Digital East St. Louis Project

-Dr. Jess DeSpain

East St. Louis

-Population decreased 82,3666 in 1950 to 27,066 in 2010.

-Source of Project Funding: National Science Foundation ITEST

Purpose of Digital East St. Louis Project is to attract East St. Louis natives, who largely constitute under-represented groups, into STEM

Project Overview:

-Develop + test an urban place-based learning model

-Cohort of grade 6-9 participants progress through 4-week summer camps and Saturday sessions during the school year over a three-year period

-5-6 Instructors help develop + deliver content in the hopes they will take what they learn into their classrooms

Urban Place-based Education

Participants ask questions, solve real-world problems, and use field work to gather information in a local urban setting

Impacting Local Communities

1. Pairing “IRL” experiences with digital methods
2. Begin projects with a goal of listening + learning from participant experiences
3. Gauging participant technology use + needs
4. Forms of reciprocity when facing a lack of basic human needs

Middle School: age where STEM based interests often fade away, also age where web-building commonly involves playing around with text in ways that might hurt the eyes of an adult, but for the student, it is the coolest thing ever. They play with WordPress sites before working on main project.

If could start it over, prefer to work with smaller cohorts (15 at a time beginning in the summer)

Project should last 4 Years- ideally each student will be transferred into upward bound (upward bound=college readiness program for high schoolers), 3^rd year = more options, e.g. graphic novels/game design, Intrinsic based: extrinsic learning does not equal long term learning.

Biggest tension: how much control over website is given to students vs. providing a usable database

Best way to encourage extrinsic motivation: choice + presence of friends

Problems with Project: because basic human needs are not always met in East St. Louis, it has been hard to get people involved

Better luck getting people to show up by texting students instead of parents

Omeka

-Dr. Jessica DeSpain [note:  the more ridiculous parts of this post are of my own invention to help others, as well as myself, relate some of the more tech-heavy parts of Omeka into an easy to understand context]

“Omeka” (pronounced oh-MEH-ka): Swahili word meaning to “display or lay out wares”

-Created at George Mason University

Is Omeka the right choice?

-Have set of things to display on wed

-Best when you have complete info about each object

-Not great for a simple website (consider WordPress instead)

-Not great is want control over how things look

-Not great is you want sophisticated dynamic queries of database

-Not great if you want to create complex paths through collection (Consider Scalar instead)

Which version?

yoursite.omeka.net

-free on Omeka.net servers

-fewer functionalities than full installaion/Omeka.net susbscription

-Example of Omeka hosted page: eaststlouisculture.org/omeka/

This page costs $20 a month for Omeka to host.

Omeka Vocab:

Item:   things added to site (like images, scanned pages)

Item Type: type of thing added to site (videos, photo, etc.)

Collection: grouping of items on site (e.g. digital book)

Exhibit: items displayed together on site

Metadata: specific groupings amongst items on the site (think Subject)

e.g. Wide, Wide World, Geography, or History of Tacos

Tags: generic pieces of information (more general searchable terms)

e.g. cats, tears, or Chuck Norris

Theme: look of site

Plugin: programs that can be added to a site

Simple Pages: type of plug-in to easily create web pages, basic, not detailed

Geoserver: server for multiple layers of maps, needed to run Neatline (Neatline not necessarily recommended for mapping, but no other option for Omeka without embedding new code into Omeka)

Building Omeka Pages

• Create a Plan: Organizing content- determine how site will be structured, requires you know beforehand what sections + subpages of exhibit will be. E.g. a flowchart can help you understand hierarchy of items, collections, +exhibit pages in Omeka Tricky Aspect of Item Description- are you describing item or photo?
• Prepare Items for the Web: important concepts for optimizing image for web use- file size, image size, + image resolution always do a “save as” when working with images + keep a folder for originals and one for edits
• Add Core Fields: Dublin Core + Controlled Vocab, subject=topic of resource, description= account of resource, relation=establishes one item’s relation to another item, format= file format/physical medium/dimensions of resource, language= language of resource
• Build an Exhibit: install exhibit builder plug-in, enter exhibit metadata: title, slug, description, credits, + themes.

            Ex: widewideworlddigitaledition.siue.edu

Warning: adding items monotonous business, important to keep intellectual goals in mind.

Importance of Controlled Vocab: to help unify searches and keep relationships amongst items easy to locate, agree ahead to use specific terms so that items that should be related to one another pop up within same search. Ex: if one image shows George Washington on a unicorn and another image shows George Washington punching a T-Rex on a nose, but the unicorn picture is tagged only as General Washington and the T-Rex picture is tagged only as President Washington, the two will not appear within the same search.

Possible use for Omeka: Student run blog/magazine?

Places to host: Bluehost (good IT) + Amazon Web Services (free terabyte of storage)

Lead by Dr. Jessica DeSpain, The Wide Wide World Project, featuring students Ben Ostermeier, Elizabeth Korinke, and Gabby Borders

The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition is a long-running project devoted to cataloging the 174 editions of a nineteenth century bestselling novel: The Wide, Wide World. Students will discuss their involvement with the project, what they have learned and gained, and what goals they have.

This session must be scheduled on Sunday.

