Just in time for the end of the year, here’s how the finances of THATCamp Bay Area 2011 ended up. Thanks again to our amazing sponsors for making THATCamp Bay Area possible, and to all of the individuals who contributed money and/or ideas to make this year another great event! The good news on the money front is that we broke even again and have a little extra money in the coffer for next year.

At Saturday’s AR for Poets workshop, we covered the basics of mobile augmented reality and looked at two CMS tools for creating location-based AR using the Layar platform. We also discussed computer vision-based image recognition and had a little fun with Occupy George:

If you want to explore AR creation on your own, here are some resources that will get you started (latest version). If you have questions about the workshop or know of a group that wants to learn about AR, you can reach me via gene-at-layar-dot-com or @genebecker.

Accounts

You’ll want to set up three developer accounts. For best results, use the same email address as your username for all three.

Layar developer account: layar.com/publishing
Hoppala Augmentation free CMS: augmentation.hoppala.eu
BuildAR professional CMS: buildAR.com

Mobile Apps

Get the Layar Reality Browser app for iOS or Android. You’ll want to use a more recent smartphone: iPhone 3Gs or later, or an Android phone running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or later. The iPad2 also works, but most Android tablets are not yet supported (as of October 2011).

Hoppala Tutorial

I wrote a short tutorial on using Hoppala: HELLO WORLD: MOBILE AR WITH LAYAR & HOPPALA.

BuildAR Tutorial

The BuildAR team has a simple tutorial video: Getting Started on BuildAR.

Image Recognition

Two introductory videos explaining Layar Vision image recognition: Introducing Layar Vision and Layar Vision Explained.

Live JSON output from a very simple Vision layer (Occupy George).

Layar API

For the more technically inclined, the full Layar API documentation is at layar.pbworks.com.

If you are interested in building your own Layar web service, a very useful starting point is PorPOIse, an open source PHP server for Layar.

Notes and questions (Please Feel Free to add to this list)

Are designers responsible for questioning the sources of their data?

Should they make public their conscious omissions/methodolgy /problems with presenting the data?

What ethics should designers employ when presenting source data?

Questions of aggregation and curation?

Every map implies a set of choices. Every map makes an argument. In some ways, every map is a lie. How fine grained is the data available?

How accurate is crowd-sourcing and how can this be used to counter/augment official records?

Teachers using “bad data” to teach about validity of sources? Starting with wiki and spark notes to question quality of source?

What are the edges of creating a context for our data?

How do you create a culture of data skepticism? Data Literacy is the future of media literacy!

Sources we talked about:
Crimespotting: oakland.crimespotting.org/
Home and Away: stamen.com/clients/cnn_home_and_away
Crisis Mappers: crisismappers.net/
Ushahidi: www.ushahidi.com/
Apps for Development: appsfordevelopment.challengepost.com/submissions/1431-your-world

To download the software and data sets for the QGIS Workshop, click this link: dl.dropbox.com/u/18853430/THATCampQGIS.zip.

Got a lot of digitized text? Not sure what to do with it? Try text mining!

I’d like to hold a Text Mining session for those interested in using computers to extract information from raw text.  My background is in the field of computational linguistics, so I can introduce the teriminology and  possibilities – when we talk about the “information in text” what do we mean? What kinds of things has computational linguistics made it possible to extract from words, sentences, and document collections?

Some questions I’d like to discuss are

• What are different ways of using text in the humanities? As examples? As evidence? As inspiration for an interpretation?
• What are some computational activities that humanities text analysis interfaces should support?

I am interested in exploring emerging notions of “digital fieldwork” that integrate various aspects, including: doing research online (the web as the “field” and online contributors as “informants”), examining the status of primary sources online, organizing one’s data (see other session proposal on database setup), integrating digital and analog primary sources, blurring the lines between participant-observer fieldworkers and informants, and especially using social media and other platforms to conduct collaborative research. My interest is twofold: on the one hand, I’d like to hear what others are doing, their challenges and success stories; on the other, I’m very interest in the theory of fieldwork, and in how digital technologies are impacting it. I’d like for this conversation to be as interdisciplinary as possible.

I’m just starting to explore the needs for journalists who use social media and other crowd-produced reports (SMS, blogs, Flickr, etc.) to become aware of breaking events, or for surfacing topics, or for cultivating sources.

It’s my hope that social science, qualitative research, and a good understanding of the technical issues can help us break down: What affects confidence in a report? In a source? What is relevant to identity?

And different beats might have different use cases and sets of needs. I was a journalist for a decade, but never faced the challenges of crisis or war reporting, or did a long-term investigative piece. Is there a way to find what’s in common, and what varies, and design that into a tool?

From Inception to Sesame Street, the influence of film and video is widespread. Because of their reach, there is vast potential for the role they play in society. While film and video possess entertainment value, they can also be leveraged to advance learning and education. Specifically, I’m interested in discussing the design and applications of video for education.

Already, there is an emerging trend in the integration of technology in classrooms. By 2015, South Korea plans to switch completely to digital textbooks in elementary schools, according to a Technology Review report. As stated in an Education Week article, school districts across the U.S. are moving to incorporate virtual classes for high school students. In Hong Kong, Chief Executive Donald Tsang said in a recent October 12 policy address that “[a]part from providing students with an interactive mode of learning, electronic textbooks and learning resources allow more flexibility in textbook compilation, lower production costs, reduce wastage and help achieve reasonable pricing.” Such developments raise some interesting questions to consider:

o   As we make progressions in ed tech, how exactly would e-learning resources look like?
o   Continuing with the earlier theme, how can we teach students through educational media?
o   How can we motivate them to learn through educational media?
o   What would be the pedagogy or learning theories behind such resources?
o   At the level of the student, how well would they respond to learning with digital devices in terms of engagement, academic performance, and development of 21^st century skills?
o   To what extent should current technologies be incorporated into students’ learning experiences?

Along the thread of digital learning, there are extensive possibilities within the realm of video. Video can act as a medium to communicate and illustrate key concepts, presenting multiple representations and ways of looking at an idea (e.g. digital storytelling, video adaptations of the classics). Additionally, students can engage in their own video projects, producing and editing shorts that demonstrate their understanding of a topic. Becoming creators of their own videos, students can develop media literacy skills and critically analyze media they consume. What remains to be explored is how we can design and apply video to best address students’ learning needs and ultimately develop their ability to reflect, analyze, and create as critically thinking human beings.

Hello Campers!

We’ve just learned that the parking lots to the east of the buildings will not be available to us on Saturday. Instead, please park in the lot south of building CL3, which does include accessible parking spaces. If that lot fills up, the extra lot to the north of CL4 is also available.

The map below shows the closed lots in red.

I’m looking for ideas for collecting, untangling and sharing data effectively. As a specific case study, I’m interested in creating an interactive model that captures and shares more detail than the paper tangle below can. The image below is known as the “Windsor Music Tangle” and it hangs on the wall in Phog Lounge in Windsor, Ontario Canada. While the example might be geographically distant from this weekend’s unconference, the type of data and the strategies needed to model it would be broadly applicable.

To untangle a little bit: Windsor has a lively music scene. The music scene is made of bands, individual musicians, songs, instruments, venues, supporters, etc. People come and go, venues open and close, people play guest spots in other bands, bands break up and reform, etc. People move on to work not connected to the music scene at all. What would be needed to trace a path of an individual musician, follow their work, hear and see clips, and trace everyone they’ve ever worked with – and who they’ve yet to connect with?

Going further, would it be possible to outline a path of the community’s changing musical interests over time? Back in the 80s, punk bands made regular stops in venues that have since been bull-dozed for the casino. Jazz clubs have come and gone. Swing music and dancing made a comeback in the early 2000s. Venues have shifted style. Could all of this be represented in the Tangle? How far back could we go? And how to capture that this data is people, relationships, community? All of this suggests a need to consider and be mindful towards the emotional connection people feel towards the data, i.e. these aren’t just names and numbers.

Once we’ve identified appropriate tools for such a project, what are proven methods of finding and encouraging people to contribute? This is the kind of project that could appeal to people of different skill levels, ages, etc. and a lot of the people with valuable knowledge are not going to be connected to things like Twitter or Facebook. At the moment, the paper tangle sits in Phog and visitors there contribute, but what can be done to reach the broader community and enlist support and contributions from the community (including the university)? And how best to dig up historical data so that the data reaches back instead of capturing only relatively recent history?

Are there other projects like this? Would love to talk tools and strategies that worked/didn’t work for others.

Photo is from “Windsor’s missing link” by Alishia Fox.

I’m in the earliest stages of a project that hopes to combine data visualization and network analysis to cast light on English medieval scribes, medieval manuscripts, medieval texts, and the unstable connections between them. While generating a small sample dataset in order to help conceptualize what usefully-structured data might look like for the project, it has become abundantly clear how awkward the fit can sometimes be between the digital and the raw, messy “stuff” of the humanities.   There is an enormous amount of uncertainty in the things I work on: books dated to within a quarter century or so, texts dialectally localized not to lat./long. but to a county or a large chunk of the country, manuscripts about which we know very little until they entered libraries and collections in the 18th century.  It’s not simply that we lack metadata for medieval books and texts, but that the nature of the metadata, and expectations for the information, are simply different when looking at 600-year-old books.  There are ways to accommodate these uncertainties in nice, tidy schemas, of course, but one thing I hope to spend some time thinking about this weekend is what messier schemas might look like and how they might work: what digital structures more closely modeled on the analog sources of the humanities might resemble, what ignorance might look like when acknowledged and included rather than elided.

Greetings Campers,

Last week, my staff in New York City had the privilege of attending a reception for new Nobel Laureate Leymah Gbowee, who said, “use local experience to build global peace.” That concept resonates with our work at iEARN over the past 23 years to connect more than 40,000 teachers in 130 countries to help their students to take action locally while sharing globally with their peers. iEARN participants use high-tech, low-tech or no-tech to participant in STEM, music and arts collaboration, cross-cultural storytelling, and community-service projects, which are designed by teachers and students to enhance existing classroom curricula.

My first challenge to Campers is: what new tools and resources can help teachers and students worldwide make their local experiences contribute meaningfully to the health and welfare of the planet and its people? Can efforts like HistoryPin enhance global understanding through classroom history projects such as the Local History Project , the Early People’s Symbols Project , the Kindred (Family History) Project, and the Public Art Project ?  Can Google GEO APIs help scale global environmental projects such as  Our Footprints, Our Future  Daffodils and Tulips, Talking Kites and YouthCaN?

The second challenge is: what new technologies can help policy-makers, education-focused foundations, corporations, entrepreneurs, and community-based organizations to “visualize” the importance of global education? In the United States, what iEARN-USA and our partners do is relatively rare: very few of the 120,000+ US K-12 schools emphasize global education and connect their teachers and students to peers worldwide despite new technologies that make it relatively easy & inexpensive to do so. Preparing the next generation of global leaders—despite this being an economic and national security priority for the US government—is a low priority and deemed extracurricular for most US schools. Learning is becoming global, networked, and mobile. US classrooms are not.  Sharing stories of classrooms connecting internationally is our first attempt to create some national momentum, but new ideas and partners are needed.

Look forward to this weekend with you.

Cheers,

Dave

Numerous digital databases exist online for use by historians (i.e. the Old Bailey Proceedings Online; BnF Gallica, etc.). I feel that creating one’s own database (on a much smaller scale than these huge data collections) can be a great way to organize and process one’s own research [i.e. photos taken in an archive, notes, interviews, etc]. This past summer, I began putting my archival research into a Microsoft Access database, but am still working out the kinks in how to best organize and process my data set.

I propose holding a discussion and brainstorming session over the best ways to organize and process primary sources. Questions would include, but not be limited to,

• What are the benefits and limitations of using/creating a digital database for humanities research? Is it really better than old-fashioned note cards and composition notebooks?
• What kinds of research questions become possible by having a database at one’s fingertips? What does it mean for humanities research?
• What are the best practices for organizing research?
• What are some practical recommendations for how to use databases for research (i.e. file formats, programs, etc.)?
• Databases for the initiated: do you need to be a programmer to make a solid database?
• Should databases be project-specific? Theme-specific? Person-specific? Field-specific? Or not specific at all?
• How might databases be shared? What problems arise with propriety (of the source materials in the database, of the file formats, of the structure of the database, etc.)?
• Are there benefits to creating one’s own database structure rather than simply using Zotero or other  research software?
• Any other related ideas, thoughts, concerns, recommendations, etc.

Libraries, museums, and archives are chock full of content that is variably available for digital reuse. The current interest in linked data is one way that these types of institutions can unlock their metadata and content to make it available to scholars, researchers and the public.

I’m interested in having an open discussion about the ways open data and content can go from a great idea to a practical reality as formerly exclusively paper-based institutions attempt to keep up with user interest and demand. Some questions could be:

• What are the most useful ways to discover and deliver digital content?
• What services can libraries, museums, and archives offer to ensure efficient content and metadata reuse?
• How can libraries, museums, and archives most effectively capitalize on their traditional strengths in the digital humanities space (e.g. how can these institutions get data from digital humanities projects back into their respective collections to preserve it for future research)?

Hello campers!

As you know, ThatCamp is entirely organized by volunteers. So we wanted to recruit a couple more generous souls to help out at the event. Having some extra hands, for things like setting up and putting away the food for lunch, goes a long way! And this way the organizers get to attend some of the ThatCamp sessions too.

If you would like to help out, reply to this thread or simply approach us at the event.

Thanks, and see you soon!

Two proposals to consider:

Workshop: Writing a Zotero translator

If there is interest, I would be happy to teach campers how to write a Zotero translator using the translator framework. No coding experience required (I hope; this may be wishful thinking!), though knowledge of Zotero would help.

General discussion: Web archiving

I can give a brief introduction to web archiving. Then I would love to have an open discussion of what uses web archives can be put to.

I look forward to seeing all of you next week!

I was hoping to have a general discussion around the designs my partners and I have put together for a Library Lab. The concept was developed for the Digital Public Library of America beta sprint, and is not being developed further in that particular forum right now. There’s a lot of love for it, but we need to 1) get some funding for further development 2) partner with folks who want to do some construction experiments. More in the discussion group, see you there-

Hello Thatcampers!

Something is wrong with our old email server (probably gremlins), and some emails were deleted before we got to read them. So we’ve set up a new account. From now on, please send all correspondences to thatcampbayarea@gmail.com. Sorry for the confusion!

Here are some links to hotels in the Mountain View area.

The Marriot on El Camino Real:
www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/sfomv-residence-inn-palo-alto-mountain-view/

Hampton Inn on Moffett Blvd, which should be very close to the event:
hamptoninn.hilton.com/en/hp/hotels/index.jhtml?xch=1043308611,1HLHTKnCz7shbc9llT50C1QPqkRKvL9rnTVhBcLDJJycVWG80Rp8!-1725667317!1317711554159&ctyhocn=NUQCAHX

Hilton Garden on El Camino Real:
hiltongardeninn.hilton.com/en/gi/hotels/index.jhtml?xch=1043309436,1HLHTKnCz7shbc9llT50C1QPqkRKvL9rnTVhBcLDJJycVWG80Rp8!-1725667317!1317711554159&ctyhocn=SJCMVGI

For some luxury, the Four Seasons Palo Alto, which is right off the
highway www.fourseasons.com/siliconvalley/

(Note: We did not arrange any special accommodations with these hotels.)

Hello everyone! We are happy to announce the following exciting workshops for THATCamp Bay Area 2011. Session times are listed here. (Workshop session times may change.)

Google Geo APIs
Josh Livni
Workshop Session 1
Room TBA

Participants will learn how to create a project from start to finish using Google Geo APIs.

Omeka for Beginners
Dave Lester
Workshop session 2
Room TBA

Designed with non-IT specialists in mind, Omeka is a free, flexible, and open source web-publishing platform for the display of library, museum, archives, and scholarly collections and exhibitions. Its “five-minute setup” makes launching an online exhibition as easy as launching a blog.

Augmented Reality for Poets
Gene Becker
Workshop session 2

Augmented reality (AR) overlays digital media onto the physical world and creates physical hyperlinks on images and objects, which you experience through your mobile phone. In this hands-on workshop we will introduce the basics of AR, and then you will learn how to create your own AR experiences using the new Layar Vision platform. We will explore both location-based and image recognition based AR. This session will be of interest to artists, historians, curators, archivists, journalists, architects, urban designers, and yes poets. No technical knowledge or equipment is required, but for the full hands-on experience you’ll want to have access to a laptop and a modern smartphone (iPhone 4, iPad2 or Android phone running version 2.2 or higher).

Intro. to QGIS
Cyrus Hiatt
Workshop session 3
Room TBA

This workshop will provide an introduction to Quantum Geo-spatial Information Systems (QGIS), an open-source GIS software. No prior knowledge of GIS is assumed.

Introduction to Gephi
Elijah Meeks
Workshop session 4
Room TBA

Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.

History Pin
Jon Voss
Workshop session 4
Room TBA

Historypin (www.historypin.com) is a public history project developed by London non-profit We Are What We Do in partnership with Google and over a hundred cultural heritage institutions worldwide. The project aims to bring millions of people together around historical content and the stories and recollections behind it. The free site and mobile smartphone apps enable users to pin content in place and time, as well as layer street level content onto Street View. This workshop will walk through the major features of the site and app, give a tutorial on pinning photos, and give an overview of Historypin’s collaborative education and community outreach programs. We’ll also preview forthcoming features specific to our institutional partnerships.

Organizing Your Research with Google Apps
Andy “Rufus” Rothfusz
Workshop session 5
Room TBA

Learn how to store, share, and organize data through Google Apps! Participants will explore what is possible through existing user-friendly web pages and try extending and specializing things to meet their own needs–everything from drag-and-drop file organization to scripting. We will also look at some of the heavier mail, spreadsheet, and document APIs, just to see what is possible.

How to create your own THATCamp Bay Area 2011 Bookmark:

1. Download image
2. Print (for best results, use 50-80 lb. vellum)
3. Cut
4. Enjoy

This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

We are pleased to announce that applications are now open for THAT Camp Bay Area 2011! The deadline is August 31st, and acceptances will go out in early September. Click here to apply. See you soon in Mountain View!

For THATcamp Bay Area 2011, we are organizing our Bootcamp sessions around the themes of GIS, spatial analysis, and maps. If you are in the Bay Area, are knowledgeable in any of these fields, and would like to share your expertise at a bootcamp session, please contact us at info@thatcampbayarea.org.

Any THATcamp participant may attend a Bootcamp session, but we also offer several small fellowships for Bootcamp attendees. For more information, and to apply for a Bootcamp fellowship, please see thatcamp.org/go/fellowships/. Applications will open soon!

We are pleased to announce that the second annual San Francisco Bay Area THATcamp will be held Oct. 22-23, 2011, hosted by Google. Applications will open soon!