I’ve increasingly felt that digital journalism and digital humanities are kindred spirits, and that more commerce between the two could be mutually beneficial. That sentiment was confirmed by the extremely positive reaction on Twitter to a brief comment I made on the launch of Knight-Mozilla OpenNews, including from Jon Christensen (of the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford, and formerly a journalist), Shana Kimball (MPublishing, University of Michigan), Tim Carmody (Wired), and Jenna Wortham (New York Times).

Here’s an outline of some of the main areas where digital journalism and digital humanities could profitably collaborate. It’s remarkable, upon reflection, how much overlap there now is, and I suspect these areas will only grow in common importance.

1) Big data, and the best ways to scan and visualize it. All of us are facing either present-day or historical archives of almost unimaginable abundance, and we need sophisticated methods for finding trends, anomalies, and specific documents that could use additional attention. We also require robust ways of presenting this data to audiences to convey theses and supplement narratives.

2) How to involve the public in our work. If confronted by big data, how and when should we use crowdsourcing, and through which mechanisms? Are there areas where pro-am work is especially effective, and how can we heighten its advantages while diminishing its disadvantages? Since we both do work on the open web rather than in the cloistered realms of the ivory tower, what are we to make of the sometimes helpful, sometimes rocky interactions with the public?

3) The narrative plus the archive. Journalists are now writing articles that link to or embed primary sources (e.g., using DocumentCloud). Scholars are now writing articles that link to or embed primary sources (e.g., using Omeka). Formerly hidden sources are now far more accessible to the reader.

4) Software developers and other technologists are our partners. No longer relegated to a secondary status as “the techies who make the websites,” we need to work intellectually and practically with those who understand how digital media and technology can advance our agenda and our content. For scholars, this also extends to technologically sophisticated librarians, archivists, and museum professionals. Moreover, the line between developer and journalist/scholar is already blurring, and will blur further.

5) Platforms and infrastructure. We care a great deal about common platforms, ranging from web and data standards, to open source software, to content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal. Developers we work with can create platforms with entirely novel functionality for news and scholarship.

6) Common tools. We are all writers and researchers. When the New York Times produces a WordPress plugin for editing, it effects academics looking to use WordPress as a scholarly communication platform. When our center updates Zotero, it effects many journalists who use that software for organizing their digital research.

7) A convergence of length. I’m convinced that something interesting and important is happening at the confluence of long-form journalism (say, 5,000 words or more) and short-form scholarship (ranging from long blog posts to Kindle Singles geared toward a more popular audiences). It doesn’t hurt that many journalists writing at this length could very well have been academics in a parallel universe, and vice versa. The prevalence of high-quality writing that is smart and accessible has never been greater.

This list is undoubtedly not comprehensive; please add your thoughts about additional common areas in the comments. It may be worth devoting substantial time to increasing the dialogue between digital journalists and digital humanists at the next THATCamp Prime, or perhaps a special THATCamp focused on the topic. Let me know if you’re interested. And more soon in this space.

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My impression was that the experience was a good one for those in attendance. I certainly got plenty of positive feedback. Of course, one rarely hears the negatives in situations like this, so it’s quite possible that some weren’t pleased with the whole unconference concept, but I certainly didn’t see anyone who looked unhappy or frustrated during the two days.

At the concluding session, attended by about half of those who were there when we started, several people emphasized their belief and/or hope that further connections and collaborations would grow from this THATCamp. If this one is anything like the others I’ve attended, that will certainly be the case. And, I was pleased to note, a number of people referred to my admonition on the morning of Day One to “have fun.”

If only one could say that about the other academic conferences we attend…

Among the questions discussed were how to complete a project once the money runs out? Another was how to plan successfully for the final outcome? Another was how do we get started with a digital humanities project?

The conversation then turned to audience. We have to think through who might be using the resource–ranging from just me to many different audiences in different fields. This makes project management difficult in the extreme if we don’t know what people in those other audience groups want (or don’t) from our work.

