Blog Archives

Intro to Programming Bootcamp at THATCamp New England

I had the daunting task of doing a Bootcamp session at THATCamp New England in which I tried to “introduce programming” to an audience I did not know ahead of time. SO. MUCH. FUN. (seriously!)

Here’s the “official” session description:

To participate in this session, no previous programming experience is required — and in fact none is assumed. Additionally, you won’t ”learn to program” in any particular language. Instead, you’ll learn several of the foundational elements of programming, see examples of these elements in a few languages, take a look at various types of digital humanities projects, discuss how programmatic elements work within those structures, and (finally) we’ll think about how to put these pieces of knowledge together to design an application of your own. There might be some programming-on-sticky-notes involved.

Here’s the slidedeck I ran through for the first two-thirds or so of the session:

Introduction to Programming (well, kind of.)
View more presentations from Julie Meloni.

Project Management BootCamp at THATCamp PNW 2010

At the 2010 version of THATCamp Pacific Northwest, I facilitated a BootCamp session on project management. While not nearly as sexy as the 3D modelling or the “Zotero Love Lab” bootcamp sessions, project management is important, gosh darn it, and something I’m apt to geek out about (things that make Julie geek out is an admittedly long list, but again, project management is important!).

The full bootcamp session title was originally “Bootstrapping Your Digital Humanities Project: How to Pull Together a Team and Work Collaboratively (Virtually or Otherwise) throughout a Project Lifecycle” but when I put out a call for participant input into the types of things people wanted to learn, the e-mail replies I got made me shift to more of a general project planning and management sort of thing—less about specifically working with teams and more about how to get started, the role of the project manager, and the sorts of things that one might (and should) expect to write about/plan when managing a project.

Continue reading →

My Scholars' Lab Talk About n-Dimensional Archives

A few days ago I had the good fortune to speak for a bit at Scholars’ Lab at University of Virginia. It was an actual event, with signs and people in attendance and everything! People attended for good reason—the other two speakers were Jerome McGann and Bethany Nowviskie. I wanted to hear them.

You see, just about everything I had to say is based entirely on McGann’s essay “Marking Text in Many Dimensions”, and Nowviskie’s experiences in the SpecLab with this piece of vaporware called the ‘Patacritical Demon. [You can read about some of those experiences in Johanna Drucker's SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing.]

Some bits of my talk were also present in my Yale PDP talk, but not too much. The goal of both was the same: inspire movement and change.

[Throughout this text I'll either place the slides I used or will provide off-site links to things for more context. Look for emphasized bracketed text like this. I should also note that I write talks like I speak, with pauses and breaks and such (which means comma splices at times, and other bad grammar).]

Continue reading →