Today was the first day of classes at Berkeley, so I’m not ready for a reflective blog post yet, or even able to tell you what my final course schedule is. I can tell you this: I’m incredibly fortunate and excited to be here.

Here’s a photo of the Berkeley iSchool‘s incoming class, taken by Peg Skorpinski:

Don’t we look great?

More soon.

I have some big news to share. Here goes:

1) I’ll be moving to the Bay Area in August!

2) Working remotely, I’ll assume the new position of Creative Lead at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Every world-class digital humanities center needs a West Coast branch, right? I’m so proud to have been Assistant Director for the past year-and-a-half, and look forward to continuing to work at MITH.

3) I was admitted to the Masters program at the UC Berkeley iSchool, and have enrolled with a fellowship starting this Fall. I’m psyched to focus on my graduate studies, collaborate with the iSchool’s faculty, and connect with the DH community in the Bay Area.

There’s more to write what this means personally, professionally, and academically; I’m still searching for the right words to express my gratitude for the amazing ride that I’ve had in the DC area for four years, and thank everyone that I’m greatly indebted to. I only have positive things to say. My experience so far can most-easily be summed up by the THATCamp groundrules: fun, productive, and collegial. I can’t wait to see what opportunities these changes bring.

I just returned from a Project Bamboo kickoff in Berkeley, which was the first face-to-face meeting during this 18-month phase of technology development. Bamboo is building applications and shared infrastructure for humanities research, and focused its goals on a set of research environments/tools to interact with interoperable collections and using web services. MITH’s primary involvement is a community-driven design process to determine the next phase of the project, and I feel a real energy from our team. As Robert McDonald pointed out, we’re eager to engage the digital humanities community, and have structured iteration throughout our schedule to build, get feedback, and refine our work plan. This iterative process means that the MITH team is already building, and should be rolling out a tool to get feedback on in about six weeks time. In addition to the positive direction the project is moving in, I’m having a great time working with our new Bamboo hires Travis Brown and Seth Denbo, as well as our savvy Software Architect Jim Smith.

Preparations for the API workshop are coming along, and we recently added Kirrily Robert from Freebase to present on their API and linked data. As I’ve reviewed the list of participants, I’m psyched about their diversity and what each person will bring to the table. Right now we’re using a twitter hashtag to share ideas: #DHapi, and I’m about to create a Google Group for pre-workshop planning.

Above is a photo of two MITH graduate research assistants, James Neal and Alex Quinn. Last semester I worked closely with James to conduct research on emerging multitouch interfaces for libraries and museums, and with Alex on two Microsoft Surface applications to display museum objects. Alex and I are now planning this semester’s work, and looking to prototype a few applications that stretch the capability of the Surface for specific use cases. There’s even a chance that we’ll be interacting with Omeka collections on the Surface.. more about that as it develops.

Last year Wayne Graham introduced me to Sinatra, a simple Ruby web framework that I’ve since fallen in love with. Wayne was using Sinatra to build an API to serve data to Layar, taking advantage of its basic syntax for creating routes and handling HTTP methods. My use for Sinatra? Well, it’s not as cool. The first *real* Sinatra app that I’ve built is a revamped homepage, ditching its PHP predecessor for a much more maintainable application.

Look familiar? Not much changed on the front-end in the switch; the real difference is in the code. I like the minimalistic structure of Sinatra, where I can specify a few routes to get going (my site only has five individual pages). HAML and SASS forced me to pay closer attention to syntax, which was made made easier once adopting the 960 css grid.

Sinatra is a small step in many ways. Take a look at my code and you’ll see how basic it is. But dig deeper, and you’ll notice that I’m using gems in addition to Sinatra, experimenting with templates, and successfully deployed my app using Passenger. A small step, in an exciting direction.

Today NEH hosts the 2010 Start-Up Grant project directors meeting, featuring lightning talks on 46 projects funded in the last round. It’s no secret that I’m a fan of lightning talks, which are short elevator pitches — they’ve been a part of THATCamp and we’ll be hosting a panel at the American Studies Association conference this fall that will include them (more details, soon). As Melissa Terras said in her DH2010 Plenary, we must “be prepared by having at the tip of our tongues what we do and why we matter and why we should be supported and why DH makes sense.” This is good practice.

Since each project will be limited to only two minutes and three slides, I plan to gloss-over what was one of the more considerable parts of my grant proposal: a justification for APIs and funding of a workshop as a level-one startup. Instead, my pitch will address the basics: who, what, when, where, and why. I’ve also decided to share relevant text from my accepted proposal below for those that may be interested in learning more. Feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly.

