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Workshops

All workshops take place on Friday, September 14; see the schedule.

Workshops are listed in alphabetical order.  Some titles are merely placeholders until we get official titles and abstracts this week.

To take advantage of the hands-on nature of most of these workshops, you should bring a laptop (preferred over a tablet). These workshops do not take place in a computer lab, and many applications and web services will not work on a tablet. If you can’t bring a laptop, you are welcome to attend as an observer.

 


DIY Project Management

It’s (not really) a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.
Instructor: Tim Stanton
Time: 9:30am – 11:00am
Room: Pavilion C or Gabrielino
Requirements: No tech requirements or required reading.

Don’t know what to say when the NEH asks who your project manager will be and your Dean says it’s you?! Get hands on and learn how project management (PM) can help you and your project. In this workshop USC Libraries Project Manager Tim Stanton will explain how, with some key PM principles, you too can keep digital projects running on time, and under budget, all while being faithful to your vision. A brief history of PM will be explored, the standard waterfall and agile techniques, how PM skills can help you land grant money, and some hands on exercises to drive the points home.

 

Drupal Starter-Kit: Intro to Drupal Content and Views

Instructor: Doug Worsham
Time: 1:30pm – 3:30pm
Room: Ontiveros ABC
Requirements: TBA

What can you do with Drupal? Bring your laptop and find out in this hands-on introduction to the Drupal content management system. We’ll start by setting up a Drupal sandbox site, and then use two powerful Drupal modules, CCK and Views, to explore the possibilities of creating custom Drupal content types. Ample time will be provided for exploration and Q&A.

 

History in 4D: Sharing Content on Historypin

Instructor: Manuel Escamilla
Time: 89:30am – 11:00am
Room: Gabrielino or Pavilion C
Requirements:

  • A laptop (for full hands-on experience)
  • An Apple or Android tablet or phone (for limited hands-on experience)
  • Participants are encouraged to create a Gmail account prior to arriving.
  • Those wishing to upload photos should bring their digital files with them to the workshop.

Participants will learn how to use Historypin’s geographically based photo sharing interface to share their image collections. Participants will learn how to use Historypin’s free web and mobile app tools to increase access to their historical collections and engage new online audiences. This workshop will provide examples of projects used by the Santa Ana History Room and Heritage Museum of Orange County utilizing Historypin.

Participants are encouraged to create a Gmail account prior to arriving. Those wishing to upload photos should bring their digital files with them to the workshop. You should be able to correctly place these images on a map. We highly recommend using images that are visible from a street perspective.

 

Introduction to Omeka

Instructor: Amanda French
Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm
Room: Ontiveros ABC or Pavilion C
Requirements:

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.
  • 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.

 

Introduction to Viewshare

Instructor: Gloria Gonzalez
Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm
Room: Gabrielino or Pavilion C
Requirements:

  • A laptop
  • Request a free Viewshare account (viewshare.org/registration/register/) in advance to give us the most time to play with Viewshare
  • If you bring your own data, please format as an Excel file with at least the following basic fields: Title, ISO formatted date, Description, and a Link.

Viewshare (www.viewshare.org) is an open source platform provided by the Library of Congress that’s used for generating interfaces like timelines, maps, and charts for digital collections. Simply put, Viewshare works in three steps: import, build, and share. Data can be uploaded in Excel format, or XML MODS records or even Dublin Core data via OAI-PMH. After ingest, the data can be augmented for categories like date and location for timeline and map views. The views can be customized with different navigation facets, including tag clouds, lists, free text, and a search box. The final step is sharing your interface, which Viewshare makes very simple. You can make your view public and share the link, or embed the view into any website. Viewshare also provides collaborative space online. Each Viewshare user has a profile that lists their public views and datasets. This means you can make your own views using other people’s public data, and vice versa.

During the workshop:

  • You’ll become familiar with Viewshare, learn the process described above, and make several views of your own (using either the sample datasets provided by me, or you can bring your own data).
  • We’ll go through the view building process from beginning to end, and explore the benefits and creative possibilities of using Viewshare for digital collections.

