Dave Lester’s Finding America

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

On Friday I had the pleasure of presenting ScholarPress at CUNY WordCampEd. I was blown away by the energy and excitement of everyone there (as you can see in the photo above), and fortunate to meet many Twitter friends face-to-face. And man, are they great. Special thanks to Joe Ugoretz (@jugoretz) for masterminding the event, in concert with Mikhail Gershovich (@mikhailg) and Luke Waltzer (@lwalter) of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute at Baruch College, and Matt Gold (@mkgold) of the New York City College of Technology. I also met Stephen Brier and Joshua Brown, among other CUNY faculty who I’ve followed from afar. I had a great time.

The day’s schedule offered a mix of traditional presentations, as well as opportunities for participants to choose their own paths. I’m a big fan of the unconference model, and I think this helped customize the event for many people there. We began with a presentation given by Jane Wells of Automattic who gave an overview of where WordPress is moving in the future. Next, I gave a presentation on ScholarPress, and Zoe Sheehan-Saldana presented on how she is using WordPress with her art and photography students. During lunch we hopped from room-to-room to hear about how WordPress is being used at CUNY, and I think the highlight of the day was Jim Groom’s keynote in the early afternoon. Michael Cripps blogged a great overview of the day focusing on Jim’s keynote, and I was able to record video of the keynote if you’d like to watch it.

The problems and questions around tools for teaching and learning were similar to many of the other universities I’ve interacted with, but the enthusiasm at CUNY is unparalleled. Mikhail noted that this event may be a turning point for WordPress at CUNY, while Cripps notes in his blog post that given the “abysmal performance of Blackboard 8 across CUNY in Spring 2009, an open source e-portfolio platform looks a lot more viable at CUNY than it did even 4 months ago.” Beyond those problems, there are some distinct highlights at CUNY. Blogs@Baruch is a terrific example of how WordPress Multi-User can be used as a platform to provide blogging to faculty and students. At Macaulay Honors College they’re using WordPress to build E-Portfolios for students, and the latest development is the CUNY Academic Commons. The academic commons is really interesting, because they’re using BuddyPress and WordPress Multi-User to create a social network that exists across all CUNY colleges. It has the potential to radically change how the university and colleges understand their own identities.

For me, the event demonstrated that there is a distinct need for ScholarPress, and also that the WordPress Education movement is growing. It’s hard to believe that this marked the fourth WordCampEd event since November. There are really exciting things happening at CUNY, and I hope that moving forward we can grow a collaborative relationship that makes open source a viable option for universities, faculty, and students.

Earlier this week I announced the creation of the Humanist Makers Summer Reading Group. With 15 people already signed up, it looks like a great opportunity to explore part of William Turkel’s Reading List for Humanist Makers, and provide focus to my summer reading.

What will the group do?
Each week we’ll have assigned readings to discuss.  We may decide to have someone leading the discussion, or to come up with a series of questions that we’ll respond to. These details are up for grabs, and the group will decide them once we get going.

Otherwise, it’s my hope that we’ll not only be reading, but also building at the same time. What will we build? Let’s find out! Do you have to build? Certainly not, but the whole idea is to create a lower barrier of entry for those who want to give it a try — we can help each other through the learning process.  Building and reading should provide to be synergetic, and many of the readings themselves have to how to build.

When does the group meet and for how long?
The group will officially start the third week of June, and last for 8 weeks.  At this point, everything is online. People have signed up across the country, but we may organize some physical meet up, especially for the builders among us.

What will the group’s outcome be?
That is yet to be seen. I’m viewing this as a summer experiment — thinking about new ways of organizing like-minded individuals by using the web to share information. I planned to read many of these texts over the summer on my own, so the ability to share ideas with others who are also reading should prove helpful.

How can I join?
There’s currently a Google Group that everyone has joined. We’ve started out by introducing ourselves, and we’ll soon begin discussing the reading list. If you want to follow-along but not participate, that’s OK. If you’re going on vacation and can only participate for a few weeks, that’s fine as well. I’m hoping that this can be a flexible and fun way to share ideas, so don’t hesitate to join in the fun.

I’ve been quietly experimenting with place-based computing since last summer, and had the opportunity earlier this month to present my pitch for a mobile history web service/application called HistoryPlot. While I’m not entirely sure on the trajectory of the project overall (which I aptly refer to as an experiment), I’m exploring different options to get it off the ground and overall learning a TON. Interested in participating and collaborating? Let me know.

