Collaboration – THATCamp Digital Writing 2014

Talk Session: Textual Annotation in CommentPress

Cheryl Smith — Fri, 02 May 2014 15:59:25 +0000

This semester, I launched a pilot project in a writing-intensive literature course, Great Works of World Literature, required of all undergraduates at my school. We offer up to 75 sections of this class every semester and most of our students are not English majors. For the pilot, students across four sections of the course are reading three common texts and collaboratively annotating these texts in CommentPress. The instructors are discussing annotation practices and purposes in class, and asking students to work in groups to annotate the three common texts for specific purposes that are relevant for the classes. This proposed session will share the purposes that students and teachers identified for textual annotation; discuss the results of the annotation work students did in CommentPress; consider the challenges; and explore the potential of CommentPress for building an interactive archive of student reading and writing. Questions I’d like to consider include:

What are the limitations and potential in CommentPress for this kind of work?
How can we encourage more interactivity, creativity and conversation in the student annotations?
What other platforms might be effective for this kind of work?

I look forward to hearing from others who have done or are interested in doing similar projects, and brainstorming more ways to promote student writing and reading in digital platforms.

Building a Digital Exhibition Writing Assignment

LaTanya Autry — Fri, 02 May 2014 08:53:26 +0000

One of my teaching goals involves incorporating a digital exhibition writing assignment in my undergraduate art history courses. I envision this assignment as a form of collaborative writing. Students would work in small groups to divide the labor and delegate responsibilities for preparing the general exhibition narrative, various exhibit labels, and artist biographies. While these tasks are common of exhibition planning, I believe that the digital environment will present a different set of challenges and possibilities. The capacity for multimedia implementation would make the online exhibition space far more dynamic than the environment one normally encounters in actual art museum settings. The writers/designers would have to think in a very engaged and networked manner to realize the potential of the digital exhibition mode.

As I plan this assignment, I would like to learn more about other people’s experiences with digital exhibition writing in general and as a pedagogical activity.

What challenges related to this topic have you faced?
What strategies did you employ?

I have experience employing social media, WordPress blog, Twitter, and Pinterest, in the classroom. The takeaways I have from assigning student blogging and tweeting are particularly useful as I begin to develop ideas about this more advanced project. Additionally, I have participated in small to large collaborative digital writing groups. These activities entailed using a combination of Google Docs/Drive, MSWord with track changes, and email communications. We made those platforms work; however, they each presented frustrations and sometimes seemed awkward for group writing. So I also would like to discuss more interactive, yet free or low-cost, platforms for both student collaborative writing and digital exhibition writing.

Talk Session: Handwriting – What we can we learn from it, and how can we use it in a digital age?

David Kaminski — Fri, 02 May 2014 02:57:25 +0000

The distinction and dividing line between pre-history and history is the written word. Handwritten materials still exists from millennia ago, and these handwritten works give us great insight about nature, civilizations, commerce, literature, and personal communication, as well as information about the person who wrote it down.

-How and what can we learn from handwriting, one of the oldest and most important forms of communication?

-How has handwriting been preserved, saved, and lost over time? What can that teach us about our data?

-Should we try to preserve our remaining handwritten material?

-What efforts are underway to save handwritten material?

-What collections of handwritten material exist?

-Are collections of handwritten material public or private, and how are they shared?

-What efforts are there to transcribe handwritten material?

-Does the latest trend away from teaching the reading and writing of script endanger understanding of the last 500 years of material in English?

-Will only specialists and archivists be able to read handwriting in the future?

-Will computers and software alone be able to read and interpret handwriting?

-How can we create sets of data and linked data with existing handwritten work?

-Should we continue to create handwritten work?

-Should we try to create a personalized hard copy with digital enhancements so that the fuller meaning of our words, emotions, and character that exist in normal handwriting can be expressed digitally, preserved digitally, and archived digitally?

-What is lost if we only use computers, their fonts, and either hardcopy or a digital copy?

-How does the move away from handwriting affect all languages, cultures, and their futures?

-How will born-digital handwriting and writing transform our cultures, literature, and perceived identities?

-How is born-digital writing best preserved for future generations, and how will it be perceived or understood in thousands of years?

-Will born-digital writing outlast and remain viable longer than works on paper or other materials?

Make Session: What is Digital Writing?

Melanie Kill — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 14:03:27 +0000

What defines digital writing? We are all too comfortable attaching ‘digital’ to ‘writing,’ ‘rhetoric,’ and ‘literacy,’ but what exactly do we want it to describe? In what fundamental ways have writing practices and products changed in the wake of the personal computer and networked computing? I propose we write and curate content for a website that offers a focused but multifaceted, readable but academically-grounded answer to this question that might serve as a starting point for discussion in courses as well as for other interested readers’ thinking about this question. I will facilitate discussion to establish our goals for the site, provide a forum for collaborative writing, and prep a site template (HTML/CSS, WordPress, or Tumblr depending on the choice of the group).

Come ready to write and curate:

A declaration of unique principles of digital writing
A select bibliography of readings / one key quotation from each
A select collection of thoughtful digital writing resources online
Other ideas?

Talk Session: Editing Wikipedia, Inspired by Adrianne Wadewitz

elizabethcornell — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 18:53:39 +0000

As many of you have heard, May has been designated as a month for groups around the world to come together to edit Wikipedia in honor of Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz, who was a Mellon Digital Scholarship Fellow.

For this session, I propose that we discuss good practices and strategies for editing Wikipedia, as well as approaches for editing Wikipedia in a classroom setting. Or (and?) the session could be used to edit Wikipedia entries.

This session is for experienced Wikipedians and for people who want to learn more.

Read about the Wadewitz Tribute Edit-a-thon and find resources.

THATCamp Digital Writing, New York City, May 2-3, 2014

elizabethcornell — Fri, 28 Jun 2013 21:05:57 +0000

From tweeting to multimodal research papers to Prezi, writing these days means more than just black text on a white background. Through workshops and discussions, THATCamp Digital Writing aims to deepen and advance our notions of all facets of composition. Participants in THATCamp Digital Writing will explore how to effectively compose using different digital tools and platforms. We begin with a special lecture on Friday afternoon, May 2, 2014, at John Jay College, and continue all day Saturday, May 3, 2014 at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus with workshops, discussions, and a Maker Challenge.

At THATCamp Digital Writing, join a dynamic cast of participants to

Learn more about innovative ways to digitize your work and publish it online
Share pedagogical methods that use digital media for writing and research assignments
Explore how to evaluate online writing and give feedback
Question how tools, technology, and methods for publishing work shape the way we write
Take workshops on Scalar, Juxta, Omeka and collaborative writing
Tell people about your work in a Lightning Presentation and during discussions
Make connections with others
Establish new collaborations.

TCDW is being organized by Amanda Licastro, a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Elizabeth Cornell, IT Communications Specialist at Fordham University.

We’re on Twitter: @THATCampDW & #TCDW14