Another was whether digital humanities projects can be anything but a collaborative/team effort? My own take on this is that none of us have the expertise we need to realize all aspects of such an endeavor and so from the beginning we need to plan collaboration into the project in a formal as well as an informal way. This can also mean, according to one of the participants, that we may do much of the initial work alone, but there is almost always a point at which we have to engage others as partners, building a community around the work we began. The evolution over time can therefore move from an idea to a community with specific details of the project being realized either by the initial researcher or the growing community over time.

The session also raised the point that, given the difficulty of realizing a digital humanities projects, shouldn’t there be some part of graduate education (formal or informal) to teach our graduate students learn how to get from start to finish on a digital project. Our second course in the Clio Wired sequence (most recent version) offers one example of a full course version of such an introduction.

The session began with a Ted Talk by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel on Google’s n-gram viewer and what we can learn from 5 million books (500 billion words), a topic I’ve also played with here in the blog.This was a way of raising the question of “data driven history” and will this change our writing?

A second question was how has the process of writing changed (or is changing)? A third, are we going to keep writing books anyway? What are some of the truly new forms of writing? Does this mean we are thinking differently about history? Are ePubs going to be something different in the sense that 35-40 pages is an article, 200 pages is a book, but what about 100 pages, which is neither? Who is doing the writing? What is the future for collective authorship?

I raised the issue of what happens when writing is taking place in real time in public as in the case of my current research project? What does it mean that I’ll be getting comments–are those who comment co-authors, for instance? How does my writing and thinking change as a result of their input and what does that mean for authorship?

I’m also thinking about this because in my short term plan, once my book on teaching history in the digital age comes out, is an ePub tentatively titled “Edwired: The Book.” My plan is to take a selection of half a dozen or so larger issues I’ve raised in the blog that also elicited a higher degree of engagement from readers, pull them together in a sort of chapter form, add some commentary at the beginning of the chapter (new content) including a reflection both on where the issue is today and what I think about that commentary now that I’ve had more time to reflect on it.

One of the issues batted around in the room for a while revolved around the question of authorship in the digital world. If work is collectively authored, or includes comments, or other input from others, what does that mean for authorship? So, for instance, to what degree can McKenzie Wark claim authorship of Gam3r Th3ory if he incorporated content from the website where he wrote the book in public?

Another question raised was about narration in digital media. How do we tell stories differently in these new media? How is the new media working its way into our writing if writing is the core of what we do in the humanities? Does the writing process change? Does imagination change? Does our sense of time change?

Another question was related to the issue of what happens to us when we create a digital publication like Docupedia? To be specific, authors for this project were generally resistant to taking “interactive responsibility” for things they wrote, because they wanted to be done once they had submitted their work. It seems to me this is a point well worth keeping in mind, because there is certainly a danger in taking on too much interactive responsibility over time. I know journalists who speak of this issue with respect to having open comments on their stories and being glad that there is a point when the comments are closed so they don’t have to keep monitoring them.

Projects discussed were Hacking the Academy and Writing History in the Digital Age and what projects like these mean for things like the authorship question raised above?

My answer is that I think we are in a generation of transition in the historical profession and in the humanities in general. By that I mean that while things digital are rapidly gaining prominence in our field(s), digital humanities remains an activity of a devoted minority. But, and I think this is a big but, I also think that 20 years from now, i.e., one full generation, digital work will be as central to what we do as non-digital work is. That is to say, I don’t expect that 20 years from now no books will be published. But I do think that 20 years from now digital forms of scholarship will be just as important as analog forms.

Note — I think it could take a full 20 years. As I wrote three years ago now, historians are a conservative tribe when it comes to the methods of our scholarship, and so I really do think that it will take 20 years before digital work is considered the same as analog work. There is certainly a degree of ageism in what I’m arguing, because I do think that some of the objection to digital work is that it is new and so suspect among those who have become very comfortable doing history the way we’ve done it for a long time. But there are also not unreasonable objections based in a view that the old forms have worked quite well for a very long time so why should we abandon them for something potentially faddish?

