As Lisa mentioned during the wrap-up session, Profhacker was dreamed up at ThatCamp 2009 at CHNM. ProfHacker publishes advice, reviews, tips, and commentary on technology, pedagogy, productivity, and other topics relevant to those who work in and around academic institutions. I’ve been a regular contributor for the site since August 2009.

I’ll be writing a post about my experience at ThatCampTX,  but since I could only attend one session at a time, I’d like to invite you to share yours as well for inclusion in my post.

If you’d like, write a brief answer to one or more of these questions and email it to me (nmhouston [at] gmail [dot] com) by noon Thursday, so I can add some other perspectives.

What did you expect, coming to ThatCampTX?

What was your ThatCampTX experience like?

What’s your biggest take-away from the weekend?

Let me know if you have any questions!

I’d be interested in facilitating a discussion on personal productivity for those working on DH projects. We could talk about challenges and share tips and solutions. For instance, possible topics might include:

• how do you manage your time between DH projects and other professional responsibilities?
• what tools or methods have been helpful to you in organizing your personal workflow?
• what jumpstarts your creativity?
• what tasks do you procrastinate on?
• if you don’t have a large team (or any team at all), how do you get everything done?
• what do you know now that you wish you had known earlier?

I’m currently working on a project that applies different kinds of digital analysis to a large corpus of nineteenth-century poetry texts.  One of the things I’m exploring are the strengths and limitations for poetic analysis of existing tools that are typically used with prose texts.  For instance, word frequency and word clustering can tell us certain things about poetic texts as they do with prose texts.  But there are other features of poetic language (like rhyme, line length, and punctuation) that are meaningful and thus require different tools.

I’d love the chance to brainstorm some new tools or uses of existing ones for analyzing the language of poetry with people who have different expertise than I do.  I’d also be interested in talking with other people currently working with poetic texts in any kind of DH project to share ideas, methods, problems, and so forth.