**Update 5/10/12: Added links to DH books and another DH-focused journal issue **

So you don’t have to wade through the Twitter archive to find a link to something, here is a round-up of the documents, projects, tools, and publications shared via Twitter during THATCamp OSU. If there’s anything I missed, feel free to leave it in the comments.

The first group contains links to the Twitter archive, a blog post about the event, and Google docs for a few sessions. The second (below the fold) is a jumble of other stuff.

Documentation:

• Twitter archive
• Post about THATCamp OSU on Michelle Aubrecht’s HASTAC blog
• Twitter Resources for THATCamp OSU with Jen Michaels
• Google doc for session on emotion and technology
• Side projects (Google doc)
• Notes from plenary session with Julia Flanders

Other links:

• Computers and Composition Digital Press
• When you die on Facebook, The Huffington Post
• Geoffrey Rockwell’s presentation on Planning Digital Projects
• DH journals:
• Journal of Digital Humanities (also see this introductory post on DH Now)
• Digital Humanities Quarterly
• DH issue of Culture Machine
• Kate Hayles on hyper and deep attention
• Against thinking, Peter Stallybrass
• The Curator’s Code
• Content Curators are the New Superheroes of the Web
• Kill Peer Review or Reform It?
• Planned Obsolescence
• Books on the spatial humanities
• The Spatial Humanities
• GeoHumanities
• Past Time, Past Place
• Placing History
• Other books on digital humanities
• Gold, Matthew K., ed. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2012. Print.
• A Companion to Digital Humanities
• Cool DH projects
• Mapping projects
• America’s Highway: Oral Histories of Route 66
• The Virtual Morgantown Project
• Journalism’s Voyage West
• Hypercities
• Historypin
• Mapping the Republic of Letters
• Quijote Interactivo
• Links to educational game resources
• How Video Games are Changing Education
• Free Art and Technology Lab
• Carmen Instructor Tutorials Online
• Open Heat Map
• Possible next steps
• “Networks” at OSU
• Working groups at the Humanities Institute

We’ve been mostly leaving the (blog) floor to the session proposals, but the Modern Language Association just released the first update in 12 years to its Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media, and I thought it warranted a mention.

How to evaluate digital scholarship is a hot-button issue in DH. It is an area of concern both for promotion and tenure committees tasked with evaluating scholarship in non-traditional formats, as well as for authors, reviewers, and editors interested in exploring the possibilities of the digital environment for improving the evaluation process. Those of you who are interested in evaluating digital scholarship should also check out:

• Les Tannenbaum’s proposal for a Session on Peer Review
• The NINES Summer Institute on Evaluating Digital Scholarship
• Digital Humanities Now, which is, among other things, “an experiment in how we evaluate new scholarship.”

Disucss this chart: www.onlinecolleges.net/2011/08/25/how-video-games-are-changing-education/

News from Online Colleges, August 25, 2011

Today is the 2012 Day of Digital Humanities, “a collaborative publishing project for digital humanists around the world to document what they do.” Started in 2009, Day of DH is another way for digital humanists to explore the scope of their field and document the wide variety of work they do on a daily basis. The participants will document what they do throughout the day in words and photos, and will post the results in journal format. Watch the site throughout the day and in the coming weeks as the content grows and is refined into an online publication. Learn more and see previous years on the wiki.

The NEH recently announced 22 new Start-Up Grants. Collectively, the projects provide an interesting cross-section of DH work in progress.

Digital Humanities as a field resists definition – for all kinds of very good reasons. Sometimes, however, you only have a couple of sentences (or 30 seconds in an elevator) to tell someone what it’s all about. Those moments are tricky for DHers.

In the interest of helping us all wrap our heads around the topic we’re coming together to discuss, I wanted to share a brief definition of DH I just came across in a very nice post by Jentery Sayers at the University of Victoria, “Making Things in the Digital Humanities.” (With apologies to Mr. Sayers for pulling this particular quote out of a post with a much broader focus and no intention of defining DH in a tidy way. Sorry – it was too good to ignore!)

