Whenever I’m around people using computers to do things I think are cool, I notice lots of unfamiliar applications and workflows. I’m wondering if a productive conversation for some of us to have would be to talk through our favorite software, hardware, and tools for the humanities things we use technology to accomplish the things we accomplish. Something along the lines of The Setup, but all together, in a room, where we can demonstrate things and recommend things to each other.

I’m thinking questions we could answer could include:

• What is your favorite text editor/word processor, and why?
• What is your screenshot workflow?
• What databases, archives, catalogs, or collections are essential to your work?
• What is your academic writing workflow?
• What do you carry with you when you travel for research or conferences?
• What technologies do you use in the classroom?
• How do you read/manage/save things you read online?
• What are some free/open source alternatives to well-known expensive packages?
• What’s in your browser’s bookmarks bar?
• What are your backup practices?

I’m mostly interested in bringing the practical matters of our work activities into the conversation. Sometimes learning a handful of new tools for personal use can transform the way we approach our work, but even if I learn about something that saves me 2-3 minutes or a modicum of frustration on a daily basis, I will be grateful.

**Note: I teach a class MWF from 10:30a to 11:30a; any times outside of that are fine by me.

Given recent political events people are more interested in VPN and safe browsing. In this session I will introduce three tools: The Piratebox, TailsOS, and Virtual Private Networks.  Piratebox, a totally legal, open source project that converts a router into a personal file sharing device that is private, secure, and functions independently of an internet connection. Next I will show participants Tails, a legal linux distribution that prioritizes privacy and which you can install on a flashdrive.* The session will end with a discussion about  VPNs – how they work, what they protect against, and why people might want to use them – and the measure participants want to take to match the level of privacy they desire.
*for participants that bring a flashdrive of at least 6gb, there is potential for them to make a TailsOS drive during this session [note: all contents of the drive will be erased]

I propose a session to talk about the playful aspects of electronic literature and web writing. We’ll see some example projects, explore some tools, and mess with digital text in a variety of ways, thinking about pedagogical and creative uses of text on the web and the tools we have to create, unmake, and distribute them.

Guiding principles:

the web is not read-only

text + interactivity = fun

you don’t need to know how to write a computer program to write a computer program

e-literature = “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.”

For some background information and a sneak peek at the tools we’ll be using, check out:
reallysystem.org/cny2017