We welcome your feedback. Please take a few moments to fill out and return the feedback from. Side 1 is for the BootCamp Workshops, Side 2 for the THATCamp and Knowledge Representation conference. Feedback Form (PDF).

Alternatively, you can use the general THATCamp feedback form online at thatcamp.org/go/feedback/

Thank you!

Here is a spreadsheet where URLs mentioned at THATCamp KS can be entered.  It is not necessary to fill in every column for every link, but try to fill in info you know.  I will add to the sheet as I have time but I hope others will contribute, too.

docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ak4JEzOyiqM0dGZERnQ0RHVxMUpNa3pFdnpfbGZtOGc&hl=en_US

Google Doc

Our Google doc for this session is at:

docs.google.com/document/d/1qwUAp1nC0ySmRH5aidbgKW8z1EYJw6gdERCjpqPd_9I/edit.

Google Doc for session 1: How do Humanities Scholars Make Use of Digitized Materials goo.gl/JXXPs

About THATCamp
THATCamp.org

Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University”

THATCamp “groundrules”
www.foundhistory.org/2010/05/24/thatcamp-groundrules/

KU Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities
idrh.ku.edu

THATCamp Kansas Blog
kansas2011.thatcamp.org

Twitter
#thatcampks
#thatcamp
@THATCampKS

Google Docs
http://…..?

Friday’s THATCamp
Schedule: goo.gl/dt70m

Michael Sperberg-McQueen talk and reception at Spencer Museum of Art: 4:30pm

Saturday’s Representing Knowledge in the DH conferene
Schedule: goo.gl/9B4he

Presentation Abstracts: kansas2011.thatcamp.org/category/representing-knowledge-conference/

Feedback sheets
On paper and online

KU Libraries planning team:

• Marianne Reed, Digital Information Specialist, Center for Digital Scholarship
• Elspeth Healey, Special Collections Librarian, Spencer Research Library
• Kim Glover, Instructional Design Librarian
• Scott Hanrath, Web Services Manager
• Geoff Husic, Slavic and Eurasian Studies Librarian

THATCamp Kansas logo: Todd Pickrell, Library student assistant, Industrial Design

Slides, handouts, exercises, and participant notes from Thursday’s bootcamp “Creating Scholarly Editions Using the TEI” are available online!

Jennifer Serventi’s collaborative document for her “Grantwriting strategies for Digital Humanities Projects” session: is.gd/djiNay

We’ve now posted the abstracts for the the papers and posters for Saturday’s “Representing Knowledge” conference. See the links in the Categories sidebar or click here for the abstracts…

….and here for the schedule of times and locations.

A reminder that on Friday, after the THATCamp sessions, at 4:30pm, Michael Sperberg-McQueen of Black Mesa Technologies (www.blackmesatech.com) will give a plenary talk at the Spencer Museum of Art. He will also be giving a talk at the “Representing Knowledge” conference on Saturday.

Friday, September 23
4.30pm, Spencer Museum of Art
XML as a tool for domain-specific languages

Abstract: Computers are general-purpose machines for manipulation of symbols, which means they can be applied in almost any field whose problems can be expressed in terms of symbols. But the creators of computer systems and the potential users of those systems do not always think the same way and do not always find communication easy. Much of the history of information technology can be glossed as a series of attempts to bridge this communication gap. One current approach to this problem is to design ‘domain-specific languages’ (DSLs): formal languages suitable for computer processing, with vocabulary and semantics drawn from the intended application domain. In retrospect, the design of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) can be viewed as an attempt to encourage domain-specific languages and make them easier to specify. Like DSLs as conventionally conceived of, XML vocabularies allow concise descriptions of interesting states of affairs in a particular application area and tend to be more accessible to domain experts than conventional programming languages.

Unlike conventional DSLs, most XML vocabularies are specified as having declarative not imperative semantics; this is both a blessing (declarative information is almost always easier to verify and easier to apply in new and unexpected ways) and a curse (many conventional programmers find declarative semantics hard to come to terms with). Examples will be drawn largely from XML vocabularies for the encoding of culturally significant textual materials.

If anyone has need Interent access beyond http or https, please see us at the registration desk. The KUGUEST network will work for basic access to Internet, but if you need secure FTP or other secure connections, you will need to log on to a different network.

KU users please use the SECURE JAYHAWK network (you may need to configure your laptop to access that network. Please see KU’s wireless info page for more details.

Dear participants: To prepare to delve into mapping using Quantum GIS, please download this software before Thursday’s workshop at: www.qgis.org. Click the ‘Download Now Free’ button and click on ‘Standalone Installer…’ under ‘Windows.’ Click ‘Download QGIS 1.7.0,’ save this .exe file, then open (double-click) the file to load software.

Secondly, you can download workshop data at: www.lib.ku.edu/gis/scanned. Click on the file called ‘snow.zip’ and OPEN with the default compression software. Choose ‘Extract all files’ and save the files to your hard drive, without using more than 1 or 2 folders, such as c:\temp or c:\users (avoid the desktop or ‘my documents’). Please contact instructor (rhouser@ku.edu) in advance if you need any assistance.

This is not part of THATCamp, but those at KU might be interested in this talk by Sam Pepple of Sample Cartography:

Tues Sept 20, 2011
12-1 pm
Lindley 210 (next door to the Art & Design Building)

Sam Pepple worked for the last three years at National Geographic. Starting in NG Maps as an intern, Sam was soon hired to design and produce maps and graphics for the Thematic Section of the 9th Ed. Atlas of the World. After the atlas, he was hired by National Geographic magazine to make maps and graphics for the monthly periodical. In January 2011 he left NGM to pursue a freelance career, and consequently created Sample Cartography. He will be presenting on his career in print and interactive cartography, and on his current work designing in a programmatic way with Open Street Map data for OpenGeo. The focus wil be on the creation of the Atlas of Rock Creek Park, which incorporated a public art project, printed book, and a digital, dynamic, data-base built with open-source geospatial data and mapping API. Through such projects, Sam hopes to inspire whole communities of (non-professional) cartographers to participate in telling their unique narratives, histories, and cartographies through maps.

Information regarding visitor parking on KU’s campus is available at parking.ku.edu/visit.shtml. The visitor parking lot that is closest to the conference venues is the Mississippi Street Garage (just north of the Kansas Union), which has 500 visitor parking spaces. The fee for parking there is $1.25/hour payable in cash or credit card at the pay station on level 4, or with a credit card at the exit gates. It is recommended that you park here on Thursday and Friday.


View Larger Map

However, there is *free* parking available at many campus lots on Saturday. Accordingly, we recommend that you do not park at the Mississippi Street Garage on Saturday (where fees will still apply), but instead park either in the lot across from the Kansas Union on Jayhawk Blvd (Lot 16) or the lot near the intersection of Mississippi Street and 11th St. (Lot 94). These lots require permits during the work week, but will be free on Saturday, September 24. Please consult the following campus parking map for precise lot locations: parking.ku.edu/2011map.pdf.

Should you find the Mississippi Street Garage full on Thursday or Friday, an additional 250 visitor spaces are available in the Allen Fieldhouse Garage at 1501 Irving Hill Road, directly north of Allen Field House, at the same fee of $1.25/hour.

(Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.)

* As a developer, I’m interested in collaborative development practices and in the new kinds of scholarly products enabled by APIs, Linked Data, social media, and other new technologies.

* I’ve been out of the humanities research arena for quite a while, would like to get a picture of where things are going. I’ve been working on an idea to harvest OAI repository record sets with an eye to making a sort of freely downloadable corpus of bibliographic records — an OAIster you could run/play with/analyze locally. Also would like to discuss NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, CouchDB) as a platform for an institutional repository software system.

* I’d like to learn to create Zotero translators. I tried it using available tutorials and got stuck. I am the chief Zotero support person on my campus but have very limited programming skills (learned HTML in 1997, have taught myself a little CSS, do NOT know Javascript or Java or Flash programming)

* I would like to become more fluent in TEI and learn its extensive capabilities, and learn more about creating web content in order to build archives and databases for texts and alternate-media translations of those texts. I would also like to explore a programming language, since I have almost no experience in that realm. Since I am applying to graduate programs in digital humanities for next year, I am particularly eager to meet and start building connections with new and long-time members of the field through this THATCamp.

(Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.)

* Our college recently challenged all faculty to do more integration of technology in our teaching. As we are a small liberal arts college, the resources for training are limited. As a historian, I find myself behind the curve on many of the digital resources out there. I hope to learn what is out there for me and my students and how to use it.

* I’ve been designing digital projects for educational enterprises and would like to learn more about how to design projects more closely related to me individually both as a scholar and a teacher.

* I’m trying to develop curriculum for information skills for graduate students and advanced undergrads in language/lit. studies. I’m interested in getting suggestions on what would make up a basic tool-kit for the budding digital humanist; suggestions on how to keep up to date; and input on how to structure on online, modular sequence that would help individuals develop their skill-set.

If Workshops, THATCamp, and a Knowledge Representation conference are not enough for you…..

* Check out the KU Calendar for listings of lectures and other events happening at KU.

* Lawrence.com provides a list of concerts, movies, galleries, and other events happening in Lawrence.

I would like to talk about various options for mapping and georeferencing. We have dabbled with Google maps and Hypercities and are exploring other options. I would like to have a better understanding of what open-source software will work well enough and when the more advanced features of commercial software are needed. I would like to learn what software people have been using for what projects and the level of expertise required for the software.  I would also like to talk about open-data in mapping projects and also having data in open formats to archive (even if the data is not openly shared).