And in the interests of transparency, I’ll also cough up the definition I typically provide when teaching DH courses at the University of Victoria (UVic): “Digital humanities is the combination of technical competencies in computing with critical thinking in areas such as history, literary criticism, cultural studies, textual studies, media studies, geography, musicology, and information studies.”

I call what I’m doing “digital humanities” when I shift from treating technologies as objects of inquiry (e.g., a cultural history of magnetic recording) to actually expressing my work through them (e.g., using a platform like Scalar).

What do you think, THATCampers? Does this definition make sense? Does it apply to work you do?

It is fitting that the Libraries is the primary sponsor of THATCamp OSU, since libraries are a major player in the digital humanities world. Many DH centers are located in libraries, and librarians often serve as project partners or PIs. The best model for library involvement in DH is still an open question, however. We certainly hope that there will be some discussion at THATCamp of how the Libraries can best support DH at OSU.  Keep reading for some resources and session ideas.

Resources

• Tom Scheinfeldt, “Nobody cares about the library: How digital technology makes the library invisible (and visible) to scholars,” Found History blog post, 2/22/12. About library invisibility – good and bad- and how digital humanities can bring scholars and librarians into closer collaboration.
• Miriam Posner, “Digital Humanities and the Library: A Bibliography.” A heck of a bibliography on the subject. Visit for lots of further reading.
• Ben Showers, “Does the library have a role to play in the Digital Humanities?,” JISC Digital Infrastructure Team blog. Identifies possible roles for libraries in DH work, including digitization and curation, and discovery and dissemination.
• The Association of College and Research Libraries Digital Humanities Discussion Group, a low-traffic email list that is only a few months old, but has already hosted some interesting discussion on the intersection of DH and libraries.

Session ideas

• A general discussion session on how the Libraries can/should support DH work at OSU.
• Project planning session introducing an item or collection held by the Libraries that could form the basis of a collaborative DH project.

Lots of you have expressed an interest in talking about DH in the classroom and teaching with digital media. For a straight ‘teaching with digital media’ discussion, there are some other venues on campus (for example, check out Innovate, the DU’s eLearning Events, and the Exploring Learning Technologies Community), so how might we focus the conversation so that it’s relevant to THATCamp and a discussion of what digital humanities means at OSU?

We might begin with some questions in mind. For starters, what is the current state of DH pedagogy at OSU?

• Where does DH currently appear in OSU classrooms?
• What opportunities do students have at OSU outside the classroom to participate in DH research or learn about it?

Broadening the scope, what does the larger world of DH education look like?

• What does DH education look like at other universities?
• What kinds of instruction/experiences produce humanities graduates who are qualified to do DH work?

Plenty of other people are thinking about this stuff as well, and no one has all the answers. Some places to start:

• Bethany Nowviskie’s guest post on the Chronicle’s ProfHacker blog, It Starts on Day One. It’s “a modest proposal for reforming higher education in the humanities and creating a generation of knowledge workers prepared not only to teach, research, and communicate in 21st-century modes, but to govern 21st-century institutions.”
• Digital Humanities Unplugged, an article in Digital Humanities Quarterly about teaching DH without technology
• Katherine Harris’ poster from the Digital Humanities conference last summer at Stanford: Pedagogy & Play: Revising Learning through Digital Humanities. A quick read about the importance of play in teaching.
• There’s already a ton of good information on Tanya Clement’s new site Teaching DH. Check out the reading list for a huge collection of resources related to DH and pedagogy.
• And some syllabi from DH-related courses in the new Digital Humanities Education group on Zotero

[I’ve had this post in the works for a couple of days now, and Blake Wilder beat me to the punch with an interesting session proposal. I hope the thoughts and links below will inform his and other sessions. –Melanie]

Digital Humanities is a highly collaborative field. There are some practical reasons why this is the case – DH projects tend to be large and complex, and they often require skill sets as diverse as humanities research design, digitization, programming, and organization and description of digital resources. However, the collaborative nature of DH is also a result of its interdisciplinarity. A DH project may involve cutting-edge work, not only in the humanities, but also in computer science, library science, the social sciences, etc. Keep reading for more thoughts on collaboration in DH and some ideas for THATCamp OSU sessions on the topic…

