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Category: digital humanities

THATCamp Reflections

THATCamp 2008 Badges

My path to the inaugural THATCamp started at the Society of American Archivist’s 2006 annual meeting in DC. I was a local grad student presenting my first poster: Communicating Context in Online Collections – and handing out home-printed cards for my blog. When I ran out, I just wrote the URL on scraps of paper. I found my way to session 510: Archives Seminar: Possibilities and Problems of Digital History and Digital Collections, featuring Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, described in the SAA program as follows:

The co-authors of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web lead a discussion of their book and, in particular, the possibilities of digital history and of collecting the past online. The discussion includes reflections on the September 11 Digital Archive and the new Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which collects stories, images, and other digital material related to hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.

The full hour and twenty-four minutes audio recording is available online if you want to dive down that particular rabbit hole.

2006 was early in the “archives blogging” landscape. It was the era of finding and following like-minded colleagues. RSS and feed readers! People had conversations in the comments. 2006 was the year I launched my blog. My post about Dan & Roy’s session was only the 9th post on my site. I was employed full time doing Oracle database work at Discovery and working towards my MLS in the University of Maryland’s CLIS (now iSchool) program part-time. So I added Dan’s blog to the list of the blogs I read. When Dan invited people to come to THATCamp in January of 2008 and I realized it was local – I signed up. You can see my nametag in the “stack of badges” photo above. For a taste of my experiences that day, take a look at my 2008 THATCamp blog posts.

In 2008, the opportunity to sit in a room of people who were interested in the overlap of technology and humanities was exciting. As a part-time graduate student (and wife and mother of a 6-year-old), I spent almost no time on campus. I did most of my thinking about archives and technology at home late at night in the glow of my computer screen. There was not a lot of emphasis on the digital in my MLS program at UMD. I had to find that outside the classroom.

The connections I made at that first THATCamp extend to today. As mentioned elsewhere, I was part of the group who put together the first regional THATCamp in Austin as a one-evening side-event for the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting in 2009. I swear that Ben Brumfield and I were just going to meet for dinner while I was in Austin, where he lives, for SAA. Somehow that turned into “Why not throw a THATCamp?”. How great to have no idea of the scale of what we were taking on! Ben did an amazing job of documenting what we learned and tips for future organizers, including giving yourself more time to plan, reaching out to as diverse a group as possible, and planning an event that lasted longer than four hours. All that said, it was a glorious and crazy evening. I still have my t-shirt. While our discussions might have been more archives-skewed than at most THATCamps, it also gave lots of archivists a taste of what THATCamp and un-conferences were like. Looking through the posts on the THATCamp Austin website, there was clearly an appetite for the event. We could easily have had enough topics to discuss to fill a weekend – but only had time for two one hour session slots, plus a speed round of “dork shorts” lightning talks.

I know I went to other THATCamps along the way. I graduated with my MLS in 2009. I started an actual day-job as an archivist in July of 2011 at the World Bank. Suddenly I got paid to think about archives all day – and I didn’t need my blog in the way I used to. I started writing more fiction and attending conferences dedicated to digital preservation. Somewhere in there, I went to the 2012 THATCamp Games at UMD.

THATCamps brought together enthusiastic people from so many different types of digital and humanities practice — all with their own perspectives and their own problems to solve. We don’t get many opportunities to cross-pollinate among those from academia and the public and private sectors. Those early conversations were my first steps towards ideas about how archivists might collaborate with professionals from other communities on digital challenges and innovations. In fact, I can see threads stretching from the very first THATCamp all the way to my Partners for Preservation book project.

Thanks, THATCamp community.

This post is cross-posted as part of the 2020 THATCamp retrospective.

Day of Digital Archives

To be honest, today was a half day of digital archives, due to personal plans taking me away from computers this afternoon. In light of that, my post is more accurately my ‘week of digital archives’.

The highlight of my digital archives week was the discovery of the Digital Curation Exchange. I promptly joined and began to explore their ‘space for all things ‘digital curation’ ‘. This led me to a fabulous list of resources, including a set of syllabi for courses related to digital curation. Each link brought me to an extensive reading list, some with full slide decks related to weekly in classroom presentations. My ‘to read’ list has gotten much longer – but in a good way!

