to a new institutional learning management system. I thought there might be an upside to that.

Perhaps we need a sandbox to play with ideas where we feel freer to experiment because of the LACK of permanence.

I’ve heard politicians say they regret they can no longer have the sorts of exploring, deep conversations that are common among college freshman in the dorms at 1:00am. Those young people are free to experiment with ideas because of the privacy of the setting.

-what does it mean when images, video, music can be accessed from anywhere on the web when previously you would have to go to a museum, attend a class, or visit a specialist to have access to traditional art forms?  Does this mean art is really accessible to the masses?

-Integrated classrooms can enhance learning, but what about the distraction that is free broadband in the classroom? How do students pay attention when anything else on the web might be more interesting than your class?

I am currently teaching Spanish education at Lakeridge jr. high in Orem.  As a foreign language department, we have developed common assessments in digital format and they are administered using CPS clickers on a weekly basis.  We are currently in the process of analyzing data as a department and I would like to further research technological approaches and data collection with respect to our anaylsis of classroom formative and summative assessments.

I am new to this kind of conference, and so much of the jargon used goes over my head. I’m interested in integrating my blog, facebook, and educational media (offered at BYU) to give students a unified experience that conveniently extents beyond the walls of the classroom. I’m also interested in learning about techniques to draw people to my blog on outdoor education/writing.

Hi everyone,

My background is in professional communication and technical writing (among other things). Currently (Thurs, 3/22/2012) I’m here at ATTW/CCCC in St. Louis giving a presentation. The project I’m working on uses politeness theory to help analyze email messages from the Enron email corpus. This project introduced me to research in corpus studies, computational linguistics, and digital humanities.

Part of the project included the use of Google Docs to crowdsource the sampling and coding of 400 email messages for the project.  Amazing to me was the fact that these 400 messages were identified and coded using 20 student volunteers to code the data over a single weekend.

Through this project I’ve realized how much data and how many tools are out there. Tools and data that would be helpful for those of us in the humanities if only we had a little technical know-how or guidance to get us started.

I’d love to share my experience and connect with others who have experience or are interested in learning more or even helping to develop resources or research ideas.

Please feel free to contact me at christon.walker(at)usu(dot)edu. You can also click here for access to the presentation slides for my ATTW presentation on politeness and study of the some of the Enron email corpus.

I’d like to talk about what the open data really holds for Humanities study. Open Linked Data and the Semantic Web is really hot right now, and they seem to be buzzwords included in a lot of proposals, funding requests, etc. But how can the technologies really be leveraged for Humanities research and study? What can having an ecosystem of open data do to change the traditional landscape? What might such an ecosystem look like (i.e. what kind of data do we really have in the Humanities…is it just bibliography and metadata, or is there more)? What can traditional scholars learn from contributing to open data repositories or from utilizing such resources?

To help spark the conversation, it may be helpful to read over the RDF Cookbook for Digital Humanities, a collaborative document started several months ago.

Rather than go into detail on any one idea, I thought I would list several claims and see which, if any, get some traction. I’m game to discuss any of these:

• Digital Literacy First
  More could be done to advance digital humanities by developing digital literacy with available social media and open tools rather than investing in large and proprietary humanities computing projects.
• Using and Making eBooks
  Teachers and students should begin using (and perhaps creating) eBooks since they are economically inevitable and ultimately a core component of the digital humanities.
• Authentic Audiences for Student Work
  Students should be guided toward creating humanities-related content targeted to real audiences and authentic applications.
• Open Educational Resources
  Digital humanists should be using, creating, and making available open educational resources that are creative commons-licensed and able to be repurposed and remixed by others.
• New Scholarly Models
  Consistent with the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (see their report, “Our Cultural Commonwealth“), digital humanists should be defining and creating best practices and evaluative standards for “born-digital” scholarly creations and activities, including those that are not clearly derivative from traditional text-based, interpretive scholarship.
• Hacking the Humanities 
  DIY, remix culture, and edupunks need to be welcomed into today’s humanities curriculum. Rather than thinking of digital humanities as a simple value-added proposition within established structures, we should see it as a mode of inquiry that invites true independence and creativity among learners and that can transcend and rethink basic modes of teaching, scholarship, and art (see HackingTheAcademy.org).
• Bring on Video
  We should be incorporating video into humanities teaching both for informal interaction, virtual office hours, and for things like telepresence, remote performance, guest interviews, and group “hangouts” on Google+. Having students create videos can also be a method of developing their ideas for more traditional academic work.

Generating content is one thing, but managing distribution, look-and-feel, and feedback systems, not to mention a host of other considerations – is another. Designing with modularity in mind can increase the reuse of systems, as well as their content. There are some great implications, not just for the humanities, but for all knowledge systems that seek to disseminate to a global audience. We need to explore these implications and identify the future possibilities and channels that may not exist now (but soon will). Modularity, as Baldwin and Clark have stated in their book “Design Rules”, will be at the core of these innovations…

I’ve used PowerPoint, Prezi, and Keynote and I’m still dreaming of an ideal presentation medium for teaching. My wishlist includes:

• Being able to navigate gracefully to any point in the presentation (skip slides forward or back)
• Include media clips seamlessly (this includes using YouTube videos without having to display YouTube’s comments(!!) or their recommended similar videos)
• Zoom in on high-def images to full resolution to examine details
• Allow for student interaction (either clicker-style or open-ended writing, generating graphs or word clouds from student responses on the fly).

I’d be interested in discussing how others have refined their presentations and what others would add to the wishlist.

Hello friends,

I hope that I am doing this correctly- I’ve read the email instructions twice to double check but there’s no guarantee that I’m doing this right (until someone says- hey, you’re doing this wrong).

So this will be my first unconference and first THATCamp as well.  I would like to throw out an idea however regarding some research that I am currently conducting to explore the use of a Facebook group for language learning/teaching purposes.  I’d love to provide a summary of my project and then get anyone’s feedback/comments/thoughts/suggestions about how to continue on with my research.

The research is part of my MA thesis for the Spanish Pedagogy program.  The title is “Pedagogical Exchange in a Common Digital Space.”

Looking forward to sharing and learning with everyone soon.

Paul

I work in the main library at BYU doing data manipulation. I recently finished a project where I went through the authority database and searched for every foreign (non-Latin), vernacular script. In other words, if the Cyrillic alphabet was used, we wanted to know. Same for Hebrew, Greek, etc. My problem came in figuring out how to read Unicode input into Perl and then use some of the more Unicode-specific regular expressions to parse the data.

I don’t know if a presentation is really in order on this (I don’t consider myself an expert, nor is there a large body of work to present on), but I figured that the information should get out there somehow, especially because there are not an abundance of online resources with the information. The gist of it is that you have to decode the input file first, then use your regex, and finally encode the output file. Nowhere except one place was I finding that information. So please let me know if this is something of interest, or if I should merely write a little blurb on it elsewhere and we can all move on with our lives.

How would you introduce the field of DH to undergraduates?  What history would you think essential for foundational thinking?  What examples of DH would best demonstrate the evolution from Humanities Computing?  What basic texts describe the fundamentals? What tools should be taught and what practice provided?