Nevertheless, I think the technological wave washing over us isn’t going to recede and so those studying history now need to take account of that and plan accordingly. What, then, does that mean? Here is what I would have mentioned in my session:

1. Some level of skill with digital technology is going to be essential to the historians who will take over from my generation (my anticipated retirement date, May 15, 2025 in case you were wondering). This “level of skill” could be anything from working comfortably with forms of digital writing (blogs, tweets at present), to building or working with databases, to the design of digital content, to making use of collaborative and mobile tools to further their work;

2. Writing is changing in this digital age. Those studying history today need to be able to work in these new forms, if only at a minimal level, because I’m certain that, 20 years from now, they will need to be able to write digitally as well as in the analog world;

3. Those studying history today need to manage their digital identities very carefully, because who you are online is already who you are as a historian–in fact, it might be more of who you are, because it is the you encountered by others. Now is already too late to begin thinking about that digital identity. I do not mean to suggest that they should conform those digital identities to some set of accepted norms–far from it! Instead, I am arguing that they need to think those online identities through.

Those were the points I was going to raise for sure. If there were time, I also would have mentioned that I think they should be advocating for courses–formal or informal–in the digital skills they need.

The version I was able to access didn’t seem to have the full functionality being shown on the screen in the room, but it is clearly a nice tool for students to use as they begin to poke around in digital collections in archives. Given my limited German these days, I may have missed some of the most important points, so when I have more time, I’ll poke around the project some more to see what it can do.

Among the questions that came up in the session were: What are your experiences with apps; what specific comments do you have on the app demonstrated; what needs should an app fulfill; what are the key technical questions; how do we take into account the fact that not everyone will have a smartphone/mobile device?

One of the questions discussed was the degree to which mobile computing has penetrated the student population. I know in the case of George Mason, it seems that maybe only half of our students still have easy access to mobile computing. But how much longer will this be true?

Another important question on the technical side is the difficulty in making sure your app will work on multiple platforms? Keeping up with the constant changes/needs to support different devices seemed to some in the room as more than academics can afford to do such sork.

The app I want is one where I can go into an archive with my mobile device, work in Zotero, take pictures of the documents I’m working with, and have them uploaded in a frictionless way to my Zotero database. Right now, I have to take the pictures with my camera, download them, resize/rename them, then upload them, which will take me days. If you are an app developer and create such an app, please email me right away!

My request led to a wide-ranging discussion of the cloud, user interfaces, “creeping featurism” (a term I like a lot), and how many devices will we be using when doing our research? Some argued that one day in the near future we will have only two — a phone and a tablet. Microsoft seems to be betting on this kind of a shift with Windows 8.

At least one university (Washington State) is offering a course in summer 2012 for mobile apps in the humanities. Perhaps we should all plan on spending a week in Vancouver this June? More on their summer Digital Humanities Institute is available here.

Most of the conversation was about apps related to archives and research. A couple of the public history apps that came up were Romerstrasse and Biblion.

Another interesting conversation revolved around what is “the toolbox” the historian or the history student needs as she walks around? Which of these should be mobile?

Because it became clear to many at the conference that although 40% of the attendees at THATCamp Switzerland were female, only one of the proposals was by a woman. So, two of the women here at Camp staged a pirate attack on my session and “occupied” it to hold a session instead on women in social media.

One of the central topics discussed was how social media respond to (or don’t) women’s career trajectory in digital humanities? Another was how women (and men) manage their identities online.  So, for instance, are men more likely to use social media in a non-professional way, i.e., tweet about what they are doing today, while women in the academic life are perhaps more likely to confine themselves to more professional uses. So much of the discussion revolved around questions of power–to what degree is the power in academia tilted toward men or not, and whether digital media might be flattening the hierarchical relationships because all have equal access.

One of the points I thought was especially interesting was whether men in digital humanities (who seemed a bit older to the commentor–I hope she didn’t mean me!) were “digital immigrants” while the women seemed younger and so were more l likely to be “digital natives.” That comment certainly bears on the experience in the U.S., in that women are taking over graduate education in general, with certain fields excepted (finance, engineering).

A good bit of the discussion centered on the editing of Wikipedia and what that could tell us about gender? Wikipedia’s own survey — 58,000 self-selected respondents out of 15.6 million account holders — says that 87% are male. So, even if we assume that men are more likely to respond to such a survey than women (which I don’t know if it’s true or not) we still have to say that writing/editing for Wikipedia is an overwhelmingly masculine activity. Why that is the case, it seems to me, is a question well worth pursuing.

