Last year, I presented an Alabama Digital Humanities Center brown bag on accessibility and its impact on digital resources and practices. Here’s a description:

How can we broaden our understanding of the ways that people use digital resources by considering the experiences of users with disabilities? In this brown bag, we will discuss contemporary DH conversation about “access,” strategies for widening this access in our own projects, and issues, such as heavy reliance on visualization, that exclude some users from working with particular digital tools and resources.

If there’s interest, I’m happy to offer a similar session at THATCamp Alabama. In a hybrid Teach-Talk session, I’d talk about some the ways that people with disabilities use digital resources, some of the challenges they face, and possible solutions for those challenges. I’d then share some of the conversations about accessibility that are happening in the digital humanities community and prompt participants to engage in some conversations of our own.

How do the increased opportunities for public participation and engagement brought about by digital composing technologies shape the way we teach writing?

The rise of what Manuel Castells has called “mass self-communication” technologies–open-access web publishing platforms, social networking technology, curation software, etc.–cannot help but radically reshape what we think of when we talk about “writing.”  A wide range of technologists and researchers have reminded us of the increased public agency we now possess as a result of these technologies of/for writing and have pointed to their role in expanding the public sphere. The rise of these technologies also roughly parallels the rise of a renewed interest in civic education and global civic education in higher education.  If mass self-communication technologies have expanded opportunities for civic writing and public participation, and we believe that higher education has a civic role, then how must our approaches to teaching writing adapt and change? What types of digital literacies, writing processes, and rhetorical capabilities do our students need for lives of civic engagement?

In this talk session, I would like to draw upon examples from a variety of writing courses to explore the possibility of an integrated, interdisciplinary understanding of writing, digital literacy, and rhetorical education that can help define more concrete goals and outcomes for civic education. I am interested in working together with participants to identify potential civic outcomes for the teaching of writing in an age of mass self-communication.

This topic may be rudimentary, but I am interested in having a conversation about how technology can facilitate collaborative narrative or “social editions” of texts and how these texts can enhance a curriculum.

A prime example of socially-edited text would be fan fiction; how these and other “living texts” are created in the context of an online community with ample feedback and communal editing are surely applicable to the composition or creative writing classroom, but may be pertinent elsewhere, too. Should we shelter student work from a larger, online community, or would having them participate within a larger beyond-the-university environment benefit their understanding of themselves as writers in a larger context?

But maybe these texts don’t need to be created and published online in order to achieve the same kind of communal narrative. Social editions might be anything from class soundtracks to digital photo albums/blogs.

These online communal texts might also work in the linking of interdisciplinary communities within the university—allowing for cross-course collaborative projects.

I’m curious to see what you find to be the relative value, practical application, and logistical framework for such a tool in your own courses or if you see the forming of interdisciplinary/intercourse projects as something we should be doing more of.

The Spatial Turn continues to transform understandings of space and human activity in many contexts, from broad strokes to nuances. Mapping and visualization tools facilitate the analysis of movement and phenomena in two and three dimensions, and from many perspectives, while innovations in teaching and technology make spatial concerns accessible to students and to (some) sectors of the public. In many cases, though, space is not problematized. As the Spatial Turn and the Spatial Humanities forge new frontiers, let’s consider these and other issues:
• Considering the diverse U.S. populace, should we introduce alternate philosophies/mapping traditions outside of European traditions?
• How do language, philosophy, and space intersect, and how can these phenomena be mapped? (In my own work, the Yucatec Maya language features deicitic time in which cyclical time is stressed at the expense of sequential time, and this affects notions of movement; some settlements in the Southwest U.S.-West Mexico are planned to be intervisible and interaudible–how can these phenomena be expressed visually?
• How can the ideas of theoreticians of space–W. Benjamin, Foucault, Bourdieu, Deleuze, J. Butler–be expressed visually?
• Share your success (or non-success) stories about spatiality and mapping in your teaching and research.

Guachimontones, Teuchitlan, Jalisco, Mexico, ca. 600 CE. Round pyramids were intervisible at sites in the Teuchitlan archaeological tradition.