On other days recently I have found myself involved in all of the following:

  • review of metadata standards for digital objects
  • creation of internal guidelines and requirements documents
  • networking with those at other institutions to help coordinate site visits of other digitization projects
  • records management planning and reviews
  • learning about the OCR software available to our organization
  • contemplation of the web archiving efforts of organizations and governments around the world
  • reviewing my organization’s social media policies
  • listening to the audio of online training available from PLANETS (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services)
  • contemplation of the new Journal of Digital Media Management and their recent call for articles

My new favorite quote related to digital preservation comes from What we reckon about keeping digital archives: High level principles guiding State Records’ approach from the State Records folks in New South Wales Australia, which reads:

We will keep the Robert De Niro principle in mind when adopting any software or hardware solutions: “You want to be makin moves on the street, have no attachments, allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner” (Heat, 1995)

In other words, our digital archives technology will be designed to be sustainable given our limited resources so it will be flexible and scalable to allow us to utilise the most appropriate tools at a given time to carry out actions such as creation of preservation or access copies or monitoring of repository contents, but replace these tools with new ones easily and with minimal cost and with minimal impact.

I like that this speaks to the fact that no plan can perfectly accommodate the changes in technology coming down the line. Being nimble and assuming that change will be the only constant are key to ensuring access to our digital assets in the future.

SXSW Interactive: Data and Revelations

I am typing on a laptop in the Samsung blogger lounge at SXSW. Given this easy opportunity to blog, I wanted to share the overarching theme for my experience so far (3 days in) to SXSW Interactive. Data. It is all about data. APIs exposing data. People visualizing data. Using data to make business and policy decisions. Graphing data to keep track of web site and application performance. Privacy of data. Crowdsourcing data. Data about social media behavior. And on and on!

It has been a common thread I have traced from session to session, conversation to conversation. I expect someone with less of a database and metadata fixation might see something else as the overall meme, but I have a purse full of cards pointing me to new data sources and a notebook full of URLs to track down later to defend my view.

I keep catching myself giving mini-lessons on archives and preservation of electronic records like some sort of envoy from another universe. While I feel like a strong overall tech person at an archives conference, I feel like a data and visualization person here. This morning two of my sessions were over in the same hotel that SAA in Austin was hosted in and it was strange to be in that hotel with such a different group of people. I have managed to connect with an assortment of digital humanities folks. Someone even managed to find space for and plan an informal event for tomorrow night: Innovating and Developing with Libraries, Archives, and Museums.

My list of tech to learn (HTML5, NoSQL) and projects to contemplate and move forward (mostly ideas for visualizations using all the data everyone is sharing) is getting longer by the hour. It has been a process to figure out how to get the most I can out of SXSW. It is definitely more a space for inspiration than for deep diving into specifics. Letting go of the instinct that I am supposed to ‘learn new skills’ at a conference is fabulous!

Heading to Austin for SXSW Interactive

Anyone out there going to be at SXSWi? I would love to find like-minded DH (digital humanities) and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives & Museums) folks in Austin. If you can’t go, what do you wish I would attend and blog about after the fact?

No promises on thoroughness of my blogging of course. I never have mastered the ‘live blogging’ approach, but I do enjoy taking notes and if the past is any guide to the future I usually manage at least 2 really detailed posts on sessions from any one conference. The rest end up being notes to myself that I always mean to somehow go back to and post later. Maybe I need to spend a month just cleaning up and posting old session summaries (or at least those that still seem interesting and relevant!).

Drop me a comment below or contact me directly and let me know if you will be in Austin between March 10 and 15. Hope to see some of you there!

Creative Funding for Text-Mining and Visualization Project

The Hip-Hop word count project on Kickstarter.com caught my eye because it seems to be a really interesting new model for funding a digital humanities project. You can watch the video below – but the core of the project tackles assorted metadata from 40,000 rap songs from 1979 to the present including stats about each song (word count, syllables, education level, etc), individual words, artist location and date. This information aims to become a public online almanac fueled by visualizations.

I am a backer of this project, and you can be too. As of the original writing of this post, they are currently 47% funded twenty-eight days out from their deadline. For those of you not familiar with Kickstarter, people can post creative projects and provide rewards for their funders. The funding only goes through if they reach their goal within the time limit – otherwise nothing happens, a model they call ‘all-or-nothing funding’.

What will the money be spent on?

  • 45% for PHP programmers who have been coding the custom web interface
  • 35% for interface designers
  • 10% for data acquisition & data clean up
  • 10% for hosting bills

They aim for a five month time-line to move from their existing functional prototype to something viable to release to the public.

I am also intrigued by ways that the work on this project might be leveraged in the future to support similar text-mining projects that tie in location and date. How about doing the same thing with civil war letters? How about mining the lyrics from Broadway musical songs?

If this all sounds interesting, take a look at the video below and read more on the Hip-Hop Word Count Kickstarter home page. If half the people who follow my RSS feed pitch in $10, this project would be funded. Take a look and consider pitching in. If this project doesn’t speak to you – take a look around Kickstarter for something else you might want to support.

