Sessions I attended covered such topics as designing digital humanities/digital history curriculum for undergrads and grads, issues surrounding the conception of large and small scale digital projects, text mining small textual corpora, constructing a series of asynchronous, free online courses for mid-career humanities professionals who want to get digital skills, the limitations of TEI mark-up schemas, particularly in marking non-hierarchical observations or observations that break the hierarchy, and on privacy, education, and data rights as an analogue of academic freedom. And there were many more sessions I was sad to miss, including “All Courseware Sucks,” which was intended to take the courseware discussion beyond simple blackboard bashing, “Who Wants to be a Hacker,” in which Patrick Murray-John walked people through some Javascript coding, “Zotero Hacking,” “Open Peer Review,” which by all accounts witnessed a lively discussion on the limitations of peer review and it’s 1-to-1 adoption in a digital format. … And there was more– sessions of teaching quality collaboration to students, using digital texts in the classroom, Alternative Reality Games, HTML5, geolocation, visualization of text data, hacker ethics in educational settings, OpenStreetMap for historians, and the role of social media in the university and for humanities non-profits.

…I’m at the beginning of a new book project, the first in which my goals have included start to finish digital applications, and I’m thinking through the process of how to integrate the collection of archival materials, the transcription and analysis of manuscripts (in this case 18th c. sex and murder criminal trials), the construction of databases, the curation of research materials online, and the combination of long-form monograph and web-based historical presentation.