Welcome to Great Lakes THATCamp

Great Lakes THATCamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp) is a user-generated "unconference" on digital humanities originally inspired by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. Great Lakes THATCamp will be held on the beautiful campus of Michigan State University on April 30th & May 1st, 2011 in the Residential College of Arts & Humanities.
  • Thinking technology through the humanities

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    Those of us using digital technologies for teaching often think of technologies as helpful and interesting tools that can help us make the humanities relevant, or that are fun and interesting to teach, in and of themselves. I have been teaching a unit in my library cataloging and classification class in which I use an example from the humanities to think about technology, rather than the other way around. I would like to think of other ways that the humanities can help us train technologists to design better tools for human (and non-human) flourishing.

    The unit in my class is small, but I draw it like a thread through the course material, which is about using library cataloging standards (a specific form of metadata application) to develop consistent and easy access to the entire library collection. We read a short piece from a queer poet who is also disability rights advocate. It becomes our touchstone for thinking about how technological infrastructures necessarily create inclusions and exclusions. We also read some excerpts from Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out, in which the authors make clear the moral force of categories (including categories writ small, as manufacturing and interoperability standards) and the moral obligations of the designers of technical systems to surface the exclusions their systems create even in a good-faith effort to create ease of access and functionality across local and global scales.

    I am trying to help my students avoid the traps of technological determinism, the idea that technologies will do their own things, irrespective of humans, and that it is up to humans to adapt. What other ways can the humanities illuminate how we use, assemble, and patch together technologies, and the consequences of doing so? And how can we be diligent in showing that the humanities are also fully germane and foundational to technologies in society, rather than appearing always to say that digital technologies bestow relevance on the humanities?

  • Cobbling together dynamic online courses with critical pedagogy

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    As a now-seasoned online instructor, I am interested in rethinking the relationship of online classes to campus classes. I would like to think about how to design an online course from the ground up in a way that is organic to online tools, rather than as a counterpart to campus courses, simply in a less restrictive space-time. I think campus classes will always be the yardstick online classes are measured against, but there must be ways to nativize online classes in the online environment.

    The first issue seems to be to defeat the “course management” “tools” like Blackboard. Tools for course management are not tools for pedagogy. Face to face classes are dynamic; they are customized on the fly depending on how people engage in that space-time. How can online education move out of the prison environment of management systems into the open field of the internet, perhaps using technological tools already in use by dynamic, critically technological classroom instructors?

    Can an entire course be cobbled together, essentially using the course management portal only for posting grades? What strategies and approaches to pedagogy and assessment will enable this? And what ideas about assessment have to be rethought? I am following Cathy Davidson’s experiments on HASTAC. Some bits are really alluring; some are worrying. But when students never meet in the same room together, can the necessary rapport be created so that students become invested in keeping track of the learning components that are scattered across the internet, and in being active participants and creators of their learning spaces?

    I don’t expect anyone to have the final answers to these questions, but maybe all of us have a bit of the stone soup that could enable the promise of education that is desirable in its own right, rather than just because it has fewer space-time constraints.

  • Important Great Lakes THATCamp 2011 Info

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    Great Lakes THATCamp 2011 is rapidly approaching, and we are all very excited to meet everyone when they get here. I just wanted to sshare some important details.

    Topic Proposals:

    If you haven’t already, please post a brief description of your topic on the Great Lakes THATCamp website. This is an absolutely vital part of the process as it allows attendees to get to know each other virtually (before they meet physically). Attendees are strongly encouraged to read and comment upon all of the topic proposals as they appear on the site. Posting your topic proposal also helps enormously with the process of collective and collaborative scheduling (which will take place in the opening session on Saturday). Remember, when you post your topic proposal, you are essentially signaling the topic that you wish to talk about (and coming prepared to talk about). Feel free to propose more than one topic if you want.

    If you’ve lost your account information, send me an email ASAP and I’ll get it to you.

    Registration and Check In

    Check in will take place on the second floor of the Residential College of Arts & Humanities/Snyder-Phillips Hall right outside the LookOut! Gallery starting at 7:30. An assortment of light breakfast-type foods (including coffee and tea) will be available. there will be plenty of signs scattered around the building to help you get to where you need to go.