Abstract
Level 1 Start Up funding is requested to support a two-day workshop on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The workshop will gather 40-50 Digital Humanities scholars and developers who are using or interested in using APIs in their digital projects, industry leaders who will demonstrate their APIs, and practitioners who will help guide the group through the “working weekend.” The workshop will lay the groundwork for the integration of APIs into participant projects, and serve as a platform to develop future ideas for how to share and access humanities data through APIs. Presentations by workshop presenters will be video recorded, and recordings made available online through the workshop and MITH websites. Similarly, workshop activities will be archived on the workshop website, which will act as a clearinghouse and publication of all workshop-related content.

Enhancing the Humanities
Thanks largely to generous funding at both the national and global levels, there are now many large repositories of cultural and scholarly data freely available on the Web. The best of these repositories usually provide tools for searching, viewing, and manipulating their contents; tools, which, following the current conventions and values of web design, are often designed according to an uncluttered, simple aesthetic. These tools make the most common use cases as intuitive and simple as possible, and return nicely formatted results presented as a web page (rather than, say, an XML file or Excel spreadsheet) to be examined within the web space of the archive. There is much to be said for this approach, however, by itself, it can prevent (or make unmanageably difficult) uses of the data that while welcome and useful may not have been imagined by the original designers. A scholar may, for instance, want to ask a question that an elegant but relatively simple search interface does not allow. Another may want to combine the data from two archives together to create a visualization to illuminate previously unknown or unacknowledged connections. The growing number of scholars who have both content expertise and software programming ability increasingly want to access data programmatically (that is, within their own code) rather than by using an intuitive though limited web interface. At the same time, there are often reasons–practical, political, and legal–why it is not always preferable or possible to simply allow users to download the entire dataset for use on their own machines. The most common and arguably best solution to this problem is an Application Programming Interface (API).

An API can be informally defined as a set of published commands that computer programmers can use in their own code to interact with code that they did not write and to which they often have only limited access. For example, an API is often provided to allow third party programmers to retrieve data from a repository that they do not control. The emergence of APIs has facilitated the growth of “mashups”: the combination of data from different sources. Examples of mashups include, for instance, plotting photographs from the photo sharing service Flickr on a Google Map, or dynamically displaying book covers from Amazon.com associated with articles returned from a ProQuest query. Dan Cohen, the Director of the Center for History & New Media has written, “APIs hold great promise as a method for combining and manipulating various digital resources and tools in a free-form and potent way.” Indeed, the potential for APIs to be used in the humanities is significant.

The most-popular APIs have been produced for commercial products including Flickr, Google Maps, and Freebase. Few Digital Humanities scholars, however, have attempted to create APIs for their scholarly repositories. We are therefore organizing a meeting to bring together both Digital Humanities scholars and industry developers in order to study existing APIs and develop a set of recommendations and best practices for API development in the digital humanities. Sessions at the workshop will be videotaped and placed in an online archive to both preserve the work of the sessions and make it available to those who were unable to attend. Events such as the proposed API workshop not only help develop necessary skills within the Digital Humanities community, but serve as a platform for planning, sharing, and innovating.

Work Plan
September – October 2010: The project team will develop and launch the workshop website. This website will house not only information regarding the event but will also serve as a clearinghouse for all materials relating to the workshop.

November 2010: An official call for participants will be published on the MITH website as well as the workshop website. The two-day workshop will be promoted on Digital Humanities email lists and social media sites (such as Twitter). Potential participants will have one month to submit a brief application that explains who they are and what they’d like to do at the event. From that list, MITH staff will choose a group of participants (should the number of interested parties exceed the 50 participants budgeted). Participants will be selected based on their programming ability and their connection to an existing or emergent digital humanities project which might benefit from an API.

December 2010: Participants will be notified through email about the status of their applications.

Late January 2011 or February 2011: The two-day workshop will be held at the University of Maryland in College Park. Each of the two days will have similar structure: mornings will feature talks by representatives from data repositories with existing, exemplary APIs, followed by afternoon breakout sessions in which small groups of digital humanities practitioners will seek to implement the ideas shared in the morning sessions into their own code. Time at the end of each afternoon will accommodate brief presentations of ideas.

March 2011-May 2011: Lester and a web developer will produce a web exhibition of video from the workshops. Lester will produce a white paper and a set of guidelines for designing APIs for the humanities which will be vetted by workshop participants.

Final Product and Dissemination
The workshop will be promoted through a website developed specifically for the event, through various social media including Twitter and Facebook, the Humanist listserv, and MITH’s community mailing list. In addition, video recordings of the speakers will be made available on the website along with notes from participants. Additionally, MITH will publish a set of guidelines for developing web-based APIs for digital humanities projects which will be published on the site and promoted through the same channels that promoted the workshop. The resulting website will act as a resource for those interested in the event, as well as humanities researchers interested in leveraging APIs in their digital work.

Earlier this month the National Endowment for the Humanities announced 28 new awards from their Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program, including the funding of my proposal to organize and run a two-day API workshop. The workshop will gather 40-50 digital humanities scholars and developers who are using or interested in using APIs in their digital projects, industry leaders who will demonstrate their APIs, and practitioners who will help guide the group through the “working weekend.” The workshop’s abstract is available online.

I was inspired to organize the MITH API workshop by discussion at last year’s NiCHE API workshop, organized by William Turkel. I hope our workshop will build off the success of NiCHE’s event and offer concrete ways that APIs can be integrated into digital humanities projects today. As part of the event, time for hacking/building is scheduled in afternoons to prototype ideas. Video of presentations will be recorded and made available online for those that can’t attend. I’ll blog further details about the API workshop and how to participate in October.

Funded by the same NEH program, congratulations to my colleagues Tanya Clement and Doug Reside on their “Professionalization in Digital Humanities Centers” workshop.

Early Tuesday morning I’ll board a bus to NYC to attend ITP Camp, a month-long unconference hosted by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. As a vocal supporter and organizer of unconferences, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to feel out the boundaries of what an event of such length is like. ITP Camp has been described as “a mash-up of an artist residency and a summer camp for adults.” How wonderful.

ITP itself is an innovative graduate program with a 30 year history, and I’m excited to visit their space and meet some of its faculty and students. It’s awesome that they’re opening their doors for the month of June to let people like myself get a taste of what ITP is all about, so I jumped on the opportunity. One of many things that the program does *right* is that it empowers students to run with creative ideas for applied work and provide them with the skills necessary to realize their projects. A brief glance over their projects page reveals diverse areas of focus, ranging from video & performance, mobile computing, wearable technologies, and algorithmic art. For more insight, listen to the great segment that NPR did on ITP two weeks ago, including an interview with professor Clay Shirky.

I’m not sure what will unfold in June, but that is part of the event’s fun. I look forward to a lot of hacking, meeting new people, finally spending some time in New York, and eating delicious pizza.

Things have been quiet here at Finding America, but haven’t been slowing down. In January I began a new position at the University of Maryland as Assistant Director of MITH. Joining UMD has been a great opportunity to play a significant role at a growing digital humanities center, and share my experience from working down the road at Center for History & New Media. MITH hosted the Digital Humanities 2009 conference, is home to a talented group team of digital humanists including Neil Fraistat, Matt Kirschenbaum, Doug Reside, and Tanya Clement, and growing, growing, growing! With the recent creation of the Digital Cultures and Creativity living and learning program in the Honors College, new digital humanities faculty positions in the College of Arts and Humanities, and an emerging suite of software tools developed by MITH that I’m managing, it’s proving to be an exciting place to work.

I began heavily blogging not long after starting at CHNM in May 2007, and with that came many posts about my role with Omeka as well as THATCamp. In my job transition I’ve passed the baton on both projects, but I’m pleased that over the last several months they have continued to flourish. Individuals can now sign-up for Omeka.net, a hosted-version of the software which creates an installation of the software without requiring separate website hosting. Earlier this week it was also announced that THATCamp has received funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which will provide significant support for the event and its regional events which are spreading everywhere. Related to the big THATCamp announcement is the hiring of Amanda French as Regional THATCamp Coordinator. Congratulations, Amanda!

So what have I been up to? Life has been a great mix of code, travel, concerts, and friends. At UMD I’m managing several grant-funded projects including software development on the Our Americas Archive Partnership with Rice University, and integration of MITH’s AXE annotation tool into Zotero to offer compatibility with the Open Annotation Collaboration. I’ll be presenting the latter development at CNI next month. I’ve also been having a great time working with Alex Quinn of the UMD Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) on a project to develop a Microsoft Surface application for a museum, which I’ll be excited to share more about in a future post.

With so much going on, this blog definitely deserves an update. Here’s a quick run-down of all that is new:

AwesomeCamp
I’ll go ahead and declare that THATCamp 2009 was a success! Judge for yourself though, and poke around Flickr, over 3,000 tweets, the wiki, or schedule. Several campers blogged their thoughts on the event. Over the course of the upcoming year, we’ll experiment with smaller regional THATCamp unconferences, and I’m excited to see where this all goes moving forward.  I hope to see many of you back at GMU for THATCamp 2010!

As a result of the feedback we received from interested campers, Jeremy and I are planning to write an article about unconferences as a new model for academic conferences.  We’d encourage you to join our Unconferences and Academia Zotero group and crowdsource some materials that may be useful.

A Blogging Resolution
One reoccurring thought that I had during THATCamp was “I have an idea related to that” or, “I started to write a blog post on that.. but never published it.” I hope to be more transparent with my thought process, and start writing again to share ideas for feedback.  I’m not sure if it’s Twitter or my schedule that have cut into my blogging time, but I’m setting aside times to update this more often.  If you don’t already subscribe to my blog, you may want to.

Digital Humanities Caucus
Susan Garfinkel from the Library of Congress and I have started a Digital Humanities Caucus within the American Studies Association. If you’re an ASA member and interested, I encourage you to visit our caucus page and join. We’ll be sharing more details about our plans soon, but we’ll plan on a meetup or meeting during the annual ASA meeting (which will be in DC this year) in November. If you’d like to help organize, let me know..

Getting physical (computing)
I recently bought an Arduino, and although I’m not building my own robot *yet*, I have some plans to explore the use of physical computing in representing and sharing historical information.  My summer tinkering is related to the Humanist Makers reading group, which is inspired by the work of William Turkel. If anyone reading this uses arduino, let me know! I’d love to pitch around some ideas for its use.

Getting my GeoFunk on
I haven’t blogged about this yet.. in fact, Cameron blogged and mentioned my own project before I did. So here’s the short version: for the last 18 months I’ve been in love. Yes, love. With maps.  The walls of my apartment have slowly become covered with maps, and I’ve realized that this interest is going to stick.  Not only do I think there’s a lot of room for geospatial innovation for historians, but in terms of how everyday people understand and experience the past. Landscapes and place have become a serious research trajectory that I’ve been exploring (and, for whatever reason, not blogged about). Once I begin to explain where I’m coming from, it may make more sense. I promise to write a ton about this in the coming months.

Related to mapping, there are two local developments: HistoryPlot, and Mapping DC. I threw up some slides about HistoryPlot in a separate post, but I’m in the process of drafting several new posts that explain the project in greater detail. There’s also a Mapping DC meetup at 7pm this upcoming Thursday night, July 23rd 2009 at HacDC that you should come to if you’re in the area.

Summer
Did I mention that it’s summer? I’ve already taken a trip out to San Francisco for MakerFaire and Wordcamp, and I’m planning an August road trip to the Midwest to see my cute nephew.

A few days ago, Jeremy Boggs asked for suggestions on grant writing, and received some terrific responses via Twitter. At the same time, I’ve heard recent concerns that it’s difficult to access and search the history of your own Twitter activity.. making us wonder what happens to all of this valuable information. The grant writing conversation is something that I’ll want to review in the future, so this is my attempt at preserving it:

clioweb: Teaching grant writing to #audigitalhistory class tonight. Any suggestions, or words of wisdom, from the crowd? [4:18 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

briancroxall: @clioweb It’s obvious, but specifics matter. The best grants I get are when I’m mostly done w/project as I can then talk specifically @ it. [4:21 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

nowviskie: @clioweb Assessment is more important than you think! Humanists aren’t trained for it, so get help. Also, Lisa Spiro has a good blog post. [4:33 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

rebel129: @clioweb Same as pitching movie/book. Need to boil down what the project is and who the audience in in the first para. Think: HIGH CONCEPT [4:35 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

georgeonline: @clioweb 1 Find out what most recent grant-winning projects were. 2 Ask agency if they’ll discuss your app ahead of time. #audigitalhistory [5:10 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

sramsay: @clioweb Follow the requested format precisely — even if it seems highly redundant. #audigitalhistory [5:17 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

sramsay: @clioweb It’s designed that way to facilitate the review process, and missing pieces make you look careless. #audigitalhistory [5:18 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

georgeonline: @clioweb 3 Much of the language you write for one grant app can be used again for others but be mindful of audience diff’s #audigitalhistory [5:27 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

williamjturkel: @clioweb Every bullet point in grant description should be matched by section title in your narrative [5:32 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

williamjturkel: @clioweb Find out what percentage granting agency wants to give for student support and budget that up front [5:33 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

parezcoydigo: @clioweb revise x 12, pass around to as many smart people as you can. Pay super close attention to grant description/instructions. [5:38 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet

paregorios: @clioweb @williamjturkel is right in my experience about verbatim bullet points; clear some reviewers use a checklist approach [6:03 PM Jun 22nd] View Tweet