Hi! One of the issues I run into is that humanities scholars (like me!) are trained for solitary research, not collaboration. While we’re eager to collaborate with our cross-disciplinary peers and colleagues, we may lack the soft skills to engage constructively in collaborative activities. How can we incorporate collaborative activities into our pedagogy to instill not only the praxis of collaboration but the spirit of it as well into our students?

Maybe we could use the Voyant suite voyant-tools.org/as a test case to brainstorm how to incorporate collaboration into a teaching activity. I can do a short demo of the suite, and then we can brainstorm how we might model collaboration in the classroom using the range of tools the suite offers.

What sort of structures are needed to support collaborative work? After two years working in digital libraries, and since attending Lynne Siemen’s Issues in Large Project Planning and Management mini-course at UCLA, I’ve been thinking about how collaborative work is delineated, assigned, and, really, managed. Of course, the twin issue is: how is credit assigned and given, and what authorship issues arise in collaborative work? In this session, I’d like to talk about how collaboration raises the need for new models of authorship.

If possible, maybe we could look at examples of authorship agreements among groups, talks about some potential disciplinary tendencies and differences, and examine taxonomies of digital scholarship and roles. Are best practices out there?

Anyone want to talk LOD?  What datasets have you used or are interested in?

We should have a session on the tools participants find useful in supporting their collaborative teams, especially those that cross disciplinary boundaries.  The session could explore how to hack a collaborative team site by loosely coupling existing tools.

Our THATCamp is taking place on May 16-17, 2014.  We plan to have a half-day boot camp on Friday,  with the usual THATCamp sessions on Saturday.    Possible topics for boot camp thus far includes TEI and/or XSLT training,  GIS,  digital project management,  digital project startup,  and Neatline.   Do you have ideas for boot camp classes?   Let us know!

–Maura and Kathy