Many institutions have a backlog of “items” in their holdings that are not currently discoverable/accessible in their online finding aid(s). Most institutions are actively working on rectifying this, as funding, staffing, etc., allow.

Currently if researchers want to know if more items relating to something they are interested in (e.g., person, place, time period) can now be found via an institution’s finding aid, the researcher has to decide how often to got back to the institution’s finding aid and re-submit their search criteria.

What if, instead, the researcher could submit the search string once and include in that search the request that he/she is automatically advised if anything new results from that search string are returned.  A bit like TradeMe searches. Or perhaps the Digital NZ search builder (digitalnz.org.nz/about/custom-search-builder).

What functionality would researches like? Are there existing add-ons that institutions could use? Or are there apps (I’m thinking ‘bots) that researchers could use to achieve this?

A session around the use of FLOSS software and open standards/protocols in digital repositories, and the needs of digital humanities in particular. Discussions could centre around Fedora Commons, DSpace, Fez, Drupal and so on. How do we weigh rigid metadata schemata (MODS, MARC, DC-TERMS etc.) versus relying on full-text indexes, or open access versus access control, flexibility and complexity versus ease of use?

Hi Im Greig I work in the digitisation team at NLNZ and am currently obsessed with the idea of making a cat card based battle game out of Papers Past Article Ideas.

The general Gist is to expose new audiences to our heritage data and encourage them to poke around with API’s and open Data sets.

Lite Background:

-World of Warcraft at its peak had 12 million active accounts around the world, players mined data out of the game data to display in databases (wowhead.com, thottbot.com). They also wrote modifications for the game to enrich this data with item drop rates, and “geographic” spawn locations for mobs(creatures). Many Calculators where created to work out the optimal DPS, HPS, migration etc.

-Collectible Card Games -CCG’s have been around for ages but got super popular in the 90s with games like Magic The Gathering. There are often sort after cards that cost sometimes hundreds of dollars to purchase.

-What if you generated cards from papers past article data? Finding a rare card would not cost thousands of dollars, just some time searching through Papers Past or even better writing a script/app/program to work out the best “characteristics”.

A crude mock up was made on monday at the NDF Hackathon and I really want to explore this idea further. You can try it out here:

dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/57626027/CatBattles/index.html

It was an amazing experience working with people with a variety of skills and ability’s, I want to keep that going!

Proposed Talk/Session:

-Go Through Background, explain as necessary

-mechanic demonstration (using Magic the Gathering Cards)

-Card Generation discussion. What Interesting information can be taken from a newspaper article and turned into a value or modifier. Is there anything useful that could be learned from this?

eg. I was tossing around the idea of bad OCR providing a special ability to encourage people to find these articles that would best benefit from text correction (which Im sure will get added to Papers Past eventually right?). As someone that works with the Digitised data this game could become a working tool.

Hi, I’m posting this on behalf of Jay, who suggested a discussion tomorrow on the topic of digital archiving.

Facilitator: Murray Hemi

I’d like to talk about audience. How do you use or match your publication/digital platform with the audience you are wanting to access. Is there any data or research undertaken with the NZ public to understand how different demographics are engaging with digital information sources – what platforms and how?

Note: afternoon session

Having data in a spreadsheet can be fine for many types of data and projects, but when you want to start interrogating the data in more complex ways a relational database is much more powerful. There are numerous programmes around to create such a database in (MySQL is a powerful free one), but before we get to that stage it is necessary first to plan out the database, going back to first principles.

I propose covering these first principles step by step, then working our way together through a few sample datasets to think about how we would structure that data for a relational database. If you have some data you would like to go through, feel free to bring it along.