I’ve never actually managed to get this idea off the ground at THATCamp but I thought I’d try it one more time.

This is a totally half baked idea but it keeps popping up in my little head and maybe you all can help me deal. I’m basically thinking about the challenge of applying my humanities-trained mind to data driven projects.

The challenge isn’t that I am skeptical of quantitative stuff but that I know how easy it is to make mistakes with it if you don’t know what you’re doing or get easily confused by big numbers (I am guilty of both). I also know how easy it is to be dazzled by big numbers and beautiful visualizations (no offense Hans Rosling).

I started thinking about this while reading the first of the New York Times stories about digital humanities. Patricia Cohen wrote:

Members of a new generation of digitally savvy humanists argue it is time to stop looking for inspiration in the next political or philosophical “ism” and start exploring how technology is changing our understanding of the liberal arts. This latest frontier is about method, they say, using powerful technologies and vast stores of digitized materials that previous humanities scholars did not have.

The idea of a “data turn” in the humanities has been tossed around but it is not as if data are somehow a-political or outside of ideology, right? In this session I want to hear people’s ideas about strategies for approaching Big Data. On the one hand, the idea of being able to search for patterns across vast sets of historical and cultural data is very exciting. On the other hand, I can’t unread Foucault (or Marx for that matter). I know all of this data exists in a context but I don’t know how to keep that in perspective when I’m dealing with Big Data.

Anyway, this is just a thought on the table. I would love it if someone wants to pick it up and build an actually coherent session proposal out of it.

Stewart

(full disclosure: I totally copy-and-pasted that from another THATCamp blog post I wrote over the summer)

(Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.)

* Our library is beginning to support digital humanities projects and I want to learn more about what people are doing, what people need to know and what support is needed.

* One of my jobs at Emory is managing the DH center we are building in the library so I am looking forward to talking with attendees about the kinds of projects they want to work on and possibly identifying new tools for working on them. In particular, I want to hear more about text mining and strategies for managing collaborative work. I am also deeply – and selfishly – interested in talking through strategies for sustainability and preservation or possibly rethinking what we mean when we use those terms. Does everything need to be sustainable? Do we have to preserve all of it?

* I was just hired into a new position librarian position at the University of Oklahoma-Tulsa library in August. Part of my new responsibilities will be managing the digital Arts and Information Gallery located within the library. The purpose of the gallery is to showcase the work of OU-Tulsa students, faculty, and staff and to promote collaborative learning across campus. THATCamp Kansas will be provide an excellent opportunity to interact with and learn from other professionals involved in digital learning.

–[Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.]–

My interests in the digital humanities have, up to this point, been rather theoretical. At the KU THATCamp, I am hoping to gain some more in-depth knowledge of how management of digital humanities assets actually works in real-world applications. I am personally interested in promoting and pioneering radical approaches to writing and reading, combining hypertext, programmable media, Web design, video, film, and net culture. I believe the cross-pollination of computational poetics with traditional literary traditions is where the future lies in terms of creative and scholarly work in the humanities.

–[Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.]–

As a Rare Books and Manuscripts librarian, I am interested in exploring how the materials held by special collections libraries are being mobilized for and integrated into digital humanities projects. In particular, I am interested in investigating:

a) collaboration between different special collections institutions and subject specialists on digital humanities projects [and, particularly, how we might best fulfill researchers’ desire for pooled subject-oriented resources that span institutions]

b) the types of functionality that researchers in the humanities want from digitized books, manuscripts, and artifacts

c) the latest trends and tools in the digital humanities.

It his my hope that discussing these matters will help me generate better digital projects at my own library as well as forge productive partnerships with other THATCamp attendees.

–[Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.]–

I am preparing a new research project that will involve text analysis. I expect this initiative will involve archival documents and a few digitized documents as well. I am interested in learning about how best to plan for and execute this project. My specific questions center on: organizing the data, selecting the most appropriate analysis tools, sharing the data with others, and presenting results.

–[Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.]–

I am an American literature scholar, and I want to develop with others in my field an online digital archive devoted to Louisa May Alcott, her works, her circle, and research materials related to her career, life, and times. I am hoping that the camp and conference will provide both professional development as well as inspiration as I work with others in the planning of this digital project.

–[Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.]–

The art museum continues to pursue new ways to integrate new technologies into understanding our collections and providing new platforms for our audiences (university, community and virtual) to engage with our objects and programs. Improving my knowledge of the technology landscape, the possibilities and interests (esp. among faculty at KU) would be immensely helpful so that we pursue avenues that align with the goals of our audiences as well as help us reach new audiences. I am also curious and excited to learn more about the interesting activities of my colleagues and new possibilities.

–[Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.]–

I’m interested in exploring ways for people to share personal, family, and community history using digital tools. I’d like to gather and share ideas to help record, preserve, celebrate, and communicate the stories of our ancestors, communities, and organizations using digital/online media.

–[Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.]–

I am particularly interested in the design of digital humanities resources: there are plenty of powerful software and web tools for analysis and presentation in the humanities, but not many that are designed for portability/reuse, ease of use by non-technologists, or beauty of presentation. I want to build streamlined digital humanities tools that:
-apply state-of-the-art principles of MVC (Model-View-Controller) development, web design and typography to the display of complex humanities data;
-intelligently hide information based on context, to avoid overwhelming users (the dynamic, digital equivalent of end notes vs. foot/marginal notes);
-allow non-experts to explore texts and their digital reincarnations, in depth and in a manner as aesthetically pleasing as print reading.

Other interests: taxonomic information encoding vs. contrapuntal textual movement.

–[Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.]–

I’m launching a study this fall to examine how humanities scholars work with digitized materials from digital collections in their scholarly research. I have a couple initial research questions that I think would be good points of discussion for a THATcamp session: What are the features and services that would optimize a digital collection for scholarly research? How do scholars use digital collections in their research workflows? Also of note: this study is initially being conducted as a sub-project of the Bamboo Technology Project (www.projectbamboo.org/), a multi-institutional research partnership that is developing an e-research environment for humanities scholars. This study will assist us we prepare to develop digital collections for research within the Bamboo e-research environment and I’d be happy to talk about what we’re doing with that too.

–(Proposals and areas of interest from participants as indicated on the THATCamp registration form.)–

I’d like to explore the question of whether individual scholarly repositories have a place in humanities scholarship. Such repositories are becoming increasingly popular in the sciences and, to some extent, the social sciences through services such as Mendeley (www.mendeley.com), Papers (www.mekentosj.com/papers), and Colwiz (www.colwiz.com). Some possible sub-topics for discussion: Do humanities scholars use such services? Are there missing features that would make such services more attractive? How could such services fit into a library’s technology offerings?

Welcome to Lawrence and the University of Kansas! Below is a selection of dining, coffee, and snack options for the Digital Humanities Forum. The descriptions are divided into Campus Options (for lunches and snacks) and Downtown Options (for when you are not on campus).

This list is by no means comprehensive. Additional information about dining options in Lawrence is available through the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau (www.visitlawrence.com/dining), Lawrence.com (www.lawrence.com/restaurants/), and through user-generated sites like Yelp! (www.yelp.com) and UrbanSpoon (www.urbanspoon.com).

Note: Several of the campus options are closed on Saturday, so be sure to check the hours for each!

Key: $ – inexpensive; $$ – moderate; $$$ – more expensive

1. Campus Options (locations near or in the Kansas Union and the Watson Library)

A. In the Kansas Union: (1301 Jayhawk Blvd.)

Hawk Shop Store, 4th Floor, Kansas Union

• M-Th.7am-11pm, F. 7am-11pm, Sat. 7am-11pm, Sun. 12pm-9pm
• Convenience store with the usually fare. Pre-packaged sandwiches, some hot food (hot dogs, corn dogs, etc.), chips, candy, etc.

Impromptu Café, 3rd Floor, Kansas Union

• 785-864-8001; www.union.ku.edu/impromptu.shtml
• Semester Hours: M-F 11am to 2pm; *closed Saturday and Sunday*
• Impromptu is known for its watermelon lemonade; lunch offerings include a tasty selection of sandwiches, burgers, salads, and entrées (table service)
• $ Most entrées $6.95-$8.95

The Market, 3rd Floor, Kansas Union

• union.ku.edu/market.shtml
• M-Th. 8am-5pm, F 8am-4pm, *closed Saturday and Sunday the weekend of Sept. 24 and 25*
• Cafeteria with the following options:
  • Fresco! Cuisine: daily entrées
  • Boulevard Grill: burgers, chicken fingers, fries
  • Quesarito: Burritos, quesadillas, tacos
  • Garden Gourmet: salad bar, soups, Panini
  • Pizza Hut: personal pan pizza and bread sticks
  • Brellas: wraps and artisan sandwiches
  • Sushi with Gusto: sushi
  • Corner Bakery: cookies, muffins, baked goods
• $ Most lunch entrées $5-$8

Milton’s Coffee Shop, 1st Floor, Kansas Union

• M-Th. 7am-5pm, F. 7am-5pm, *closed Saturday and Sunday*
• This is a smaller version of a Lawrence favorite. It has great special espresso drinks and small selection of assorted pastries
• $

Pulse Coffee Bar, 4th Floor, Kansas Union

• union.ku.edu/pulse.shtml
• M-Th. 7:30am-7pm, F. 7:30am-6pm, Sat. 9am-3pm, closed Sunday
• Serves flavored coffee drinks, has a good smoothie selection, and packed ice cream. Also has some assorted pastries, and will have “to-go” pre-made deli sandwiches available on Saturday
• $