To get a few more proposals in the hopper, I am willing to lead a Talk Session on DH Applications for Indigenous Cultural Knowledge &via Place Based Education. I am labeling this as a Talk Session in the best form of collaboration–not presentation. For participants interested in place-based teaching and undergraduate (grad?) research–invariably connected in one form or another with the indigeneity of place/history/culture–this would be a sharing of ideas and ways that our classes can incorporate Digital Humanities Applications of Indigenous Cultural Knowledge via Place Based Education.

I have been thinking about what would be an interesting THATCamp learning/production that would be of broader benefit beyond our own DH work in our classes and communities. For this session, I would like to propose for our unconference a radical knowledge production that would be  open access, freely available, and unblind peer reviewed edited eBook available via Amazon. If several of us have some coherence of ideas and praxis, then it would be possible to write up some of what we have already done (including materials already crafted for our teaching and/or research activity) and collect that together for a helpful collection of examples that would be widely available to faculty and students globally, digitally, and freely.

There will be a brief initial TALK presentation of no more than 10 minutes in which I will present my most recent book: 10 Strategies for Your Success in College. [I have set up the Amazon page to include a preview that gives you access to the front matter, including the  brief and detailed Tables of Contents, along with the unblind “peer review” section of responses by various experts in the field.] This is my first experiment in more broadly accessible and available publishing models.

The potential and wholly insane goal of this session is to produce by noon on Sunday an eBook draft with the work of several of us: giphy.com/gifs/okkultmotionpictures-excerpts-xkmQfH1TB0dLW

Sharing project ideas with a group is a good way to collaborate and get fresh perspective. A few history grad students will share their digital theses projects and discuss ideas for future digital projects, the problems associated with creating a digital thesis, and look for feedback or ideas for their current projects.

One issue with creating a digital thesis is the lack of precedence. Here at SIUe, there have been few examples of master’s students creating and defending digital projects. Without that precedence, professors and students seem unsure of steps to take or defense strategies. New guidelines published by the AHA and universities like George Mason University provide an idea but they have yet to be tested at SIUe.

This session will bring researchers together to brainstorm. Talking about current digital projects will make others to think about their research in new ways. Learning about platforms for presenting research could encourage more digital work and build precedence for future work.

The Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship (IRIS) Center (siueiris.com/) is a facility designed to support individual and collaborative scholarship at faculty and student levels that applies digital content as a primary methodology. IRIS facilitates cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects that involve applications, enhancements, or re-conceptualizations of technology in the humanities and social sciences.

The IRIS Center is home to a number of exciting faculty-student research projects, and IRIS-affiliated faculty have even launched a brand new interdisciplinary minor in digital humanities and social sciences.

The co-directors of the IRIS Center (Jessica DeSpain and Kristine Hildebrandt) would like to offer a tour of the Center, including some illustrations of current and past projects, conversations with IRIS faculty and student researchers, and a discussion of the minor.

We are planning two tours: one on Saturday June 11 @ 1.45pm and one on Sunday June 12 @ 10.10am. We will meet in the MUC Hickory-Hackberry Room and walk together to Peck Hall, where the IRIS Center is housed.

Welcome to the website for the SIUE THATCamp 2016! This is an unconference that will be held Saturday, June 11 – Sunday, June 12 on the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville campus in the Morris University Center.

What is THATCamp?

THATCamp stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp.” It is an unconference: an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions loosely formed prior to the conference and proposed on the spot. This allows for a more informal, collaborative atmosphere compared to a typical conference setting. SIUE THATCamp 2016 attendees will come together in sessions to solve a question , or perhaps create a new one, through scholarly exchange.

Who should come?

All are welcome! The organizers of the THATCamp are enthusiastic about engaging with the community and to learn the ways in which others have engaged with their communities through the digital humanities.

What is community?

The digital humanities is in inherently interdisciplinary. When we talk about community, this could mean local historical societies, librarians, scholars, humanists, technologists, and any community member within and outside of SIUE. Welcoming groups from outside the university setting is a fantastic way to build partnerships and share needed skills and new perspectives. We are always looking for ways to reach out and make these kinds of connections and we are interested to see how technology can be a facilitator for that.

How to register?:

Attendance is limited to 100 participants to ensure a lively and engaged atmosphere. Apply now to let us know why you want to attend and what ideas you want to share. Registration is $10. Register here.

What to expect and other information:

The unconference format allows for a variety of crowdsourced sessions and topics, and the schedule of the event is not decided until after the accepted attendees propose sessions (here) leading up to the event. As a group, we will vote on the content the morning of June 11. Those who propose events are expected to lead and moderate the self-proposed sessions if they are voted into the schedule.

With a maximum of 100 participants, the THATCamp will be intimate, informal, and executed by the attendees themselves. We hope that sessions will create dialog about DH and community engagement, as well as demonstrations and showcases of current DH tools and projects from the attendees.

All attendees will be invited to compete in a maker challenge! Attendees can work together to create a digital object like a document, app, script, or website. They will be able to share their digital projects on this website where all attendees will vote on their favorites and the top three entries will be awarded prizes!

This is a great opportunity to practice presentation skills in an informal environment and talk about topics or projects you’re interested in pursuing.

Stay Connected:

We hope to have some other fun things planned that weekend so stay tuned by checking the blog and following @SIUeTHATCamp and #thatcamp.

For more information about THATCamps, visit the About page and the THATCamp 101 page.

If you have any questions, please email Lora Smallman ( siuethatcamp@gmail.com ).

We hope to see you in Edwardsville!