I’m interested in having a discussion about bias and standards in Wikipedia’s editorial process, especially who decides and how is it decided what constitutes “worthy” sources of knowledge or if a subject is important enough to “deserve” an article. One recent example is the controversy over creating a standalone article for the twitter hashtag #yesallwomen. Most Wikipedia editors fit into a specific set of demographics- single, educated males in “developed” countries aged 18-30 with no children. What are the micro- and macro-level implications that arise when most of the editors come from the same social group- especially in one of the most dominant information sources worldwide? What solutions might attract a more diverse base of editors? Is the wiki model liberating (by putting power of knowledge creation in the hands of anyone who wants to participate) or does it reinforce structural oppression (access is limited to those with internet access and literacy, and it can be difficult to make edits that are not deleted)?

Create and organize your or your class research data to share with others or provide a foundation for visualizations and other dh projects.  Metadata records are surrogates of text, images, notated music, audio files and more!  Enhance text by producing digital editions that represent authentic texts or provide commentary, interpretation, or highlight important themes.  Tried and true metadata schemas and metadata related standards will be discussed.  Learn what to do if you can’t find a metadata schema or controlled vocabulary that meets your needs. Discussions may be illustrated with dh projects.  Bring your metadata questions!

Metadata librarians and dh consultants from the University of Alabama Libraries (Mary Alexander, Vanessa Unkeless, and Todd Wallwork) welcome the opportunity to talk to you.

I would like to lead a discussion on why we use digital maps. I will share some of the ways that I am using maps in my research, specifically by creating a collaborative and interactive activity that employs Google Maps to augment and mediate our experience at THATcamp on the UAB campus.

As teachers and researchers, I want to discuss the affordances and constraints of map assignments. Have you tried group work, collaborative, or “crowd-sourcing” activities with students? If so, please share your tips and tricks. I envision this session as one in which we share examples, questions, and possible uses of digital maps and mapping tools. Since pedagogy should drive the use of technology, greater emphasis is given to “why” we might use maps than “how” to map complex data sets.

I’d love to hear from anyone interested in the technical and interpretative potential of mapping personal, literary, or historical spaces.

I’d like to propose a talk session about makerspaces on our campuses and in our communities. I’m part of a group working to establish a makerspace on the UA Tuscaloosa campus. I’ll share information about our project and would love to hear from others about how we can work together more effectively.

Alabama has great potential when it comes to education, but lags behind other states in execution and results. What should we do right now to improve digital access to classes and instructors? What should we stop doing?

Consultant Wade Kwon leads the discussion that will generate ideas, debate and questions for our future. Join in and help to build the state’s educational roadmap.

• What digital resources do educators have to reach more students?
• What areas should policy makers focus on in the next 3 years to improve digital outreach?
• What types of professional development are needed to help educators with digital learning?
• What are the most effective digital education programs in other states?
• What should Alabama stop doing in digital education?

Evolving “best practices” for classroom teaching emphasize engaging students, including cognitive breaks, and guiding interactive responses and peer discussion. Video can be a powerful driving for student learning. We (Brande and Arslan) have developed for our teaching, EZSnips, an online tool to be used with YouTube.

Although we developed EZsnips as a tool for use in Brande’s UAB Earth Science course, we believe the model we have developed and template for deployment is general to academic disciplines overall, and is just as suitable for a course in the humanities as it is in the sciences.

A teacher can, with EZsnips,

• “snip” a YouTube video without video editing software to create an arbitrary segment for later play
• input and store relevant metadata for later retrieval of the snip from a private, shared, or public video repository
• create a web link for each snip that will play the video segment from PowerPoint or any web compatible environment.

In this workshop, lead by Brande, we propose to hit all four marks – Talk, Make, Teach, Play.

Talk – Brande will demonstrate the power and functionality of EZsnips when used in combination with YouTube. Free trial accounts will be provided for immediate access by attendees.

Teach – Brande will also demonstrate how he uses Bloom’s Taxonomy to create a “video tutorial” to accompany video viewing, thus transforming a passive viewing experience into a guided, active one that initiates student written responses and peer group discussion. 

Make/Play – By the end of the workshop, attendees will have

• searched and located a few videos on YouTube that are pedagogically relevant to their course(s)
• created a number of snips and associated metadata within EZsnips
• become familiar with the EZsnips user interface for viewing, filtering, and retrieving snips
• deployed EZsnips links from within PowerPoint and web browsers
• created at least one video tutorial based on Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Some of the detailed information about EZsnips to be presented during the workshop may be viewed from the Squarespace landing page here.

www.ezsnips.squarespace.com

EZsnips, the tool, and its public library of snips, may be viewed here.

www.ezsnips.com