B. In the Oread Hotel (1200 Oread Ave., at the northern end of Jayhawk Blvd)

Bird Dog Bar, Oread Hotel, main floor

• 785-830-3921; www.theoread.com/#play_restuarants_FourSplitPage_Restaurants
• Sun-Th. 11am-midnight, Fri. & Sat. 11am-2am
• Casual dining and bar, table service, burgers, salads, entrées
• $$ Entrées $8-24 (most $8-14)

Coffee Corner at The Oread, Oread Hotel, main level

• Menu at www.theoread.com/downloads/CC_Menu_Board_WhiteGeorgia.pdf
• Daily 7am-5pm
• $ Coffee and espresso drinks, breakfast baked goods (to-go)

Jimmy John’s, Oread Hotel, lower level

• 785-842-4500; www.jimmyjohns.com/
• 10am to 3am daily
• Submarine sandwiches, cafeteria style
• $

A Slice of History, Oread Hotel, lower level

• 785-830-3910; www.theoread.com/#play_restuarants_FourSplitPage_Restaurants
• 11am-10pm daily
• Pizza, cafeteria style
• $

C. In Watson Library (1425 Jayhawk Blvd)

Watson Library Food Stop, 3rd Floor Watson Library

• M-Th.8am-8:30pm, F. 8am-2pm, *closed Saturday and Sunday*
• Packaged snacks and sandwiches, baked goods, brewed coffee

2. Downtown Lawrence Options (non-chain restaurants on and around Massachusetts Street)

The Burger Stand at the Casbah, 803 Massachusetts Street (between 8th and 9th Streets)

• 785-856-0543, thecasbahburgerstand.com/
• Restaurant Hours: Mon – Sat 11am – 10pm, Sun 11am – 9pm
• Bar Hours: Sun – Mon 11am – 2am
• Gourmet burgers and fries. Karaoke.
• $$

Encore Café, 1007 Massachusetts Street (between 10th and 11th Streets)

• 785-856-3682, encore-cafe.com/
• Sun. – Th. 11am – 10pm, F. – Sat. 11am – 11pm
• Asian fusion
• $$ Most entrées $6.95-9.95

Esquina, 801 Massachusetts Street (at the corner of 8th St.)

• 785-856-1625, www.esquinalawrence.com/ESQUINA.html
• Sun.-Mon. 11am-9pm, Tue.-Sat. 11am-10pm
• Mexican & Latin American
• $$ Entrées $7.95-9.50

Free State Brewing Company, 636 Massachusetts Street (between 6th and 7th Streets)

• 785-843-4555, freestatebrewing.com/
• Mon. – Sat. 11am to midnight, Sunday Noon – 11pm
• Brewery with casual dining, including burgers, Tex-mex items, pasta, and pub fare
• $$ Most entrées $7.95-11.95

India Palace, 129 E 10th Street (between Massachusetts and New Hampshire Streets)

• 785-331-4300, indiapalace.food.officelive.com/default.aspx
• Lunch Hours: Mon. – Fri. 11:30 to 2:30, Sat. – Sun. 11:30 to 2:45; Dinner Hours: Sun. – Thurs. 5:00 to 9:45, Fri. – Sat. 5:00 to 10:15
• Indian food, lunch buffet
• $$ Dinner entrées $9.95-13.95

La Parilla, 814 Massachusetts Street (between 8th and 9th Streets)

• 785-841-1100, www.laparrillalawrence.com/index.html
• Sun – Mon: 11am – 9pm, Tue-Thu 11am – 10pm, Fri-Sat 11am – 11pm
• Latin American inspired with many vegetarian options
• $$

Teller’s, 746 Massachusetts Street (at 8th Street)

• 785-843-4111, www.746mass.com/
• Lunch Mon-Sat. 11am-2pm; Dinner M-Th. 5pm-10pm, until 11pm Fri-Sat, until 9pm Sundays; Sunday Brunch 10am-2pm
• Bistro with Italian slant
• $$$ Dinner entrées $15-35 (most $15-20); $5 lunch specials Mon-Thu.

WheatFields Bakery & Café, 904 Vermont Street (at 9th Street)

• 785-841-5553, www.wheatfieldsbakery.com/
• M-F 6:30am – 8:00pm, Sat. 6:30am – 6:30pm, Sun. 7:30am – 4:00pm
• Fresh baked breads and pastries with a breakfast menu, sandwich menu, and small dinner menu
• $$ Most lunch and breakfast entrees $5.95-7.45; dinner entrées $8.95-10.95

Zen Zero, 811 Massachusetts Street (between 8th and 9th Streets)

• 785-832-0001, zen-zero.com/
• Sun- Mon: 11am – 9pm, Tue- Sat: 11am- 10pm
• Asian Fusion
• $$ Entrées $6.99-12.99

715, 715 Massachusetts Street (between 7th and 8th Streets)

• 785-856-7150, 715mass.com/
• M-F 11am-12am, Sat & Sun. 9am-12am
• European bistro, with handmade central Italian cuisine and locally-sourced foods
• $$$ Lunch entrées, $6-11; Dinner entrées $12-24

For Workshop 4: Integrating Digital Humanities Projects into the Undergraduate Curriculum, after we go through one example of integrating a project into a course, we will work in groups to practice this technique. In order for this exercise to work, we need your help. Please add your courses and projects to the wiki. Your group will vote on which project they want to workshop–each group will use a checklist to brainstorm around creating assignments, assembling resources, and integrating digital humanities research into undergraduate courses. If you don’t have a course or project, don’t worry–someone else will. You’ll need to request access to the wiki if you haven’t already. Just follow the wiki link above and click the button for requesting access.

I’m already teaching a workshop on this topic, but I’d love to see a session on the place of undergrads in the digital humanities.  Our workshop, Integrating Digital Humanities Projects into the Undergraduate Curriculum, covers one aspect of that integration, integrating an existing DH project into a class.  But, there are many more issues to discuss.

• How do you train students in digital humanities?
• Which methodologies do you teach and how?
• How can we create a pipeline to graduate school or should we?
• Which texts should you use?

I’m sure we can come up with more questions and some answers, too.

In a recent whitepaper, “Divided and Conquered: How Multivarious Isolation Is Suppressing Digital Humanities Scholarship,” Quinn Dombrowski and I argued that isolation is a major challenge for the digital humanists, especially at the small liberal arts colleges that are members of the NITLE network, at primarily undergraduate institutions, or at other institutions without a digital humanities center.  Isolation is especially problematic since much digital humanities work is collaborative.  How can you effectively engage in digital humanities if you are the only digital humanist on your campus?  I would be interested in a session that discusses how to combat isolation in the digital humanities.

This session might include successful strategies and remaining challenges.  Regional THATCamps like this one help, as does social media.  Currently, we are also working on a project to combat that isolation by developing a project registry to link potential project collaborators.  DHCommons, short for Digital Humanities Commons, seeks to ameliorate the isolation that impacts digital humanists by developing an infrastructure that facilitates both collaboration and awareness of existing digital humanities projects. Although isolation from digital humanist colleagues and information about activities in the field is felt most acutely at smaller or non-research institutions that lack a digital humanities center, even scholars at institutions with well-supported centers may need reliable channels for connecting with potential collaborators beyond their institution, or discovering extramural projects without the resources for extensive outreach efforts. These disconnects between potential collaborators and existing projects result in duplicated effort. Rather than building on one another’s work or combining complimentary resource pools (e.g., skilled student labor on one side, and institutional funding on the other), scholars end up repeating or nearly repeating existing projects or redeveloping existing tools. To address these challenges, DHCommons will build an online project repository that provides faceted searching and browsing, where project leaders can post needs (e.g. technical assistance, beta testing, or content development), and potential collaborators can post their interests and availability. This tool will form the centerpiece of a larger effort to break down silos in the digital humanities community by changing practice.  What silos do you see and how can we break them down?

As newcomers to our respective fields (Mike Hernandez is an English MA student, Mackenzie Brooks is new librarian), we are interested in a general discussion and recommendation-giving on the topic of designing and implementing a humanities based digital resource, especially for use in the classroom. We are in the beginning stages of creating a Drupal-based website that will serve as an encyclopedic introduction to science-influenced approaches to the literature. We are interested in discussing such questions as:

-What features do you look for in a digital resource?
-What elements make you consider using a digital resource in a class and in what capacity?
-In your discipline, how would you go about creating and marketing a digital resource? What gap would you fill with it?
-What are examples of successful projects and how have you used them in your research or courses?
-What are some known stumbling blocks for web-based resources?

I’m not in a position to teach how to create a Zotero translator or citation style, but I’d very much like to learn.  I do not have any background in Javascript but would hope to learn just enough to do these two things.  Is anyone else interested in this topic?

We look forward to seeing you in a few weeks. For those attending Workshop 4: Integrating Digital Humanities Projects into the Undergraduate Curriculum, here is the agenda:

9:00 am Welcome & Introductions

9:20 am Pedagogy Review and Introduction to Undergraduate Digital Humanities Projects

9:35 am  Case Study: Wheaton College Digital History Project (Kathryn Tomasek)

9:50 am  Exercise 1: Learning Goals (individual)

10:00 am  Break

10:15 am  Exercise 2: Matching Project to Curriculum (group)

10:40 am  Debrief

10:50 am  Exercise 3: Scaffolding & Pacing (group)

11:15 am  Debrief

11:25 am  Dork Shorts (each group shares its course in 2 minutes or less)

11:40 am  Project management (full group workshops one course)

12:00 pm Bye!

