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)

Ranking America is one my new favorite blogs with a simple goal: to provide information about how the United States stands in global rankings. This is a great example of how academics can use blogs as a way of sharing an aggregate of research and information. Mark provides no commentary, only information. What makes America the best, or not? It’s a simple question that leads to some interesting discussions.

I’m excited to announce that the Edupunk session I’ve proposed for SXSW has been accepted! I’ll be moderating an all-star panel including Barbara Ganley, Gardner Campbell, Stephen Downes, and Jim Groom.

Following the inaugural WordCampEd that I organized in DC several months ago, I’ll be in Worcester, MA in February to speak at WordCampEd Northeast. There’s also one scheduled for Vancouver, Canada that I wish I could make it out to. The revolution has grown! If you’re interested in organizing one in your area, send me an email.

Last month Omeka received the Mellon Foundation’s award for Technology Collaboration from a prize committee including internet luminaries Vinton Cerf, often called the “father of the internet” and chief internet evangelist at Google, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, and others.  This is an enormous honor, and a testament to Omeka’s growth as a project.  As Dan Cohen recently noted, CHNM and Omeka have also been funded by the Kress Foundation for two grants that involve mobile technology and additional Omeka plugins.  Join us this upcoming Friday (1/16/09) for Q&A about hacking Omeka themes and plugins during our weekly developer chats on IRC.

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Omeka was released yesterday. This version of our web publishing system features a very flexible data model that will make data migration easy in the future, improves the exhibit builder, adds a plugin for easily creating pages within your site and firms up of the theme and plugins API. The entire omeka.org website features a terrific redesign, and offers new ways that users can contribute to the project.

“So what does this mean?” Omeka is ready for use today. Whether you’re a scholar, an enthusiast, an archivist or librarian, you’ll find Omeka easy to use and customize to your needs. To use a phrase from early on in the project, Omeka is a great tool to “show your stuff” on the web. Digital photos, scans of documents, texts, video.. anything. It can help organize those objects, and present them elegantly on the web. But don’t just take my word for it — go ahead and look through examples in our showcase page to get some ideas. Dan Cohen had a great post about the Ringwood Library’s use of Omeka, and I see this as only the beginning.

“But we already have a CMS and it’s called WordPress.” I love WordPress, as evidenced by my work developing plugins along with it powering this blog. But unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t use structured metadata the way that scholars, libraries, and archives do. We have controlled vocabularies, 50 ways of classifying the same thing, and need a system that allows us to easily do that. Omeka can help. Featuring an unqualified Dublin Core metadata schema, Omeka 0.10 beta also includes fully extensible element sets to accommodate interoperability and make Omeka a simple solution that can be used by an individual, while also running a powerful engine that can accommodate large digital archives.

As I work on this project, I’m excited by how actively Omeka is reshaping my own scholarly methods. We’re too often bogged down with disciplinary distinctions in the humanities that cloud the commonalities between our research interests. That’s one of the reasons I’ve identified so closely with American Studies and interdisciplinary work. And it’s my hope that in some way, Omeka can also be a bridge among the humanities. As a tool, it thoughtfully incorporates metadata standards and important features that can be integrated into all of our research methods. If you’re interested in joining us and using Omeka, please post on the forums, or contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

Institutions of Higher Ed are increasingly providing WordPress Multiuser as a blogging service to faculty and students. The most-developed examples are University of Mary Washington, Georgetown, and Harvard. But what other colleges and universities are using WordPress MU? What institutional groups are supporting these platforms? Are these campus-wide, or department-wide? After some serious searching, here’s my list of 69 institutions of Higher Ed currently using WordPress MU:

1. University of Mary Washington (http://umwblogs.org/)
2. Georgetown University (https://digitalcommons.georgetown.edu/)
3. Harvard (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/)
4. Stockton College (http://titania.stockton.edu/)
5. University of Virginia (http://clove.edschool.virginia.edu/wordpressmu/)
6. Middlebury (http://blogs.middlebury.edu/middblogs/)
7. SUNY Purchase (http://blogs.purchase.edu/)
8. Cornell (http://blogs.cce.cornell.edu/)
9. Capella University (http://blogs.capella.edu/)
10. Rutgers (http://blogs.camden.rutgers.edu/wpmu/)
11. NYU (http://itp.nyu.edu/blogs/)
12. Wooster (http://blogs.wooster.edu/)
13. University of Texas at Arlington (http://blog.uta.edu/)
14. Wesleyan (http://blogs.wesleyan.edu/)
15. Spring Hill College (http://departments.shc.edu/)
16. Savannah College of Art and Design (http://blog.scad.edu/)
17. University of Florida (http://blogs.uflib.ufl.edu/)
18. New Jersey Institute of Technology (https://blogs.njit.edu/)
19. Berkeley (http://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/)
20. Elmhurst (http://blog2.elmhurst.edu/)
21. Albion (http://blogs.albion.edu/)
22. Valpo (http://blogs.valpo.edu/)
23. MIT (http://dune.mit.edu/wordpress/)
24. Baruch (http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/)
25. Plymouth State University (http://blogs.plymouth.edu/)
26. (http://cesd.eng.uci.edu/)
27. Loyola University Chicago (http://blogs.luc.edu/)
28. Boston University (http://blogs.bu.edu/)
29. Texas A&M (http://blogs.tamu.edu/)
30. Bowling Green State University (https://blogs.bgsu.edu/)
31. Lake Superior College (http://blog.lsc.edu/)
32. Weber State University (http://weblog.weber.edu/)
33. CUNY Graduate School of Journalism ()
34. College of Charleston Blogs (http://blogs.cofc.edu/)
35. University of Wisconsin (http://blogs.cofc.edu/)
36. UCLA Library (http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/)
37. Concordia University, St. Paul (http://blogs.csp.edu/)
38. University of Maryland (http://blog.umd.edu/)
39. Lupton Library (http://blog.lib.utc.edu/)
40. Aquinas Institute (http://ai.edu/blogs/)
41. Ogden-Weber Applied Technology College (http://owatc.edu/blogs/)
42. Wayne State University Library (http://cgi.lib.wayne.edu/blog/)
43. Vanderbilt Medical Center (http://www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/blogs/)
44. University of Rio Grande (http://mu.rio.edu/)
45. UC San Diego (http://blog.ucsd.edu/)
46. University of Iowa Libraries (http://blog.lib.uiowa.edu/)
47. Eastern Mennonite University (https://emu.edu/blog/)
48. Cape Fear Community College (http://cfcc.edu/blogs/)
49. Boston College (http://idesweb.bc.edu/wordpress/)
50. Illinois Institute of Technology (http://idesweb.bc.edu/wordpress/)
51. Concordia University, Portland (http://blog.cu-portland.edu/)
52. University of Akron Graduate School (http://blogs.uakron.edu/)
53. St. Lawrence University (http://blogs.stlawu.edu/)
54. Ivy Tech (http://wwwb.bloomington.ivytech.edu/blogs/)
55. Columbia Law School (http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/)
56. Valparaiso University (http://blogs.valpo.edu/)
57. Ohio State (http://people.ehe.ohio-state.edu/)
58. Wheaton (http://fred.wheatonma.edu/wordpressmu/)
59. Saint Louis University (http://www.slu.edu/blogs/)
60. Georgia Tech Savannah (http://blogs.gtsav.gatech.edu/)
61. Albion College (http://blogs.albion.edu/)
62. Surabaya Indonesia (http://blog.perbanas.edu/)
63. Purdue (http://webs.calumet.purdue.edu/)
64. Bryn Mawr (http://blogs.brynmawr.edu/)
65. UMass Amherst (http://blogs.umass.edu/)
66. University of Missouri-Columbia (http://comp.missouri.edu/blogs/)
67. Macaulay Honors College (http://macaulay.cuny.edu/)
68. Northwest College (http://commons.nwc.hccs.edu/)
69. Kutztown University (http://blog.kutztown.edu/)

Blogs are being used in a variety ways, varying from building faculty and staff bios like at Ohio State, to allowing students to blog their college experiences like Saint Louis University.  Many of these installations look as if they’re experiments as well — many underdeveloped.  It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes in the next year.  Please leave comments with additional colleges using MU to help build this resource.

