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We had a session at THATCamp Prime called Public Scholars Unite! The discussion touched on a lot of interesting ideas and questions about how and why scholars should (or shouldn’t) connect with broad audiences via mass media, blogs and social media.

I’d like to facilitate a discussion more specifically about writing. A lot of the really amazing websites and programs THATCampers create benefit greatly from really good writing. I want to discuss how scholars might better communicate their ideas, especially those who work on contemporary issues, outside their fields.

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If there’s any interest, I’d be more than happy to teach an Introduction to Omeka workshop. For those of you who don’t know, Omeka is a simple web publishing system designed for putting collections of primary source material (images, audio, video) online in a scholarly way, with all the information scholars need, and in accordance with established archival standards. Here’s a description of what we’d do in the workshop:

Omeka is a simple system used by scholarly archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts; to put such digital objects online in a searchable database; and to create attractive web exhibits from them. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll create your own digital archive of images, audio, video, and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and we’ll learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects. We’ll also look at some examples of pedagogical use of Omeka in humanities courses and talk about assigning students to create digital archives in individual or group projects.

Looking forward to coming to THATCamp SoCal the Third!

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I’ve been working with Zotero for several years, and I’d like to guide interested participants through the Zotero ecosystem as it currently exists, but more vitally, I’m interested in working to find new ways for people to mash Zotero’s many-faceted world up with other tools, from annotation to textual analysis to archival research to writing tools, to whatever you bring to the table.

As I understand it, the beauty of Zotero is its capacity for extension and growth, and I would love to share what can be done by ambitious and creative people. My own small experience started by extending and maintaining the translator library that maintains compatibility between Zotero and web sites, import formats, and search engines, and proceeded to include the development of a Zotero mobile client for Android. This has all been a thrilling experience, yet the extant documentation isn’t really sufficient to get a good foot in the door of the deeper Zotero world and I believe a session, a couple of hours with interested minds and some mild expertise, would do much to spur new and unexpected new developments.

The concrete content of the session will necessarily depend on the desires of the participants, but I’m hoping to steer the discussion away from the basics of setting up accounts, formatting references, and the like, so that we can devote time to the more arcane and possibly transformative elements of the Zotero project.

Resources

1. Zotero itself, www.zotero.org/
2. Contribution to Zotero, www.zotero.org/getinvolved/. The plugin, translator, and API information is particularly relevant.
3. API implementations, www.zotero.org/support/dev/server_api. There are open-source API implementations in Python, PHP, JavaScript, Obj-C/iOS, and Java/Android.
4. Zotpress, wordpress.org/extend/plugins/zotpress/. A WordPress plugin that neatly demonstrates the potential of using the Zotero API in new places.

I would also be more than happy to offer an introductory workshop on either site translator development (i.e., making sites work with Zotero and Zotero work with sites; www.zotero.org/support/dev/translators) or basic API usage (i.e., making Zotero data show up in program/place X). Please let me know in the comments or on Twitter (@ajlyon) if people have any interest in such introductory workshops