I am interested in how people are managing their digital image collections, including working with RAW images.
What cataloging, metadata and annotation tools are people using, either offline or online?
How do we analyse our image collections and what tools are there to help with this?
UPDATE: Thanks Anna Gerber for offering to hold our hands on this one 
I learn better by doing than listening. After attending the bootcamp sessions today, lots of us understand theoretically how the tools work.
Can some kind person with more coding experience run a session where participants make their own something using the tools we learned about today?
I would like to create a little webpage (probably as a post on my WordPress site ? ) where I could embed a widget that is querying the NLA People and Organisations set. (For example something that pulls in the entry for Tim Winton then fetches the DBpedia info about him and displays it). Maybe another widget-y thing that produces an interesting something using Tim’s Trove Tools? My idea is that we focus on how the queries are built and pulling in and matching datasets .
We could use something similar to the Netvibes Ecosystem where you can easily make widgets where they do the “wrapper” (graphics and embed code) and you get to focus on just making a query. I am sure there is something even better.
Vague, but I am sure other people can develop and build on this.
Kathryn Greenhill suggests a session where we create some presentations, mining from sources/tools shown at Bootcamp sessions. Sounds good!
Building on the Trove bootcamp sessions, I’d be interested in a discussion about the possibilities and challenges the NLA’s Trove repository for large-scale analysis (and associated issues: ‘hacking’, institutional connections, history from afar). In relation to this, but more broadly, I’d like to consider the implications of using data as the basis for theorising about the past and culture – especially data that, as in Trove, are mutable and often unreliable.
This is a tentative exploration of ideas, so if anyone specialises in this, please jump in.
Official government information, historical records and newspaper articles tell part of the story of a community. The digital humanities community is working well to collect and expose this data.
Many communities have “shoeboxes under the bed” containing personal information like family photographs, recipes, memorabilia and artworks. People can be filmed or recorded telling their personal stories. Amateur historians, hobby genealogists, community arts projects, library local history collections, ABC Open are all involved in trying to capture these stories.
“Build it and they will come” models for harvesting this type of data have not proved effective. The internet is littered with beautiful looking sites with great architecture that have no data beyond the initial seeding data that was collected before grant money ran out.
Kete Horowhenua is an example of a successful site collecting many different digital formats and community metadata, harvesting the shoeboxes under the bed. http://horowhenua.kete.net.nz/
What is the best way to create a project to harvest these stories that has community ownership ?
Is there value in creating a model or guidelines to create an easy-to-implement platform for communities that want to harvest their shoeboxes? What features need to be included beside:
This may be better as two topics, but many of the skills will be the same.
What specific skills do humanities researchers need to be sufficiently technologically literate to take advantage of possibilities offered by the digital humanities?
Whose responsibility is it to help them gain these skills?
What model would work to help support researchers to gain these skills? Is there a role for research institutions to provide:
Information Studies courses at universities claim to be producing graduates who are specialists in metadata, database design, taxonomies and information design. They claim that graduates will be experts in collecting, organising and retrieving digital and physical information.
What specific skills should be taught in Information Studies courses so that graduates can support the digital humanities?
How can libraries and librarians provide better support for digital humanities?
Have librarians and Information Studies departments missed to boat at becoming useful in this arena, or is there still a chance to be usefully involved? If so, what do we need to do?
I’d like to propose a session on/responding to the Digital Culture Public Sphere. The live date for the public sphere discussions is taking place on Thursday 6 October, the day before THATCamp, and it makes sense to continue the discussion with the aim to making comment and a submission from participants. It would include questions on the digital arts and culture, and would ask what are ideas for a long term sustainable vision; what would success look like; and what are some ideas of how we could get there?
The results of the Public Sphere consultation will be submitted in response to the National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper, so it’s important for digital humanities people to contribute.
It will probably help to read the Digiculture Wiki and get a sense of some of the ideas that have been coming through, or check out #publicsphere on Twitter for the comments that came through during the event. There event was also streamed online, and I think you can find the video here.
[images below of Suse's whiteboard notes – added by Cath. Each image is about half a mebabyte – to optimise readability.]
I can run an introduction to Elan, free software for doing transcriptions of video or audio, at THATCamp. It also generates subtitles from the transcript.
I’m managing a sizeable DH project and would like to have a general discussion about project management strategies for DH. I’ll kick it off with some background about my approach, which is based on PRINCE2 and RUP, but I’m really keen to hear what other people have to say about questions like: ‘What are the benefits of Agile over waterfall-based methods, and does Agile really scale to large projects?’; ‘How do you manage multiple project managers?’; ‘What do students need to know about project management and should we be teaching it in our courses?’; ‘When, if ever, can we get away without using any methodology at all?’; ‘Does a project manager have to have technical skills, or is it a good role for people who want to be involved, but aren’t technically inclined?’; ‘Does project management stifle creativity?’. It would be nice to produce some kind of ‘best practice’ document for DH projects, along with a resource guide, that allowed DH PMs to size their project and choose an appropriate method (or consider a range of possible methods).