Now that editing software is easily available and it is increasingly simple to download/rip AV content, video essays are becoming increasingly popular. Two main trends seem to be emerging:

1. Video essays that merge text, sound and visual content in an open manner that can be read in multiple ways. These normally lead viewers towards central arguments but ask viewers to engage in their own interpretations of the content. A good example is Catherine Grant’s ‘Touching the Film Object? Notes on the ‘Haptic’ in Videographical Film Studies’ (filmanalytical.blogspot.co.nz/2011/08/touching-film-object-notes-on-haptic-in.html)

2. Video essays that follow a traditional voice-over documentary format which leads viewers through specific arguments and towards direct conclusions. A good example is Arielle Bernstein and Serena Bramble’s ‘Female Sexual Agency in a World of Blurred Lines’ (blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/video-essay-female-sexual-agency-in-a-world-of-blurred-lines)

Both types can be constructed with relative ease and are good tools for exploring and presenting research topics and/or class themes.

In this session I propose covering the basic principles of how to construct video essays with a particular emphasis on how consumer technologies such as smart phones can help produce original content to be included in the essays as well as how to use creative commons licenses in the production of video essays.

Background

Data collection from human subjects is always a challenge. Now that everyone and their dog is on the internet, it has become possible to collect data online. Some researchers have investigated the feasibility of doing so and have concluded that it is possible. These data can also be analysed to understand human learning, cognition, psychology, and possibly other topics of interest.

Most of the researchers seem to be paying participants small sums in exchange for the data they produce. But another alternative exists when you consider what is going on with all the data that users generate on interactive websites. Many companies mine it and sell it to advertisers, market researchers, and the like. Others use it to improve the user experience or to evaluate changes to the code base.

Proposed discussion

I’m interested in possible ways of combining the provision of useful services in exchange for collecting (mostly) anonymised data which can then be used for research. Twitter, for example, has created one of the largest corpora in history of speech-like text which everyone from computer scientists to linguists to political scientists are analysing.

Other examples include Coursera and Khan Academy, both of which collect data on human learning in exchange for a free education. Other sites, such as Human Benchmark, don’t even really offer a service, and yet manage to collect impressive data sets.

So, what I propose is a discussion about

• what types of human data are interesting, but difficult to collect
• what kinds of services or formats could be used to entice people to produce that data
• what are some reasons why these types of services have succeeded/failed in the past
• what existing platforms/projects could be leveraged to facilitate data collection and service provision
• etc.

Qualifications

I have some limited experience collecting data through websites which have yielded interesting insights into vocabulary acquisition and rent pricing (yes, they are completely unrelated). I’m keen on pursuing this concept further to study the development of reading proficiency and speed in a second/foreign language.

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[Update: 3 December 2013]: A blog summarizing a little of what I presented at my THATCamp session can be found here: exponentialdecay.co.uk/blog/architecture-of-the-fr-org/ – Thanks to all those who attended!]

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Two-weeks back I built myself a linked file-format registry. For me, one of the biggest motivations is opening up existing data and making it more queryable…

I want to share some of that experience and provide a bit of a technical background about the implementation of that work, and what a SPARQL endpoint can do for you.

Covering:

• The motivation
• A (brief) intro to RDF / Linked Data
• Architecture
• .htaccess makes it fly! (hint: magic)
• Query mechanisms
• You… (well, what’s next)

Conclusion: The technology isn’t a silver bullet, but, make your data available on the web, and use open standards.

Further Reading…

Personal blog, covering the work: exponentialdecay.co.uk/blog/tag/the-fr-org/

A bit of an example query: bit.ly/I2xwB3 (More information on this particular query in session…)

If you’re new to the THATCamp scene, you might be wondering how to facilitate a session. This is entirely up to you, but here are a few suggestions…

Camper introductions

• Who are you?
• Where do you come from?
• What do you know about the session topic?
• What would you like to get out of the session?

Plan the session

• How are we going to record our ideas? (whiteboard/notepads/Google docs/something else)
• What are our session objectives? (write these down)

Go for it!

Learn, share, hack, build, brainstorm…

 Wrap up

• What are our takeaways?
• What this session useful?
• Do we need more time? We could use another session to continue…