If you’re planning to take part in Workshop 4: Integrating Digital Projects into Undergraduate Courses, please join our wiki:  integratingdh.pbworks.com/w/page/40112677/FrontPage

Day 1 of our Digital Humanities Forum is a series of hands-on workshops. Day 3 is a conference with papers and poster sessions. The format of these sessions will be familiar to most participants, and the schedule and session titles for both these days are already on the website.

But for those who are new to THATCamp, you may be wondering what to expect from Day 2. As you will notice, the schedule is completely open….and it will stay that way until the day of the Camp.

First held at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media in 2008, THATCamp follows an “unconference” model in which the participants themselves set the agenda. There are no papers or presentations—instead each session is intended for discussion, sharing of information, and interaction. Every unconference is different, depending on the number of participants and their interests. Here’s is how we are planning to organize THATCamp Kansas:

1) Prior to the conference, participants can post to this blog ideas or topics they think would make for interesting sessions (please use the “Session Ideas” category to make it easy for others to find). Others can then respond with expressions of interest, or their own suggestions.

2) On the morning of THATCamp (Friday, Sep 23rd) the organizers will post the ideas on large sheets of paper, and as participants arrive, register and drink coffee, they can vote or sign up for sessions that interest them. We will then schedule the most popular topics into one of the rooms and time slots for that day. With four rooms available, and 5 hours of session time for each room, there will be plenty of time for a variety of topics!

For more information on proposing a session, including many examples of of sessions from previous THATCamps, please see our Propose a Session page.

If you’re planning to take part in Workshop 4: Integrating Digital Projects into Undergraduate Courses, take a look at this ProfHacker post by Amy Cavender:

Integrating a Digital Project Into a Class: Deciding on a Project

There are some good comments, as well.  Amy was a participant in the first iteration of this workshop at THATCamp Liberal Arts Colleges in June.

Also, don’t forget to join our wiki:  integratingdh.pbworks.com/w/page/40112677/FrontPage.  You can access readings for the workshop and share assignment ideas in advance in the wiki.

To get access just follow the link above and click on the link to request access.  Once we we grant access you should get another message.  If you don’t hear from us, try contacting me directly at rdavis@nitle.org or via twitter @frostdavis.

If you’ll be attending Workshop 1: Creating Digital Scholarly Editions Using the TEI, please take a few moments to read this Introduction to XML for Text in advance of the bootcamp.  We look forward to seeing you at THATCamp Kansas 2011!

Kevin Hawkins & Rebecca Welzenbach
MPublishing
University of Michigan Library

If you’re planning to take part in Workshop 4: Integrating Digital Projects into Undergraduate Courses, please join our wiki:  integratingdh.pbworks.com/w/page/40112677/FrontPage

To get access just follow the link above and click on the link to request access.  Once we we grant access you should get another message.  If you don’t hear from us, try contacting me directly at rdavis@nitle.org or via twitter @frostdavis.

You can also access readings for the workshop and share assignment ideas in advance in the wiki.

We suggest you take a look at these readings in advance:

• Blackwell, C., & Martin, T. R. (2009). Technology, Collaboration, and Undergraduate Research. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 3(1). Retrieved from www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000024/000024.html
• Cavanagh, S. (2010). Bringing Our Brains to the Humanities: Increasing the Value of Our Classes while Supporting Our Futures. Pedagogy, 10(1), 131-142.  Retrieved from muse.jhu.edu/journals/pedagogy/v010/10.1.cavanagh.html
• You can also the Cavanagh reading in our wiki.  Just click the link and request access.

The deadline for applying for BootCamp fellowships to help with travel expenses has been extended to August 15. If you are on the fence about attending THATCamp Kansas because of funding, the BootCamp fellowships may be able to help! Please see thatcamp.org/go/fellowships for more details.

Also–we now have 4 workshops set withe great instructors, and more in development. Confirmed workshops include: Creating Digital Scholarly Editions Using the TEI, Introduction to Omeka, Introduction to R for Humanists, and Grantwriting strategies for the Digital Humanities. See our BootCamp page for more details.

Poster Session

Ireton, Daniel. Assistant Professor/Undergraduate and Community Services Librarian, Kansas State University;
Urton, Ellen. Associate Professor/Visual Literacy Librarian, Kansas State University

Title: The Power of Amusement: Lessons from the gaming world

Abstract: Video games have long been dismissed as an amusing distraction at best and as a direct cause of the decline of civilization at worst. Yet, undergraduate students entering higher education now have never lived in a world in which video games have not existed; indeed they are a ubiquitous aspect of our shared cultural experience. The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) reported that as of 2009 video games are played in 67% of all U.S. households and the computer and video game industry made $10.5 billion in revenue (www.esrb.org/about/video-game-industry-statistics.jsp). According to Stephen E. Siwek in “Video Games in the 21st Century: The 2010 Report” compiled for the Entertainment Software Association (www.theesa.com/facts/pdfs/VideoGames21stCentury_2010.pdf):
• “The U.S. computer and video game software publishing industry directly employs more than 32,000 people in 34 states.”
• “The U.S. computer and video game software industry’s value added to U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was $4.9 billion.”
• “The real annual growth rate of the U.S. computer and video game software industry was 10.6% for the period 2005-2009 and 16.7% for the period 2005-2008.”
• “During the same periods, real growth for the U.S. economy as a whole was 1.4% for 2005-09 and 2.8% for 2005-08.”

An educator may create a game intended to impart certain knowledge or skills, but those wishing to do so should be wary of creating games that succeed at delivering content but fail as games. Where video games are discussed or applied in education, the academic community seems to dismiss the broader cultural context of gaming and has yet to harness the cultural application and relevance of video games. The instructive power of video games is not discipline-specific, but rather they are instructive by their very design; problem solving, visual literacy, aesthetic literacy, critical thinking, data driven decision making, and a willingness to iterate are ubiquitous in the games of today. The most successful games are narrative-driven, immersive, experiential, aesthetically pleasing, and enjoyable works of art.

Poster Session

Monaco, Greg. Director for Research and Cyberinfrastructure Initiatives, Great Plains Network

Title: Great Plains Network: Fostering Communities of Interest

Poster Session

Palmer, Scott. Professor of History, Western Illinois University;
Perkins, Jonathan. Director, Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center, University of Kansas

Title: Strategic Visions and Tactical Realities on the Frontlines of Digital Humanities: Russia’s Great War & Revolution

Abstract: For most of the twentieth century Russia’s involvement in the First World War was a historical afterthought. Overshadowed by the Bolshevik revolution, Civil War, and consolidation of power, Europe’s “Great War” took a back seat within professional scholarship to explanations of the origins and rise of Soviet Communism. In recent years, however, a new generation of researchers has begun to re-examine and re-evaluate the wartime experience. Buttressed by new archival findings, they have begun to analyze and represent Russia’s Great War not as a prelude to “Red October,” but as the first in a chain of events that transformed Eurasia and much of the world.

Russia’s Great War and Revolution, 1914-1922: The Centennial Re-appraisal (RGWR) is at the forefront of these investigative efforts. A decade-long multinational undertaking involving more than 300 scholars and graduate students from around the globe, RGWR aims to fundamentally transform our understanding of Russia’s “continuum of crisis” during the years 1914-1922. RGWR’s companion website (russiasgreatwar.org) aims to integrate advanced scholarly research with new digitized content and innovative multimedia applications to provide visitors with an interactive environment for exploring the cataclysmic events that gripped Eurasia at the outset of the twentieth century. Developed and housed at the University of Kansas, the ongoing digital humanities initiative is jointly overseen by its Director, Dr. Scott W. Palmer (Professor of History, Western Illinois University), and Project Manager, Dr. Jonathan Perkins (Director of EGARC, University of Kansas).

In their poster, Palmer and Perkins will share with conference participants their experiences in conceiving, designing, and managing russiasgreatwar.org with particular emphasis on the challenges involved in implementing a large digital humanities initiative in light of competing project agendas and limited resources.

Poster Session

Schulte, Becky. University Archivist, University of Kansas;
Hanrath, Scott. Web Services Manager, University of Kansas Libraries;
Thiel, Sarah. Imaging Librarian, University of Kansas Libraries

Title: Dr. James Naismith: his life and legacy. Three University Archives tell the story of the “Father of Basketball”

Abstract: This project involves an international collaboration between the University Archives of the University of Kansas Libraries and McGill University, Montreal, Quebec and Springfield College, Springfield, Massachusetts (where Naismith graduated and the game of basketball was invented, respectively).

University Archivists from each institution will select and digitize items from their collections concerning James Naismith. The KU project team will build a permanent and public digital collection using Naismith image files from each participating institution. Images and metadata will then be made accessible through the KU image management system (Luna Imaging). The team will also create a virtual exhibition of selected Naismith image files using Omeka as the web publishing platform. Both a temporal and spatial timeline will be developed to show the relationships between the three institutions throughout Naismith’s personal and professional life.

This international collaboration will allow one-stop access to a unique archival collection representing James Naismith’s life and varied achievements spanning both time and space. Speakers will share best practices, workflows and project management decisions and results in their presentation of this rich and complex collaborative effort.

Poster Session

Ward, Doug. Associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Kansas

Title: Tracking Audiences: How Mapping Forces a Rethinking of the ‘Mass’ in Mass Media

Abstract: Traditional methods of media history favor qualitative analysis, and a focus on individual lives, organizations, and social and institutional norms. That focus often leaves the role of location largely unexplored. This presentation will explain how the concept of where can be combined with the analysis of media audiences, another little-explored area of media history. It will show how a combination of geographical information systems and statistical analysis of census data can lead to new questions about audiences. It will argue that the term “mass magazines” is a misnomer, and that geographic patterns of readership suggest a deeper, more complex relationship between magazines and audiences than analysis of editorial content can explain.

