I have a couple of interests that I would like to see discussed during THATCamp Texas.  I’m interested in looking at ethical research practices in digital humanities scholarship.  What does it mean that current practices are influenced by “mapping” and “data mining” practices that, while beneficial to the current modes of research practices, are instituting the same colonial structures of knowledge production that come with western modes of literary studies?  How do we negotiate the necessity of our research without creating disciplinary divides?  How can we challenge the current modes of thought that position digitisation as a process of manifest destiny (the we need to do it first, frontier rhetoric)?  Though these questions seem a bit “out there” I believe these will be conversations that will need to take place as we start to think about the culture of digital humanities research, something Alan Liu has discussed recently at the TILTS 2011 symposium.

I’m also interested in thinking about bringing digital humanities research, ethically of course, into the composition classroom.  How can we get students to work and understand texts in the same ways that we do?  What are the benefits, the downsides, and how do we do it ethically without making them laborers?  What are some of the tools that can help them develop the necessary literacies that are required of these composition classrooms?

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 have two related projects — here’s the first one.

France's most profitable plantation colony in the 1700s

I want to propose a help-a-thon for a project I’m calling Virtual Saint-Domingue. Saint-Domingue was the French colony that became Haiti in 1804 after the only successful slave uprising in world history. In the second half of the 1700s French administrators compiled an extraordinary collection of census data for the colony. About a dozen censuses recorded data for each of approximately 30 colonial parishes, giving numbers of white colonists, free people of color, enslaved workers and breaking these categories down by age and gender.  There are also parish-level tallies for commodity and food crops, munitions, weapons and animals. I’ve already made substantial progress towards this project, first on proprietary software (ArcGIS) and now on open source QGIS. I can already create choropleth maps of the census data for Saint-Domingue in ArcGIS and I’m working on reaching the same level in QGIS.

My goal is  to put this data on the web in a dynamic format, so that users can chose the different formats themselves and get a display on the screen. This is an amazing source for understanding what was happening on the eve of the world’s only successful slave uprising. It could also be very useful for writing an environmental history of Haiti, something that is sorely lacking.  I want something that would be accessible to undergraduates as well as researchers. So I also want to make the data available in spreadsheet form so that other researchers can check it.

Finally I’d like to leave the door open to add other kinds of data to this project. For example, I’d like it to be open so that colleagues could add coordinates of plantation ruins in modern-day Haiti,  overlays of historical maps that show locations of plantations, irrigation works, plantation illustrations, other material. There is also an amazing textual source — a highly detailed parish-by-parish overview of the colony written in 1788 just before the Haitian Revolution. A colleague has a spreadsheet showing slave populations on hundreds of individual plantations. I’d like to be able to integrate that as well in the future, if he is interested. And there is also the slave trade data from slavevoyages.com

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.

It would be interesting to hear more about memes. Unlike Adorno and other cultural theorists who are critical of popular culture as being comprised of commercial products to placate the masses, there are other theorists (for example, Douglas Kellner) who believe that individuals can play with and comment upon products of pop culture. I think I would argue that memes do just that. Although fleeting ephemera, they give voice to those who rearrange, redo, or literally comment upon the original image, song, or video. The question remains though since they are temporary and easily forgettable, can they ever have a chance of enacting any real political change?

One of the great aspects of Web 2.0 is the availability of numerous APIs that are attracting both professional and hobbyist programmers to build cool new applications. The mashup has been borrowed from Hip-Hop culture and re-envisioned as a combination services and data from multiple locations online. Do you care about the modern views by location on 17th century poetry? You can cross-reference your collection of poems with the one of the news archive APIs and visualize the results on a Google Map.

The flip side to this is that each of these APIs started with a person who saw the benefit to letting data be available and re-usable. API creation is a daunting task, but it can be made easier. The Walden’s Paths project at Texas A&M, which I am currently the lead designer on, has found that by coupling modern database access techniques and the RESTlet library for API creation, we can easily produce APIs that can be successfully used for creation of interesting interfaces.

I propose a hack-a-thon where we would discuss as a group API design, issues to be concerned of when exposing your data, and then put together simple APIs that would allow easy data access. This might be even more useful when combined with others who have knowledge of creating mashups so we can quickly see what an open-API allows us.

Learning to make maps with GIS is  the most profound way to learn geography. Learning by doing. Learning by making.

Unlike pre-packaged images, creating a map with GIS is also like designing artwork in Photoshop or Illustrator. You control the pen, the color, the thickness of the line.  You chose to highlight the items you want people to see and fade the less important ones.

And if you like math, you can compare areas or geographic shapes, measure distances, calculate angles.

English Professor Jerome McGann, of the University of Virginia, writes, “Electronic scholarship and editing necessarily draw their primary models from long-standing philological practices in language study, textual scholarship, and bibliography. As we know, these three core disciplines preserve but a ghostly presence in most of our Ph.D. programs.” Do McGann’s comments take on a special relevance now that a judge has limited the ambitious and commercial aspects of Google Books? What should be the future of electronic libraries and who should edit the texts in their new format? (I write more thoroughly about the issue here).

How can students and faculty create productive online identities? How should online instructors model for students as they create an online identity? What constitutes too much information in the world of Facebook and iPhones?

As a longtime progressive political blogger, I wonder about these questions: What is the future of blogging as more and more words and multi-media artifacts crowd the information highway? Can open source platforms, such as Word Press and Drupal, keep current and relevant against the continuing commercialization of the Internet? What about archival systems when it comes to saving a written political history without a hard copy?