Given all the tools most of us use to manage our daily reading habits, I’d like to hear how this could be used to the classroom. Not every class wants to engage with the news of the day, but I can imagine many advantages to having students engage with very recent events. Since we obviously can’t build these into a syllabus before hand, I’m wondering if anyone has experience (or wants to brainstorm about) using RSS feeds, or something else, in a class: how do we keep our students and ourselves up to date on recent events? How could we ensure we all have the same focus? Or the same information? Or usefully contrasting information (can some students watch Fox, some the Daily Show)?

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?