Hi! I’m John Theibault, Director of the South Jersey Center for Digital Humanities and main organizer of THATCamp Jersey Shore. The glitches I mentioned in an earlier post have extended to my own individual login to contribute to this conversation. So I’ll contribute as “Jerseyshore2011” the administrator of the site.

The previous posts have given us several very interesting ideas to chew on. All will make for interesting sessions. I’ll just add a couple of other ideas that are on my mind as THATCamp starts.

The first is simply to try to construct an overview of the infrastructure for doing digital humanities. I had even considered offering a BootCamp session on something along the lines of “Navigating the Digital Humanities Landscape” in which we would consider the umbrella organizations and sites dedicated to helping beginners and experts become familiar with the complete toolkit of digital humanities work. If people wish to share stories of how they keep up to date with digital humanities work it might be an enlightening session.

The second aligns more closely with the digital humanities projects I am working on. I am interested in how new visualization methods can create different forms of both narrative and argumentation in scholarship. Just this evening via Twitter I encountered two new pieces on the transformative power of visualization. Edward Segal’s and Jeffrey Heer’s paper on Narrative Visualizations: Telling Stories with Data and today’s New York Times article “When Data Struts its Stuff.” How can humanists harness these powerful explanatory tools to make arguments and how can we teach people to “read” visualizations effectively?

Within the applications for THATCamp are suggestions for a number of other very important potential sessions. I’ll list some below in abbreviated form for our consideration during the agenda-setting stage.

1) What is the future of the book in the digital age?
2) Text Mining and Advanced Search techniques
3) Network Analysis and visualization
4) Geo-Referencing and Analysis
5) Student Digital Humanities Projects — Opportunities for Collaboration between CS and Humanities
6) Using Digital Methods to Enhance Communication and Collaboration in Class
7) Content Management Systems — Drupal, Strengths and Limitations of WordPress
8) Digital Curation, Building an Online Exhibit
9) Creating an Organizational Digitization Strategy
10) Social Networking for Organizational and Project visibility

I’m looking forward to a very engaging discussion. I hope to see you all tomorrow at 9:15 to help assemble the program.