Join the DH@MSU Community for an afternoon of projects, updates, mingling, and some snacks!
Thursday, 12/7/23 3PM-5PM, Green Room, MSU Main Library
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THATCamp – January 2024
Date: January 12th, 2024
Location: Online
Register to attend by Wednesday, January 10th, 2024!
THATCamp (which stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp”) is a gathering where the agenda is set by attendees on the day of the event based on what people want to learn and/or share. It is an event where students, staff, and faculty from any discipline and from all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed, led, and voted upon by the community.
At DH@MSU THATCamp, we create space for meeting fellow members of the community in informal networking sessions. We encourage people to share their work in impromptu discussions and workshops. There is also time for a project showcase, when community members can share very short prepared or impromptu remarks about their projects and work.
This January, we are holding THATCamp as a virtual event from 9:30AM – 3:00PM EDT.
The goals of DH@MSU THATCamp are:
- To bring people back together at the beginning of the semester
- To introduce new folks to the DH community
- Build connections between community members for future collaborations, troubleshooting, and less formal, unplanned interactions
Who is THATCamp for?
This is an opportunity for people, whether formally a part of the DH@MSU community or part of the larger DH community, to gather, learn from each other, and make connections to carry forward into the academic year. We welcome:
- Members of the DH community, old and new
- Students in–or interested in– MSU’s Digital Humanities or Digital Cultural Heritage and History undergraduate minors or the Digital Humanities graduate certificate
- Humanists who are engaged in digital and computer-assisted research, teaching, and creation
- Anyone interested in exploring digital topics especially (but not exclusively) in the areas of arts, humanities, and social sciences
- Family members (kids, pets, are welcome!)
This is a flexible, family- and pet-friendly event.
This event will operate under the Code of Conduct for THATCamp MSU
Schedule
How the day will work
Technology and Communication
Register to Participate
Schedule*
All times are Eastern Standard Time
- 9:30am – 9:50am – Welcome and THATCamp basics
- 9:50am – 10:20am – Meet and Greets / Introductions (breakout rooms)
- 10:20am – 10:50am – Discussion and workshop topic ideas – gathering proposals, voting, and creating the schedule
- 10:50am – 11:50am – Session 1 (breakout rooms)
- 11:50am – 12:00pm – Break
- 12:00pm – 12:30pm – Session 2 (breakout rooms)
- 12:30pm – 1:15pm – Lunch Break
- 1:15pm – 2:15pm – Session 3 (breakout rooms)
- 2:15pm – 2:25pm – Break
- 2:25pm -2:45pm – What did we learn?
- 2:45pm – 3:00pm – Debrief of the day
*This schedule may shift if the community decides to make adjustments on the day of the event. For example, one of the sessions may break into two thirty-minute sessions in order to accommodate more topics. This page will be updated during the day of the event with any schedule changes.
How the day will work
Meet and Greets / Introductions
Using breakout rooms, we will have 3 short meet and greet opportunities. This means that groups of 4-6 will be gathered in a breakout room to introduce themselves and answer a question prompt for 7 minutes and then will be reshuffled into another room for 7 minutes with different people.
Sessions
Over the course of the day, there are two one-hour sessions and one half-hour session. During each of these session times, there will be up to 4 concurrent sessions that participants can choose among.
These sessions will be proposed or requested by THATCamp participants at the time of the event.
Session types may be:
- Panel – 2-3 subject matter experts (and one moderator) gather to discuss a specific topic and offer differing perspectives. Panelists share facts or personal experiences, express opinions, and answer audience questions. The moderator keeps the momentum going, facilitates the discussion, and manages questions from the audience.
- Demo/How To – A practical instruction that can be accomplished in a session wherein attendees learn a single skill. How-To sessions are similar to workshops in that they are participatory, but are less in depth, concentrated on audiences walking away with a single skill, rather than multiple, or more involved, skills.
- Deep Dive – An in-depth discussion of a particular subject in DH, such as pedagogy, research, or outreach that digs extensively into a single topic
- Problem Solving – A open forum to discuss moments when you may have hit a block with a DH project and would like to brainstorm ways forward with THATCamp participants
- Show and Tell – an individual or group showcases a project and explains how it was created, what went into it, including the technology, etc (this type of session may also group together 1 to 3 project show and tells)
- Other: You decide what format you will use
Technology and Communication
Zoom
THATCamp will take place on Zoom. The meeting link and information will be sent via email to registrants when registration is complete. For the best experience, please update to the most recent version of Zoom via these instructions.
When you enter the Zoom meeting room, your video and microphone will be turned off/muted by default, and you are welcome to turn them on/unmute as you prefer throughout the event. We will all convene in one room, and we will use breakout sessions to facilitate introduction sessions and the discussion sections. There will be moderators available throughout the day and in each breakout room to assist with technical issues and Zoom questions.
Closed Captions will be provided throughout THATCamp and made available to all in main sessions. If participants would like captions provided during breakout rooms, please let the organizers know by emailing dh@msu.edu.
