THAT Camp Conference Summary

Transcribed by: Manuel Fiallos Garcia

The conference I was in talked about Wikipedia. It focused in the fact that there’s a lot of information in Wikipedia that you can come to believe it’s fake. That is because people could edit information easily and there was no problem with it, even if it was fake. People started doubting about using Wikipedia as a credible source and developed a tendency to disapprove it as a primary source of information. In the conference, they explained that there are actually back up proves of who the author is and what he added to the information, bringing more credibility to the source. As well, now you need to become an approved user to be able to edit in Wikipedia. They told us that also if you get to add too much fake information, people can flag you and you can get to a point were you are blocked from editing the content in Wikipedia. There was also someone who had edited a page in Wikipedia and showed us where her user appeared and what she had edited. A lady was saying that there might be content that even though it is backed up by an author’s biography website or some sort of website containing the content he added up; there might a probability that what he added is fake and could have make up that information in the website just to add content to Wikipedia. We saw a video containing how to edit Wikipedia and how people really use this tool to spread the information they know and contribute to the digital information world. This is the audio file that contains the conference, it is not that great the audio but it can provide a further insight of what they talked in the session. Thanks.

Wikis and Wikithons

Transcribed by: Hope Gillespie

• There is a widespread perception that Wikipedia isn’t a “trustworthy” source
  • But crowdsourcing is helping
• Initially, anyone could edit
  • They took on a group of editors
  • NOT primary source driven,  must be able to cite source of information
• Wiki ambassadors
  • Can train students to edit pages
• Editing
  • If the format exists already, It’s easy to follow
• VisualEditor
  • Gives you the ability to edit, but you must have an account and you can only work on one at a time
• Wikipedia Tutorial
  • Shows you how to edit
  • en.wikipedia.org/wiki/wikipediatraining
• Adam Lewis ( DC Wiki Ambassador)
• Sandboxes
  • Not meant to be permanent, low risk

Transcribed by: Rachel Cousins

• Happy hours for writing letters “write to your happy hour”
• NEH.gov website resources
  • Breakdown of federal funding by state
  • Information of the history of the endowment
• The NEH was at its peak under Nixon’s administration
• The biggest recipients of federal funding are not states you would expect (Vermont, Alaska)
• When lobbying for federal funding it is important to go into a breakdown of programs that would benefit
• National Humanities Alliance
• We need more innovative curriculums that teach problem solving to students of the humanities
• How do you highlight what goes away if you take away national humanities funding?
  • The impact on society
• Using NEH grants to match donors to incentivize them to donate
• Documentary film is having difficulty under the competition of other digital sources for funding
• How do you know whether to trust the information presented in a documentary
  • NEH approval on documentary films provides reliability because of the peer review process
  • Also applies to websites
• The NEH has to be open with their practices to the public because they are funded by taxpayer dollars in a way private foundations don’t have to be
• The National Humanities Alliance
  • They bring people from organizations all around the country to speak to their representatives on the Hill to talk about the importance of their organizations

Building History Databases: What’s Overkill?

Transcribed by: Sydney Thatcher

• US and Mexican travelers 1846 across border
• More quantitative information then expected
  • Ship manifests- which includes some data such as names of people and where they came from
• Historians build these data bases for their own use to organize personal data or is it a way to also share the date with other researchers
• Hard to maintain an open access database with such information
• There was a guy in the New York times who made a Google sheet and anyone could see
  • Access and Filemaker you merely see a page at a time
  • Excel allows you to see 50 entries at the same time
  • Google sheets is also good so that multiple people can collaborate in one place
  • Quantifying Kissinger- an example of how excel can have visualizations
  • Mapping, visualizations, and social network analysis
• Gephi- is a plug in for visualization
  • Geolayout- applies latitude and longitude
• Gene Bower- Theory in DH, the relations you build into a database is how you can get the information out of your database
• Hard to determine if simple data that can be held in an excel sheet can answer larger questions about the history of the time
• Create multiple sheets for different information on excel
• Heuristnetwork.org– possible in between source between an excel sheet and a database
  • Put in your info and how you want them to connect
• Sequal- to be able to link multiple ships and people together
• Openrefine.org – allows you to clean up messy data such as in an excel sheet
• Carto.org
  • Robust mapping tool, which also has a timeline feature
• Quantifying Kissinger is a good source for ideas of different kinds of visualizations that could be used with substantial excel skills
• Node excel- add excel sheets and play with them
  • As Diana Cline has used
• Paledio- is another source for visual constructions
• Lincoln Mullin- statistical analysis and visual analysis
• Introtodh2016.web.unc.ed/workshops/mapping
  • Has some examples of mapping sources
• Neat line
  • Presentation, carto, D3- are more researching tools
• D3- is a java script system but can allow you to put in research the way you want to see it

Building History Databases: What’s Overkill?

• Looking at travelers between Mexico and US pre 1846
  • Passenger manifests used after 1920, which is helpful
    • Organizing with excel with criteria
• How do you organize this information?
  • Do you want to simply organize your data or do you want to share it?
    • Washington Post used Google Sheets to track popular votes
    • Access vs. Filemaker Pro vs. Excel
      • Google sheets makes it easier to communicate information with other people and it can be exported as an Excel sheet
      • Excel can also be used in social network analysis, GEPHI (plugin called Geo Layout) for visualization
        • IE: t.co/idasYmtWJq ( Quantifying Kissenger)
• How you construct the database dictates what kind of questions you can answer
  • Think about building in the right way to see patterns
  • Is simple data ok for answering these types of patterning questions?
    • Visualization tools can be super helpful
      • But perhaps use separate spread sheets?
• What is a database?
  • Data dump?
  • Organized Data dump, which can be used to see relationships?
• hueristnetwork.org
  • Very robust resource
  • Allows you to organize your date and export as CSV
  • Nonprofit open source program
• Sequel
  • Allows you to create separate tables for specific criteria and combines them
• OpenRefine
  • Cleans up your messy data, like spelling differences
• Carto.org
  • Mapping tools, allows you to mess with CSS
  • Gives you a sense of changing patterns over time
• Node Excel
  • Social Networking Analysis
  • Also, Palladio from Stanford for a less intense analysis
• introtodh2016.web.unc.edu/workshops/mapping
  • For comparative mappings
• Omeka and Neatline
  • More web-publishing than researching