If we were to come up with a wish list of how a professional academic organization maintained its online presence, what would be on that list? In an age when the affordances of electronic communication are changing significantly the way we communicate, what are the best ways to maintain the best traditions of print culture while also pursuing the possibilities of digital culture? I’d like to propose a session in which participants collaboratively generate a list of recommendations. I learned a great deal as a participant in the process of revamping the web site and online presence of one scholarly organization (the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing, a.k.a. SHARP) and would be very interested in talking with others about this topic.

I’ve published a Google doc with notes for my workshop on Voyant Tools. The workshop will provide a very basic introduction to using computational text analysis tools using Voyant Tools.

In this workshop I will give a short introduction to the use of computational text analysis using a web-based set of tools called Voyant Tools. I will briefly talk about text analysis software, and what Voyant does. I will then show how to get texts into Voyant and guide the participants through using the tools on some eighteenth-century texts. The workshop will also demonstrate some of the capabilities that Voyant Tools has, and look at a few different possibilities for things that can be done with it. Participants will also be given the opportunity to do some work on their own texts using Voyant.

You can find the Google Doc here:

docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1C_UU_HizZvgsn0AnXcsgY26oGb_iaPuDz2OR72Akslg

I will probably continue to work on this between now and the workshop, so it might be updated before we start.

If you are planning on participating in the workshop you will need to have your own laptop. The demonstrations and hands-on participation will all be live, so please make sure you can connect to the wifi before we begin.

I am always interested in hearing about new digital projects and pedagogical practices as well as learning new tools. For Wednesday I would like to hear from anyone who has used free 3D modeling tools such as Google SketchUp as well as from those who have experience with semantic or meaning-based search tools. In the UK JISC’s Historic Books enables meaning-based searching across ECCO and EEBO, and I am interested in comparisons with this type of searching and traditional keyword searching (see my EMOB post).

Finally, I would be especially interested in discussing ways in which 18th-century scholars could use 18thConnect to enhance our knowledge of print and manuscript cultures. I wonder if it would be possible to do something along the lines of EEBO Interactions. Anna Battigelli is on EEBO Interactions’ editorial board, and her recent post on this interactive forum and the comments it generated explains a bit more.
Some of what I suggested there for EEBO Interactions workshops/projects could be easily adapted and applied to ECCO and 18thConnect:

Here are a few suggestions Although numbered, they are in no particular order:

1) The Material and the Virtual: Using EEBO Interactions to Teach Bibliography

3) EEBO Interactions as a Book Historian’s Tool*
*Workshop could also be titled “EEBO Interactions as a Tool for Bibliographers and Book Historians”
This workshop could illustrate how EI affords a space for recording, discussing, and correcting information related to the production, distribution, consumption of texts: details about authors, printers, booksellers, shop locations, dedications, distribution networks, illustrations, translators (and translations), pricing, and much more.

Come to this workshop session at ASECS! We’ll go over the basics of Omeka, an open-source tool developed by the Roy Rosensweig Center for History and New Media that allows you to construct descriptive archives of resources from images, to websites, to videos, and more. What’s better, our students can collaborate on an archive and learn, in the process, how scholarly knowledge is produced and made accessible in an electronic environment–this can give your students insight into the preconditions of research, cataloging conventions, and resource quality control, in addition to offering opportunities to begin a scholarly conversation on their own.

I’ll show you a few interesting sites generated using Omeka, and then we’ll familiarize ourselves with Omeka.net, which you can use with little or no cost to you (in either time or funds) to set up a class archive. Taking on the role of student, you will become a researcher on a central Omeka.net archive and contribute a resource of your choice by uploading files and adding descrptive metadata. We will also discuss some of the potential difficulties and benefits of such a tool in the classroom, and you’ll have the opportunity to ask questions and learn from your colleagues.

Please bring a laptop to this session, and be sure you have Internet access!

For a draft verion of this workshop, visit my blog–updates are always in the process of being made, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions!

Eleanor Shevlin’s post on ASECS sessions pertaining to Digital History, Book History, and Print Culture is available on emob.  We welcome additions to this list.

It would be great to hear more from conference participants about how ASECS might modernize itself.  THATcamp is a great addition.   Are there other things we can do to bring ASECS into the twenty-first century and advance its relevance for students and faculty?

Jessica Richard (Associate Professor of English, Wake Forest) and I are currently working to envision, design, and launch a public digital humanities website, entitled The 18th-Century Common (www.18thcenturycommon.com).  We have been inspired by the success of Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder:  How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (Knopf, 2009), a 576-page trade book which was on the New York Times’ list of Top Ten Books of 2009, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books.  The public embrace of Holmes’ text revealed to us the widespread interest in the intersections among science, literature, and the arts during the long-eighteenth century–topics that we had (perhaps incorrectly) assumed to be “esoteric” scholarly research interests.

The appeal of Holmes’ book is its interdisciplinary subject; that is, The Age of Wonder does not merely tell the life-stories of idiosyncratic scientists but uses those biographies as a way of telling the story of the interdisciplinary foundations of modern science:  the musicians William and Caroline Herschel who mapped the stars and discovered Uranus, the poet-chemist Humphry Davy.  Nonetheless, The Age of Wonder omits the more complex contexts that scholarly accounts offer of the inextricable relations between science and the arts in this foundational era.  With The 18^th-Century Common, we hope to offer readers a view of those contexts.  Our series “The Age of Wonder:  Science and the Arts in the Long 18^th Century” will feature accessible versions of published scholarship on this subject, commentary on Holmes’ book, as well as links to related resources, texts, and images around the web for readers who want to explore further.

At THATCamp Jessica and I (along with Derek Ohanesian and Stephanie Libous, our undergraduate collaborators) will be excited to discuss additional ways in which to engage through our nascent website a public already enthusiastic about eighteenth-century studies.  What types of forums might the public wish to explore through this site?  How might we best envision the ways in which to make available scholarship for this broad readership?  In what ways can we design the site to allow for the public to interact with academic and other communities?  During the day-long seminar we hope to share with other THATCampers the current design and aims of the website while revising our vision of and approach to the project.  We plan to launch The 18th-Century Common later this Spring.

Andrew Burkett

Assistant Professor of English                                                                                                       Union College                                                                                                                         Schenectady, New York

In addition to the self-organizing sessions at THATCamp ASECS2012 it would be good to have a workshop or two aimed at scholars who would like an introduction to using digital tools and methods for research and teaching. I would be happy to organize a workshop type session to provide anyone who’s interested with an introduction to the basics of using some simple text analysis software. This will be informal, but a little more structured than the usual THATCamp session.

In the workshop I will demonstrate how to use Voyant Tools to do ‘distant reading’ of texts. Voyant tools a collection of free web-based tools that can handle individual texts or collections, be they digitized novels, online news articles, twitter feeds, or other textual content. It provides a straightforward and easy way for provides scholars and students to do some basic analysis. The workshop will give a brief introduction to text analysis, and then a practical hands-on demonstration of how to get texts into Voyeur and then show what can be done with it.

To participate in the session you will need to have your own laptop and it would be useful if you could come with some texts you want to work with. If you have any questions about this workshop session please put them in the comments below.

Voyant tools are developed by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair.

I was hoping we might have a general discussion session on opportunities for crowdsourcing projects in eighteenth-century studies: what needs doing most, but also what people would be most interested in doing.

Many at this THATCamp will already know about the ambitious text-correction program that 18thConnect will facilitate, and I know we’re all looking forward to learning still more about it. I have great hopes for this project, because it promises to yield, finally, a reliable textbase of eighteenth-century writing—something we don’t currently have, but which is absolutely fundamental to much of the kind of inquiry that we imagine a digitized archive facilitating.

Of course, the project will only deliver on that promise if people actually pitch in and correct the texts: the success of a crowdsourced project hinges on whether a crowd actually turns up. Now, as many will know from hearing Laura Mandell speak about 18thConnect, they’ve actually given a lot of thought to how to align the project with the interests—in the senses both of “tastes” and of “self-interests”—of their audience, so I’m optimistic about the outlook here. I hoped we could discuss, though, future prospects for other crowdsourcing projects in the field (or, perhaps, the fields) of eighteenth-century studies.

Some questions I had in mind:

• What are some of the big problems out there that seem amenable to crowdsourcing solutions? What kinds of projects, if they could be brought to completion, would be the most enabling for the most people (whether scholars, students, or whomever), allowing them to do further interesting and important work of their own?
• What kinds of professional considerations might hold you back from participating in a crowdsourcing project (e.g., “I don’t think this would help me get tenured/promoted/finished with my dissertation”)? What might it take for a crowdsourcing project actually to fit into your professional life—for it to be something that helps you, rather than something you just can’t see finding the time for, what with everything else you have to do?
• If you’re a faculty member, are there kinds of projects that you could see incorporating into your teaching? What kinds of things could your students learn better by contributing to a live project? If you’re a student, what would you think about being asked to work on a crowdsourcing project as part of your studies?

I’m sure there are many other questions that haven’t occurred to me, but I hope that these might be enough to get us started, if anyone’s interested in pursuing them.

THATCamp ASECS 2012 is just a few weeks away!

It’s time to start proposing and discussing sessions! See thatcamp.org/proposals for advice on unconference session proposals.

Log in at asecs2012.thatcamp.org/wp-login.php and go to Post –> Add new to post your session proposal to the blog, and come back often to read and comment on others’ proposals.

Any questions? Please leave them in a comment below. Thanks!

Registration is now open for THATCamp ASECS2012.

On March 21, 2012 we will be holding a one-day THATCamp as a pre-conference event at ASECS. It will be an opportunity to discuss and debate issues in the digital humanities related to eighteenth-century studies in an informal and open environment. For anyone who is new to the idea of THATCamp, the event will be an unconference. THATCamps are self-organizing, free events ‘where humanists and technologists meet to work together for the common good’. For more information go to THATCamp.org. THATCamp ASECS will be an opportunity for anyone attending ASECS, and anyone else who wants to join in, to discuss the use of digital resources, tools and methods for eighteenth-century studies.

THATCamp will start at 8:30 and finish at 4:00. From 4:00 to 6:00 there will be a workshop for faculty, graduate students, independent scholars, and anyone who is interested about how to do research and publish peer-reviewed articles and scholarly editions in 18thConnect. To wind up what we’re hoping will be a very good day of digital eighteenth-century studies, the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC) at Texas A&M University will host a cash-bar with finger-food from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.

So click the link to register, think about the sessions you might want to lead or participate in, and plan to be in San Antonio a day early for what should be an excellent day of the digital eighteenth century.