Talk session proposal:  I would like to propose a session to discuss and/or brainstorm ways to use digital history tools to encourage students to engage with the history of their local community. As a reference point for the discussion, I am directing a service learning project this spring in which students will use wikispaces to document the history of our local community. Some questions to consider might be: What kinds of creative uses might there be for building history pages with wikispaces? What other digital tools might be used to connect students to the community? Conversely, how best to encourage community interest in students’ work? How to develop a collaborative project that might involve other departments or disciplines? While my interest is primarily in student learning and collaboration, I’d be happy to bring these questions to a larger discussion of collaboration in digital history as well.

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.

This session may fall outside the usual range of digital-humanities topics for a THATCamp, but so be it.

I’d like to convene a session on teaching history in fully-online formats– that is, when you may never meet your students in the flesh. At the urban public US university where I teach, there’s increasing pressure to bring more of our courses online, up to and including a fully-online BA in history. We’re encouraged to follow the Quality Matters standards for peer-reviewed best practices in fully-online course design. I was originally suspicious of Quality Matters, not least because of its Orwellian naming, but it’s been very useful for learning how to teach online.

So, how do you teach history online? 3 semesters ago, I walked into a job with a substantial online-teaching component and no prior experience. Frankly, I’ve been making it up as I go along, with the help of a staff instructional designer and my university’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching. Although my initial efforts were very rough, things have improved, and I’m now cautiously optimistic about online courses compared to face-to-face courses. I’d like to share some of what’s been working for me and hear from others about your experiences.

Some topics we might discuss include:

* How to use discussion forums, with or without instructor participation
* Assignments that work for teaching critical-thinking skills in history
* The challenges of self-directed learning; motivating students by teaching curiosity
* Journals and reflective assignments
* Designing assignments that are manageable to grade with a large student load (90+ students per instructor per semester)
* synchronous meetings (chat, Adobe Connect, Skype, etc) and when they’re most effective
* team-based learning (I’m not doing it, but I hear it can work very well online)
* peer-review assignments as a learning tool (via Turnitin.com or similar)
* mini-lectures and when they’re useful
* teaching strategies from MOOCs that we can adapt for smaller courses

So, who’s interested? Comment here with a little more information about how this session relates to you. If we do this, it’ll need to be in the morning, because I need to depart by 1pm for my flight home.

For my proposal, I’m offering up a roughly formed-slammed together session that is sorta make and sorta talk based. Throughout the last few years, the evaluation of digital scholarship has been of growing focus particularly within the context of scholarly communication and, to my mind, within the digital humanities/digital literatures communities and the new media/media studies communities.

There’s a laundry list of voices being thrown into the mix—whether in media (e.g. the numerous Chronicle, Slate, InsideHigherEd articles), in scholarship (e.g. evaluation as a key consideration in monograph length dh works), in presentations (see the tweetstream from AHA2012/2013/2014 or DH2012/2013), or in policies (see MLA’s guidelines). The Journal of Digital Humanities and others are steadily increasing the review of digital projects. Even JAH has gotten into the game of evaluating digital projects as a key scholarly activity.

Pedagogically, we are seeing evaluation exercises becoming more prominent in both undergraduate and graduate courses. Brian Croxall’s done this with his undergrads, Doug Seefeldt and Will Thomas have done this with their grad students and there are a growing number of Digital History courses that ask students to evaluate digital projects….AHA’s even offered a report (under the rubric of public history) about best practices for review.

Yet, for all of these discussions and resources about the value of digital work within teaching and promotion, there is little consensus for digital historians on the explicit components that projects should be reviewed, assessed, and evaluated on. I’m proposing to lead a group think exercise where we create a checklist, question list, or some other sort of evaluative framework that could be used by non-digital historians to familiarize themselves with how digital history projects should be reviewed and evaluated. I imagine something that reflects a shared value discussion…what matters within digital history and how to we want to be evaluated on our scholarship? If a book review does these certain things to be considered a “good review” then what must we as digital historians look for in digital projects for a project to rated a “good” digital project.

In his introduction to the workshop on digital history Thursday morning, Seth Denbo stated that collaboration was central to the ethos of digital history. Ethos struck me as not quite the right word, because it suggests to me that collaboration is first and foremost an ideal or belief. In my experience, collaboration is an unavoidable reality for digital history and one which historians, like most humanists, both welcome and abhor. On the one hand, collaboration enables us to take on more ambitious questions and explore them in more complex ways. On the other hand, it requires abandoning the traditional ideas about where control and credit over a scholarly product are assigned.

So what works and what doesn’t? I propose to lead a conversation about the different kinds of collaborations that are possible in the digital humanities. My starting point is my own experience as part of two very different digital projects, ranging from a generously funded grant with multiple full time and part time staff to an experiment powered almost exclusively by the enthusiasm of four dozen medievalists and the ad hoc resources that brings. What I would like to generate is a typology of the kinds of collaborations digital history projects can or must involve, the most common challenges such collaborations present, and (perhaps the most useful part) strategies to negotiate these challenges succesfully. If you aren’t sure where to start thinking, Sharon Leon’s resources on project management are an excellent starting point, but I see this conversation as not just useful to aspiring (or current) project managers, but for anyone interested in the range of ways one can participate in a digital project.

While y’all are free to discuss this at whatever point in the day you please, I am only available to facilitate for the morning sessions (1 & 2).

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?

When we’re in the classroom, we can’t guarantee that all of our students will have laptops (unless we bring them laptops or reserve a computer lab).

If we want to teach digital history techniques to our students as part of their classroom experiences, how do we balance these constraints against our unbounded digital-history optimism?

I have a blog post that outlines one technique (www.kalanicraig.com/teaching-digital-humanities-with-analog-tools-the-iliad-and-networks/), but I’d like to get a discussion/brainstorming session going to see how others are handling the question of digital access as part of a digital-history curriculum.

(P.S. Dear session organizer: I will not be available to lead the session until 1pm, so feel free to nix this session proposal if necessary.)