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.

Computer simulations are used in the study of literature, history, anthropology, and philosophy, among others.  I'll illustrate basic concepts of "agent-based" simulations using NetLogo and my own POPCO software, and suggest that simulations can incorporate insights from traditional humanistic research.

Agent-based simulations are computer programs in which many instances of simple software components ("agents") interact to produce an overall pattern of behavior.  For example, in many simulations, each agent is viewed as an abstract representation of a person.  The goal of such a simulation is to develop insights about changes in groups of real people when they repeatedly interact in ways very roughly like ways that the simulation's agents are allowed to interact.  I'll explain why such simulations can complement both traditional humanities research and common kinds of digital humanities research.  I believe that new kinds of simulations such those I've been developing may provide new ways of meshing traditional and digital humanities projects.

I'll describe the process of developing simulations using POPCO, which is intended to help illuminate the influence of analogy, metaphor, and other "symbolic" cultural interactions on how culture spreads through a population.  For example, past POPCO simulations have been based on research showing that Americans' attitudes about crime can be influenced by whether crime is described, metaphorically, as a "virus" or a "beast", and on anthropological research suggesting cultural links between sex roles, food gathering practices, and stories about human origins.

Though this session won't try to provide participants with all of the tools to develop their own simulations, I'll provide information on how to get started on simulation research for those interested.

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