Now you’ve some time to recover from our busy weekend, we’d appreciate it if you could please take a moment to fill out this survey on the 2016 Central New York THATCamp.

Thanks again for your participation – we hope that you enjoyed the event, and came away with some useful resources and ideas for your own work. If you would like to get in contact with any of the other participants, you can find everyone’s details on the Campers page of the website.

We’ll be contacting you in the future about more THATCamps, symposia, and other events at Cornell and Syracuse. In the meantime, look out for the new website for Cornell’s Digital Humanities Collaborative–a link will be posted on our placeholder website shortly. You can also contact Mia Tootill (mst88@cornell.edu) for info about Cornell’s new Digital Humanities Grad Network.

Thanks to everyone who turned up yesterday! Day 2 begins in Olin 702 at 10am with breakfast, followed by the first sessions at 10.15am. Or you can check out the schedule and drop by during the day. A couple of reminders:

• Sign up for dork shorts (an opportunity to present your digital work/ideas for future projects etc. in 1-2 minutes)–these will take place during lunch. See an example here.
• Is there anything we didn’t cover yesterday that you’d like to learn/tell people about? Propose a session and/or let me know you want to add something to the schedule.
• Use the hashtags listed in the schedule to live tweet your session and remember to use the googledocs to take collaborative notes

Welcome to the CNY 2016 THATCamp! We’re starting the day with the inaugural Graduate Student Digital Humanities Symposium in Olin Library 703, then the THATCamp will launch after lunch at 1.45pm, also in Olin 703. We hope you’ll join us for refreshments at the reception in the A.D. White House at 5pm.

If you can’t stay for the whole two days, feel free to check the schedule, which’ll be updated by 2.15pm today, and stop by for whichever sessions catch your interest!

Related to my other proposal—a sort of general discussion of text encoding—I wonder if anyone would be interested in trying to put ideas about text encoding into practice by trying to imagine into existence a small mini-edition of some interesting but neglected text.¹ We would need to thing through the entire process: questions of textual scholarship (what state of a text to represent; what annotations or apparatus does it need to be useful to readers; in what formats should be encoded; what outputs can/should we provide; how/where could it be hosted).

We probably wouldn’t have enough time to complete such an endeavour, but we would have enough time to get started.

1. As a starting suggestion for a text that could benefit from such an edition, I don’t think Hope Mirrlees’s early twentieth-century poem Paris has a good digital representation on the web right now—though a rather raw looking PDF is available.)

I continue to be fascinated by the fundamental problem of representing texts—I’m thinking of literary texts in particular (and, lately, poetry, especially), and the many solutions (all variously imperfect) that people use. I have in mind all the various technologies that folks use to represent texts (whether remediating historical texts or authoring their own). This could include complicated, semantically rich models like that of the TEI, to that most ubiquitous of markup formats—HTML, or the lean, simplified “markup” of Markdown. We could also think about the related tools (from XSLT or Pandoc… or, my latest favorite and a real dark horse in this race, Pollen), which can make such texts usable in different ways.

I’d be happy to meet and talk with people of any level of experience (seriously! if TEI/HTML/Markdown are all equally befuddling terms, this could be a session to hash what they mean!) about the passion and perils of text encoding.

Collaborative world building is a process by which students learn to think critically about social forces at play in a given place at a specific moment in history and how these forces influence the lived experiences of the people who live in the world. Students write a metanarrative describing the governance, economics, social values, and cultural influences and then populate a wiki with entries for people, places, and things and pin them to a map. Collaborative world building is useful for creative projects such as creating post-apocalyptic futures, alternate histories, or fanfiction in preexisting worlds and could be used in courses in literature, history, or other humanities. Participants will learn about the pedagogical theories underlying collaborative world building including its roots in role-playing games and will participate in the creation of a brand new world of their choosing.

Gather, create, invent and learn with Cornell University Library’s new pop-up makerspace! Makerspaces are DIY areas equipped with supplies, where people with any level of experience can drop in, mess around, work together and make stuff. The Library’s new portable kit includes a 3D printer and scanner, Arduino and Littlebits microelectronics kits, button making, basic hardware tools, and more.  

Come to a hands-on demonstration; try making something; discuss the range of applications, programming, and other possibilities for making and makerspaces in the library; and participate in a makerspace design challenge!

Enjoy a guided tour of the the exhibit “Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Rose Goldsen Archive” with one of the exhibit’s curators.  This exhibition offers visitors the opportunity to experience more than 60 original electronic and digital artworks involving video, sound, complex interactive multimedia and the Internet. The exhibition also features posters, pamphlets and other materials documenting the international history of artists, granting agencies, and cultural centers that have supported experimental media work across disciplines, artistic boundaries, and geopolitical zones.

Depending on participants’ interests, discussion might include such topics as:

• Central New York’s important role in the development of media art
• Technological experimentation and the arts
• Challenges of teaching and reasearch using historical (obsolete) media formats
• Developing digital preservation infrastructure needed to support such research collections

Mendeley is a citation management software that also allows you to organize and manage your digital library. It integrates with your Hard Drive, Zotero (endnote), Microsoft Word, and your internet browser to allow you to seamlessly keep track of your sources, cite them, and produce bibliographies. It also comes with a lively online community and social features that allow you to search for academic papers and share your library with others. I’m no expert, but I can introduce the software and some of its functionality, and also talk about my personal transition from hard copy books to digital reading.

Scalar can be a powerful tool for producing a multimodal project. However, its interface is less than intuitive and can prove intimidating to students with little or no experience with digital composition. In this session, we’ll discuss techniques for generating _Scalar_ project prompts appropriate to an undergraduate (and especially a freshman) audience, ways of integrating _Scalar_ training into class meetings, and modes of assessment. In the process, we’ll try our hand at using the _Scalar_ interface and manipulating and annotating media within _Scalar_.