ThatCamp Jersey Shore: Amanda French’s Omeka Presentation

I attended a great presentation about Omeka by Amanda French sometime in the morning on the first day of ThatCamp Jersey Shore. I have become interested in Omeka recently, as I had been considering moving the flyer archive over to it. After hearing Amanda speak, I have decided not to move it, but i think there are plenty of great uses for Omeka.

  • Omeka was built for use by museums and archives
  • Omeka.org is server side software. Must have a server to publish on your own.
  • Dreamhost does one click installs of Omeka.
  • Omeka.net is a hosted version similar to wordpress.com
  • There is a lot of potential for metadata (Dublin Core) in Omeka. Standards are set by archivists and librarians.
  • The interface for Omeka is similar to WordPress. Adding an item is really easy.
  • A big downside I found was items only being in one collection at a time. Tagging may work better for that ala WordPress.
  • Plugins for adding an item to multiple collections may be coming soon.
  • Archives about Hurricane Katrina run on Omeka.
  • TEI looks very interesting. For example, in one of Washington’s letters would add “Martha Washington” to words “my wife.”

 

ThatCamp Jersey Shore: Engaging With Massive Humanities Datasets

The final panel of ThatCamp: Jersey Shore was run by Amanda French on engagement with massive humanities datasets. I’ve been tipping my toes into this field a bit recently, so I was eagerly awaiting this panel.

  • Franco Moretti’s very important Graphs, Maps, and Trees was discussed. Even with canon expansion, still only 10% of 19th century publications.
  • Digital humanities apply millions of pieces of data to Dickens instead of Foucault.
  • Moretti article Style Inc. looks at thousands of titles.
  • What does these large datasets do to applications like the Oxford English Dictionary? For example, the OED’s proclamation that OMG was first used in 1914.
  • Someone (Amanda?) wondered if these large datasets are leading to something like Borges’ Library of Babel.
  • Datasets more about questions than theory.

After ThatCamp was over, I headed out for lunch With Amanda, John Theibault, and Deb Gussman. A great end to an excellent conference.

 

ThatCamp Jersey Shore: Games Games Games-Thinking With Teaching

Sometime during the first afternoon at ThatCamp Jersey Shore I attended a panel which started out about using games in the classroom, but then evolved into a discussion of various games and applications which have aided us as teachers.

  • A very interesting game discussed was the High Tea game based on the British opium trade.
  • Preloaded.com offers a lot of information about publishing games.
  • One of the participants commented that they don’t “get” Civil War reenactment, but they get playing games about the Civil War. I completely agree with this.
  • Gaming is very visual in history (I would argue literature too).
  • At some point, I commented about some games ideas I have had in the past involving literary scavenger hunts and perhaps some geolocation.
  • Playthepast.org is a historical gaming website.
  • I think literature classrooms could use more games. Imagine Ibsen’s A Doll’s House The Game, with explanations of women’s issues. Nora tries to leave with children and screen comes up explaining why she can’t.
  • We discussed Storify as a document of collections.

ThatCamp Jersey Shore: Open Source Tools

I believe this panel on open source tools was the last one on the first day. We ended up going around the room and discussing open source tools we have found useful in the classroom.

  • Joomla is a promising CMS that has many useful plugins. Someone showed one which integrates photo galleries and Google Maps.
  • There was some discussion, since we were there, of Atlantic City. The Atlantic City Experience uses Joomla.
  • AC is an easy city to forget because a lot of the living documents are gone.
  • Deborah Gussman talked about a digital edition (I can’t remember the author unfortunately…Deb?) she is working on. She wants to supplement it with political and legal documents. And wedding dresses. There was some talk that Omeka may be more useful for this.
  • A big issue we discussed was how there is no easy way to do backup on most blogging platforms. I also brought up Zotero as an example of that too. There needs to be a simpler way for non-techy users to do backup/move content.
  • Nines.org has paid and open source content. A “guest pass” can be acquired. They also fund digital humanities archives like Herman Melville’s Typpe.

 

Pushead Top 100 Podcast Part Two

https://signifyingnothing.net/uncategorized/pushead-top-100-podcast-part-two/

  1. GBH-Knife Edge

  2. Channel 3-Manzanar

  3. Youth Brigade-No Song

  4. The Proletariat-Religion is the Opium of the Masses

  5. Negative Approach-Nothing

  6. Poison Idea-Made To Be Broken

  7. Chaotic Discord-Fuck The World

  8. Scream-U Suck A/We’re All Fed Up

  9. SNFU-She’s Not On The Menu

  10. The Fartz-Campaign Speech

  11. Impact Unit-My Friends, The Pit

  12. Youth Patrol-America’s Power

  13. Anti Cimex-Cries of Pain

  14. CIA-Commie Control

  15. Youth Brigade-Violence

  16. Chaos UK-Kill Your Baby

  17. Cause For Alarm-United Races

  18. Cro Mags-My Myself

  19. The Stalin-Title In Japanese

  20. Circle Jerks-Paid Vacation

ThatCamp Jersey Shore: Online Collaboration

In this panel, we went around the room discussing different collaborative tools we use in our classrooms.

  • Spicebird runs email, calendar, and chat all in one program. Spicebird reminds me of Google Wave.
  • Prezi creates very pretty presentations. I am going to experiment with this in the fall.
  • …along with Dipity, which creates timelines. I like timelines.
  • Transcribe Bentham crowd sources transcriptions of digitized Bentham documents.
  • At some point, I brought up my experiences using PBWorks in the classroom to create wikis for my classes.
  • GroupTable organizes group projects and allows document management.
  • Some discussion of the lack of ease of exporting files from Google Docs. I discuss the symposiums I put together using Google Docs in graduate school.
  • Zotero.
  • Academia.edu could become a Linked In for academics, but not a lot of work seems to be happening with it. I barely used my page until recently.
  • DHAnswers can be helpful for finding out tools.
  • Comment Press incorporates review into writing. Could be a replacement for gate kept peer review.

Signifying Nothing Episode 04×03

https://signifyingnothing.net/uncategorized/signifying-nothing-episode-04x03/

Talk Is Poison-Right To Die (Self Titled)
Youth Brigade-Snow Job (Demo)
Voorhees-A Cure For The New Disease (Spilling Blood Without Reason)

Necros-Youth Camp (IQ32)
Mind Eraser-Manhood (Glacial Reign)
Sacrilege-A Violation of Something Sacred (Beyond The Realm of Madness)

Rorschach-Hemlock (Protestant)
Corrosion of Conformity-Holier (Animosity)
Blessed Offal-Bottomless Grave (Demo)

Misery-Class Warfare (Who’s The Fool)
Neurosis-The Choice (The Word As Law)
Slang-World of Lunacy (Life Made Me Hardcore)

Indian Dream-Silent Screams (Orca)
Mauser-New Threat (End of the Line)
Black Flag-Best One Yet (Loose Nut)

Whirl-Blue (Distressor)