For updates on my progress, follow HistoryPlot on Twitter. Below are the slides I presented at the American Association for History & Computing Conference, with audio recorded this afternoon to supplement the slides.

While I’m not as hooked into the local music scene as I was in college, I have fond memories of attending concerts in crowded bars, playing in bands, and having a group of friends that shared a passion for the music. I’m young enough that the internet playing a crucial role in building that local music community — it was where we learned about each other’s projects, listened to music, and made plans to meet up by leveraging message boards and the tools at our disposal. These activities persist on the web today, but at that time it was a little more raw — there weren’t central websites to store your music, nor social networking websites to create relationships with listeners (although, myspace did eventually play a critical role in that). It was DIY.

There’s one feature of the scene that stands out in my memories — the self-described online “street teams” of local bands that would go around town hanging up posters, telling their friends about shows, and proudly wearing pins. While street teams existed before, their activities were in some ways amplified and more visible on the net. It gave fans a role in the promotion of the band, and a mutual feeling of involvement/dedication to the music. Leveraging the power of simple online tools, they were able to coordinate and promote shows, as well as create a stronger sense of community among members. The street team community grew through its online presence and promotion, and in many ways acted as a social hub for us while we were in college.

So I wonder, can you take the best features of those online street teams of the past, and apply their approaches to digital history? You already have the history enthusiasts, and the Internet isn’t going anywhere. What else do you need? What could a DIY digital history street team look like? I understand two purposes of the street teams I knew growing up: to promote the activities of the band, and to also develop a cohesive physical community. Likewise, engagement and building community are critical in public and digital history, so perhaps this is an analogy worth exploring further. In the least, it provides a point of entry for discussing grassroots and community-based, highly collaborative, DIY digital history. I get excited just thinking about it.

How can we organize digital history street teams, whose passion and local interest drives them to explore our personal pasts and share with others? What are ways that we can leverage today’s technologies to both promote and define that digital history community? While bands have a very specific purpose (to perform music), what are activities of these history enthusiasts? Can we engage casual history enthusiasts in local communities by using simple digital tools? How can these street teams grow organically?

I have some distinct ideas for how we can go about this, but before I get ahead of myself — what do you think about this idea? What are examples that you can share of activities that may already fit this vision?

This spring I’m bouncing around from conference to conference… if you’re attending any of these, or you’re in the area, drop me a line (either as a comment, or on Twitter) and let’s meet up. Here goes:

National Council on Public History (Providence, RI  4/1-4/2)
I’m facilitating an Omeka workshop in Providence that introduces the software, shows examples of different types of websites created with Omeka, and discusses ways of customizing your site using plugins and themes. There’s also a CHNM sponsored workshop in June that has space for both end-users and developers/designers, so please sign up to attend.
American Association for History & Computing (Washington, DC  4/3-4/4)
I’ll be unveiling a new project that I’ve been working on called HistoryPlot. I’m really excited by the possibilities of this project, and expect to share a lot of ideas in upcoming posts.
WordCamp 2009 (San Francisco, CA  5/29-6/2)
I was fortunate to attend last year’s WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco, and after having a great time, learning a lot, and bumping into great people, I’ve decided to fly out to SF once again. Any other higher ed, history buff, omeka-using digital humanists attending? Let me know — I’ll be in the area for several days while to take a break as well as test out HistoryPlot on the west coast.
Innovations in E-Learning Symposium (Fairfax, VA 6/4-6/5)
I’ll be co-presenting with Trevor Owens on “Open Source, Extensible Platforms for Creating Collaborative Learning Communities,” which will cover Zotero, Omeka, as well as ScholarPress. I’m excited to hear Vint Cerf give the keynote.
Digital Humanities 2009 (College Park, Maryland  6/22-6/25)
I’ll be joining other CHNMers with a poster session, as well as attending sessions throughout the week. If you’re in town for this, let me know. I’m expecting this to be a pretty intense week, considering how many DH folks are in town.
The Humanities and Technology Camp (Fairfax, VA  6/26-6/27)
I’m once again co-organizing our digital humanities unconference with Jeremy Boggs and hosted at the Center for History & New Media at George Mason University. If you haven’t already applied, you have until April 1st!
National Educational Computing Conference (Washington, DC 6/28-7/1)
I’ll have a poster session with Jeremy and Trevor, and also be running a “birds of a feather” unconference-ish session on using WordPress in schools. I’ll share more details about the latter when I find them out, but I would love some help organizing the session if others are interested and available.