Poster Session

Williams, Sheryl. Curator of Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas;
Garrison, Wade. Assistant Librarian, Center for Digital Scholarship, University of Kansas

Title: Digitizing Kansas Sanborn Maps

Abstract: The Kansas Collection is home to a significant collection of Kansas Sanborn fire insurance maps that provide detailed information about the built environment, especially the business districts, for many Kansas towns (some 220) over a period from roughly the 1880s – 1920s. A recent grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission provided funds for their digitization. The grant project, completed in March 2011, has allowed the Libraries to provide access to these unique sources through LUNA to a much broader audience virtually. Presenters Williams and Garrison (the project Director and Manager) will discuss the maps and project, detailing the history of the maps, their research use that supports the humanities, and specifics of carrying out the project, including selection of vendor for outsourcing the digital work, mounting of records in LUNA, and reaction to the project thus far. The presentation will also provide discussion with attendees of options for additional digital projects, building from the basic data provided up to this point. Presenters will include a Sanborn map in original form, and a demo of the digitized maps as part of the presentation.

Welzenbach, Rebecca. Text Creation Partnership Project Outreach Librarian, MPublishing, University of Michigan Library

Title: Making the most of free, unrestricted texts–a first look at the promise of the Text Creation Partnership

Abstract: In April 2011, the Text Creation Partnership announced that 2,231 transcribed and SGML/XML encoded texts from the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) corpus were freely available to the public, with no restrictions on their use or distribution. This is the first set of TCP texts to have all restrictions lifted. We have already seen significant interest in studying, manipulating, and publishing these texts, which has given us a peek at what might happen in a few years, when the much larger EEBO-TCP also archive becomes available to the public. The release was met with enthusiasm by power users who were eager to work directly with the XML files, but frustration by those who expected a full-service platform to interact with the texts. This presentation will discuss the mixed reactions to the release of the ECCO-TCP texts; offer examples of how people are starting to work with them; and highlight some of the questions, challenges, and opportunities that have arisen for the TCP as a result.

Stinson, Philip. Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, University of Kansas

Title: From Uncertainty to Virtual Reality: Knowledge Representation in Rome Reborn

Abstract: Graphic representations of ancient Rome have become more visually powerful in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries with the innovations afforded by digital technologies, but the use value of these images is under debate today. This paper explores the interplay among different types of knowledge representation, an under-theorized area of research in the digital humanities, in the acclaimed Rome Reborn project, now also known as Ancient Rome 3D in Google Earth. Rome Reborn is perhaps the largest and most complex visualization endeavor in the digital humanities to date. The author of this paper belonged to the original project team (UCLA 1999-2001) and is on the Scientific Committee of the current iteration (UVA). Rome Reborn incorporates distinct classes of knowledge—historical sources, archaeological remains, and deductive logic or inference—as a basis to reconstruct the appearance of ancient Rome’s monuments (mainly temples, public buildings and residential structures), urban infrastructure (streets, aqueducts), and topography (hills of Rome, Tiber River). All forms of knowledge utilized in the making of Rome Reborn are represented by the medium of an interactive virtual reality model consisting of millions of polygonal surfaces with applied colors, textures and simulations of light and shadow effects. This paper will perform autopsy on Rome Reborn and expose its interwoven visual representations of historical, archaeological, and conjectural knowledge. The relationships of secure knowledge representations, which are sparse in the model, to the more prevalent conjectural or speculative knowledge representations will be clarified with the aim of identifying Rome Reborn’s underlying epistemological structure. Analysis of Rome Reborn in this manner holds the potential to advance the methodological discourse in the digital humanities for the visual representation of knowledge when multiple forms of knowledge require systemization and when levels of uncertainty are high.

Plenary Session
Sperberg-McQueen, Michael. Black Mesa Technologies (www.blackmesatech.com)

Title: The hermeneutics of data representation

When we consult a file on disk, or receive a data stream on a network port, we see a sequence of bits. What does it mean? And can we tell the difference between a meaningful sequence of bits and garbage? Any work involving the machine-readable representation of knowledge must consider both how to validate the representation mechanically (to detect and possibly recover from transmission or storage errors) and how to verify the information semantically and reason about it systematically. The talk will survey some possible approaches to each of these problems and point to current technologies that seem promising in addressing them. At another level, however, data representation has another kind of meaning. Like any cultural artifact, a data representation tells a story about the culture that made it. What do our choices of data representation say about our culture? And what does XML have to do with Kant’s definition of enlightenment?ls a story about
the culture that made it. What do our choices of data representation say about our culture? And what does XML have to do with Kant’s definition of enlightenment?

Shaw, Ryan. Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Title: Breaking the Historian’s Code: Finding Patterns of Historical Representation

Abstract: Historical narrative is a rich and complex form of knowledge representation. In The Savage Mind Lévi-Strauss described what he called “the historian’s code” (p. 259): the recursive conceptual structure that enables historians to represent the past as broadly or as narrowly as they wish. This structure fades into the background when we fall under the spell of a good historical narrative, and we feel that we are experiencing the past “as it happened” rather than a representation of it. This can blind us to the possibility of other representations of the past. The traditional remedy for this blindness has been to study more history: reading multiple overlapping narratives is what enables us to locate the specific point of view in each one (Ankersmit, 1983, p. 219). By comparing narratives that select different sets of events at different levels of specificity, the historian’s code can be made visible. New techniques for “distant reading” of digitized texts promise to offer new ways of seeing the contours of difference in perspective that distinguish historical narratives. I am currently exploring the use of natural language processing (NLP) techniques to identify events in historical narratives and group them into narrative chains at different levels of specificity. The goal is to help readers understand historical discourse by deriving alternative representations that can be more easily manipulated, visualized and compared than the original narratives. In this initial stage the project is focused on two sets of documents related to the civil rights movement: 300 interview transcripts from the Southern Oral History Program1 and the full text of 87 books on the civil rights movement published by the UNC Press.2 The specific NLP techniques being employed are named entity recognition, event extraction, and event chain mining. Named entity recognition involves identifying named entities (people, organizations, events) in texts and linking them to authoritative identifiers in databases containing additional facts about those entities. Event extraction involves identifying sentences that communicate some event, e.g. a strike, a protest, or a legislative act. Specifically, event extraction involves training a classifier to match sentences to a semantic frame, a conceptual structure that describes a particular type of event along with its participants and setting. To identify passages narrating more complex events we must extract not just individual events, but chains of events from texts. The procedure of identifying commonly occurring event chains from a global set of extracted event frames is known as event chain mining. The identified event chains can then be used as schemas or story templates for exploring the corpus, or event chains drawn from different parts of the corpus can be compared and contrasted (e.g. those drawn from oral histories versus those drawn from scholarly monographs).

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Ankersmit, Frank R. Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis of the Historian’s Language. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1983. 1 www.sohp.org/ 2 lcrm.lib.unc.edu/voice/

Pasin, Michele. Research Associate, Kings College, London

Title: Prosopography and Computer Ontologies: towards a formal representation of the ‘factoid’ model by means of CIDOC-CRM

View slides:
www.slideshare.net/mpasin/prosopography-and-computer-ontologies-towards-a-formal-representation-of-the-factoid-model-by-means-of-cidoccrm

Abstract: Structured Prosopography provides a formal model for representing prosopography: a branch of historical research that traditionally has focused on the identification of people that appear in historical sources. Pre-digital print prosopographies, such as Martindale 1992, presented its materials as narrative articles about the individuals it contains. Since the 1990s, KCL’s Department of Digital Humanities (formerly known as Center for Computing in the Humanities) has been involved in the development of structured prosopographical databases, and has had direct involvement in Prosopographies of the Byzantine World (PBE and PBW), Anglo-Saxon England (PASE), Medieval Scotland (PoMS) and now more generally northern Britain (“Breaking of Britain”: BoB), and is currently in discussions about others. DDH has been involved in the development of a general “factoid-oriented” model of structure that although downplaying or eliminating narratives about people, has to a large extent served the needs of these various projects quite well.

DDH’s factoid-oriented prosopographical model are currently all expressed using the entity-attribute-relationship model of the relational database. The structure formally identifies obvious items of interest: Persons and Sources, and extends to related things like Offices or Places. In our prosopographical model the Factoid is a central idea and represents the spot in a primary source where something is said about one or more persons. It links people to the information about them via spots in primary sources that assert that information. By creating “factoids” which assert things about what the source says about people, the factoid approach prioritises the sources, and our historians’ reading of them. Our data about a person is not, then, so much a narrative that presents a summary written by the prosopographer (as it was in the articles about persons included in pre-digital prosopography) as a collection of information about what the sources say about him/her, and can represent the multiple, perhaps contradictory, voices of the different sources simultaneously: one saying she is a Saxon, but another saying that she was from Northumbria.

Bradley and Short (2005) has a more complete overview of the factoid model than what there is room for here. Recent development, particularly the WWW, and its related technologies around the Semantic Web have promoted the possibility to both interconnecting dispersed data, and allowing it to be queried semantically. Central technologies to support this approach are ontology languages such as RDF and OWL. Modelling the work of prosopography in a framework such as OWL is in many ways similar to relational database modelling: including the idea of classes and slots which correspond quite closely to entities and attributes in RDB modelling, and in the handling of relationships between data. So far, the DB structured approach has served our approach to prosopography well – producing digital resources that are well received by the research community, and the broader public. What, then, are the advantages of rendering our prosopographical material which is already highly structured into an ontology instead? First, ontology systems such as OWL, by being a part of the Semantic Web initiative, are designed to inter-operate between independent resources. Our recently started project called The Breaking of Britain – which will produce separate prosopographical databases of people in Scotland and Northern England, will be our first experience of the need for substantial linking and searching between them. Second, ontology systems provide a mechanism to engage more heavily first order logic in the search. (There is something of an introduction to this issue in Zöllner-Weber 2009, although in the field of literary scholarship). First order logic could help with genealogical data (where an asserting that A was son of B, also can be interpreted as stating that B was mother or father of A), and can facilitate the management of the complex date searching needs of materials from Medieval times. Finally, we expect that a full ontological expression of our approach to prosopography will provide a richer and more transparent formal expression of the semantics attached to our approach than we have at present. As a result, such a prosopographical ontology will embody a shared conceptualisation of the field useful to both computers and people (cf. Gruber, 2000).

One of the central approaches to modelling in the Semantic Web world is to develop a model that contains elements of other, compatible, schemas. Borrowed elements must not only match structurally, but the semantics of the classes and slots in the shared model have to match conceptually as well. At present, the existing ontology that we know about that best matches our interests is CIDOC-CRM (CIDOC 2006 and Doerr 2003), and it has been mapped to both RDFS and OWL (Schiemann 2010) – but it is aimed at the needs of the museum and archive community as a way of representing cultural heritage materials.
CIDOC-CRM has several advantages as the base for a prosopographical ontology: it is sympathetic with an historical view of the materials it represents, and identifies relevant entities: including persons, places, events and sources. Page 11 of the CIDOC-CRM specification points out that “The CRM does not propose a specific form to support reasoning about possible identity”, but we are not asking the ontology for these projects to do that. The identity assertion is the work of our historian partners, and the point of the ontology is not to derive the identity of persons from the ontological-expressed data for us, but merely to express what the historians assert about their materials (including assertion of identity of individuals) in ways that support sophisticated searching.

There has been a stream of argument about the black-and-white nature of assertions made through computer ontologies, implying that this bi-polar nature is a significant flaw when applied to Humanities materials. Indeed, we expect that much of the discussion about computer ontologies – centered often on still the relatively simple problems within science and engineering (see, for example, the discussion in Gruber 1993) that have been used as examples – have put Humanists (even Digital Humanists) off. Veltman 2004 provides this kind of argument when he claims that the preservation of culture requires the dealing of changing meanings over different places and times, and that computer ontologies try to “create data structures that assume a single world-view”. (p. 7). Now, this would indeed be a significant concern and, not accidently, fit with, say, Louch’s (Louch 1969) reasoning about why narrative, with its subtlety of expression, remains for many historians the main vehicle for research output. However the story need not be as pessimistic as Veltman seems to believe, since ontology modelling need not mean that a single view of the material is an inevitable result.

Indeed, our factoid approach can show that formal structuring if designed correctly need not impose, as Veltman implies, a single perspective on the data it models, but is capable of accommodating a range of views from the different sources. In the factoid model statements about the people are not made baldly: “Alfred the Great learned his Latin from Plegmund, Asser, Grimbald and John”. Instead, the statement records what a contemporary source says: “The source of the West-Saxon Version of Pope Gregory the Great’s ‘Pastor Care’ (section 7.18) asserts that Alfred the Great learned his Latin from Plegmund …”. By introducing the source as an intermediary, the model can also accommodate contradictory statements from different sources.

CIDOC provides classes meant to facilitate the representation of this iatus between a fact and the reading (expressed by the source, or by us in virtue of our editorial role) of that fact. On page 8 of the CIDOC specifications, the E13-Attribute Assignment class is presented as what allows the “documentation of how the respective assignment came about, and whose opinion it was”. By using this class all the “properties assigned in such an action can also be seen as directly attached to the respective item or concept, possibly as a collection of contradictory values”. Examples of how to employ this mechanism to the end of constructing a reified description of reality can also be found in the context of the ‘exhibition problem’ discussion (Eide, 2009). An alternative solution could be instead extending CIDOC by using ad hoc classes; in the context of building ontologies for the philosophical domain, an approach of this kind has been previously documented by one of the authors (Pasin, 2009, p.7). Here a purposedly created ‘Interpretation Event’ class extends CIDOC and allows different users to organize networks of philosophical ideas in a subjective manner. Despite some few early examples available, the issue of how to properly map our structured factoid model into an OWL ontology based on CIDOC-CRM remains quite a difficult and interesting one. In this paper we will report in some detail on our most recent attempts to address this problem, by reviewing the pros and cons of the existing approaches and exploring in some depth aspects of the mapping that required significant enrichment or extension of CIDOC to accomplish.

Bradley, John and Harold Short (2005). “Texts into databases: the Evolving Field of New-style Prosopography”. In Literary and Linguistic Computing Vol. 20 Suppl. 1:3-CIDOC 2006. The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. International Council of Museums. www.cidoc-crm.org/

Doerr, Martin (2003). “The CIDOC conceptual reference module: an ontological approach to semantic interoperability of metadata”. In AI Magazine Vol. 24 No. 3. Online version available at www.aiide.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/viewFile/1720/1618

Eide, Oyvinde (2008). “The Exhibition Problem. A Real-life Example with a Suggested Solution”. In Literary and Linguistic Computing vol. 23 (1) pp. 27-37

Gruber, Tom (1993). “Towards Principles for the Design of Ontologies Used for Knowledge Sharing”. In Nicola Guarino and Roberto Poli (eds.) Formal Ontology in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation. Kluwer Academic publishers.

Gruber, Tom (2000). “Every Ontology is a Treaty”. Interview for Semantic Web and Information Systems SIG of the Association for Information Systems. SIGSEMIS Bulletin vol. 1 (3).

Louch, Alfred .R. (1969). “History as Narrative”. In History and Theory Vol. 8 No 1. pp. 54-70.

Martindale, J.R. (1992). The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, 3: A.D. 527-641. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992.

Pasin, Michele and Motta, Enrico (2009). “Ontological Requirements for Annotation and Navigation of Philosophical Resources”. In Synthese. Online at www.springerlink.com/content/20275389857wj5v3/.

Schiemann, Bernard, Martin Oischinger and Günther Görz (2010). Erlanger CRM/OWL. Online at erlangen-crm.org.

Veltman, Kim H. (2004). “Towards a Semantic Web for Culture”. In Journal of Digital Information. Vol 4 No 4. Online at journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/viewArticle/113.

Zöllner-Weber, Amélie (2009). “Ontologies and Logic Reasoning as Tools in Humanities”. In Digital Humanities Quarterly Vol 3 No 4. Online at digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/4/000068/000068.html.

Page, Michael. Geospatial Coordinator, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University;
Varner, Stewart. Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Title: Representing Geographic Knowledge: Opportunities and Challenges from the Atlanta Maps Project at Emory University

Abstract: Printed maps have long been a means to take a survey of an area, create inventories, and provide tools for navigation or reference. Maps create superficial representations of a space but they often tacitly record the more complex social and political history of a place in the process. As a result, maps are attractive scholarly resources for a wide range of researchers. Emerging geographic technology such as GIS offers new opportunities to humanities scholars interested in understanding how meaning is created, and contested, spatially. For example, scholars are now able to represent spatially situated changes overtime in a much clearer way than what would have been possible before. In doing so, these maps may reveal information that was hidden in text-based scholarship. Furthermore, geolocation projects are able to grow and evolve in ways that more static resources never could. However, GIS also presents some important challenges. No matter how dynamic and interactive maps becomes they will always be representations. As such, they will always highlight some aspects of a place while neglecting others. A city is a chaotic, organic space where power and resistance to power shape each other and the spaces they occupy. A map, on the other hand, organizes spaces and freezes the chaos at particular moments and from particular perspectives. The ability of a map to present the city as a controlled and orderly space is what makes it both useful and potentially deceptive. The scientific authority of GIS adds to the danger that the line between geographic data and politically situated perspectives could be blurred.

This presentation will illustrate these opportunities and challenges with experiences gained from developing a digital map of Atlanta at the Emory University Libraries. Using GIS to produce a rich digital representation of Atlanta, Georgia, the first phase of this project produced a digital map based on an atlas of the city from 1928. The map is so intricately detailed it includes everything from roads and railways to building footprints and manhole covers. Because construction all but ceased in the city shortly after this atlas was published due to, first, Great Depression, and then by World War Two, the map provides a relatively reliable image of the city as it was for the two decades leading up to the Civil Rights Era. Using this digital map as a foundation, the second phase of the project will involve building a geo-database in which the geometric features will be given both descriptors (name, type, ownership, etc.) and linkages to other digital objects (photographs, audio, maps, etc.). For example, the library holds extensive historical records from a local African American funeral home. These records document the address, age and cause of death for thousands of individuals. By representing this information geographically on the digital map, scholars may be able to find new patterns that illuminate a relationship between utility infrastructure and public health or enhance our understanding of racial segregation. Eventually, this map could be used to expose a wide variety of library resources and enhance numerous research projects. We hope that our presentation will inspire similar projects, elicit suggestions for improvement and become part of a discussion about the proper use of GIS in humanities work.

