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Plenty of digital humanists have gotten quite good at knowing how to take text files and, as Steve Ramsay says, “screw around” with them in fairly sophisticated ways using various algorithms–TF-IDF, topic modeling, N+7. But lots of digital artifacts aren’t text. We aren’t (I’m supposing) as good at screwing around with those.

So I want to talk about what the basic toolkit is or should be for playing around when you have a big file with some other kind of digital files–particularly images or sound files. What projects out there are making creative use of open-source image-processing software we can drop on our own files? Can we make some of the format-agnostic techniques that we sometimes use for clustering texts–normalized compression distance, say–be useful on binary audio or image files as well as on ASCII text? Are there any open source image-processing programs out there with the potential to be as useful for historians of visual artifacts as MALLET can be for textual scholars?

I’m coming at this from a position of a few experiments but no deep expertise. I think we’ll be able to rope in some people with more experience with clustering and classification techniques on big stores of images. If you have some fantastic way of exploring through MP3 files or archival photographs, or some idea about what software out there we should be taking advantage of and aren’t–or if you have a big stack of archival photos and want to do something useful with them–I’d love to see it.

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Catch-all for gamers, game-players, and the game-curious. A no-holds-barred arena for figuring out whether making and/or studying games really do(es) fall under DH, and for making a list of the possible ways to say “Yes, games are part of DH.” Above all, let’s compare notes on treatments of this question that we’ve run across, like Patrick Jagoda’s essay on gamification, which I link below.

Background: I’m embarked on a lunatic quest to persuade the world that games precede the humanities themselves, and that the humanities could benefit greatly from seeing texts as rulesets. Cf. this post on Play the Past.

See also: Patrick Jagoda’s contribution to the debate over gamification and his much fuller treatment in a recent essay.

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In at least two fields that I know of, practitioners make conscious use of documented patterns. You can’t swing a chicken without hitting them in the software and web development worlds, from the Gang of Four book to Yahoo’s design pattern library, perhaps throwing Twitter Bootstrap into the mix. Architecture holds a place as the development of the first pattern language I know of, Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language”, but maybe there are earlier antecedents.

What would it mean to create a bootstrapping set of patterns for DH projects? Miriam Posner wrote a moderately high-level version of one, as did Paige C. Morgan. How can we build on or further atomize these beginnings? Certainly, I’m not talking about prescribing all the steps of a project, but Alexander never claimed that houses should all be cookie-cutter either. I assert, though, that a set of patterns could help new entrants to DH make early projects, could help with prototyping more ambitious projects, and could raise the bar in general. I’m optimistic enough about our abilities that I think we can describe patterns at different scales than Morgan and Posner, but also optimistic about humanities scholarship that we will always be undertaking projects that are beyond simple patterns.

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So we can store everything in digital form now. Except when we can’t, when it’s something ephemeral that didn’t get persisted when it occurred. Except that maybe we can? I’d like to talk about the frontiers of digital recreations of irreproducible historical phenomena, like sound before recordings, not to mention things like smell, taste, and touch. This last might be having its dawn with 3D printing, and it seems there are explorations of how to work with sound: Niall Atkinson & my colleague Peter Leonard’s work with the bells of Renaissance Florence comes to mind, as does the researcher who made a stab at speaking Indo-European, and perhaps the HIPSTAS work could be turned to these ends.

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As an academic librarian, I spend a majority of my time connecting end users with primary source materials and items created by you, the digital humanist, GIS wizard, archivist, etc.!

I would like to have a discussion about the following topics:

• What do you want end users to know about searching for the information you’re creating?
• If you could interact with end users directly (or if you already do!), what would you want them to understand about your work?
• What tools would you recommend they use to discover the widest range of resources available? (ArchiveGrid? A Google Search? Something else?)
• If you teach, what do you want librarians to know about helping your students?
• Is there anything else the end user should know?

I look forward to the discussion!

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Last year at THATCamp New England I gave a workshop on using plain text for scholarship, especially using Markdown and Pandoc. Tom Scheinfeldt and Abby Mullen apparently struck some kind of deal whereby I am obligated to talk about Markdown, so here is a session proposal. I propose that we talk about how how to write scholarly work in Markdown and Pandoc. If we want, we can also talk about more esoteric plain text tools like git and knitr and LaTeX. If you’re interested in doing this session, then you might want to take a look at the compilation of links here.

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One of the usual drawbacks of a large-scale analysis of data is that details about the individual pieces of data are lost. We have to make the data fit into a specific mold in order to run our program, so we strip the individual pieces of data of their unique elements–the things that make them interesting.

These decisions have to be made with care. How can we maintain the integrity of our data while still making it usable for large-scale analysis? And then, how do we recover those unique elements so that our data pieces can retain their individuality and interest?

I’d like to talk about these issues. If you’ve dealt with this issue before, what was your decision-making process? What are best practices for such things?

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Social media has been a part of the higher education landscape for years, both as topic of study and research, and as a tool used to achieve pedagogical goals. What lessons have humanists learned about using social media for both of these aims? How should we prepare humanists of the future to use this medium in their teaching and research? Finally, how will social media change over the next 10 years, and how will that affect us as humanists?

Possible topics:

• How will humanists make use of services like the implementation of the Library of Congress’ Twitter archive or the recently-launched Topsy.com Twitter analysis service?
• How will future researchers combat “linkrot“ from defunct link-shortening services?
• Where do educators draw the line on concerns about FERPA and social media?

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I'd like to propose a show-and-tell session for people who are making maps or want to get started with them. Anyone who wants to participate can spend a few minutes showing a map they made—and preferably, actually rendering the map in front of everyone else. Hopefully we'll have a diversity of mapping methods which will give us a quick overview of the possibilities. Then for the remainder of the session, we'll talk about what was interesting in the maps we saw, and how to make them. Perhaps we'll break up into smaller groups so that mapping masters can give impromptu tutorials to beginners. By bringing together all the mapmakers into one place, I hope people will also be able to find someone who has already solved some of the problems they're facing.

If the scheduling crowd preferred, we could make this session more general, and turn it into a data analysis showcase. 

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DH can go beyond the classroom.  At Wheaton, we’re experimenting with ways to take some of the core concepts of digital humanities and find expression for them in the form of student outreach programs and events. We can certainly talk a bit  about our projects– so far they amount to a lecture series and a student curation program–but we’re most interested in a good conversation (high-falutin’, low falutin’, mid-falutin’) that exchanges ideas and perhaps even generates new ones: for us, colleagues at other institutions or maybe even collaborations that connect us.

• Which DH concepts and values best translate to outreach programs for undergraduates?
• What do (or can) those programs look like?
• How do (or can) student outreach and programming related to DH best have a curricular impact?

(Proposed with Amy Barlow)