Automated text generation is interesting and provocative for folks interested in writing; I am thinking of provocations like the material created for NaNoGenMo; but more often, this sort of text generation appears in shorter forms, often tweets, from “bots.” Mark Sample has written about the power and political potential of such bots.

Whether folks are interested, and how they’re interested, would determine the shape of this session: we could talk about, or compare, people’s favorite existing “bots” (or note some of the challenges and problems with them; my favorite is pentametron), or we could work collectively to develop a bot. I’ll try to have the infrastructure ready so that we could get a basic Twitter bot off the ground and tweeting in the course of a session, if that is something people would be interested in; there’s a lot of unfun fiddly-business when setting up a “twitter” bot (or the mechanics of how to get to a script to run routinely or whatever), which I am happy to talk with folks about, but is way less interesting, than trying to imagine what such a project/device can do.

(For folks with previous bot writing experience, I have never used a Markov chain… but if anyone had such experience, and wanted to share, I would love to learn!)

Many researchers are familiar with HathiTrust as a collections content-provider, particularly for public domain works. And, it is assumed that users at non-member institutions can’t really access the digital library’s features, nor get access to datasets to analyze. This librarian says that you can do it!

In this session, I will show how to set up a University of Michigan Friend Account (if you aren’t from a member institution), demo the collection builder, provide an overview of dataset options, intro the HathiTrust Research Center portal, and show tips and tricks about seeing the full metadata and rights for a volume.

Additionally, I’d like to discuss — How can the library support researchers who are wanting to work with HathiTrust data? I’d like to discuss options, especially with folks who have used or who want to use datasets.

Are there any researchers attending THATCamp who have used HathiTrust datasets in their research? if so, please volunteer to share them during the session!

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.

Since I started serving on our Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Committee, I have explored various digital platforms designed to showcase scholars’ research. However, there is always part of me that worries about the sustainability of the platform. What if this site goes down tomorrow? I have only recently begun to think about this topic but I think it’s worth discussing.  What options are available to researchers who store a lot of content on platforms like Scalar, Thinglink, Tableau or Omeka? This discussion group will raise questions about considerations of content/data storage for the long-term future.

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