I’m very excited about the projects that have already been discussed, though I’d like to shift gears a little in terms of topics.

I’m interested in talking with others about their experiences teaching digital history/humanities to undergraduates (and graduates). I’ve experimented with a number of ways to involve students in the creation of group and individual digital historical research projects. In the past I’ve had students hard coding web pages in HTML or using Netscape Composer; others built their sites in wikis. These projects were typically part of content-based American History classes.

This year I set up an undergraduate digital history seminar, entirely based around the methods and practice of digital humanities. This course involved a great deal of planning and prep work (including emails to all majors before registration and a survey of digital skills and interest 6-8 weeks before the class started), and the help of a number of people outside the History Department, most notably, UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (including fellow THATCamper, Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn). With my DTLT colleagues we created a digital toolbox (including Wordpress, Omeka, MIT’s Simile/Timeline, del.icio.us and others) from which the students were able to choose the appropriate tools for their own group projects. I’m happy to talk as well about the structure of the class, including questions of grading, work load and skills, and the four finished projects themselves.

More details about the class (and links to the projects themselves) can be found at http://digitalhistory.umwblogs.org and posts on my own blog.

I look forward with talking with other THATCampers about similar topics.

Several THATCampers have asked for advice choosing hotels and transportation – here are a few links that will help you plan your stay:

• Local Hotel Information
• Cue Bus
• Parking Services

My suggestion is to stay in Fairfax at one of the hotels near the CUE Bus, and take that into campus.  It should be a short trip.   If anyone’s looking for a ride from the immediate area or is willing to help out some THATCampers, I’d encourage you to post here.  And if you’re driving, park in the Sandy Creek Parking Deck, which is adjacent to the Research I building THATCamp will be held in.

Any other ideas?

About a year ago, Gavin Robinson and I swapped our Google Reader subscriptions. Neither of us is affiliated with an institution, so blogs really are how we stay connected to the digital humanities community. We’d each amassed a few dozen digital history subscriptions, and when we imported each other’s OPML files, we each discovered new and relevant sites.

I’d love to swap RSS subscriptions with other digital humanists, and what better community than THATCamp?

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I’ve been having a lot of fun recently making interactive gizmos (a.k.a. “history appliances”) using microcontrollers and other small electronic and mechanical parts. If there is any interest, I could arrange to have some Arduino kits shipped to CHNM and we could have a session of building and programming gizmos. It is easier than you might imagine. Depending on the amount of interest, I could either provide the kits myself, or arrange a deal for participants to buy their own kits to take home.

I like Adam’s idea of the two sessions–I think that would be very helpful and interesting to many levels of experience.

Here’s a quick list of the tools I’ve been using:

• RAP (RDF API for PHP)
• ARC (a lighterweight PHP API)
• SIMILE was mentioned below, I’ve spent the most time with PiggyBank, Exhibit, and Solvent
  
• IsaViz graph editor
• Protege ontology editor
• Twinkle quick SPARQL querier
• Tabulator FF extension for browsing Linked Data (see also the Semantic Radar from the SIOC project)
• Speaking of SIOC, there’s also their PHP API

I’ve tinkered a bit with the Geonames and DBpedia services, but haven’t really integrated them into anything yet.

I’d love to talk with anyone who’s set up a Virtuoso server for their RDF work. Anyone tried this out?

I’ll follow up on the post about the F/OSS DH Infrastructure to say that I’ll be very interested to hear about projects using RDF, and to talk about a couple of my projects using it.  One project is scraping the Atom feed out of our WPMU installation to RDFize it all and make it accessible in a variety of ways; another is an ontology for describing universities from the viewpoint of the actual teaching and studying (i.e., not just saying such-and-such a class is taught by Dr. X, but also what texts etc. they study, what tools they use in the course of study, etc.).

I’ll through this out, too–is there any interest/desire for some of the people already using RDF to get together to do a tutorial/workshop/something-or-other for the curious about RDF, SPARQL, ontologies, etc?

Back in November, I was brought in as the first DH lead developer for the TAMU College of Liberal Arts because a growing number of faculty are wanting to do something with digital humanities, they didn’t have anyone available who could interface between the faculty and the technologies, and they were wanting to leverage the open source community. The easiest way to produce open source is to pay someone.

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Adam Solove asked about space details for THATCamp to help with brainstorming before the camp, so here it goes:

Research 1 has wireless access throughout the building. We currently have five spaces reserved:

• Conference room to hold 20-25 people, with projector, whiteboards with markers
• Conference room to hold 15-20 peopple, with projector, whiteboards with markers
• Conference table in a CHNM workspace (in front of my office actually!) that could hold 10 people fairly comfortably. Has a LCD TV hooked up to a G5 Powermac, but could easily be attached to a laptop. Whiteboards with markers.
• Conference table in a CHNM workspace that could hold 10 people fairly comfortably. No projector or tv, though, but we could figure something out with this.
• Computer lab that could comfortably hold 20-25 people. Widescreen TV mounted on wall, attached to a Powermac G5. Also has a GameCube, if someone wants to start a MarioKart tournament!

Welcome to the THATCamp website! We have a few plans in the works for adding features to the site. If you twitter, use the tag #thatcamp in your tweets and we can create an aggregated list of tweets. When blogging on your own site, or uploading relevant pictures to Flickr, tag them with “thatcamp” so other campers can find them too.

If you’ve registered, you’re free to contribute posts to this blog. Anything goes: live-blogging sessions, posts on organizing sessions, post-camp drinks, finding a ride to campus, interesting websites or tools, whatever! Dave and I will be using the blog primarily to keep campers updated on pre-camp plans and announcements.