I’m happy to announce that all blog posts on Finding America are now released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. This was both an obvious and difficult decision. On one hand, I’m fairly active in the open source community and sharing is second-nature to my work. However, I was previously concerned about how my words could be used. It was R. Stuart Geiger’s blog post, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Attribution-ShareAlike” and our subsequent twitter conversation that sold me on the idea (he goes by @staeiou on Twitter).  I’m a Creative Commons convert.

Now that my data is out there (as if it never was in the first place), I’d like to see my colleagues and the greater blogging community join me and release their content under Creative Commons. I’m hardly the first person to go CC, but I was surprised to find out which of my favorite blogs are licensed. It’s easy to do: you specify the types of uses of your content on CC’s License Your Work page, and you’re provided the appropriate code to embed the CC badge on your website.

I challenge you to release your blog’s content under CC, or at least justify your reason for not doing so to add to a larger discussion about licensing academic blogging content. Feel free to leave comments here, or use the #ccchallenge hash-tag on Twitter. Here’s the start of a list of bloggers whose content I’d like to see under Creative Commons: Timothy Burke, Rob MacDougall, Jeremy Boggs, Dan Cohen, Matt Gold, Mark Rice, Sterling Fluharty, and Tom Scheinfeldt. This is just the beginning of the list, really..

Props to many individuals who are way ahead of me on Creative Commons, including Stuart Geiger, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Amanda French, Jim Groom, Citizen of Somewhere Else, Dave Parry, Richard Urban, and Matt Kirschenbaum.

I hope the rest of us can catch up, soon.

In late January, I began my Saturday morning with what has become a simple weekend ritual of sorts. Roll out of bed. Turn on the coffee maker. And log on to Twitter to read what my followers are discussing.

As it turned out, all my internet friends were busy working on a new project, called A Better CFP. The sequence of events leading up to this moment was simple. Matt Gold (@mkgold) of the CUNY Graduate Center tweeted the question: “How is it that the Penn CFP list still isn’t working? Does any other centralized CFP site exist?” Hours later, Dave Parry (@academicdave) of UT Dallas replied: “@mkgold re:CFP. Not that I know of, but we could just build one. Want to?” And shortly after, a wiki was setup to collaborate on this new project. To date, eighteen different people around the country (and world, for that matter) have contributed to the wiki by sharing ideas about the site, its design, and possible software implementations while considering a feature-set for both its initial launch, and our pie-in-the-sky ambitions.

I’m excited by this.

A highly-collaborative, interdisciplinary, and diverse group of academics all spent part of their weekend to work on an idea that began with only two short text-messages. No one waited to apply for an NEH ODH start-up grant. There were no committees. There was definitely a focused purpose, and more importantly a passion among the participants to contribute to the project. And there was a flat hierarchy that gave everyone an equal voice in the discussion. This is the changing face of digital humanities, and something I’d like to see become more mainstream in the academy.

There is a second development underway which is synergistic in terms of fostering interdisciplinary academic relationships: unconferences. They take many forms, but an unconference is simply a “participant-driven conference around a theme or purpose.” I’m a huge proponent of the unconference format, having organized the DC WordCamp for Educators last fall that brought together 70 educators, technologists (and a few students!) up the east coast and as far away as Michigan to discuss how they’re implementing blogging into the classroom. The day began with pre-planned speakers, and we spent an entire afternoon in breakout sessions led by participants on topics of interest. There have been two other WordCampEd events that have been spun-off in Worcester, MA and Vancouver, CA… so this is really taking off. And I’m proud to say that unconferences made the Digital Campus “top ten most significant stories, trends, and technologies of the year” at #8, as a vibrant alternative to traditional conferences of paper readings and panel discussions that lack the same interaction and participation.

You may have heard of the other unconference that I’ve helped organize with Jeremy Boggs at the Center for History and New Media. THATCamp, which is short for The Humanities And Technology Camp, is a digital humanities unconference that we ran last year. An archived version of our 2008 website is online, which documents participants and their bios, the schedule that we made entirely on Day 1, and a blog which was run by participants to share ideas before, during, and after the conference. We brought together a terrific team of participants stretching across the humanities for this “working weekend.” It was by far one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had at a conference in terms of the knowledge I learned and shared, and the people which I became close to and stay in touch with.

