By Kenja McCray, Associate Professor of History, Atlanta Metropolitan State College

Kenja McCray

Several images flash across my mind’s eye when I reflect on THATCamp Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) 2012, which was held at the Atlanta University Center’s Woodruff Library, and which was my first.

Overall, I imagine the experience as a gateway which helped provide access to various enriching opportunities. The THATCamp “portal” primarily provided a way for my Atlanta Metropolitan State College (AMSC) colleagues and me to access a professional development opportunity which was both engaging and helpful.

The broader digital humanities provide students access to necessary tools, knowledge, and information via many avenues which assist them to navigate the digital divide and to reach their educational goals while also experiencing personal transformation through exposure to various avenues for enrichment of their personal knowledge. Finally, through interactions with colleagues in THATCamp (HBCU) sessions, I was able to envision digital humanities as a bridge between cultures, thus helping to make the world a much smaller venue for information sharing between seemingly disparate people who might be empowered by processes of developing digital and cultural connections to one another.

The THATCamp “portal” primarily provided a way for my AMSC colleagues and me to access a professional development opportunity which was engaging. In these tough economic times colleges in the University System of Georgia (USG) faced deep budget cuts. As a result, AMSC had to scale back its financial support for faculty and staff development. In search of personal opportunities for quality, affordable professional development, I was excited when my alma mater, Spelman College, posted THATCamp (HBCU) registration information via a popular social networking web site. Initially, I was worried I would not be able to participate, as AMSC is not an HBCU but it is a predominantly Black institution (PBI).

I knew it was important for me to tap into the opportunity to learn more about the area of digital humanities. This, I believed, would help me better teach my majority-minority United States history students and to help them get access to the latest information and technology. In short, THATCamp HBCU organizers were warm and accommodating. Their unique “unconference” approach gave me an opportunity to help shape the proceedings in a way that was relevant, interesting, and fun.

One area which made THATCamp (HBCU) most relevant to my work was the participants’ emphasis on digital humanities as a way to provide access for students. In particular, camp organizer and Clark Atlanta University lecturer, Dr. Michelle Kassorla, pointed out that HBCU [and PBI] students often face efforts to marginalize them because of their race, but technology can be used in many ways as an equalizer. At the very least, minority students should be assisted in any way possible to traverse the digital divide in terms of contact, utilization, and know-how.

Thus, camp participants explored interesting ways to use technology on our campuses. For instance, faculty and staff at Morehouse College suggested that introduction of iPads to the campus would stimulate student use of such technology and could be made financially tenable when hardbound texts are replaced by ebooks and “free” course content accessible online via such platforms as iTunes U.

Additionally, Dr. Kassorla shared a very interesting and fun way to use Zotero to have students “crowd source” a bibliography of resources for any given course or topic. This activity is particularly helpful for (mostly my freshmen) students who find it inconvenient, difficult, or intimidating to find pertinent and scholarly sources in such databases as GALILEO on their own.

Because I teach online courses, I am especially interested in new ways to reach students who rely on distance learning to provide educational access they might not otherwise be able to obtain. Many are homebound due to injuries and disabilities, pregnancy, care-giving responsibilities for infants or elders, lack of resources or time to travel to campus and to libraries because of their busy work schedules. Others have insufficient funds for gaining entrance to certain museums, plays, and other enriching attractions.

THATCamp (HBCU) sessions addressed ways digital humanities could assist in bridging this resource divide in several ways including use of free screen casting sites to give feedback on papers in ways that are easier for some students to comprehend than other formats which might be limited to written text or for those who cannot get to campus to meet in person.

Some presenters suggested using digital storytelling and programs like Second Life to convey important ideas and information related to learning outcomes for the students of this information age. We discussed the reality that they are simply less inclined to read a text book than to seek a short, online, audio/video version of the same information.

My contribution to the conversation about the same educational challenge was to share my use of short video logs or vlogs to address confusing topics in my online classes, which students reported via online survey.

My colleagues at AMSC and I are having conversations and are participating in activities around digital humanities which have continued through our work with virtual field trips to help students access cultural centers that will enrich their growth as a college students and as citizens of our diverse world. One of the goals at AMSC is to demonstrate to students that they should not just “go through college” but that college should “go through them.” My experiences with THATCamp (HBCU) and with our work in the area of digital humanities in general is that technology can be used to provide access in myriad ways, some of which have yet to be fully explored.

One gateway that was opened and which calls for more exploration is in the area of digital humanities as cultural “bridges.” Specifically, fellow USG professor, Dr. Seneca Vaught, led a sharing session about a project he is working on, which is aimed at connecting rural coastal Georgia communities with people in Sierra Leone.

He was especially interested in empowering people by creating digital and educational access on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, his research group is exploring ways people in these parts of the Atlantic world are historically and culturally connected. The interchange with Dr. Vaught highlighted how we can share so much across digital causeways – books, oral histories, family recipes, common vocabulary to broaden knowledge of understudied languages and dialects. The list goes on and on.

Clearly, THATCamp (HBCU) itself was an act of bridging cultures. Learned humanities professors and erudite librarians from all walks of life connected their wealth of knowledge with the expertise of savvy digital technicians and vice versa. The faculty and staff members of several minority-serving colleges and universities connected with their USG colleagues and committed themselves to addressing some of the imperatives of success in today’s digital world.

Through the process of crossing bridges, I imagined that, unlike the literal closed doors many of our predecessors faced in the Jim Crow past, technology allows us opportunities to access sites of information and tools for all kinds of success. The portals are open. Let’s click and explore.

My Dear THATCamp HBCU participants–

Please feel free to add a reflection upon your THATCamp HBCU experience to this site, or, if you have added it to another blog or website, please feel free to share that link with the rest of us here.

Remember, any posts that are tagged “Thatcamp” and “proceedings” will be immediately picked up by  “Proceedings at THATCamp,” a publication of the Center for History and the New Media at George Mason University.  After you finish your reflection/article/essay, just click on “Proceedings” under the category button next to the post.

We would all love to hear what you have to say about your experience, how you are using the knowledge you gained, and any suggestions you have for next year.

Thank You!

Michelle

Atlanta Reflections

I’m so thrilled that we had such a productive day at THATCamp HBCU!

There’s more to come tomorrow!  Please remember, if you have any new session ideas you would like to happen, please add them to the WIKI in the schedule section.

Please make sure that you add your notes to the WIKI so that others who couldn’t be at the session or workshop you attended could still learn about that topic.

Also, there is a small poll that THATCamp.org would like everyone to take when they are done with THATCamp HBCU in order to evaluate how our THATCamp went.

I can’t wait to see you all tomorrow!

My dear THATCampers!  I just wanted to touch base and tell you that I can’t wait for all of us to meet!

Wednesday from 4-6 p.m., I will be in the “Quiet Study Room” on the bottom floor of the AUC Woodruff Library doing early registration and also providing any assistance that anyone might need in some basic tools for THATCamp–like how to use Twitter, the WIKI, and our WordPress site.  Please stop by if you have any questions at all!

We have given the security people at the front door a list of your names, so you should be able to get in with no problems.  However, if you DO have a problem, the security people also have my cell number–so please give me a ring!

Wednesday night, some of you might enjoy going out to a nearby Cantina called “No Mas.”   I am told they have a wonderful bar and restaurant there, as well as some nice shops.  There is a pre-conference Schmooze set for 6-8 at No Mas.  I didn’t make any reservations,   but I figure we can all meet there casually.

From 8-9 a.m. in the AUC Woodruff Library “Quiet Study Area,” we will met for some coffee and some more registration for anyone who needs to pick up badges then, and then, at 9 a.m. we will convene our scheduling session for the (un)conference.

Please be prepared to suggest some session ideas (even on the fly), so that we can make this a very useful and interesting THATCamp!

These Ground Rules have been established by the THATCamp organization at the Center for History and the New Media at George Mason University, where THATCamp was founded.

Since then, THATCamp has become an international phenomenon, helping to bridge the gap between people, projects, and the digital divide of technology and humanities teaching and research.

These are the THATCamp Ground Rules:

1. THATCamp is FUN – That means no reading papers, no powerpoint presentations, no extended project demos, and especially no grandstanding.
2. THATCamp is PRODUCTIVE – Following from the no papers rule, we’re not here to listen and be listened to. We’re here to work, to participate actively. It is our sincere hope that you use today to solve a problem, start a new project, reinvigorate an old one, write some code, write a blog post, cure your writer’s block, forge a new collaboration, or whatever else stands for real results by your definition. We are here to get stuff done.
3. THATCamp is COLLEGIAL – Everyone should feel equally free to participate and everyone should let everyone else feel equally free to participate. You are not students and professors, management and staff here at THATCamp. At most conferences, the game we play is one in which I, the speaker, try desperately to prove to you how smart I am, and you, the audience member, tries desperately in the question and answer period to show how stupid I am by comparison. Not here. At THATCamp we’re here to be supportive of one another as we all struggle with the challenges and opportunities of incorporating technology in our work, departments, disciplines, and humanist missions. So no nitpicking, no tweckling, no petty BS.
4. The Law of Two Feet – If, at any point in a session or workshop, you decide that it is not useful to you, you are expected to use your two feet to go to another session or workshop.

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Robert W. Woodruff Library The Robert W. Woodruff Library, which contains one of the country's most extensive collections of archival material relating to African American history, is centrally located in Atlanta among the schools that belong to the Atlanta University Center.

IT’S NOT TOO LATE!  YOU CAN STILL COME TO THATCAMP HBCU!  CLICK ON THE “REGISTER” TAB ABOVE!

We have 10 spots left!

We are having the conference at an HBCU, but you don’t have to be HBCU affiliated to attend! Please join us!!

THATCamp HBCU will be held at the Atlanta University Center Library in Atlanta, GA June 14-15, 2012.

The address is:

111 James P. Brawley Drive SW,
Atlanta, GA 30314 

We have lined up Workshop instructors, we are taking session ideas, and we are  accepting applications until we reach our maximum capacity of 75 campers.

Please see our Travel page to make arrangements for your trip to Atlanta.

We look forward to seeing you at THATCamp HBCU!

Sincerely,

Michelle Kassorla

THATCamp HBCU
Coordinator
THATCampHBCU@gmail.com

@thatcamphbcu #thatcamp #hbcu

Please, please, please . . . if you have a session idea: propose it!  If you think you have a session idea, but aren’t sure:  propose it!

This is an (un)conference!  If we don’t have lots of session ideas, we don’t have sessions!!

If you are unsure about how to post, please contact Michelle and she will assist you.  You can also suggest last-minute session ideas at the opening session on Thursday.

Please post your Twitter ID on our WIKI because the silly “comments” section on this blog won’t let us do it without eliminating the link.

The Hashtag for the Conference:  #THATCamp #HBCU

OK, I’m taking the ultimate THATCamp risk–trying something very new.

I created two new areas for our THATCamp in order to help organize and take notes for this (un)conference.

First, I made a “dashboard”–where you can access many of the tools that are useful for THATCamp HBCU all in one place.

Next, I made a WIKI–so that we can all take collaborative notes and make schedules, etc. (This can also be visited using the dashboard).

I hope these are both useful and that they work.  If they don’t–we can always abandon them!  

Michelle

I thought this might be a helpful guide for many of you who are new to the field!

You can find this helpful document by clicking HERE.

If you took a look at our schedule outline, you will see that, on the last day of the conference, during lunch, we are scheduled to do something called “dork shorts.”

Dork Shorts is a THATCamp tradition which is loosely based upon the idea of PechaKucha 20X20, a presentation that gives a lot of information in a very short time.

In 2 minutes or less, you can present a project you are working on–either one you are currently doing, or one you are now inspired to do because of THATCamp HBCU–and make some powerpoint slides to show as you do it.

It doesn’t have to be fully realized.  You may present on things you are just thinking about, if you wish.

Here is an example, from THATCamp CHNM:

Most of us who are working at HBCU’s and small liberal arts colleges find ourselves alone in our quest to use Digital Humanities in our classes, in our research, and in our departmental work.  I would like to suggest the idea of a Digital Commons for HBCUs, where we can work together toward common projects.

Last November, City University of New York announced they would be creating a “Commons in a Box” that would make the creation of a Digital Commons easy to set up.

I would like to talk about the possibility of setting up a commons, and some of the technical and logistical challenges that might be part of such a project.

Calling all iPad users . . .

Andre Vlajk, Higher Education Account Manager in Technology Assessment, Planning, and Consulting for Apple will be presenting two workshops for THATCamp HBCU on Thursday, June 14th:

1) “Tips and Tricks on iPad”

Demonstrates some of the new features in iOS5 with a focuses on the educational relevance. The workshop is designed to show ways to more efficiently use your iPad. The seminar is designed to be sharing and interactive so bring a tip/workflow/app to share. The target audience is educational iPad users. Personal iPad Recommended

2) “Beyond Textbooks: Creating textbooks, distributing via new iTunes U, and access textbooks on the new iBooks”

Apple announced iBook Author, iTunes U app and iBooks 2 on January 19th, 2012.  See a demonstration to explore usage of these new tools.  See www.apple.com/education/ for an overview.  No iPad Required.

OK, everyone!  It’s time to get posting!!

THATCamp HBCU depends upon you to decide what we will be doing in our sessions. Do you want to discuss a theory?  Find common ground? Rant?  Rave?

This is your chance!  You don’t need a “finely crafted proposal”–just throw something out there and see what we think!

Fellow THATCampers will comment, suggest, and eventually vote on whether we hold the session.

This is how it works–stolen in most of it’s entirety (I changed some dates) from THATCamp Prime website!:

Technical details

Once you are registered, you should receive login information for the site. To propose a session, log in and go to Posts –> Add New. (Note from Michelle: This isn’t how it has worked for me!  If you want details about how to get onto the site to post, check out the page on How to Post Session Proposals for more guidance.)

Write your session proposal as a blog post and publish it to the blog. In the first time slot on Thursday morning (6/14), all of us will go over all the proposals together and create an agenda for the next day and a half from them. We encourage all participants to propose a session.

Content details

Some session genres and examples are given below. The best tip: do not prepare a paper or presentation. Plan instead to have a conversation, to get some work done, or to have fun. An unconference, in Tom Scheinfeldt’s words, is fun, productive, and collegial, and at THATCamp, therefore, “[W]e’re not here to listen and be listened to. We’re here to work, to participate actively.[…] We’re here to get stuff done.” Listen further:

Everyone should feel equally free to participate and everyone should let everyone else feel equally free to participate. You are not students and professors, management and staff here at THATCamp. At most conferences, the game we play is one in which I, the speaker, try desperately to prove to you how smart I am, and you, the audience member, tries desperately in the question and answer period to show how stupid I am by comparison. Not here. At THATCamp we’re here to be supportive of one another as we all struggle with the challenges and opportunities of incorporating technology in our work, departments, disciplines, and humanist missions.

Note that while we have arranged for some hands-on skills training workshops beforehand, and there may be some smidgen of presenting going on therein, you can also propose to teach a workshop at the last minute. As long as you know something and others don’t, it will likely be productive for all concerned, even if you haven’t prepared much. And, if it isn’t, we encourage participants to invoke the law of two feet to find a more productive session.

Session proposers are session facilitators

If you propose a session, you should be prepared to run it. If you propose a hacking session, you should have the germ of a project to work on; if you propose a workshop, you should be prepared to teach it; if you propose a discussion of the Digital Public Library of America, you should be prepared to summarize what that is, begin the discussion, keep it going, and end it. But don’t worry — with the possible exception of workshops you’ve offered to teach, THATCamp sessions don’t really need to be prepared for; in fact, we infinitely prefer that you don’t prepare.

At most, you should come with one or two questions, problems, or goals, and you should be prepared to spend the session working on and working out those one or two points informally with a group of people who (believe me) are not there to judge your performance. Even last-minute workshops can be terrifically useful for others if you know the tool or skill you’re teaching inside and out. As long as you take responsibility for running the session, that’s usually all that’s needed. Read about the Open Space Technology approach to organizing meetings for a longer discussion of why we don’t adopt or encourage more structured forms of facilitation.

Session genres

1. General discussion — Sometimes people just want to get together and talk informally, with no agenda, about something they’re all interested in. Nothing wrong with that; it’s certainly a much better way of meeting people than addressing them from behind a podium. Propose a session on a topic that interests you, and if other people are interested, they’ll show up to talk about it with you.
   • Jon Voss, Toward Linked Data in the Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010.
   • Nick Mirzoeff, An actual digital revolution?, THATCamp Prime 2009
   • Jeffrey McClurken, Archiving Social Media Conversations of Significant Events, THATCamp Prime 2009 (this session was combined with Nick Mirzoeff’s, above)
   • Eli Pousson, How do we share our knowledge of historic places?, THATCamp Columbus 2010
   • Frédéric Clavert and Véronique Ginouvès, Les archives orales et le web (Oral testimonies and the web), THATCamp Paris 2010
   • Zach Whalen, ARGS, Archives, and Digital Scholarship, THATCamp 2010
2. Hacking session — Several coders gather in a room to work on a particular project. These should usually take more than an hour or even two; if you propose such a session, you might want to ask that one room or swing space be dedicated to it for the entire day.
   • David Uspal, Hackfest: HTML5, THATCamp Philly 2011
   • Wayne Graham, Mostly Hack Zotero hacking session, THATCamp Prime 2010
   • Stéfan Sinclair, One Day, One Toolet, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
   • Ben Brumfield, Hackfest, THATCamp Austin 2009
3. Writing session — A group of people get together to start writing something. Writing can be collaborative or parallel: everyone can work together (probably in Google Docs) or by themselves (yet with a writing vibe filling the air) to write an article, a manifesto, a book, a blog post, a plan, or what you will.
   • Julie Meloni, “Project develop self-paced open access digital humanities curriculum…, THATCamp Prime 2010
   • Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, One Week, One Book: Hacking the Academy, THATCamp Prime 2010
4. Working session — You’re working on something, and you suspect that some of the various people who come to THATCamp might be able to help you with it. You describe problems you want solved and questions you want answered, and strangers magically show up to hear about what you’re doing and to give you their perspective and advice. This is not an hour-long demo; you should come with specific questions or tasks you want to work on with others for most of the session.
   • Aditi Shrikumar, Text Mining and the Digital Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
   • Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “how to transform something like CommentPress into a viable mode of open peer review,” THATCamp Southern California 2010
   • Sherman Dorn, The Ill-formed Question, THATCamp Prime 2009
5. Workshop — A traditional workshop session with an instructor who leads students through a short introduction to and hands-on exercise in a particular skill. (Note: the workshop series was formerly called “BootCamp,” a term we have now deprecated. Note too that as of January 2012 the Mellon fellowship program for THATCamps with workshops has ended.) A workshop may be arranged beforehand by the organizers or proposed by a participant who agrees to teach it.
   • Kirrily Roberts, FreeBase workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
   • Bethany Nowviskie and Bill Turkel, Hacking Wearables and E-Textiles Workshop, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010.
   • Aditi Muralidharan, Visualization workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
6. Grab bag — Ah, miscellany. One of our favorite categories. Indefinable by definition. It’s astonishing how creative people can be when you give them permission; performances and games are welcome.
   • David Staley, An installation, THATCamp Prime 2009.
   • Mark Sample, Zen Scavenger Hunt, THATCamp Prime 2010 (N.B.: The Zen Scavenger Hunt didn’t actually happen, but it was still a great idea).

Many of us have been saddled with outdated Blackboard Systems for Course Management at our campuses.  What system do you use?  What are the alternatives?  How do we organize and deliver our courses without confusing and overwhelming our students?

THATCamp Workshops are the heart of any THATCamp (un)Conference.  We all love to learn something new, or learn something better.

We are planning to offer Workshops on Thursday and Friday Morning (Please see schedule).

These are the Workshops we have planned so far!   If you can teach a workshop, please let us know!!  We are adding more every day!

Thursday, June 14

Build a WordPress Website In One Hour or Less!

Learn to build a website with WordPress Blogging software hands-on.  This will be held in the computer lab.  No coding experience required!  A beginners workshop for anyone who wants to build a WordPress Site like the one you are on right now.

Michelle Kassorla is the coordinator of THATCamp HBCU, and a lecturer in Clark Atlanta University’s WISE QEP program.  She has been teaching WordPress for three years.

Think Like a Programmer:  

Learning LaTex as an Introduction to Programming Syntax

Peter Molnar will walk you through this hands-on workshop in learning LaTex, providing you with all the information you need to create a document and begin thinking like a programmer–with no programming or coding experience required.

Peter Molnar is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Clark Atlanta University. 

Introduction to Zotero

Making the Teaching of Style Almost Obsolete!

Zotero is a free open-source program created by the Center for History and the New Media at George Mason University (where THATCamp originated!!).  It works with Firefox as an add-on, and on Safari and Google Chrome as a stand alone program.  It also has an extremely powerful Microsoft Word plug-in which makes teaching style to our students almost obsolete!

Michelle Kassorla is the coordinator of THATCamp HBCU, and a lecturer in Clark Atlanta University’s WISE QEP program.  She has been using Zotero for years, and has just started introducing it to all of her students, random people at the computer lab, and anyone she can stop on the street.

Friday, June 15th

Note-able Software

Evernote and Microsoft OneNote

Notebook software can be the best option for an overall organizational tool at a low cost. Chystal Renfro and Mary Axford will introduce the two most common and most powerful notebook software programs, Evernote and Microsoft OneNote.

The discussion will include characteristics to consider when choosing a notebook software application and how to most effectively use them to organize your personal and professional life. We will give a walking tour of both products using real life notebooks which illustrate characteristics such as device compatibility, organizational structure, and note formats.

Crystal Renfro and Mary Axford are subject librarians in the Faculty Engagement Department of the Georgia Institute of Technology Library. Both have an interest in tools to increase academic productivity and workflow, and teach library workshops on these topics.  Their upcoming article on notebook software will be published in the May/June 2012 issue of the journal Online.

Google Tools

How We Use the World of Google Tools in our Classrooms

Google Tools are powerful, free, and engaging.  This is a session about Google Tools in the Classroom–how we use them, and what we do with them.  This session will be moderated, but it is open for sharing and swapping best practices with Google Tools.

Moderated by Vance Ricks, Associate Professor of Philosophy, and hard-core technophile from Guilford College, Greensboro, NC.

Productivity with ideas

Software for Tracking and Transforming

What You’ve Found and Thought

We generate ideas, save articles from journals and databases, take notes at meetings, jot down notes during phone calls, archive emails, have wow! moments during conversations  – but how do we keep track of all these ideas?  We don’t know which ones will end up being useful, so we tend to save them all.

There is software that can help you take these different kinds of items, combine them, play with them, uncombine them, put them back together differently, and ultimately make sense of them and turn them into new knowledge.   This session will cover some different types of software for dealing with these issues. We’ll look at actual databases using examples of these types of software so that you can see typical problems they can address and get a sense of how they work.

Dr. Shields has a PhD in International Relations as well as a Masters’ in Library Science.  During her first career, in international development, she worked in organizations ranging from the Peace Corps to the World Bank, and in countries as diverse as Tunisia, Djibouti, and Sri Lanka.  She came to Atlanta to work as a librarian in the Carter Center, went on to work for Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, and moved recently to Kennesaw State University.  She started looking for “idea management” software in the 1980s when she was writing her dissertation, which was based on semi-structured interviews.  The problem of information/knowledge management has gotten steadily worse. 

THATCamp HBCU would like to offer some awesome workshops June 14-15 at the AUC Center in Atlanta, GA.  We are calling upon YOU to step up and give us your best!

These workshops are mostly instructional and technical.  Their intent is for beginning or intermediate DH Scholars to increase skills and knowledge in DH.

Although we are currently working on funding, fellowships from the NEH for teaching or attending THATCamp workshops no longer exist, so we can’t promise anything in return but our thanks, a satisfying line on your vita, and the warm feeling of accomplishment.

Please contact THATCampHBCU@gmail.com if you would like to volunteer!