Category: Conferences and Workshops

Digital History at the 2013 AHA Meeting

It’s time for my annual list of digital history sessions at the American Historical Association meeting, this year in New Orleans, January 3-6, 2013. This year’s program extends last year’s surging interest in the effect digital media and technology are having on research and the profession. In addition, a special track for the 2013 meeting is entitled “The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age.” Looks like a good and varied program, including digital research methods (such as GIS, text mining, and network analysis), the construction and use of digital archives, the history of new media and its impact on social movements, scholarly communication, public history and writing for a general audience on the web, and practical concerns (e.g., getting grants for digital work).

Hope to see some of you there, and to interact with the rest of you about the meeting via other means. (Speaking of which, I hereby declare the hashtag to be #aha13. I know we care about exact dates, fellow historians, but we really don’t need that “20” in our hashtags.)

Thursday, January 3

9am-5pm

THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) AHA

1-3pm

Henry Morton Stanley, New Orleans, and the Contested Origins of an African Explorer: Public History and Teaching Perspectives

3:30-5:30pm

Spatial Narratives of the Holocaust: GIS, Geo-Visualization, and the Possibilities for Digital Humanities

Presidential Panel: H-Net and the Discipline: Changes and Challenges

8-10pm

Plenary Session: The Public Practice of History in and for a Digital Age

Friday, January 4

8:30-10am

Roundtable on Place in Time: What History and Geography Can Teach Each Other

Public History Meets Digital History in Post-Katrina New Orleans

“To See”: Visualizing Humanistic Data and Discovering Historical Patterns in a Digital Age

Viewfinding: A Discussion of Photography, Landscape, and Historical Memory

Scholarly Societies and Networking through H-Net

H-Net in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean: Building New Online Audiences

Applying to NEH Grant Programs

10:30am-noon

Self Defense, Civil Rights, and Scholarship: Panels in Honor of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall , Part 1: Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s Africans in Colonial Louisiana Twenty Years Later

Online Reviewing: Before and After It Was de Rigueur

Gender, Sexuality, and Ethnicity: Household Space and Lived Experience in Colonial and Early National Mexico

The United States and Its Informants: The Cold War and the War on Terror

2:30-4:30pm

Front Lines: Early-Career Scholars Doing Digital History

From the March on Washington to Tahir Square and Beyond: Tactics, Technology, and Social Movements

Are There Costs to “Internationalizing” History?, Part 2: The Domestic Politics of Teaching and Outreach

Saturday, January 5

9-11am

H-Net in Africa: Building New Online Audiences

Scholarly Communications and Copyright

Oral History and Intellectual History in Conversation: Methodological Innovation in Modern South Asia

Research Support Services for History Scholars: A Study of Evolving Research Methods in History

Comparative Reflections on the History Major Capstone Experience: A Roundtable

The Power of Cartography: Remapping the Black Death in the Age of Genomics and GIS

11:30am-1:30pm

Mapping the Past: Historical Geographic Information Science (GIS)

Beyond “Plan B” for Renaissance Studies: A Roundtable

11:30am-2 – Poster Session 1

Hell Towns, Butternuts, and Spotted Cows: Bringing the History of a Small Town in the Hudson Valley into the Digital Age

2:30-4:30pm

Peer Review, History Journals, and the Future of Scholarly Research

Space, Place, and Time: GIS Technology in Ancient and Medieval European History

Factionalism and Violence across Time and Space: An Exploration of Digital Sources and Methodologies

Connecting Classroom and Community: H-Net Networks and Public History

The Deep History of Africa: New Narrative Approaches

First Steps: Getting Started as a History Professional

Renegotiating Identity: The Process of Democratization in Postauthoritarian Spain and Portugal

2:30-5pm – Poster Session 2

Digital History: Tools and Tricks to Learn the New Trade

Building the Dissertation Digitally

The Global Shipwreck

Picturing a Transnational Pulp Archive

Sunday, January 6

8:30-10:30am

Building a Swiss Army Knife: A Panel on DocTracker, a Multi-Tool for Digital Documentary Editions

11am-1pm

Teaching Digital Methods for History Graduate Students

Public History in the Federal Government: Continuing Trends and New Innovations

Using Oral History for Social Justice Activism

DPLA Audience & Participation Workshop and Hackfest at the Center for History and New Media

On December 6, 2012, the Digital Public Library of America will have two concurrent and interwoven events at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. The Audience and Participation workstream will be holding a meeting that will be livestreamed, and next door those interested in fleshing out what might be done with the DPLA will hold a hackfest, which follows on a similar, successful event last month in Chattanooga, TN. (Here are some of the apps that were built.)

Anyone who is interested in experimenting with the DPLA—from creating apps that use the library’s metadata to thinking about novel designs to bringing the collection into classrooms—is welcome to attend or participate from afar. The hackfest is not limited to those with programming skills, and we welcome all those with ideas, notions, or the energy to collaborate in envisioning novel uses for the DPLA.

The Center for History and New Media will provide spaces for a group as large as 30 in the main hacking space, with couches, tables, whiteboards, and unlimited coffee. There will also be breakout areas for smaller groups of designers and developers to brainstorm and work. We ask that anyone who would like to attend the hackfest please register in advance via this registration form.

We anticipate that the Audience and Participation workstream and the hackfest will interact throughout the day, which will begin at 10am and conclude at 5pm EST. Breakfast will be provided at 9am, and lunch at midday.

The Center for History and New Media is on the fourth floor of Research Hall on the Fairfax campus of George Mason University. There is parking across the street in the Shenandoah Parking Garage. (Here are directions and a campus map.)

Panel on the Future of Digital Publishing [Video]

I really enjoyed the 2011 HASTAC conference at the University of Michigan last weekend. Many interesting talks and project presentations, and less formal (but no less interesting) conversations in the hallways.

I particularly enjoyed the panel I was on with Tara McPherson and Richard Nash on “The Future of Digital Publishing.” Video of that panel is now available:

I expand upon several points I’ve been making in this space and elsewhere, such as PressForward‘s pyramidal scheme of assessment, the notion that scholarship can come in many forms and should shape journals rather than vice versa, the hidden cost of perfection, and the affordances of digital publishing.

Digital Humanities at the 2012 American Historical Association Annual Meeting

Longtime subscribers to this blog know that I’ve been grousing for years about the lack of digital topics at the American Historical Association annual meeting. From today’s announcement about the 2012 meeting in Chicago:

The AHA’s 126th Annual Meeting in Chicago this January 5-8, 2012, will feature nearly two dozen sessions on digital history. This series, titled The Future is Here, includes presentations, discussions, and demonstrations of how digital methods might assist historical research and the humanities in general.

Fantastic. I was on the program committee this year, but this was really a group effort: the committee chairs (Jake Soll, Jennifer Siegel), the entire program committee, the president of the AHA (Anthony Grafton), and the AHA itself (especially executive director Jim Grossman) were all committed to providing more of a platform for new, digital work. And as you can see from the program, we were fortunate that many innovative scholars and projects decided to present in Chicago.

Hope to see you there.

THATCamp 2011: Even Bigger, More Open, More Educational, More Fun

We decided to pull out all the stops for this year’s THATCamp (now called THATCamp Prime or THATCamp CHNM or that THATCamp since there are now so many regional THATCamps). From the THATCamp blog:

All year has been THATCamp time, seems like, but we’re now talking about that THATCamp, which will take place

June 3-5, 2011
Center for History and New Media, Fairfax, VA

We’ve instituted some changes this year:

  • THATCamp will be larger: we’re planning on having about 125 people who do all kinds of work related to the humanities and technology;
  • THATCamp will be truly open to all: instead of having an application process, we’ll be accepting all registrations up to 125 people until April 22;
  • THATCamp will have a BootCamp: the unconference will happen as usual on the weekend over a day and a half, but the Friday beforehand will be devoted to a series of workshops dedicated to improving technical skills; and
  • THATCamp is planning on at least two virtual sessions in which we get to talk to campers at THATCamp Liberal Arts Colleges and to Jon Voss about the outcome of his Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit.

Needless to say, we’re psyched. See you there.

If you haven’t been to THATCamp yet, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s intense, fun, and you’ll learn more and meet more interesting, great people than anywhere else. There’s also a bit of Woodstock to it, and no big registration fee, just a very small suggested donation. We also have on-campus accommodations this year at the very nice new Mason Inn.

Register right now to reserve your slot. Hope to see you in June!

Digital History at the 2011 AHA Meeting

It’s time for my annual report/rant on the lack digital sessions at the American Historical Association annual meeting, a good gauge of what professional historians are interested in. Evidently we historians will just keep on doing what we’re doing how we’re doing it until it seems truly anachronistic. Just one of the main AHA panels, out of nearly three hundred, covers digital matters; perhaps another will touch on digital methods. By my count there are another six digital sessions overall, but these other sessions are put on by affiliate societies or were added by the program committee during lunches or other break times (that is, there were almost no digital panels proposed by historians attending the meeting). Incredibly, there are actually fewer digital sessions at the 2011 annual meeting than in prior years. Because clearly this digital thing is a flash in the pan.

OK, I’ll stop with the sarcasm. I love my colleagues in history, but it’s time for a change, and as a new member of the AHA program committee I suspect the state of affairs will be different at the 2012 meeting. For now, here is this year’s list of digital sessions at the AHA annual meeting:

When Universities Put Dissertations on the Internet: New Practice; New Problem?
[Special session added by the program committee during lunch on Friday]

Critical Issues in Bibliography and Libraries in the Digital Age
[Sponsored by the Association for the Bibliography of History and the American Association for History and Computing]

Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning American History
[CHNM‘s own Rwany Sibaja hosts a 45-minute intro/demo]

Public Media and the Case for Digital History: New Directions and Opportunities for Students, Teachers, and Historians
[Special session added by the program committee during lunch on Saturday]

What’s Next? Patterns and Practices in History in Print and Online
[AHA Session 191, co-sponsored by the American Association for History and Computing]

History and Technology In and Out of the Classroom
[Sponsored by the Coordinating Council for Women in History]

Religious History’s Digital Future
[Sponsored by the American Society of Church History]

Enhancing Historical Thinking Skills Through Teaching American History Grants
[AHA Session 269]

What Should Scholarly Society Meetings Look Like in the 2010s?

Unlike some of my blog post titles, this one really is a question. What do you think they should look like? I ask because I am now on the program committee for the American Historical Association and this Saturday we begin planning for the January 2012 meeting. Committee members are encouraged to bring five “panel ideas” with them to the initial planning meeting; I, of course, plan to agitate for non-panel forms as well (think: THATCamp), and I suspect that the audience for this blog has even more creative ideas.

So: What would you propose? Let me know in the comments.

Thoughts on One Week | One Tool

Well that just happened. It’s hard to believe that last Sunday twelve scholars and software developers were arriving at the brand-new Mason Inn on our campus and now have created and launched a tool, Anthologize, that created a frenzy on social and mass media.

If you haven’t already done so, you should first read the many excellent reports from those who participated in One Week | One Tool (and watched it from afar). One Week | One Tool was an intense institute sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities that strove to convey the Center for History and New Media‘s knowledge about building useful scholarly software. As the name suggests, the participants had to conceive, build, and disseminate their own tool in just one week. To the participants’ tired voices I add a few thoughts from the aftermath.

Less Talk, More Grok

One Week director (and Center for History and New Media managing director) Tom Scheinfeldt and I grew up listening to WAAF in Boston, which had the motto (generally yelled, with reverb) “Less Talk, More Rock!” (This being Boston, it was actually more like “Rahwk!”) For THATCamp I spun that call-to-action into “Less Talk, More Grok!” since it seemed to me that the core of THATCamp is its antagonism toward the deadening lectures and panels of normal academic conferences and its attempt to maximize knowledge transfer with nonhierarchical, highly participatory, hands-on work. THATCamp is exhausting and exhilarating because everyone is engaged and has something to bring to the table.

Not to over-philosophize or over-idealize THATCamp, but for academic doubters I do think the unconference is making an argument about understanding that should be familiar to many humanists: the importance of “tacit knowledge.” For instance, in my field, the history of science, scholars have come to realize in the last few decades that not all of science consists of cerebral equations and concepts that can be taught in a textbook; often science involves techniques and experiential lessons that must be acquired in a hands-on way from someone already capable in that realm.

This is also true for the digital humanities. I joked with emissaries from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which took a huge risk in funding One Week, that our proposal to them was like Jerry Seinfeld’s and George Costanza’s pitch to NBC for a “show about nothing.” I’m sure it was hard for reviewers of our proposal to see its slightly sketchy syllabus. (“You don’t know what will be built ahead of time?!”) But this is the way in which the digital humanities is close to the lab sciences. There can of course be theory and discussion, but there will also have to be a lot of doing if you want to impart full knowledge of the subject. Many times during the week I saw participants and CHNMers convey things to each other—everything from little shortcuts to substantive lessons—that wouldn’t have occurred to us ahead of time, without the team being engaged in actually building something.

MTV Cops

The low point of One Week was undoubtedly my ham-fisted attempt at something of a keynote while the power was out on campus, killing the lights, the internet, and (most seriously) the air conditioning. Following “Less Talk, More Grok,” I never should have done it. But one story I told at the beginning did seem to have modest continuing impact over the week (if frequently as the source of jokes).

Hollywood is famous for great (and laughable) idea pitches—which is why that Seinfeld episode was amusing—but none is perhaps better than Brandon Tartikoff’s brilliantly concise pitch for Miami Vice: “MTV cops.” I’m a firm believer that it’s important to be able to explain a digital tool with something close to the precision of “MTV cops” if you want a significant number of people to use it. Some might object that we academics are smart folks, capable of understanding sophisticated, multivalent tools, but people are busy, and with digital tools there are so many clamoring for attention and each entails a huge commitment (often putting your scholarship into an entirely new system). Scholars, like everyone else, are thus enormously resistant to tools that are hard to grasp. (Case in point: Google Wave.)

I loved the 24 hours of One Week from Monday afternoon to Tuesday afternoon where the group brainstormed potential tools to build and then narrowed them down to “MTV Cops” soundbites. Of course the tools were going to be more complex than these reductionistic soundbites, but those soundbites gave the process some focus and clarity. It also allowed us to ask Twitter followers to vote on general areas of interest (e.g., “Better timelines”) to gauge the market. We tweeted “Blog->Book” for idea #1, which is what became Anthologize.

And what were most of the headlines on launch day? Some variant on the crystal-clear ReadWriteWeb headline: “Scholars Build Blog-to-eBook Tool in One Week.”

Speed Doesn’t Kill

We’ve gotten occasional flak at the Center for History and New Media for some recent efforts that seem more carnival than Ivory Tower, because they seem to throw out the academic emphasis on considered deliberation. (However, it should be noted that we also do many multi-year, sweat-and-tears, time-consuming projects like the National History Education Clearinghouse, putting online the first fifteen years of American history, and creating software used by millions of people.)

But the experience of events like One Week makes me question whether the academic default to deliberation is truly wise. One Weekers could have sat around for a week, a month, a year, and still I suspect that the tool they decided to build was the best choice, with the greatest potential impact. As programmers in the real world know, it’s much better to have partial, working code than to plan everything out in advance. Just by launching Anthologize in alpha and generating all that excitement, the team opened up tremendous reserves of good will, creativity, and problem-solving from users and outside developers. I saw at least ten great new use cases for Anthologize on Twitter in the first day. How are you supposed to come up with those ideas from internal deliberation or extensive planning?

There was also something special about the 24/7 focus the group achieved. The notion that they had to have a tool in one week (crazy on the face of it) demanded that the participants think about that tool all of the time (even in their sleep, evidently). I’ll bet there was the equivalent of several months worth of thought that went on during One Week, and the time limit meant that participants didn’t have the luxury of overthinking certain choices that were, at the end of the day, either not that important or equally good options. Eric Johnson, observing One Week on Twitter, called this the power of intense “singular worlds” to get things done. Paul Graham has similarly noted the importance of environments that keep one idea foremost in your mind.

There are probably many other areas where focus, limits, and, yes, speed might help us in academia. Dissertations, for instance, often unhealthily drag on as doctoral students unwisely aim for perfection, or feel they have to write 300 pages even though their breakthrough thesis is contained in a single chapter. I wonder if a targeted writing blitz like the successful National Novel Writing Month might be ported to the academy.

Start Small, Dream Big

As dissertations become books through a process of polish and further thought, so should digital tools iterate toward perfection from humble beginnings. I’ve written in this space about the Center for History and New Media’s love of Voltaire’s dictum that “the perfect is the enemy of the good [enough],” and we communicated to One Week attendees that it was fine to start with a tool that was doable in a week. The only caveat was that tool should be conceived with such modularity and flexibility that it could grow into something very powerful. The Anthologize launch reminds me of what I said in this space about Zotero on its launch: it was modest, but it had ambition. It was conceived not just as a reference manager but as an extensible platform for research. The few early negative comments about Anthologize similarly misinterpreted it myopically as a PDF-formatter for blogs. Sure, it will do that, as can other services. But like Zotero (and Omeka) Anthologize is a platform that can be broadly extended and repurposed. Most people thankfully got that—it sparked the imagination of many, even though it’s currently just a rough-around-the-edges alpha.

Congrats again to the whole One Week team. Go get some rest.

Spring 2010 Roy Rosenzweig Forum on Technology and the Humanities: The Library of Congress Twitter Archive

Beth Dulabahn, Director of Integration Management in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress, will talk about the donation of the Twitter archive to the library. Beth was involved in the talks with Twitter and will provide some background and insight into this major digital acquisition. There will also be a general discussion of the value of the archive and related issues.

The Spring 2010 Rosenzweig Forum will take place Friday, May 21, at 3 pm, in Rm. 470 (the Center for History and New Media’s lab), in the Research I building, George Mason University (Fairfax Campus). Parking is available in the Sandy Creek Parking deck, right across from Research I. CHNM is on the 4th Floor. Directions to GMU: http://www.gmu.edu/resources/welcome/Directions-to-GMU.html

All are welcome to attend!

The Last Digit of Pi – Video of My TEDxNYED Talk and Live Discussion

Here’s the video of my talk “The Last Digit of Pi,” given in New York City on March 6, 2010, at TEDxNYED. I’ll be discussing it live on Friday, May 7, at 3p EDT, on Twitter (follow me there or use the hashtag #tedxnyed to join in the discussion).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoadUAsQTFc&w=425&h=350]