    The registration fee ($25) will be due at check in. All registration fees go directly to the cost of running Great Lakes THATCamp 2011. We will accept cash or checks (makes checks payable to Michigan State University). We will also gladly provide a receipt. If attendees are feeling generous, they are more than welcome to include an additional donation with their registration fee.

    Parking

    Thankfully, parking is free to the public on the MSU campus on the weekends. Unless otherwise noted (there are some places on campus where you cannot park at on the weekend), feel free to park in guest parking, metered parking, or faculty/staff parking areas.

    Opening Session

    The opening session will run from 8:30-10 in the Snyder Hall Theatre (CB020 – 2 floors down from where you check in). In the opening session, we’ll introduce attendees to the whole idea of THATCamp, cover some ground rules, and generally talk about logistics. The most important part of the opening session is the scheduling. All THATCamps do scheduling a little differently. At Great Lakes THATCamp 2011, we completely embrace collaborative and collective scheduling. We start out with a blank Google Calendar (and room full of awesome ideas and awesome people) and end up with finished schedule. In between, there is much friendly debate, discussion, and negotiation. The process is fluid (some might say messy), glorious, and like nothing you’ve ever experiences at an academic conference.

    If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

    See everyone this weekend!

  • Narrow topic for GL THAT Camp 2011

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    I’d really like to work with others in exploration of Recollection http://recollection.zepheira.com/ the “free platform for generating and customizing views, (interactive maps, timelines, facets, tag clouds) that allow users to experience your digital collections”

    Trevor Owens, Digital Archivist, NDIIPP, National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, Office of Strategic Initiatives, Library of Congress welcomes application for beta testers/users if anyone wants to join in.

  • Gamification in the classroom

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    I have a few ideas, and I may post them all, but I’ll start with this.

    I am currently reading Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken, which has got me thinking about making the classroom more game-like.  I would like to use this Prof Hacker post as a springboard for a discussion about gamification (a word I really don’t like, but it’s all I have right now).

    As always, as I design my classes for the summer and next fall, I find myself struggling to figure out how to get students interested and engaged in a more intrinsic way.  McGonigal argues that games give us intrinsic rewards rather than extrinsic, and that we should refashion reality to resemble games.  I want to put this to the test in the classroom.

  • “Virtual” Communities: Let’s Drop the Qualifier

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    It seems that as we become more invested in our online identities, the boundaries that divide our online selves and our fleshy selves are getting harder to distinguish. These same boundaries are blurring as we move through online and real life communities. One community that is easy to look to as an example of such blurring is a classroom community — particularly as more instructors are including online components for classes that aren’t online classes. Suddenly, what used to be just a face to face community becomes a community that exists somewhere in both worlds: online and in real life. This can complicate the face to face community because now the identity we portray in different places online collides with the persona we show in face to face interactions.

    Along with the difference between individual personas online and off, communities that exist online and off (like in a class) can take on different tones and personalities during face to face meetings and the interactions that occur online in Blackboard, Angel, on student blogs, or Twitter. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, in fact, I think it can be good. Some students feel more comfortable expressing things to a classroom face to face, and others will do better with online interactions. (This can be true for instructors as well.)

    So often (and even in this post I did it) we qualify the difference between a “community” and an “online community”. Why? When the boundaries are becoming so blurred, is there really a distinct difference between the two? Do online communities operate differently than “real” communities? If there are differences, what are they? Do they matter? In a classroom situation, are there ways that instructors can ensure than the community functions online the way that it does in real life? Do they have to be the same? Does an online community produce different relationships between members? I’m curious to see if we can come up with some answers to these questions, but we will probably just end up with more questions….

  • Digital Archives: Researcher, Teacher, and Student Friendly!

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    I’ve seen a couple of posts so far relating to the creation and use of digital archives – a topic that I’m very much interested in myself.  I recently started working on a digital archive, “Sixteen Tons” using the Omeka web publishing system.  As both a graduate student and someone that enjoys teaching history, I was anxious to create a project that would both highlight my own dissertation research and also possibly be useful to others in some way.  I’m hoping a digital archive may be the answer to this dilemma.

    “Sixteen Tons” is a digital archive that will document the lives of mineworkers in two remote towns at the turn-of-the twentieth century.  Many of the issues I hope to discuss with people at THATCamp have already been addressed in several different posts – so sorry for the repeats here.  However, my biggest concerns are:

    *Can digital archives facilitate an environment in which researchers are willing to and able to access the research of others?

    *How can these digital archives be incorporated into my own lesson plans for teaching history courses to undergraduate students?  Can sharing these primary sources with students change the way we think about teaching the humanities?

    *Can these sources be useful to people outside of academia?  Again – I like to teach and am thinking of ways that researchers can share digital archives with teachers and students at the secondary education level.  I have thought about applying lesson plans/guides arranged thematically to my archive but am not sure of how to reach an audience outside of academia.

    *Finally, I’ve written about this in a blog post, but I think it’s worth discussing with as many people as I can – what can creators of these digital archives do to avoid copyright issues further down the road.

  • Humanities in 3D

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    I’d like to talk with others about how we can digitize and re-materialize things. I’ve been working with 3D printing and rapid prototyping technologies to make tangible things from plans and blueprints of the past. In particular, I’m interested in the experiences humans had and have with those things, and what we can learn from exploring those interactions.

    More generally, in what other ways could those technologies be applied in the humanities? What about related technologies, like 3D scanning, that are also becoming more accessible? How do we go about collecting, curating, and communicating digital 3D models? Online communities that share 3D models and make them publicly available are growing, but those efforts have run into ambiguous areas of intellectual property law and curation.

    I’m interested in talking with others about specific technologies (software and hardware), or discussing some of the broader concerns over such practices. How can making inform our research? What can we learn from playing with things? What happens when we try to make things from our research?

  • Translating Text to Digital

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    I’ve been working on a project that translates Euripides’ Medea into Inform as a side project/experiment dealing with issues I’m researching for my dissertation (narrative theory). Various problems and questions have come up during the process, so I’d like to propose a discussion session to talk about some of them and also explore the uses (or whether there are any) of this kind of project in both research and classroom practice. Below are a number of questions/topics I could see us talking about, but not by any means an exhaustive list.

    1. Digital and the text: How does the meaning of “the text” change when moving from a purely textual format into something like Inform that not only blends text and code (a form of text itself), but also deconstructs (or perhaps, metaconstructs?) the original linear format of the work.

    2. Pedagogy: How can a tool like Inform be used with literature (like Medea) to engage students in the text? Is it useful to have them translate into a digital format? Can a digital translation of a work provide a better learning experience for students? Can it help them come to a deeper understanding or does it distract from close and/or thematic readings of the text?

    3. Narrative: How does our idea of storytelling change when we look at the same work in both a linear, textual format and a multi-linear, digital format? (There is another session on this so maybe everything under this heading will be covered there!) Can we find new insights into the text or into narrative itself through an exercise like this? On what particular aspects can a digital translation shed light?

    4. Inform: Is Inform the best choice for a project like this and/or for a pedagogical exercise? What are its strengths and weaknesses? What place should aspects of interactive fiction (like puzzles and world exploration) have in a translation from traditional text?

    5. Authorship (and Translation): How does translation, but a digital translation in particular, undermine the idea of authorship? Is it ethically problematic for a translator to take the limited world of the text and populate it for exploration and discovery?

  • Defining the Game in a Digital Age

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    My work considers the long history and phenomenon of the game, but in this session I am interested in discussing the nature of the video game specifically. How do we understand concepts like ludology, narrative, gamification, platforms, and video games? What makes the video game unique from traditional games? I’d like to open an invitation to meet and discuss with other scholars the major issues in theorizing and understanding the video game.

    I am also interested in the video game as object for born digital preservation. How do we determine the significant properties of a game for preservation? What does it mean to preserve Super Mario Bros. for people to play in 2111?  What is the relationship of fan communities and preservation? These questions are important not only for preserving video games but all software generally. In a digital age, the worlds we create are often all too ephemeral. How can we give them permanence for future generations?

    Mostly, I’d like the session to be an opportunity to meet local game scholars and hear about the work they’re doing. In the upcoming year, I’ll be writing my dissertation from Michigan and I am interested in creating new connections with others that share a passion for video game studies.

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