THATCamp Austin 2009: Now Accepting Applications

THATCamp Austin 2009THATCamp Austin 2009 will be the first regional THATCamp. Slated for Tuesday evening August 11st, 2009 in Austin, Texas it will be held on the campus of the University of Texas, Austin. ‘THAT’ stands for The Humanities and Technology, while the Camp portion refers to the fact that it is an unconference.

What is an ‘unconference’ you ask? It is an attendee organized gathering focused on a common theme – in this case digital humanities. In the days leading up to the camp, attendees will post their ideas for discussion topics – but the final schedule will be sorted out on the ground during the gathering itself.

The original THATCamp event, organized by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, was a full two day weekend event. THATCamp Austin 2009 will be held on a single evening during the same week that the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists is being held in Austin (and has the blessing of the CHNM).

I had an amazing time at the first THATCamp at CHNM in 2008 and wrote 3 posts about various presentations and discussions. Since I was unable to attend THATCamp 2009 I am especially pleased to be lending a hand in organizing this first regional THATCamp while I will be in Texas for SAA. If you can get yourself to Austin on Tuesday night August 11th and have a passion for the digital humanities — take a look at the what/when/where details over on the THATCamp Austin 2009 About Page.

A few details hijacked from the THATCamp Austin website:

How do I sign up?
Unfortunately, we only have space for 60-70 participants, so we’ll have to do some vetting. To apply for a spot, simply send email to thatcamp.austin.2009@gmail.com., telling us what you’d like to present, and what you think you will get out of the experience. Please don’t send full proposals. We’re talking about an informal note of around 250 words, max.  Please include your T-shirt size and an email address you can check from public places so that we can register you with the University of Texas wi-fi system.

How much?
THATCamp Austin is free to all attendees, but a $25 donation towards T-shirts and pizza will be very much appreciated.

Don’t be afraid to take a step into the less-structured unconference world. What I experienced at the first THATCamp was a group of very enthusiastic individuals who were so pleased to find like minded people with whom to talk – regardless of our very varied backgrounds. Folks have reported coming away from both of the THATCamps at CHNM feeling energized and rededicated to their projects — as well as having found new collaborators and opportunities for cross-polination across all the diverse members of the digital humanities community.

DH2009: Digital Lives and Personal Digital Archives

Session Title: Digital Lives: How people create, manipulate and store their personal digital archives
Speaker: Peter Williams, UCL

Digital lives is a joint project of UCL, British Library and University of Bristol

What? We need a better understanding of how people manage digital collections on their laptops, pdas and home computers. This is important due to the transition from paper-based personal collections to digital collections. The hope is to help people manage their digital archives before the content gets to the archives.

How? Talk to people with in-depth narrative interview. Ask people of their very first memories of information technology. When did they first use the computer? Do they have anything from that computer? How did they move the content from that computer? People enjoyed giving this narrative digital history of their lives.

Who? 25 interviewees – both established and emerging people whose works would or might be of interest to repositories of the future.

Findings?

  • They created a detailed flowchart of users’ reported process of document manipulation.
  • Common patterns in use of email showed that people used email across all these platforms and environments. Preserving email is not just a case of saving one account’s messages:
    • work email
    • Gmail/Yahoo
    • mails via Facebook
    • Twitter
  • Documented personal information styles that relate skills dimension to data security dimension.

The one question I caught was from someone who asked if they thought people would stop using folders to organize emails and digital files with the advent of easy search across documents. The speaker answered by mentioning the revelations in the paper Don’t Take My Folders Away!. People like folders.

My Thoughts

This session got me to think again about the SAA2008 session that discussed the challenges that various archivists are facing with hybrid literary collections. Matthew Kirschenbaum also pointed me to MITH’s white paper: Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use.

I am very interested to see how ideas about preserving personal digital records evolve. For example, what happens to the idea of a ‘draft’ in a world that auto-saves and versions documents every few minutes such as Google Documents does?

With born digital photos we run into all sorts of issues. Photos that are simultaneously kept on cameras, hard drives, web based repositories (flickr, smugmug, etc) and off-site backup (like mozy.com). Images are deleted and edited differently across environments as well. A while back I wrote a post considering the impact of digital photography on the idea of photographic negatives as the ‘photographers’ sketchbooks’: Capa’s Found Images and Thoughts on Digital Photographers’ Sketchbooks.

I really liked the approach of this project in that it looked at general patterns of behavior rather than attempting to extrapolate from experiences of archivists with individual collections. This sort of research takes a lot of energy, but I am hopeful that basically creating these general user profiles will lead to best practices for preserving personal digital collections that can be applied easily as needed.

As is the case with all my session summaries from DH2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.