What have you used in your class or in your own research to annotate images or to compare images…that you recommend or reject? I’d like to create a public Zotero group, at a minimum, of recommended tools or plugins.

For those working with visual culture, we analyze images regularly. But, as has been noted in some of the conference’s digital history sessions, we all work with digital images at different stages of our research or teaching (which may actually be digitized documents). I think this session could be of interest to folks engaging in all types of history research or teaching.

I’m interested in ways that we can annotate, by highlighting or selecting portions of images, for annotating and/or linking those highlighted areas to other sources. I’d also like to make those annotated images easily available within a CMS like WordPress, for others to use or to annotate themselves.

Flickr lets you highlight and annotate, but only within Flickr. Thinglink is a service that lets you annotate and embed, and then anyone else can access those images for annotating or sharing themselves. Omeka even has a deprecated plugin, but it was somewhat limited in scope.

For my own project, I would like to be able to annotate images within WP + Comment Press. I imagine others have or might want to integrate a similar exercise within their blog or WP-powered syllabus.

If I’ve missed something big (which is very possible), please let me know in the comments.

For this session, I’d also be willing to test out some tools, plugins, or services that other participants know of and use and are interested in other feedback.

For grad students and faculty alike, digital components to dissertations present opportunities to consider the nature of scholarly inquiry, research, and publication.  I am imagining a session designed for graduate students (and faculty who are interested, but more for the benefit of students) who either are or would like someday to include digital components to their dissertation.  In the session, we would share challenges, opportunities, best practices, lessons learned, and also hear from others about what worked and what was less useful along the way in completing such a dissertation.  I’m happy to share my experiences completing a dissertation with a significant digital component, but I’m also eager to help graduate students from across institutions connect and to create support networks and share lessons learned.  The purpose here is not just to commiserate over the challenges, but to help brainstorm alternative approaches.  The ideal outcome would be a Google document with suggestions for 1.) what challenges are most frequently faced 2.) ways in which those challenges have been addressed and 3.) challenges graduate students feel still need to be overcome as they move ahead with their work.

Susan posted this tweet:

session on forking history & github would be terrific @ #thatcamp #aha2014. anyone more savvy than i up for proposing? @kmlawson @historying

— susan garfinkel (@footnotesrising) January 2, 2014

Anyone else want to talk about what git and github are, and how they can be used for things other than code?