Hill, DaMaris. Doctoral Student, English-Creative Writing Program, University of Kansas

Title: Viral Venuses: The Potential of Digital Pedagogy in Feminist Classrooms

View presentation (Prezi)

Abstract: The legacy of Baartman’s exploitation has yet to be resolved by the reemergence of humanist values or the illusions of gender neutral digital environments. In 2008 the National Endowment for the Humanities defined digital humanities as an umbrella term used to describe the different activities surrounding technology and humanities scholarship. A digital humanities approach to this humanities based feminist studies course seemed eminent, particularly when one considers the influence of social media and digital mediums on popular culture. Teaching this course challenged me to align libratory pedagogy, feminist instructional theory, and digital technology, digi-feminist pedagogical practice.

This course aims to understand how the body –the female body in particular –has figured into philosophy, cultural studies, history, literature, and visual culture to include digital spaces. The course includes analysis of how these standards of beauty change across time and cultural groups, and the impact of these standards on women as individuals and on social and political outcomes. The connections between social media and physical appearance are easily recognized by many students. Social media outlets feature large quantities of photographs and images that influence standards of beauty on a very personal level. Additionally, digital devices are largely considered as accessories that accentuate attractiveness and act as indicators of personality in our culture. The Internet, instantly accessible via cell phone, laptop and iPad, has become the initial site of exploration and research for most students. One of the pedagogical aims of the course is to facilitate learning and generate outcomes in digital forms. In addition to class discussion and small group exploration of feminist issues, some of the digital tools used to facilitate learning include:

• Spencer Art Museum Digital Archives
• Individual online course conferences
• Blackboard
• YouTube Clips and live streams
• Final projects facilitated using webpages • Electronic database searches
• Digital music and audio files
• Modified identity boxes, Photoshop image design
• E-readers (Nook, iPad, ect.)

The assignments are in digital formats and the final project includes developing a webpage.

Therefore, the assignments are easily shared with peer groups outside of the classroom environment using Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, and other social media outlets. An unarticulated pedagogical experiment is being conducted as a result. Will the students share what they learned with others using social media outlets? I suspect that the 33 students that enrolled in the course will facilitate interests in feminist studies and the Venus Hottentot by sharing their assignments and webpages with an audience that extends our physical class. Will Venus studies go viral? Will their perspectives of feminist issues appear on webpages, email, tumblers, tweets, posts, and blogs that are read and visited by many Internet users around the world?

Green, Harriett. English and Digital Humanities Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: Literature Unbound: Networks of scholarly communication and knowledge creation in digital literary magazines

Abstract: Online-only, or “born digital” literary magazines and journals are proliferating faster than ever before: Once considered transitory upstarts and publications of last resort, they are now a well-numbered and thriving branch of literary publishing that promotes a rich lode of literature from both emerging and lauded writers. This paper examines a selection of digital literary journals to analyze what the publication records reveal about the role and status of digital literary journals for scholarly communications and evaluative scholarship in creative writing and writing studies. The initial study presented in the paper examines a selection of digital literary journals that have been published on a regular basis for a minimum of the past five years. These titles include Blackbird, The Cortland Review, Mudlark, Painted Bride Quarterly, 2RiverView, and Cerise Press. Collected data analyzed in the paper includes the genres of works published in the journals, formats of the works published, the frequency of publication of the different genres of works, the affiliations of authors, and the structure of the editorial processes in each journal. The author will analyze this data to explore how the dissemination of literary works has been transformed by digital literary publishing: How do digital literary journals exploit their digital platforms to publish works in new types of formats? How does the journal’s publication frequency, distribution of genres, and affiliations of authors begin to reflect their status as a journal for disseminating a scholar’s creative and critical works? As part of this examination, the author will compare the publication frequency of these digital journals to a selection of established print journals over a similar timespan, including Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, and Paris Review. The study’s analysis will then explore how these literary magazines’ editorial structures and processes establish themselves as legitimate arbiters and evaluators of creative literary scholarship. Ultimately, this study seeks to open a dialogue on how digital literary magazines are becoming established conduits in the networks of scholarly communication for creative writing and writing studies, and how their innovative publishing methods that exploit their digital media platforms challenge us to re-consider how writing is presented and consumed.

Egbert, Stephen. Department of Geography, University of Kansas; Roekard, Karen. Independent Scholar

Title: Employing Geospatial Genealogy to Reveal Residential and Kinship Patterns in a Pre-Holocaust Ukrainian Village

Abstract: By incorporating data from a variety of historical records into geographic information systems (GIS), we are conducting research into visualizing what can be learned about residential and kinship patterns in the mixed-ethnic settlements of pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. We have termed this process – the linkage of records traditionally used for family history research with GIS –“geospatial genealogy.” Our prototype is the town of Rawa Ruska, Ukraine, located on the Rata River near the Polish border. It was founded in the mid-fifteenth century and was a “mixed” town of Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians. Over time its governance shifted among Austria-Hungary, Poland, Nazi Germany, the USSR, and now Ukraine. During WWII the Jews of Rawa Ruska were murdered in various “actions” at nearby mass gravesites or gassed at the Belzec extermination camp, 14 kilometers away. Our reconstruction, based on an 1854 cadastral map, utilizes house numbers listed on the map and cross-references them as they are used elsewhere, e.g. in vital records, tax and residence rolls, Tabula register contracts, etc. from the late 1700s to the early 1900s. Thus, they provide a key link in establishing spatial patterns. Mapping residence patterns permits, for example, the examination of clustering or dispersion over time by ethnic group and relative wealth, or the degree of clustering around focal points such as the town square or places of worship.

Clement, Tanya. Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of Texas

Title: Sounding it out: modeling orality for large-scale text collection analysis

Abstract: Many scholars and poets have written about the remarkable experience of hearing Gertrude Stein’s texts read aloud. “Language poets” who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and who form important scholarly communities today have adopted Stein as an early influence and a model. In part, the nature of this relationship has been ascribed to the indeterminacy and the manner of language play that Majorie Perloff and others see evinced in Stein’s writing, but the extent to which prosody and rhythm has also influenced these artists goes undocumented.

Further, very few scholars have had the means to investigate the speech patterns (whether African American or German or French) that may have influenced Stein. This paper will discuss a use-case study in which I am using data mining to examine clusters of patterns in Stein’s poetry and prose compared to those in non-fiction narratives and oral histories as well as those present in contemporary poetry. Taking advantage of pre-existing research and development with the Mellon-funded SEASR (The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research) application, this work has included identifying OpenMary XML (a text-to-speech system that uses an internal XML-based representation language called MaryXML) output as a base analytic, producing a tabular representation of the data for clustering and predictive modeling that includes phonemic and syntactic elements, creating a routine in MEANDRE (a semantic-web-driven data-intensive flow execution environment) that produces this data and allows future users to produce similar results, and developing a user-interface for seeing these comparisons across collections of texts. Access to large-scale repositories of text opens larger questions about how literary scholars can use such repositories in their research. John F. Sowa writes in his seminal book on computational foundations, that theories of knowledge representation are particularly useful “for anyone whose job is to analyze knowledge about the real world and map it to a computable form” (xi). Similarly, Sowa notes that knowledge representation is unproductive if the logic and ontology which shape its application in a certain domain are unclear: “without logic, knowledge representation is vague, Sowa writes, “with no criteria for determining whether statements are redundant or contradictory,” and “without ontology, the terms and symbols are ill-defined, confused, and confusing” (xii). Knowledge representation is the work of all scholars in digital humanities and these scholars must help determine the logics and ontologies that shape how we access this data. Charles Bernstein has written that “[t]he relation of sound to meaning is something like the relation of the soul (or mind) to the body. They are aspects of each other, neither prior, neither independent (17). Scholars have not had the ability to analyze the features of text that correspond to orality—their phonemes and prosodic elements—much less compare these features with similar features across collections. To incorporate this kind of study in digital humanities, it is time we considered the logics and ontologies of orality in the computational environment.

Bernstein, Charles. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1981. Print.

Sowa, John F. Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks Cole Publishing Co., 2000. Print.

Buchsbaum, Julianne. Humanities Librarian, University of Kansas

Title: Materiality and Meaning in Digital Poetics

Abstract: Poetry is highly self-reflexive, even hyperverbal, in its construction. Poets pay a great deal of attention to the formal properties of language—its textures, rhythms, graphical representation, materiality (the way words sound, the “mouthfeel” of words), down to the level of the actual syllable and phoneme—all of these nonsemantic aspects of linguistic signs (the aesthetic forms they take) inform a poem’s construction and its process of meaning-making. Therefore, a poem is always, in a sense, revealing, disclosing, or calling attention to its constructedness. Some poems try to veil their constructedness, by being “transparent,” but modernist and postmodernist works tend to be more self-conscious in calling attention to their writtenness as verbal constructs. Therefore, poetry, as a practice, is helpful for understanding the ways writing and meaning-making change in a digital medium. What does it mean to “write” in a digital medium? When the tools of one’s medium are constrained and/or liberated by bits and bytes, zeroes and ones, by the plasticity and multispatiality of cyperspace? “Materiality” is a term that has been used to write about digital texts since the 1990s by at least a few critics of new media. What exactly, though, is meant by the “materiality” of new computer media? How can digital poems even be said to be “material” at all, as opposed to analog, print-based works?

