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Early American THATCampers,

This follows a bit along Zach Hutchins’s lines, and I’d be open to sharing a session with him if he’s interested.  I’ve been working on a database of the loan records for the Easton Library Company, an Easton, Pa. shareholding library (on the model of the Lib. Co. of Philadelphia), for the years 1811-1862.  The work has progressed to the point that my digital librarian collaborators and I are starting to plan front-end (i.e., user interface) issues, especially visualization tools.  At the same time, I have a research student sleuthing sources for biographical material on the shareholders and their representatives (in the early records, signatures of the people who actually signed the books out were included, not just the name on the account).  I’ve started looking at 19c maps of Easton, possible sources for the books (usually purchased in Philadelphia, from what I can tell), and I need feedback on these questions: what do you all want from a resource like this?  What queries/visualization options/etc. would be helpful?  What information beyond the loan records would you want integrated, and how?  I’m looking to do a little demonstration of the database so people can see what’s already getting built, but where things go from here is my main concern for the THATCamp session.  Thanks very much for your thoughts, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what others are doing, too!

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Hi everyone.

I’ve never been at a THATCamp before, so I’m not entirely sure how the breakout sessions work. But one topic I’ve been thinking about a bit is social annotation. I’d like my students to be able to annotate texts collectively as they read. I’ve tried to do this class wikis (Columbia uses wikispaces) and with google docs, but both get very balky when the texts are long and multiple readers are working at the same time.

I’ve been looking at some MIT projects called Annotation Studio and NB. Annotation Studio seems well set up for long texts–one of their samples is Moby-Dick–while NB may be more fully developed at this point. The PI at NB turns out to be a college friend of mine, and the site includes a paper about classroom use of social annotation: “Successful Classroom Deployment of a Social Document Annotation System.”

I’m wondering if anyone who’ll be at THATCamp has tried either of these systems (or similar ones–the Annotation Studio site lists the following similar tools: eComma, Domeo, Highbrow, Prism, OpenMargin, Public Poetics, CommentPress, Marginalia, Co-ment, and NB) and might be interested in talking about how they could work for course reading. Again, I don’t know if this is what break-out sessions are for, but I’m happy to talk about this either at a break-out session or elsewhere. I don’t have a lot of time to prepare material much beyond what I’ve posted here–my paper for the regular conference is not yet written.

I welcome your thoughts.

Thanks.

Lisa Gordis