THATCamp

This probably falls at least partly under the general heading of sustainability, but I would be interested in a mini-session or discussion about development practices and patterns for small teams in academic settings.

My development team was recently expanded from myself to myself and two undergraduate programmers, and we’re currently in the process of setting up a system with a few basic tools: Mercurial for distributed revision control, Trac for bug tracking, task management, and documentation, and some ad-hoc mod_rewrite sorcery so that we can easily deploy and try out our own revisions and each other’s.

I would be curious to hear about other people’s experiences in similar situations. What worked? What didn’t?

Though I’m way late in doing so, I did want to just introduce my project to the folks here before we all converge (if only hours before). I don’t think it’s covering any drastically new ground but maybe ties in to a number of the different conversational threads that have been going through these posts. I’m happy to demo what we’ve got this weekend, but equally happy to watch & learn from the audience.

Encyclopedia Virginia is a new project of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Quite a few different state and regional encyclopedia projects have cropped up over the past decade; EV is one of the first to do so with a mandate to create entirely new entry content instead of simply publishing online a preexisting print encyclopedia.

We got charged, as I’m sure most of you have been, with creating a web project that would take advantage of the latest & greatest web technologies while also building itself for longterm sustainability (seeing as how an in-depth state encyclopedia like ours could be 10 years in content development alone, so we’ve got to have technology that can nimbly adjust to changing web standards, trends, etc.).

To that end, we’re borrowing a few tricks from digital libraries and archives, and encoding our entries in TEI. In some sense it’s overkill — this content is all digitally-born, so much of TEI’s capabilities w/r/t annotating archival manuscript is lost here. Hopefully, what it empowers down the road is some interoperability between EV content and other regional encyclopedia or digital library content, and some small immunity to the changing web trends over the long course of our content development.

We’ve built a custom CMS that ingests TEI and strips out various elements into your standard MySQL database for web delivery. We perform a similar task for our media objects, creating METS records for each object which the CMS ingests and strips apart. While, again, this in some ways constitutes quite a bit of overkill, it makes more sense when we try to think about the project as both an online encyclopedia and a digital library, and we’re hoping that the flexibility and openness offered by XML will reap benefits for us down the road.

So, a few different things I’d love to talk about over the course of the weekend (not including all of the great things I’ve already read — my curiosity and interest are piqued!):

1. What is our responsibility vis-a-vis creating content that is accessible with the technologies of both today and tomorrow? How do we build digital creations that can themselves be lasting archives?
2. Are archival standards like TEI and METS appropriate for digitally-born content? Obviously, EV is doing this, but I don’t think it’s a given that it’s always the right choice.
3. (one close to my heart) What is the responsibility of digital archives w/r/t copyright and intellectual property? I manage EV’s media objects, finding things we can use in all kinds of archives, and struggle with this every day — as I try to get as many objects as possible delivered to the public, without getting sued. What role can humanities institutions and projects play in this culture battle? I think particularly there may be some overlap with the interest in Creative Commons that was expressed earlier.

See you on Saturday!

A side-note to travelers: I heard a report on the radio that the Woodrow Wilson Bridge is going to be down to one lane this weekend.  If that’s right, anyone is coming in on I-95 south might want to look for non-95 routes.  Anyone know more about this?

I mentioned this in my earlier post–there are many faculty grappling with how to define and evaluate the quality of applied, public, collaborative, and/or digital scholarship. The digital work takes many forms including publishing a monograph as an electronic book, developing research tools and models, blogging, building Web resources for education, and producing public projects like Mark’s Euclid Corridor Oral History Project in Cleveland. I’ve written about this a bit on Tellhistory. I would like first to learn, from those more directly involved, about broader digital humanities initiatives on this front and to discuss what more needs to be done. When departments with public history graduate programs do not recognize traditional peer-reviewed print publications about public history as scholarship — it seems like there is a lot that needs to be done to support the greater emphasis on methodology, collaboration, and organization that Tom Scheinfeldt addressed in “Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?”

If there is interest, I’d like to have a session on web mashups:  what they are, how you can make them, and specifically, how they can be applicable to the humanities.  For instance, one specific application I’ve been focused on recently is that to integrating such tools as Flickr and other applications into the classroom for the teaching of art history.  Another application is how to turn Zotero into a mashup platform.

My original THATCamp proposal mentioned some playing around I have done under the inspiration of Bill Turkel’s mapping of libraries that hold copies of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis.

I adapted Bill’s Python scripts to screen-scrape Worldcat holdings records for a number of thematically related publications, and then made a script to create some PDF maps using the GMT software (Generic Mapping Tools) rather than Google Maps. I now have a couple hundred publications in a MYSQL database and have set up a small project using the Django development framework to browse the information, although I haven’t incorporated mapping into the framework. This is a personal hobby project at the moment, and I have not yet had as much time as I hoped to develop it further.

Although I could demo GMT and Django at a basic level (I’m no expert) if there is any interest in them, the larger issues I’m interested in discussing concern aggregation and visualization to support inference. Some clear connections here are Laura Mandell’s Archive Aggregator, Jeanne Kramer-Smyth’s Visualizing Aggregated Data, Tom Scheinfeldt’s Challenges to Historical Visualization, and Karin Dalziel’s Search and Digital Projects.

It’s exciting to see how much is going on with visualization and with data linking, and how swiftly the barriers to entry are dropping. We need experiments of many kinds, including free-form play, to figure out what the tools are good for. Without limiting the experiments, I’m interested in thinking about how it is that a visualization or data pattern can come to mean something and support some kind of inference. That’s different from search.

Within the area of bibliographic data of various kinds, what starts out as “metadata” (created with a particular context in mind of search and discovery, description and access) can have an additional role, provisionally, as primary data. When I do a search in a library catalog, or a timeline visualization in Zotero, although that can be a means of discovery for particular items, and it may not need to be anything more than that, it can also be a direct provocation to interpretation—if I see a pattern, and if there is some historical hypothesis that can explain that pattern. How can we think more clearly about when such inferences are warranted, and what information researchers might need to better evaluate them? And what would it take to develop the standards and tools to better enable this kind of exploitation of existing data? I would like our library catalog searches not to return twenty results at a time with a “next” button, but to offer the full set of results in a single standard form to be downloaded or piped directly to whatever other tools we might have for further processing.

In addition to this kind of discussion, I’m very much interested in digital civic engagement, in sustainability and project management, and in the demos and tools discussions, and in the RDF-related presentations. I posted a comment to Tom’s “event standards” post that I think bridges between the point made above and my novice curiosity about RDF.

There is such a range of interesting stuff here! Enough to go all week and not run out. I’m looking forward to meeting you all.