According to the Pew Internet Project, in the U.S., women are somewhat more likely (69% vs 60%) to use social media than men. I’d have to examine the underlying data to see if this difference is wider in younger age cohorts, but if that’s true, then it could validate the comment about digital immigrants/digital natives.

All in all, a very lively discussion that needs to be had over and over and over.

If you want to play with a Commodore 64 emulator, you can get one here by clicking on the Program link. Downloading it and running it was quite the blast from the past, because it uses the Basic programming language, the first programming language I learned (way back in 1977). Of course, I didn’t make the best grade in that class, but in those days I didn’t know I was going to need that knowledge in 2011.

In the session, we all learned to play the original version of Tetris, which was fun, but then began to download other programs. in my case, I downloaded a Basic compiler and tried to write some simple programs, with only limited success. Around the room there was a lot of activity from the group with frowns and giggles liberally interspersed.

Patrick then asked us how we might then use this new knowledge. I suggested that this was one way to help our students understand the history of the box they use every day. Someone else thought that it would be especially useful for students to experience some of the frustrations to trying to understand these older programming processes, if only to gain greater empathy with those doing things like creating early video games.

This discussion reminded me of a conversation with Dan (I think on DigitalCampus) about students no longer getting anywhere near the command line on their computers and therefore have a hard time even thinking about writing code of their own.

But this raises the question of whether it’s really necessary for students to get to that very basic level of computer use any longer? My answer is that it depends on what the goal is. So, for instance, if their goal is to create a video and post it online, they don’t need to know what happens under the hood. They just need to know how to do what they want to do. But if we are trying to teach them the history of digital humanities, encountering the precursors of the field seem just as important as it is in a different field of history to have them encounter primary sources. In other words, these emulators let them interact with a version of a primary source in digital humanities.

Note to self: More than one person has told me I ought to start using Prezi for presentations. After watching Stefan’s talk, I’m finally convinced I have to put in the time on this one. It is a full order of magnitude better than PowerPoint, largely because it defeats the iron law of linearity inherent in PowerPoint.

He began with a brief overview of the transition between reference management systems and knowledge management systems, i.e., from keeping track of your references (still an important function of the knowledge management systems) to managing the linkages between those references (“cross-linked knowledge spaces” he called them). Of course, these knew systems are based on the Web 2.0 principles of sharing and collaboration and many are open source. So, for instance, on my research blog on my human trafficking project, you can not only read about my research as I’m doing it, but you can also access my Zotero library for the project.

Keller then showed a clip from Minority Report (2002) showing Tom Cruise sorting through masses of data by waving his hands as a speculation on where these systems might go, which reminds me of Bill Turkel’s work on Interactive “Ambient and Tangible Devices for Knowledge Mobilization.” Keller called the possible future “interactive and collaborative knowledge production and representation systems.” Of particular interest to me was the idea that in future word processors, everything you write (not just the citations) would be stored in a database. How that would happen, i.e., how the system would decide what got stored where, isn’t clear to me, but I love the idea.

Next we got a brief introduction to LitLink. Probably the biggest differences with Zotero, the one I know, are what he calls “cross-linking of data,” the establishment of “knowledge spaces” and the creation of working groups.

What does seem different (and appealing) to me is the ability to easily connect references to specific projects you might be working on. Because we typically use sources for more than one project, being able to do that with minimal friction is great. I also like the “similar items” bar that appears on the right side of the screen for each record. I wish Zotero did that for me, given the fact that I now have so many items in my library. Finally, I like the way one can create an outline for a project in LitLink, connecting various resources to that outline, then exporting it to a word processor.

In the discussion, people asked, among other things, why one should use LitLink instead of Zotero. One answer that came up is that because LitLink is a relational database, the author is only entered once, a structure that prevents the kinds of duplication of records that I’m very guilty of in Zotero. Thus, for instance, all works by the same author are automatically related, where in Zotero, you have to make those connections manually.