One might claim that the elements of cyberspace actually enter into and inform the production and reception of digital texts, that they change the very nature of those texts. Are the seemingly behind-the-scenes codes and web addresses of a page on which a digital poem is published actually part of that poem and inseparable from it? In the same way as the spine of a book, its binding, its page numbers, its index and table of contents, the font of its type, page format, etc., inform (to an extent) the experience of reading a poem in a print-based book of poems? In the “text-environment” of a digital poem, what is meant by materiality when there is no corresponding physical, palpable artifact that exists behind the work in the extensional world? Are we, in fact, looking at the demediation or dematerialization of physical culture? Without a material substratum, can we in fact speak of a human body’s interaction with technology? Can we translate a kind of materialist hermeneutics into the digital realm? In this presentation, I will examine the assumption that simply because we cannot reach out and touch a digital text object, electronic objects are disembodied and immaterial. I propose to take into consideration what it means to treat a digital text object from a textual-material angle, taking apart the anatomy of one or more pieces of born-digital writing and analyzing them from the perspectives of platform, interface, data standards, file formats, operating systems, versions and distributions of code, etc., keeping in mind that they are artifacts subject to embedded, historical, localized modes of understanding. I propose to speak not only of the “tiny junctures of silicon and metal,” but also of how exactly encoded data is always literally situated or embedded in a material site.

Birnbaum, David. Professor and Chair, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh

Title: The Graphic Visualization of XML Documents

Abstract: This presentation describes the graphic visualization of XML documents in several projects in order to support philological research in the humanities. In many cases information that may not be easily accessible when the data is viewed in textual format (even with the benefit of markup) emerges strikingly when the marked-up prose is transformed, using XML tools, into a graphic representation. Furthermore, the derived graphic representations can be interwoven with more traditional textual ones in an interactive “workstation” that allows researchers to move easily among textual and graphic views as a way of researching and interrogating the content.

Baym, Nancy. Associate Professor, Communication Studies, University of Kansas

Title: Fan Curation on the Internet

Abstract: Audiences have always collected and codified information and expertise about the things they love, but the networked and persistent nature of online communication have given them new ways to do this. This talk will identify the kinds of curation fans are doing with an eye toward the complexity of understanding and preserving these sites for scholarly purposes.

Poster Session

Frej, Mohamed. Student, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea

Title: Local-grammar Based approach to the recognition of variants of Loanwords

Abstract: Many studies have investigated the role Loanwords play in second language learning. While English loanwords can be considered as an effective tool in teaching Korean to speakers of other languages, there are some problems connected with the variation of the spelling of English Loanwords. Even though there is an official norm imposed by the Korean government about the transliteration of loanwords in Korean, we observe people use, especially in internet documents, many variants of the standard spelling of loanwords. The variant spellings of loanwords are idiosyncratic phenomena that are problematic not only for natural language processing applications, but also for second language learners who get confused about the right spelling of a given loanword. This would hamper their second language learning process. In this paper, to account for this problem, we propose a finite-state methodology named Local-Grammar Graph (LGG) to describe and recognize these various spellings of loanwords. Local grammar graphs consist of two parts; the input and the output. We describe all possible variations in input paths to assign them into a standard spelling of the word in output path of the finite-state graph. One example of those graphs is the following: [graph provided at exhibit].

This graph can be used to describe and recognize all the possible variants of the loanword 파운데이션. It exactly accounts for 32 forms of the same word. Therefore, LGGs are definitely more effective and less time-consuming than having to describe those variations one by one in a list form. Unitex system (Paumier 2003) which has been developed to transform the LGGs into finite-state transducers, to be integrated in E-learning systems, will offer an adequate environment for this work. Finally, the methodology we present here may be applied on other languages.

References

Cheon, S.-M. (2008). A study of English Loanwords In Korean. Seoul: KSi. ISBN 978-89-534-7946-3

Gross, Maurice. (1997) the Construction of Local Grammars. In Finite-State Language Processing, E. Roche & Y. Schabès (eds.), Language, Speech, and Communication, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pages 329-354

Nam J. S. & Choi, K. S. 1997. Local-grammar based approach to proper noun recognition. Beijing.

Paper Presentations

Aist, Gregory. Assistant Professor, Communication Studies Program, Iowa State University

Baym, Nancy. Associate Professor, Communication Studies, University of Kansas

Birnbaum, David. Professor and Chair, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh

Buchsbaum, Julianne. Humanities Librarian, University of Kansas

Clement, Tanya. Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of Texas

Egbert, Stephen. Department of Geography, University of Kansas

Green, Harriett. English and Digital Humanities Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Hill, DaMaris. Doctoral Student, English-Creative Writing Program, University of Kansas

Page, Michael. Geospatial Coordinator, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Pasin, Michele. Research Associate, Kings College, London

Roekard, Karen. Independent Scholar

Shaw, Ryan. Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sperberg-McQueen, Michael. Black Mesa Technologies (keynote presentation)

Stinson, Philip. Assistant Professor, Department of Classics, University of Kansas

Varner, Stewart. Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University

Welzenbach, Rebecca. Text Creation Partnership Project Outreach Librarian, MPublishing, University of Michigan Library

Poster Sessions

Frej, Mohamed. Student, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea

Garrison, Wade. Assistant Librarian, Center for Digital Scholarship, University of Kansas

Hanrath, Scott. Web Services Manager, University of Kansas Libraries

Ireton, Daniel. Assistant Professor/Undergraduate and Community Services Librarian, Kansas State University

Monaco, Greg. Director for Research and Cyberinfrastructure Initiatives, Great Plains Network

Palmer, Scott. Professor of History, Western Illinois University

Perkins, Jonathan. Director, Ermal Garinger Academic Resource Center, University of Kansas

Schulte, Becky. University Archivist, University of Kansas

Thiel, Sarah. Imaging Librarian, University of Kansas Libraries

Urton, Ellen. Associate Professor/Visual Literacy Librarian, Kansas State University

Ward, Doug. Associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communications, University of Kansas

Williams, Sheryl. Curator of Collections, Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas

Aist, Gregory. Assistant Professor, Communication Studies Program, Iowa State University (KR conference presentation)

Title: Exploring Issues at the Intersection of Humanities and Computing with LADL.

Abstract: This presentation focuses on a key aspect of intellectual engagement in the humanities: encountering, examining, and learning from multiple texts, both traditional written texts and multimedia. LADL, the Learning Activity Description Language, provides a way to consistently describe both the information structure and the interaction structure of an interactive experience, and allows for automatically constructing a single interactive Web page that allows for viewing and comparing of multiple source documents together with online tools and custom–‐written components as well. For example, an interactive exploration of historical and cultural material from Roman Britain that involves the examination of several different online artifacts –‐ such as a virtual tour of part of Hadrian’s Wall (1), an online edition of writing tables from a Roman fort in northern England (2), and a classical biography of Hadrian (3) –‐ might be designed and built in LADL. Written reflections that a reader produces when encountering a text are carried forward in the experience, through Javascript code that LADL produces automatically from the interaction structure. LADL is designed to support a variety of scholarly and pedagogical purposes in the humanities.

This presentation focuses on an area where issues in the humanities such as ethics and culture come in contact with information and computing technologies: the use of the computational support provided by LADL and the theoretical framework of culturally relevant pedagogy to design exercises that explore how ethical and cultural issues of interest to girls of color – young women of Black, Hispanic, or Native origin – relate to computer science topics. The fourteen exercises present a sample of topics from each of fourteen areas identified in a recent curriculum outline by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society, two leading computing societies. The issues linked to the topics by the exercises include ethical issues such as racial profiling, language issues such as representing names with accent marks in computer systems, issues of place and space such as challenges to Internet access in poor or rural areas, and cultural issues such as what kinds of relationships between simulated characters are supported by computer games. The exercises include custom–‐written explanations of concepts as well as the examination of video and written texts from online sources that are germane to the matter at hand.

In terms of knowledge representation and the humanities, LADL addresses several of the issues raised by the workshop. First, LADL is designed to support scholarly integrity (and respect of copyright) by providing views of online documents through inline frames and linked windows; LADL neither captures nor rehosts content. Second, the underlying LADL elements that display of existing online texts also allow for (simple) annotation of their sources and a minimal form of digital curation to keep links alive and sources consistent. Finally, activities written in the LADL language are themselves a form of knowledge representation in that they describe both the information structure of a document – how the parts are logically related – and the interaction structure – ways in which the reader may experience the document.

1 Housesteads Forts, www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/launch_vt_housesteads.shtml

2 Vindolanda Tablets Online, vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/

3 Life of Hadrian, penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Hadrian/1.html

Registration for THATCamp Kansas, along with our other 2011 Digital Humanities Forum events, is now open! The KU 2011 Digital Humanities Forum 2011 consists of three separate but related programs held over three days:

Thursday, September 22: BootCamp Workshops: a set of in-depth, hands on workshops on digital tools and other DH topics

Friday, September 23: THATCamp: an “unconference” for technologists and humanists

Saturday, September 24: Representing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities: a one-day program of panels and poster sessions showcasing DH projects and research

Please use the registration form here to register for any or all of the these three events.

The Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at KU is pleased to announce that THATCamp Kansas will take place September 22-23, 2011 at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Thursday, September 22 will be devoted to a series of hands-on BootCamp workshops on topics such as GIS, visualizing data, and creating digital exhibits using Omeka (exact topics are still to be determined). Friday, September 23 will be devoted to open, free-wheeling conversations about topics defined by the participants.

In addition, Saturday, September 24 we will be hosting a one-day conference, Representing Knowledge in the Digital Humanities, featuring keynote speaker C. M. Sperberg-McQueen along with panel and poster sessions. Please see the conference website for more information about submitting a paper or poster.

Stay tuned to this website, follow our RSS feed (link above), or follow us on Twitter (@THATCampKS) for further updates, registration, and travel information.