Following up on the Neatline workshop yesterday afternoon, I propose a more “hands-on” session in the Scholars’ Lab fellows’ lounge (complete Neatline on large, shiny iMac screens…) in which we can play around with Omeka and Neatline, experiment with Geoserver, and talk about possible use cases and ideas for new features.

As I mentioned in the workshop yesterday, developing “framework” applications like Neatline is a challenge because you’re constantly walking a line between making the software too abstract (not enough features, not just right for any project) and too concrete (hyper-specific features that work great for a specific use case, but not for anything else).

What kinds of new features in the Neatline application would be most useful? How closely should Neatline be coupled with the underlying Omeka collection? I’d love to sit down and talk about specific project ideas and generally think about the direction for ongoing development.

Hailing as I originally do from the museum and library world, I have a particular interest in the more outward-facing aspects of the humanities–and in the digital humanities, the aspects of the field that might particularly be considered “public” or “open.”  I’d love to get into a conversation about this stuff.  Maybe we can take a look at how audiences are examined in digital projects, or talk about the degree to which digital humanities projects are (or aren’t) by their very nature forms of public scholarship.  What makes a scholarly effort “public” in the first place, and is there anything particular to digital work that supports or undermines that idea?  Maybe we can talk about crowdsourcing and its role in digital research and scholarship.  In short, if the phrase “public humanities” catches your attention, I’d love to chat.

I have three ideas for sessions this year — and will also be keeping one eye on this guy:

Pinterest Wunderkammer: For years, I’ve fantasized about creating the perfect interface for a digital humanities cabinet of wonders, but never had time to follow through. Have they beaten me to it? I didn’t pay much attention to Pinterest at first, but then started to see some startling collections. I especially find the temporal dimension fascinating: if you follow this woman’s feed, you can watch her move through varying aesthetic obsessions over time — coherent washes of color, for instance, even across diverse assemblages. So it’s fluid, performative collection-building — or beautifully diachronic fixing. There’s plenty to read about Wunderkammern, but I’d like to have a conversation with some immediate implications for building.

Quantified Self: At past THATCamps, I’ve co-hosted workshops and conversations on physical computing (especially wearables). I also started a Zotero group for research and inspiration on soft circuits. Now I’m getting interested in the “quantified self” movement (see Wolfram for an extreme example) and am thinking about melding the two. My FitBit has an API. My phone knows where I’ve been. Anybody else interested in the intersection of DH, quantified self, and physical computing?

Rethinking the Graduate “Methods” Course: I wrote this thing. Now I’m hosting these conversations and running this program. I also spend a lot of time thinking about how well qualified lots of these people are to help train the next generation of humanities faculty and knowledge workers. Wanna talk about it?