Mastodon:
We encourage live posting using the hashtag #MSUDH, and you can follow @DHatMSU!
Register to Attend by Wednesday, January 10th, 2024
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What DH Means To Me: Steve Rachman
What DH Means To Me: Steve Rachman
Whether as a faculty member in the English department, a co-founder of the DHLC, a director of American Studies, or leading DH in the College of Arts & Letters, I have been working with Digital Humanities for more than twenty-five years and it meanings have shifted over that time, but I think the constants have lay in its usefulness for thinking about literature, reaching out to new communities, and creating new forms of access and scholarship.
My first encounter with this “thing” called or would come to be called Digital Humanities was probably in graduate school when I TA’d for Stuart Moulthrop who was then working on something he called a “hypertext novel,” at the time a new form of electronic literature that could be organized around hyperlinks rather than pages and indices. He showed me a prototype of how such a thing might work and when I came to MSU and taught a course on Rock music and culture, I made sure that I included one hypertext novel in the course, Sunshine ‘69 (https://bobbyrabyd.github.io/Sunshine69/noflash.html) by Bobby Rabyd which dealt with the Rolling Stones Altamont concert. We compared the novel to the Maysles’ documentary Gimme Shelter, and it was eye-opening to see how the digital presentation could frame and re-frame our history and understanding.
In the late 1990s, I collaborated with the MSU library on digitizing the Sunday School Book Collection for the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress and that resulted in the creation of the Shaping the Values of Youth project (https://d.lib.msu.edu/ssb) which is still part of MSU’s digital collections. The ability to give the world access to materials that were once impossibly obscure to many was tremendously exciting and we thought long and hard about designing the essays and the intellectual and textual apparatus to accompany the collection and make it useful to others. In the early aughts I engaged in a similar type of project with Matrix dealing with the Lam Qua’s paintings of the patients of Peter Parker, M.D. an American Medical Missionary in China. That project, too, raised a host of challenges in framing digitized materials for a global general audience and I was pleased and surprised at how they were handled (https://matrix.msu.edu/mystery-of-lam-qua#:~:text=The%20Mystery%20of%20Lam%20Qua,a%20wide%20range%20of%20patients.) It has been gratifying to see how much scholarship has been generated around the globe by the use of these resources, often by scholars that would have no other means of access were it not for DH.
As I have moved on, I am always pleased and surprised by the collaborations that DH entails. They have taught me so much and forced me to test and reframe subjects, both those that I am very familiar with and those that are new to me. I always try to incorporate some DH technique in my work, often setting up a corpus of text data and looking for keywords before using more sophisticated modes. Just last week, I gave a new talk on neurology and nineteenth century American literature and much of its scope was facilitated by taking an approach to the literature rooted in digital techniques pioneered by practitioners of digital humanities. What was once new has become a robust tool for me and a crucial component of what it means to study literature and to share with our community and the world.The following piece was originally created for the DH@MSU Newsletter and was featured in the January 23, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
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Teaching Highlight: Imari Tetu, Teaching with AI
Imari Tetu, Teaching with AI
I use AI in teaching AL 111: Intro to Accessibility for the Humanities in two different ways: as a tool to facilitate conversation and as an example of accessible (or inaccessible) design. This semester I’ve been using Packback Questions as the discussion platform for class. I appreciate the Packback framework of asking and responding to questions in terms of student engagement, and Packback’s breakdown of student engagement on a weekly basis makes it easy to track numeric completion and engagement scores along with giving highlights of the most engaging questions.
I also use AI examples to illustrate course concepts such as accessible design and societal ableism. One such example I recently shared was ChatGPT’s suggestions for a human authentication tool. The AI suggested three different ways to determine whether a respondent was human: they can correctly identify a color (determining which of several shades is closest to “sky blue”), they can correctly identify a human emotion by looking at a pixelated picture, or they can correctly identify which emotion they would feel in response to a stimulus (happiness if their friends throw them a surprise birthday party). These examples were excellent for sparking discussion in class about not creating or supporting ableist design and about how ableism is deeply rooted in both human and AI structures.
The following piece was originally created for the DH@MSU Newsletter and was featured in the September 23, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
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Undergraduate Student Profile: Margaux Smith
Margaux Smith
What is your current major?
My major is Interdisciplinary Humanities with an additional major in French and minors in DH and professional writing.
How did you find Digital Humanities?
I found DH through the study abroad program, I had no idea what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised. My friend had asked me to apply for it with her so we could go together, but she dropped it at the last moment. I went on, and it was one of the best decisions of my college career.
What do you like most about Digital Humanities?
My favorite part about DH is being able to work creatively and collaboratively.
How is Digital Humanities enriching your academic experience?
DH has allowed me to explore research skills, develop team working skills, and most of all it has helped me to learn new things like website design or graphic design.
What have you learned so far that you didn’t expect about Digital Humanities?
I have learned more skills than I can name, but the most surprising would be time management and project building.
What advice might you have for other students as it relates to Digital Humanities?
Advice I would give is to be open to new ideas and to not be afraid to share your ideas as well.
The following piece was originally created for the DH@MSU Newsletter and was featured in the September 20, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
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What DH Means to Me: Kate Birdsall
What Digital Humanities Means to Me: Kate Birdsall (DH Core Faculty, WRAC Dept)
Digital humanities to me means undertaking research and design projects that keep people at front of mind while using and developing tools and processes that make use of innovative technologies. From more traditional research to web development and everywhere in between, my keywords are always usability, accessibility, and sustainability.
This piece was originally created for the DH@MSU Newsletter and was featured in the January 23, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
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Research Highlight: Internment Archaeology Digital Archive
The Internment Archaeology Digital Archive
Stacey Camp
The Internment Archaeology Digital Archive (IADA) project is a digital platform and website dedicated to sharing the stories of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated and interned during World War II in Idaho. The project is an outgrowth of my (Dr. Stacey Camp) archaeological research at the site of Idaho’s Kooskia Internment Camp, a World War II incarceration site that imprisoned over 260 men from 1943 to 1945. This project began in 2009 when I was a faculty member at the University of Idaho. While excavations at the site are done for now, we continue to share and disseminate the data recovered through projects like IADA.
The Internment Archaeology Digital Archive (IADA), which has been funded by the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites grant program and is a collaboration between myself and Dr. Ethan Watrall, will go live later this academic year (2023-2024). It will share artifacts and objects associated with Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at both Idaho’s Kooskia Internment Camp and Minidoka War Relocation Center. As part of this project, we (myself, Dr. Watrall, and two Anthropology Ph.D. students – Grace Gerloff and Emily Nisch) traveled to Minidoka earlier this summer (2023) and spent two weeks there digitizing and creating 3D models of objects, documents, and artifacts in their holdings.
IADA also features profiles of every individual who was incarcerated at Kooskia and Minidoka. These profiles share the history of the individual’s life, including where they lived prior to and after incarceration, any jobs they held, personal letters and photographs connected to the individual, artifacts directly linked to the individual, and the individual’s family members. Lastly, this project will provide free downloadable curriculum on these two sites of incarceration, which aligns with common core standards.
The following Project Highlight was originally created for the DH@MSU Undergraduate Newsletter and was featured in the September 20, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
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Project: Citing Slavery
Citing Slavery
The legal profession must confront its role in slavery.
Acknowledging and discussing the modern citation of slave cases is a first step. The Citing Slavery Project provides a database of slave cases and the modern cases that continue to cite them as precedent. Explore citations now.
The following Project Highlight was originally created for the DH@MSU Undergraduate Newsletter and was featured in the October 18, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
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Fall 2023 Social Hours
Digital Humanities is holding social hours several times this semester for Faculty, Staff, and Students. Bring your lunch or just stop in to say hi! We’ll be focusing on different audiences on different days. We may include some additional treats!
All social hours will happen in Project Room J of the Digital Scholarship Lab in the MSU Main Library (2nd Floor, West), 11:30AM – 12:30PM. More information coming soon!
September 6, Wednesday, Social Hour, Faculty/Staff Focus
September 20, Wednesday, Social Hour, Graduate Student Focus
October 4, Wednesday, Social Hour, Faculty/Staff Focus: Opportunity Potluck – Tell us about a conference CFP or registration, a resource you want to share or question you might have about a project!
November 1, Wednesday, Social Hour, Undergraduate Student Focus, FREE PIZZA!
November 29, Wednesday, Social Hour, Faculty/Staff Focus: Presentation from ICER
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Fall 2023 Research Showcase
Digital Humanities Research Showcase
Thursday, October 19
12:00-2:00pm
Main Library, Green Room (4th Floor West)
Join the MSU Digital Humanities Program for our inaugural DH Research Showcase, where recipients of DH summer funding and faculty/staff and students will discuss their projects in process. Join us for a wonderful day of DH projects!
The interdisciplinary field of digital humanities (DH) aims to bring together humanistic inquiry and digital technologies, organizing new modes of archival research, developing computer-aided methodologies for answering humanistic questions, curating digitized archives of all kinds, bringing digital platforms into the classroom in creative ways, and engaging critically with the culture of new media.
Schedule for the Day
- 12PM: Intro
- 12:10PM: Daniel Fandino: Lady Nijo: Travel, Tourism, and Pilgrimage in 13th and 14th Century Japan
- 12:20PM: Daniel Trego: MOCAP Dance Exchange
- 12:30PM: Aubree Marshall: Merging LEADR and CAP – Utilizing StoryMaps to Tell a Story as a method utilizing time, space, and media.
- 12:40PM Discussion/Questions
- 12:50PM: Dani Willcut: Mapping Food Networks
- 1:10 PM: Kara Haas: Unlocking Squareland Mysteries: The development of Squareland Digital Field Trips
- 1:30 PM: Garth Sabo & Matthew Rossi: Marsh Time
- 1:45 – 2:00PM: Discussion/Questions