Bootcamp Workshops

THATCamp Kansas will host an all-day BootCamp on Thursday, September 22nd. BootCamp workshops provide hands-on introductions to digital tools and practices. All sessions will be held in the Kansas Union in the Pine, Walnut, Centennial, and Parlors Rooms.

Workshops

Workshop 1: Creating Digital Scholarly Editions Using the TEI

9:00 – 4:00
Instructors: Kevin Hawkins and Rebecca Welzenbach, MPublishing, University of Michigan Library

This is a full‐day workshop during which participants will learn about creating, working with, and publishing digital scholarly editions and other genres of text in print and digital form using XML and, in particular, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. The TEI guidelines provide instructions for creating digital text for use across platforms and with various tools for querying data. They are recommended by the MLA and NEH and are widely used in digital humanities centers and by individual scholars. The workshop will consist of a mix of lectures and hands‐on exercises. Participants should bring their own laptop and install <oXygen/> XML Editor (available free as a trial version) on it in advance.

Workshop 2: Introduction to WordPress

9:00 – 10:30
Instructor: Amanda French, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University

My friend Scott the software engineer once said that whenever faculty and grad students came to him with a question about what system to use for a particular project, the answer was always WordPress. The open source WordPress software is basically a very easy, very flexible, and therefore very popular way of building websites and blogs. WordPress “power[s] 14.7% of the top million websites in the world … and the latest data show 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.” Even if you’ve never built a website before, by the end of this workshop you’ll get a sense of what’s involved in building one with WordPress. I’ll demonstrate how to do WordPress’s famous five-minute installation, and then you’ll get to work with some pre-installed WordPress sites yourself.

Workshop 3: Introduction to Omeka

10:30 – 12:00
Instructor: Amanda French, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University

Omeka is a simple system used by scholarly archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts; to put such digital objects online in a searchable database; and to create attractive web exhibits from them. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll create your own digital archive of images, audio, video, and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and we’ll learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects. We’ll also look at some examples of pedagogical use of Omeka in humanities courses and talk about assigning students to create digital archives in individual or group projects.

Workshop 4: Integrating Digital Humanities Projects into the Undergraduate Curriculum

9:00 – 12:00
Instructors: Rebecca Frost Davis, Program Officer for the Humanities, National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE); Kathryn Tomasek, Associate Professor of History, Wheaton College, Massachusetts
Digital methods of analysis exert growing influence on the practice of many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, yet students majoring in non-science disciplines often have little exposure to computational thinking and working with computer code. At the same time, in the curriculum, the Digital Humanities promises significant learning benefits for undergraduates, who need a measure of digital literacy to function well as citizens in the twenty-first century. This bootcamp will present strategies for effectively integrating digital projects into undergraduate courses. By examining effective cases of assignments linked to digital projects, participants will consider how to make room for such assignments in a syllabus, how to tie digital projects to a course’s learning outcomes, and how to scaffold both technological and content learning to allow students to make positive contributions to a project external to the course. Participants will leave with a set of proven examples of effective assignments, preliminary plans for assignments for their own courses, and suggestions for how to find collaborative partners in library and technology services for such projects on their home campuses.

Workshop 5: Introduction to Mapping Tools and GIS for the Humanities

1:00 – 4:00
Instructor: Rhonda Houser, GIS and Data Specialist, Center for Digital Scholarship, University fo Kansas Libraries
This workshop will include an overview of various (free and snazzy) tools for visualization of geographic data. Most of the class will entail hands-on use of open source geographic information systems (GIS), and is designed to provide a basic understanding of geospatial data formats, uses and software cababilities. Workshop attendees will explore datasets from ‘the original GIS’ investigation in Victorian London, and learn how to manipulate and integrate various types of geographic information into a GIS, such as historical maps and tabular data. Please install Quantum GIS prior to the workshop. Download software at: www.qgis.org and use the ‘Standalone Installer’ to load version 1.7.0. Please contact instructor in advance if you need any assistance. We will provide data and no GIS experience is necessary.

Workshop 6: Introduction to R for Humanists

9:00 – 12:00
Instructor: Jeff Rydberg-Cox, University of Missouri- Kansas City

R is an open-source programming language that allows statistical and graphical techniques to be applied to data analysis. Increasingly, it is being used in humanities research for textual and linguistic analysis. During this half‐day hands-on workshop, participants will use sample data (provided) to explore the capabilities of R, and then apply it to their own data, if desired. No programming or statistical expertise is necessary to take this course, and the focus is humanistic research.

References
Baayen, R.H. 2008.  Analyzing Linguistic Data:  A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R . Cambridge UP.

Biber, Douglas.  Corpus Linguistics:  Investigating Language Structure and Use.

Burrows, J.F. Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels.

Kenny, Anthony.  The Computation of Style:  An Introduction to Statistics for Students of Literature and the Humanities.

Workshop 7: Introduction to project planning and management

1:00 – 2:30 (via Skype)
Instructor: Tom Scheinfeldt, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Prerequisites: None
Difficulty: You have no idea.
Description: This session will consider both the practical, day-to-day work and intangible aspects of managing digital projects in the humanities. Pragmatic lessons will include picking a project, building partnerships and engaging stakeholders, attracting funding, budgeting and staffing, setting milestones and meeting deliverables, managing staff, publicity and marketing, user support, sustainability, and the range of tools available to support this work. The session will also consider several intangible, but no less important, aspects of project management, including communication, decision making, and leadership.

Workshop 8: Grantwriting strategies for the Digital Humanities

2:30 – 4:00 (via Skype)
Instructor: Jennifer Serventi, National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities

What constitutes cutting-edge, fundable work in digital humanities? How does one construct a digital humanities proposal? What sort of team do I need? Can I start with a small pilot project?  What funding is available? NEH ODH’s Jennifer Serventi will be available Thursday afternoon for a Skype video chat to address these and other questions about writing grants for digital humanities projects. She will also introduce at least two NEH funding opportunities: the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants and the (brand new!) Digital Humanities Implementation Grants. Participants should finish the session with a greater understanding of the digital humanities grant programs offered by the National Endowment for the Humanities and a sense of where particular project ideas might fit most appropriately.

Workshop 9: Introduction to Zotero

Instructor: Kim Glover, Instructional Design Librarian, University of Kansas Libraries
1:00-2:30
Zotero is a free, easy to use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Save citations and create bibliographies right where you work – in your web browser. This workshop covers the basics of using the citation software Zotero, including building your libraries, citing your references, and building your bibliographies.

Workshop 10: Intro to the jQuery JavaScript Library

Instructor: Scott Hanrath, Web Services Manager, University of Kansas Libraries
2:30-4:00
This workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the jQuery JavaScript Library. We’ll explore jQuery’s “write less, do more” ability to create interactive web documents and learn how to utilize jQuery’s User Interface library and plugins to create elements like slide shows, date pickers, tabbed interfaces, and accordion menus. Participants will gain a basic familiarity with the JavaScript programming language. Prior familiarity with HTML and CSS will be helpful, but not required. Participants will need a text editor (e.g., Notepad, TextEdit) and a web browser (preferably Firefox with the Firebug extension installed).