As impressed as I am with LitLink, I’m not switching from Zotero, both because I am fully in the Zotero world already and would find changing difficult, but more importantly, because I personally find the Zotero user interface a bit more intuitive. I’m happy to finally see LitLink in action, but more importantly to see how the various knowledge management systems are coming up with different ways of doing what we do in scholarship. Each new innovation means that all of us benefit.

Note to self: Don’t ever do this to an audience or a speaker. McCarty had some great points to make in his talk, but an hour long lecture is probably note the best way to start an unconference and one where the speaker is in a small video box on the screen at the front of a lecture hall is worse. Having run several conferences over the years, I know it’s a real problem when your keynote speaker can’t make it at the last minute. But I think it probably would have been better to either redo the schedule or to invite someone else to fill in at the last minute.

That said, McCarty did offer some interesting suggestions. The first is that it might be better to think about digital humanities as a series of actions or processes rather than a cluster of things (products).  While I don’t agree, because I think that many digital projects are indeed “things,” i.e., the substance of scholarship just like a book or an article, it is nevertheless useful to think about this distinction between processes and products. For one thing, computers are very good at modeling and simulating–playing with alternatives–a process that is often very difficult and time consuming in the analog world. Thus, to take McCarty’s view for a moment, one of the big contributions to scholarship that digital humanities can make is to use the strengths of computers to examine many more possible analytical outcomes than would be possible otherwise.

His approach is clearly conditioned on a computational view of the world, which is quite different from what many of us are doing in the digital humanities, which is driven more from the user experience side of the world. I think it’s likely that before too much longer, some of us will be returning to this computational view, if only to start figuring out what we can do with the supermassive databases that are making their way onto the Internet.

A second point he made that is worth keeping in mind is that when we use a computer we are automatically adopting a specific style of scientific reasoning–a style conditioned by the internal routines of the programming languages and physical structure of the computer itself. On the user experience side of this issue, I’m reminded of Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble. What the Internet is Hiding From You. Students (and probably plenty of researchers) don’t understand just how much the results of our searching is conditioned on the algorithms used to drive those searches and how much our past search history influences what we see on our screen.

You can’t have a good games conference without games, so we’ll be running a conference-long ARG, a games lounge/lab where you can take a break and play games with fellow attendees, and a Sunday games design jam where you can show off your latest games work. Following the Bootcamp workshops, MITH will host a reception where you can tour the DH center, hear about UMD’s gaming research, and play games on some of our platforms old and new.

We welcome everyone to apply, whether you’re a seasoned gamer or “n00b”; undergrad, tenured professor, or alternative academic. Applications are open now through 10/31, and the unconference will take place January 20th to 22nd at the University of Maryland in College Park. The event is co-organized by MITH Webmaster and Literature Ph.D. student Amanda Visconti (@literature_geek) and University of Baltimore Assistant Professor Anastasia Salter (@AnaSalter). Please contact THATCampGames /at/ Gmail with any questions.

Friday’s schedule is mapped out, because we are running the first day as a technology boot camp. Following the unconference model, tomorrow’s and Sunday’s schedule will be decided on by the participants tomorrow morning. Once the schedule is set, it will be very interesting to see how the topics chosen in 2011 and those chosen in 2008 compare. If I had to guess right now, I would guess that we’ll see a mix of more complex and less.

On the one hand, the pool of digital humanists is much larger than it was three years ago and so we would expect to see a more sophisticated list of topics. But for the same reason, we would expect to see more beginners who want less sophisticated topics. The boot camp on Friday may address that need for first principles, or it may not. No matter what, the schedules for all the various THATCamps that have happened since that first one in 2008 can give us a nice way to chart the interests of digital humanists.

A special event today will be a live cast of Digital Campus, our first live cast to include video. Who knows how that will go…

One of the things that’s keeping me busy at the moment is THATCamp Canberra. Yes, I got sick of missing out on all the THATCamp fun happening elsewhere and decided we should have our own.

THATCamp Canberra is a user-generated unconference on the digital humanities. It’ll be held at the University of Canberra on 28–29 August. We’re getting a great mix of applications and I’m really looking forward to learning about what’s going on around Australia.

Applications close on 23 July, so get yours in soon!