Archives Found

I’m preparing to spend 1.5 days as a participant at THATCamp Columbus, and I’m really excited about the possibilities. Some of you may recall that I was also a participant in THATCamp Austin back in August, and I came away from that experience with some solid ideas and some good starting points for future exploration.

A partial description from the website of the Ohio Humanities Council:

THATcamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp) Columbus, a collaborative effort of the Ohio Humanities Council and the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University, is a user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities inspired by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.    We’ve already received a lot of support from the Digital Humanities community, so we’re expecting this to be an exciting and entertaining event.

Looking back, I see that I never posted a review of my experiences at THATCamp Austin. Lo siento. While a full review may not be in the cards, I can say that I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest in the topic of crowdsourcing and archives/cultural heritage. As it turned out, Ben Brumfield and I ended up chatting with a decent-sized crowd in the large auditorium during the first session. Ben’s working on a neat volunteer transcription project called From the Page that he had previously demoed at THATCamp 2008. The Austin version of THATCamp was short, and Ben’s talked about some of the other challenges elsewhere. On the plus side, I found that this was a fantastic opportunity to meet/mingle with digital humanities folks that I’d wanted to meet for awhile, and while there were some familiar faces, I think this was a great way for a lot of newer, digitally minded archivists and programmers to share and receive ideas. There was a lot of positive energy generated even in that short evening, and because of the tie-in with the Society of American Archivists annual meeting, I had the chance to talk with some (though not all) of the THATCampers during the rest of the conference week. I’m hoping that something similar can be organized for the Washington DC meeting this summer.

I’ll be back to talk about THATCamp Columbus after it’s over! *fingers crossed*

Tree outside of Heinz Chapel, Pittsburgh

On this gorgeous and unusually warm Friday, I’m looking out at the beautiful leaves on campus from the top floor of the library and thinking about some writing that I’d like to finish this weekend. I’ve been finding a lot of good projects and links lately, and thought I’d share a few with you here:

Call for Papers- DH2010 – Digital Humanities conference at Kings College, London- the theme is “cultural expression, old and new.” Deadline for paper abstracts is Nov 15; conference is in early July 2010.

THATCamp Columbus- regional Digital Humanities unconference based on the popular annual THATCamp at George Mason University. They’re taking proposals now for the January 2010 conference that will be held at Columbus State. I participated in THATCamp Austin this summer, and had so much fun that I’d like to go to Columbus, too– I found it to be a great place to generate discussion and ideas.

Digital Humanities Quarterly- lots of interesting articles in this open-access, peer-reviewed journal, and I’ve been catching up on my reading.

Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology- This is an interesting place to look at the ways in which technology can shape discussion, knowledge and scholarship.

I’m also following the folks at the fall MARAC conference on Twitter– you can too! #marac

Have you found any good resources that relate to the study/use of “digital humanities” that you’d like to share?

Please post ‘em here!

Fifteen museums and cultural institutions (including the Smithsonian American Art Museum) are participating in Wikipedia Loves Art , a scavenger hunt/content-building contest that looks like a whole lot of fun. Check out the Flickr group and rules here.

Some of the prizes that looked most toothsome to me:

Indianapolis Museum of Art

The photographer with the most points (who shot at IMA) will win a fabulous prize package that includes a FREE iPod Touch, a fabulous IMA Blog t-shirt and a limited edition IMA Blog Rubik’s Cube.

Museum of Modern Art

Private after-hours tour for up to 10 people guided by an art historian.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

The winner(s) will receive a boxed set of books from our “Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum” series. In addition they will receive a special American Art Museum tote with an imprinted design based on our Kogod Courtyard roof, a tie featuring our building, a boxed set of museum note cards, and a copy of our publication Temple of Invention, about our historic building.

What are you waiting for? Get out there with your camera, and don’t forget to include me when you win that free membership or iPod!  (Thanks to Jeff Gates over at the Smithsonian Eye-Level Blog for this one!)

A (somewhat) similar local project is happening on Saturday night in Columbus, Ohio at Gallery Hop in the Short North. Several shops will be holding a photo scavenger hunt using Twitter, with gift certificate prizes. I didn’t find any information about what they’ll do with the pictures at the end, but it’s still a neat way to get patrons participating. Follow the Tweets here.

These are pretty low-budget ways to get tech-savvy folks involved that might otherwise never set foot (virtually or otherwise) in your establishment. Could you make this work for your institution, too?

One of the things that I find myself thinking and talking about a lot is the future of archives, of the research process, and of the different levels of access that continue to evolve with the internet. I recently stumbled across the blog of Dan Cohen, and this post from April really grabbed me. Dan is talking about a discussion  at UNC-Chapel Hill where a group of historians shared their thoughts about research and digitizing the Southern Historical Collection. A snippet:

In other words, in the age of Google and advanced search tools and techniques, most historians just want to do their research they way they’ve always done it, by taking one letter out of the box at a time. One historian told of a critical moment in her archival work, when she noticed a single word in a letter that touched off the thought that became her first book.

So in Chapel Hill I was the pirate with the strange garb and ways of behaving, and this is a good lesson for all boosters of digital methods within the humanities. We need to recognize that the digital humanities represent a scary, rule-breaking, swashbuckling movement for many historians and other scholars. We must remember that these scholars have had—for generations and still in today’s graduate schools—a very clear path for how they do their work, publish, and get rewarded. Visit archive; do careful reading; find examples in documents; conceptualize and analyze; write monograph; get tenure.

Read the full post here.

I’ve been poking around in the public beta sandbox of Archivists’ Toolkit in the past month or two, and I’ve found a lot to like there. While I don’t have a local instance installed with our data just yet, I think I/we may take the leap towards further testing on a dedicated server soon. So far, I’m the only one playing with this, but we’ve initiated the hiring process for some actual IT support (fingers crossed). I’ve only glanced at Archon and ICA-AtoM so far, but I haven’t been as impressed. I’m thinking about trying out a trial version of Past Perfect this week, and I’m also trying to look at less-discussed software like Re:discovery’s Proficio. Any insights would be useful! I’d like to find something that integrates accessions, donor letters and files, catalog records, processed/unprocessed collection lists, provenance and condition reports, and other stuff, and especially allows export of finding aids in XML/EAD.