THATCamp is back in 2009, and it’s bigger and better. It will take place June 27-28th, following the Digital Humanities 2009 conference which is being held at nearby University of Maryland (and hosted by MITH). It’s also worth mentioning that the day between conference and unconference, there’s our June Omeka workshop that you can sign up for as well. We’ve secured additional space for THATCamp to support a larger crowd of 70-100 participants, and we’re currently accepting short applications from those would like to attend. Jeremy describes THATCamp as “a conference/workshop/tutorial/networking/tinkering/playing-around kind of gathering, perfect for folks interested in a variety of aspects in digital humanities who want to expand their skills and knowledge.” So I hope that you consider applying for this year’s THATCamp and join me in June! I’d love to see you there. Which brings me back to my motivation for pushing forward Twitter and Unconference. As Lisa Spiro said in her THATCamp Takaways blog post last year, “It’s the people, stupid.” The community at THATCamp and unconferences is tremendous, an a very positive thing for the growth of the digital humanities community.

It is no mistake that Twitter was used heavily among unconference participants at both @WordCampEd, and @THATCamp. Their functions go hand-in-hand. Not only has Twitter served as a back-channel for discussions at unconferences, but traditional conferences and meetings as well. In his recent participation at the Smithsonian 2.0 visit last month, Dan Cohen served as a great example for how this technology can open up discussions even behind closed doors. Following hash-tags, you can find people on Twitter who are even in the same room as you (as I found out at WordCampEd Northeast in Worcester last week). And as chaotic as that may sound, I’m encouraged to see it increasingly embraced by those in the academy as a way of sharing knowledge.

Closing with the original story of A Better CFP, the project appears to be put on hold as Penn works on revamping their current system. Despite that, I still point to it as an example of how individuals can easily participate in and plan projects harnessing Twitter and an active community. Unconferences bring that virtual community together in a physical space, however I think the interactions are largely the same in terms of how we share ideas openly and the doors are open to those who want to participate. Viva la unconference! And I’ll talk to you on Twitter.

It was following our early morning panel at the American Studies Association that a colleague and I rented a convertible and drove into the New Mexico desert.  Ten miles away from the city of Albuquerque, we found ourselves at the base of the Sandia Mountains, adjacent to the Pueblo of Sandia Indian tribe, and riding the world’s longest passenger aerial tramway.  It was an experience to remember.  As families crammed into the small tram and we began our ascent, children squealed at the gentle rocking of the car, and cameras flashed at the emerging vista.  Reaching the peak, we hiked several miles and could see much of the state of New Mexico from the highest point.  But my purpose in sharing this story is not to offer travel advice (other than for perhaps Albuquerque’s BEST burrito); instead, it leads up to what I saw and how it spurred a series of thoughts that I’ll develop over the course of several upcoming blog posts.

Earlier that day, our panel had focused on tools for digital scholarship, and with that fresh in my mind I couldn’t believe that I captured this video:

Hang Gliding over Sandia Peak from Dave Lester on Vimeo.

Floating.  Gliding.  Flying.  I was struck by how wonderful these hang gliders were, and how brave the individuals were who flew them.  My first instinct was to pull out my digital camera to record their flight, at which time I zoomed in and captured this video.  You can hear a nearby tourist whose camera memory card hit capacity mid-flight, and see the great altitude of their flight as I continually zoom out more and more.  The fact that I recorded a video of them flying was in itself insignificant.  But unlike those around me who were content capturing a short clip, I wanted something more.  I wanted to preserve that experience a greater way.  Perhaps I was still mulling over earlier thoughts of how digital tools can transform scholarship, or my ever-increasing interest in digital archives had the best of me, but I began to wonder: what sophisticated ways could I document the totality of this experience?  And much later I asked: what can I learn about myself and the culture I experience through a personal digital archive of such experiences?  I continue to wonder.

I saved any physical documents from Albuquerque that I could, including my ticket stub and receipt from dinner.  I also took panoramic video of several places.  But I ultimately realized that this nagging urge to archive an experience was one that I had over a year prior, while doing ethnography in virtual worlds.  While studying virtual “wild west towns,” I wondered what ways I could preserve their virtual histories and historical roleplaying.  It was daunting, ill-defined, and overly-ambitious.  But my impulse to archive the experience atop Sandia Peak drove me back to thinking about personal experiences and how we understand/recreate/re-experience them through digital archives.  I was looking for a body of data to provide the totality of an experience; an historical var_dump() from an array of experiences.

As I researched the personal archiving of experiences, I learned that I’m not alone in my interest.  In fact, some of the most most significant work in this regard was done several years prior to my original interest . . . (to be continued)