While I think we can all agree that collaboration is good in a motherhood-and-apple-pie kind of way, it does present challenges. This is especially true in academia, where the single-author article or monograph is king, and where the idea of the individual scholar toiling in solitude holds a lot of power. One challenge presented by collaboration is how to give credit to collaborators. (Also see the FairCite initiative for work in this area.) Another is how to go about working together in the first place. A fascinating recent New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer debunks some common misconceptions about the best ways to collaborate and offers some interesting examples of successful collaborations. Some takeaways from the Lehrer article:

• Brainstorming doesn’t work, but criticism does
•  Spaces where different people are thrown together are most effective at producing innovative ideas
• The best work is done by teams with some familiar faces and some new ones

THATCamps are collaborative by nature, but we could see some sessions specifically devoted to exploring collaboration in our environment. Here are some ideas:

• An ‘idea generation’ session where a group of people come up with solutions to a problem or ideas for a project, using one or more specific collaboration techniques
• A discussion about how to encourage collaboration and cross-pollination at OSU

Other thoughts on collaboration or ideas for collaborative sessions?

Julia Flanders, Director of the Women Writers Project at Brown University (and the facilitator of THATCamp OSU!) recently announced that Women Writers Online will be free and open to the public for the month of March, in celebration of Women’s History Month. She also notes that WWO will be offering a sneak preview of a new WWO interface. Consider sharing your discoveries with other THATCamp OSU participants through a comment.

As registrations are rolling in, how about another post about digital humanities? (If you haven’t yet registered, you can do so here.)

Think Google is a giant, faceless behemoth concerned only with search results and AdSense? You’re only partly right. It turns out Google is a giant, faceless behemoth with an interest in advancing the field of digital humanities! This post is a round-up of Google-initiated or Google-sponsored projects.

1. Google’s best-known contribution to digital humanities is probably Google Books:

OK, it may not fit everyone’s definition of a digital humanities project (note the conspicuous absence of any kind of interpretation), but the Google Books project has made the (published) raw materials of humanities scholarship more accessible than they have ever been before. That’s gotta count for something. Plus, it led to…

2. Google Ngram Viewer

The Ngram Viewer uses the raw data (OCR’d text) from the Google Books project and lets the user search for the incidence of particular words in published books over the last couple of centuries. (Try it, it’s fun!) Compared to the controversy surrounding the Google Books project, the debates around the Ngram viewer have been small potatoes, but they sure make interesting reading for DHers. Dan Cohen wrote a great blog post about it.

3. In 2010, Google announced that it would be awarding 12 Google Digital Humanities Research Awards. The awardees include projects at the University of Michigan, George Mason University, the University of Oxford, and Universidad Complutense de Madrid. In Google’s own words:

We have selected these proposals in part because the resulting techniques, tools and data will be broadly useful: they’ll help entire communities of scholars, not just the applicants. We look forward to working with them, and hope that over time the field of digital humanities will fulfill its promise of transforming the ways in which we understand human culture.

Did we miss any other DH-related Google projects? Let us know in the comments!

For those of you wondering what digital humanities (DH) is, you’re in good company. Even die-hard digital humanists sometimes have trouble agreeing on a definition of the field. However, since we are going to be talking about what DH means at OSU, your THATCamp organizers wanted to provide some background info to get the conversation started. Over the next couple of months, we will occasionally post thoughts about DH and links to DH resources on the site, and we invite participants to do the same.

To get the ball rolling, here are two DH-related resources. If you prefer your info in text form, we recommend the excellent CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide.

If you’re more of a visual person (or if you’re just in a big hurry), Melissa Terras‘ Quantifying Digital Humanities sums up her quantitative research on DH into a beautiful and accessible visualization. You can learn more about the research behind it here. Here’s a sneak peak: