I’m interested in a talk session—though I would be happy to include a portion of hands-on teach session as well if people would like—about history podcasts. I’m interested in discussing how to make them interesting and inclusive research products and/or useful for teaching, but also professional, high quality audio products. I’m also interested in discussing how to produce this type of work within a university structure or other settings, whether in teaching or as a scholarly product, especially within the current job market, tenure system, and funding structures.

I’m interested in developing effective strategies to locate, access in suitable formats, preprocess, and apply computational tools to historical texts available at multiple repositories including archive.org, Library of Congress, Hathi Trust etc. There are OCRC, format, and analysis challenges galore to overcome but I think this approach can provide students with very useable skills and build historical understanding.

I won’t be there til closer to 10 so I won’t be able to participate in scheduling unfortunately. I would be interested in a conversation about teaching Intro to DH and courses with DH components.

If there interest in some hands on workshops, I am happy to help lead a workshop on a topic such as  “normalizing” data (tidy data), text analysis (voyant/mallet) or networks ( gephi).

The first THATCamp AHA was in Chicago in 2012, and it has been a valuable addition to the conference ever since, but is it something we should continue doing in the future, or are there other better ways to spend our time and energy. There have been numerous sessions at THATCamps over the years asking similar questions, without, as far as I am aware, coming to any particularly useful conclusions. Even so, I think it would be helpful to explore what (if anything) should come next or if this is still a valuable and useful format.

The American Yawp collaboratively edited textbook has been around for a few years now, and Chicago University Press has recently announced the publication of a free history textbook (although it’s not strictly speaking “open”), Open Stax has a US History Textbook, and I’m sure there’s a range of other materials available as open access resources, but it’s my impression that uptake has been slow and quality varies greatly. I would be interested in a talk session where we discuss what kinds of resources are available, how well used they are, and what could be done to facilitate the creation, discovery, and use of these kinds of materials.

I wonder if it wouldn’t be interesting to just pick a data set and try, collaboratively, to learn something from it? It would be interesting to see how others approach a problem from the process perspective: which questions asked, which tools used, etc. I don’t have a particular data set in mind, except that the APS just released “Benjamin Franklin Post Office Records,” which looks intriguing. Here: https://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/compound/franklin-post-office-book-1748-1752#page/1/mode/1up and Here: https://github.com/AmericanPhilosophicalSociety/Historic-Postal-Data .

Susan