As digital editor of the Florida Historical Quarterly (a newly created position), I’m working with colleagues at UCF, Ohio State, and U.Va. on a project exploring the use of human-assisted machine reading to reveal historiographical shifts/lags and map significant patterns (geospatial, temporal, etc.) using the journal’s JSTOR-accessible 1925-2009 corpus. To date we’ve employed, in various combinations, Zotero Groups, Paper Machines, JSTOR Data for Research, and OpenAmplify/Open Calais. At THATCamp’s FHQ workshop (scheduled for 3 pm Saturday) we look forward to demonstrating these tools and reporting some very encouraging — though still very preliminary — results.

Faculty researchers on this project are David Staley, Ohio State; Bill Ferster, University of Virginia; Connie Lester, Dan Murphree, and Scot French, University of Central Florida. Research assistance is being provided by Ohio State Students Shauna Hann and Erin Tobin and FHQ intern Sarika Joshi.

I’m interested in developing a mobile application for field research. My goal is to use mobile phone’s functionality to create a versatile data collection tool.  The app I envision allows the user to collect and organize information.  I believe the app’s design can be structured in a way to allow users to collect, correlate, and upload data to a repository with both predefined and manually designated content tags. Growing from previous experience using technology in the classroom, MAFHR is intended to be an app for student researcher. I believe MAFHR can function as a powerful teaching tool by guiding student users with research goals, prompting permissions linked to visual or audio data, and provide geographic information for all data collected. MAFHR should allow users to upload information to a centralize location and it should allow users to interact with data already in the research database.

Robinson Crusoe and the Robinsonades are a major part of digital humanities scholarship, particularly in the fields of English, Education, History, Religion, and the Fine Arts. Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719 by Daniel Defoe and has remained a popular adventure and colonialist text to this day. The University of Florida’s Digital Collections (Baldwin Library) has a subset collection on Robinson Crusoe – ufdc.ufl.edu/defoe – that allows scholars to compare the numerous editions of the text since its first printing.

I would like to have a discussion about how Robinson Crusoe is used by digital scholars. In particular, I would like the discussion to emphasize how Robinson Crusoe is used in the public sphere and the classroom to create new interpretations of digital information and metadata.

THATCamp session: ”’Using Versus Building’ in the Digital Humanities”

In a recent Inside Higher Ed blog posting entitled “The Incredible Privilege of ‘Building’”
www.insidehighered.com/blogs/college-ready-writing/incredible-privilege-%E2%80%9Cbuilding%E2%80%9D, Lee Bessette raises the issue of “using versus building” in digital humanities work and “who” does it. It is a topic that Matthew K. Gold and Stephan Ramsay have also engaged in their discussions about how “building and making” operates as a heuristic.

This session looks “behind-the-scenes” of two Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) chdr.cah.ucf.edu/ archive projects. It examines the rationale behind an archive about “digital archiving”—the Digital Archiving Information System dais.cah.ucf.edu/ —and the range of topics, from planning, preservation, copyright, “representation,” and archive management, that anyone needs to engage in order to plan and build a digital archive. It delves into how we can better understand the potential of “the archive” as both a scholarly and teaching tool. In addition, it examines how the NEH-funded Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive www.brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/archive/index.php follows, and departs from, standard conventions of “archiving” in regard to primary and secondary sources—and some of the specific issues that were encountered in building a searchable collection of texts, images, and other data.

The session welcomes discussion about the practical aspects of doing digital humanities work in general, and digital archive work in particular.

Mark Kamrath
Patricia Carlton

Digital collections and libraries are often created through collaboration with librarians, teaching faculty, and others. This panel would be a discussion panel on current strategies and best practices for engaging scholars and librarians in collaboratively supporting digital libraries and new forms  of digital scholarship with those libraries. The discussion could include considerations of roles, practices, and concerns for best supporting and engaging with a scholarly advisory board for digital libraries, collections, and projects.

The discussion could include a current example of how to best support the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection in collaboration with and utilizing the expertise of faculty on campus as a scholarly advisory board. The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature is one of the top of its kind in the world and faculty regularly travel to the collections, teach with the collections, utilize the collections in research, and more, all of these activities continue, extend, and alter in ways for the digital collections of the Baldwin.

The discussion could also include the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) with its Scholarly Advisory Board, new forms of digital scholarship, facilitated peer review, and more.

The discussion will include how to ensure full attribution and recognition for activities, as well as engagement and collaboration for ongoing development and for new opportunities for library growth and new digital scholarship works.