My primary interest in attending THAT camp is learning more about Omeka and digital archiving in general, so I add my voice to the prior posts.

I am also interested in research methodologies surrounding digital archives. At a conference last weekend, I heard several presentations featuring research in which transcribed histories, blogs, and other digital repositories served as source material for rhetorical analysis. As my research this semester involves collecting oral histories, I wondered about the parameters and ethics surrounding these practices, and how often this kind of research is used. If anyone attending the conference this weekend has experience with this kind of research, I would be most interested in hearing their perspectives on the subject.

Campers, we would love for all of you to help participate in capturing the wonder that will be THATCamp Florida by recoding the weekend in whatever ways you feel comfortable. The great folks at THATCamp “National” at the Center for History and New Media @ George Mason University have encouraged the regional Camps to record, tape, blog about and tweet the event so help keep these fleeting moments for posterity. So, remember to tweet using the hashtag #thatcampfl and bring video or audio equipment, a camera, a smart phone or whatever you feel comfortable with this weekend so that we can preserve the weekend in the fine traditions of the digital archives.

Also, we encourage the creation and sharing of google docs for event to share notes on sessions, reflections on the event, maps, etc. Google docs are a great way to open collaborative work efforts this weekend that, we hope, will carry on after the Camp has ended. You can always tweet a link to your docs using our handy hashtag, of course.

Dear Campers, As you know, THATCamp Florida is a free event to attend, and includes a t-shirt and two days of catered breakfasts and lunches, as well as two days of intense conversation about the humanities and technology, of course. We do ask, in THATCamp tradition, for a contribution of $20 to help defray some of the costs involved. We are happy to collect that onsite this weekend, but thought that some of you might prefer to donate that money online via the UCF Foundation website. We ask that you make sure to choose the History Department in the drop-down menu on the site, so that the donation goes to the proper source. Thanks in advance for your generosity and we look forward to seeing everyone in a few days!

My session proposal is this. . . . and could be combined with what was just posted–

That in addiion to learning about Omeka next weekend. . .  interested others will  also want to discuss those “other” platforms or delivery systems that Omeka is at the “crossroads” of:

(1) Web Content Management Systems such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla

(2) Library and Archival Repository and Digital Collections Systems such as Fedora, Dspace, Greenstone, CONTENTdm

(3) Museum Collections Management and Online Exhibition Systems, such as PastPerfect

How do these alternative content management systems compare to Omeka? In what situations might they be more effective or an alternative? How does one know when an alternative system might be appropriate for academic or other use?

My original intent for participating in THATCamp Florida was to gain experience and make connections within the digital humanities community. In regards to the topics I hope will be discussed, Omeka is my primary interest. In what ways can we creatively use Omeka to digitally archive and present information to the public? What future do we see for Omeka and other similar software?

My interest is not solely within the Omeka software; rather, it is in digital tools that can help academics reach a broader public audience, by presenting information in a more interactive way. I would love to have a session where we can discuss different tools available to digital humanists that can help inform and engage the public.

An emerging and related interest of mine is connected to a new initiative by Apple Inc. called iBooks 2, and more importantly, iBooks Author. Apple has taken the lead in pushing digital textbooks. Alongside the announcement of digital textbooks Apple released a free publishing software called iBooks Author, which allows anyone to create and publish digital books onto Apple’s iBooks store. If enough attendees are interested I would like to discuss the impact of emerging digital textbook market and what that means for the public and academia.

The symposia project creates ensoniment (a term adapted from Jonathan Sterne’s Audible Past) of Plato’s Symposium using eleven distributed text to speech processes arranged in the positions of the speakers in the putative drinking party in which a number of participants conversed and gave extended monologues. Typical interpretations of the Symposium focus on concepts of love developed in the individual speeches, such as found in Wikipediaand countless introductions to English and surely German, French, and perhaps Latin translations. They mostly miss its careful study of character position within virtual realities implied by the text, and give little thought to its complex framing of narratives. (For example, the tension in the outer frame between a generic reader, Apollodorus and Glaucon, and the special reader who responds in the voice of the companion.) Perhaps we can better conceive the text from the position of media specific analysis of virtual realities by hearing it instead of just reading it. Consider what it would sound like in different configurations of the participants. In the long row Aristodemus would be the farthest from Phaedrus, whose speech is less faithfully recorded in the narrative Aristodemus recounts. Other configurations would produce different ‘actual’ audible fields had the event been recorded with two microphones representing the position of his head in the virtual physical environment, like in immersive first person games. There is the added complexity of remembering this retelling thematically occurs while two walk for hours for an early critique of intellectual tools (Greek alphabetic writing).

Possible positions of speakers and listeners for ensoniment of Symposium. This project uses the eSpeak text to speech API.

In this session I seek participants willing to compile and run the the latest revision of the symposia project (symposia.sourceforge.net) on their personal computers. Another possibility is to run prepared VirtualBox virtual machines that I supply on USB thumb drives that boot into the latest Ubuntu with the appropriate software libraries and tools installed so they are ready to check out the code directly from Sourceforge, compile the symposia executable, and launch the start script to run it.

The software allows creation of never before heard phenomena by processing an ancient Greek text via text to speech synthesis, a text that at the same time played a substantial role in forming the basis of our intellectual culture. This distributed processing can also include concurrent text to speech synthesis of the original Greek translated into English and other languages so that you  can hear many voices at the same time.

I hope this session can open into a discussion of ways programming can be considered a form of humanities research, how classical studies and philosophy can be tightly integrated with working code, and ways source code can be critically studied.

Technical Requirements to run the symposia Virtual Machine image
-VirtualBox OSE (4.0.4) installed
-4 GB free disk space
-1 GB system RAM
-Bridged network
-Sound enabled