 

Text Mining Tools

Instructor: Scott Kleinman
Time: 1:30pm – 3:30pm
Room: Pavilion C or Gabrielino
Requirements:

  • No prior experience with computational text analysis is necessary. The tools for performing lexomics analysis are web based, so you do not need to download them in advance. These tools may be found on the Lexomics web site: wheatoncollege.edu/lexomics/tools/.
  • There are many tools for performing topic modelling, but we will use the GUI Topic Modeling Tool which may be downloaded at code.google.com/p/topic-modeling-tool/. Please download it in advance of the workshop. Note that in order to run the GUI Topic Modeling Tool, you will need to have Java installed on your computer. You can test whether Java is working and find out how to install it at www.java.com/en/download/testjava.jsp.
  • A few sample texts will be added here prior to the workshop. Please download these for use during the hands-on session.
  • Finally, please have a copy of Google Chrome or Firefox installed on your computer, as the lexomics tools have not been tested with Internet Explorer.

This workshop will introduce the basic concept of text mining: the discovery of knowledge through the analysis of digital texts using computational approaches. The workshop will cover the stages of text mining from preparing the texts, to performing analyses, to visualising the results. We will focus on two emerging methods of text mining that are easy for the novice to learn but sophisticated enough to produce real results.

Lexomics is a method for clustering texts or parts of texts based on their word frequencies. The technique allows users to examine similarities and differences between texts in way that can point to interpretive insights or directions of further enquiry into the style, authorship, and origin of the texts. Topic modelling is a technique for using word frequencies to extract individual units of discourse (called “topics”) from texts so that texts can be compared based on the presence of certain topics or the proportion of certain topics can be traced across a corpus over time (or other criteria).

There will be a hands-on component to the workshop to allow participants to learn the software tools for exploring these methods. We will also have discussion about the epistemological and hermeutic issues raised by the use of text mining approaches to the analysis of texts in the Humanities.

A few background readings will be added here in the next couple of days for those who are interested, but it is not necessary to read them before the workshop.

 

Web Publishing with Scalar

Instructor: Craig Dietrich
Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm
Room: Pavilion C or Gabrielino
Requirements: TBA

See: Scalar preview video.

 

Where’s THAT? An Introduction to GIS

Instructor: John Carroll
Time: 1:30pm – 3:00pm
Room: Gabrielino
Requirements:

Maps are enjoying a renaissance in popular culture and across the academic spectrum. From the convenience of a smartphone to the spectacle of “Magic Wall” maps on television news broadcasts, the ability to capture, analyze, and display geospatial data is a powerful form of inquiry. This hands-on workshop, designed for beginners, will introduce humanities scholars to the terminology and techniques of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Following a brief explanation of GIS basics, participants will go about creating maps using ArcGIS software.

 

Zotero Integrations: Research through the Tubes

Instructor: Avram Lyon
Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm
Room: Ontiveros ABC
Requirements:

  • Please create a Zotero account and familiarize yourself with the basic software.
  • To benefit fully from the API explorations, you’ll probably want to have prior experience with a programming language (we’ll focus on Python).

We will plumb the depths of Zotero’s various integration APIs to work out innovative ways to use Zotero anywhere you do research or writing. We’ll start with an overview of the ways to extend and integrate with Zotero, from the server API to translators to the local word processor integration system, then spend most of our time learning how to use the server API.

Come with your ideas of systems that could use a deeper connection to research management, and we’ll do what we can to see what’s feasible and start hacking.

Requirements:

Please create a Zotero account and familiarize yourself with the basic software. To benefit fully from the API explorations, you’ll probably want to have prior experience with a programming language (we’ll focus on Python). Most importantly, bring your dreams of what deeply integrated research websites, services, and apps might look like and work. We’ll yack them out and then hack them out.

It’s worth looking ahead of time at the existing API implementations to see what has been done and what tools we have to work with: www.zotero.org/support/dev/server_api#api_implementations

Permanent link to this article: http://socal2012.thatcamp.org/workshops/

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