Last Spring, the Center for History and New Media ran a Digital Humanities unconference called THATCamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp. The two-day event brought together 75 scholars from around the world to work collaboratively and discuss concerns and solutions relating to digital scholarship. I’m happy to announce that we’re organizing a new THATCamp, to be held June 27-28, 2009 following the DH09 conference being held at nearby University of Maryland. Save the date!

As noted by CogDog and Dan Cohen, I’ve organized a WordCamp event to be held at GMU:

WordCamp conferences are taking the blogging community by storm as one-day events to meet fellow WordPress users in regional communities. WordCamp Ed has been organized to specifically focus on WordPress and Education. The day-long event to take place November 22, 2008, and will bring together a wide-range of institutions of higher-ed, professors, high school teachers, and students.

The event has been scheduled as a morning of preplanned speakers that will cover a cross-section of educational uses of WordPress, and an afternoon unconference in the vein of THATCamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp. Food and t-shirts will be provided. If you’re using WordPress for teaching in your class, publishing scholarship, or you’re just interested — please consider registering for the event. Over that past year there has been emerging interest in WordPress MU as a blogging solution for institutions of higher ed, and we’ll have WordCampers in attendance who are responsible for the Georgetown University Digital Commons and University of Mary Washington Blogs at WordCamp Ed.

You’d like to attend, but can’t make it? I’m working closely with Randall Rode to make WordCamp Ed not just a one-time event, but a larger series of regional WordCamps for Educators. Randy is organizing a WordCamp Ed that will be hosted under the Nercomp SIG format, and I’m optimistic this could catch on. These events are done with minimal costs, and go a long way in building a professional community. Let me know if you’re interested in starting your own regional WordCamp Ed.

It’s encouraging to see conferences shaking up traditional formats to include greater uses of collaborative technology.  This year there will be two online sessions at the American Studies Association conference in New Mexico — both which encourage pre-conference discussion on their blogs:

American Studies at the Digital Crossroads
(Participants: Randy Bass, Bruce Burgett, Sharon Daniels, Glenn Hendler, Deborah Kimmey, Tara McPherson, Curtis Marez, Timothy Powell; Date and time: Friday, October 17, 12:00-1:45)

American Studies and Anthropology: The Road Less Traveled
(Participants: Amber Clifford, Kathryn Marie Dudley, Robin Hanson, Carrie Lane, Aubrey Thamann; Date and time: Friday, October 17, 4:00-5:45)

I’ll be at ASA this year, presenting “Online Tools for Open and Collaborative Research” with Sharon Leon and Jeremy Boggs.  What are ways that DH tools like Zotero and Omeka can enhance teaching and learning in American Studies?  And how can I integrate web resources like Crossroads and the Encyclopedia of American Studies into my class?  We’ll tackle these questions among others.

Perhaps we should get on the blogwagon and start a discussion — what do you think?

CHNM colleague Trevor Owens has been testing out RPGMaker — “a windows only, no-programing skills necessary, platform for building role playing games.”  In only two hours, Trevor cooked up a simple RPG about Charles Darwin in a visual style reminiscent to SNES, including character classes, items, and skills.  It’s an interesting idea, and the tool has a 30-day free trial.  His blog post, “Making Historical RPGs for Almost Nothing,” goes into greater detail about the tool, its limitations, and possible applications.

Here’s a glimpse at the game’s title screen:

And Darwin finding a finch in Trevor’s game: