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I’ve been playing with smart-phone enabled augmented reality and museum collections in some of my classes. I’d be interested in talking with folks about this work, showing how we use various free software tools to do it and the outcomes (my class’s augmented reality pop up museum catalogue). I’m wondering how this tech could be used more generally as part of exhibition design, and in particular, in conjunction with accessibility considerations. Maybe we could try brainstorming some options, thinking through what an ideal use-case might look like?

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I serve as a resource for the digital humanities center in my library and have been asked to facilitate a brown bag discussion on accessibility and the digital humanities. I’m also a member of a THATCamp organizing committee and am thinking of ways to approach accessibility-related topics if we offer workshops in addition to sessions proposed on the spot. As I’ve started putting together ideas, it has occurred to me that others might also have a need for essential information on DH and accessibility.

This session might be a discussion or the beginning of a product: a pitch, a 7 Things You Should Know About-type publication, a blog post, a compilation of existing resources, a lesson plan for workshops to be offered in our own organizations and classrooms or at other THATCamps, etc..

Would others interested in teaching and training like to talk about strategies for broadening colleagues/students understanding of disability, universal design, and accessible DH?

Note: This discussion might best be facilitated by another attendee. I’m attending virtually and, while I serve as a resource for the digital humanities center in my library, I’m not a digital humanist/digital humanities practitioner, so others probably have a better understanding of existing resources and the needs of the community.

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I’m interested in talking about accessible tools for DH work: how to use digital tools more accessibly and exploring more accessible alternatives.

If anyone else is interested in exploring this during THATCamp Accessibility, I’m thinking we could go about it in a number of different ways. For example, we could talk informally and make notes, or, if we want to make it more of a working session, we could create a resource for accessible DH work.

If we go the “make something” route, perhaps we could create a list of (ten?) frequently-used tools and compile information about their accessibility along with suggestions on how to use them in a more accessible manner and/or more accessible alternatives. Or, we could identify a set of DH-related needs/tasks (data visualization, dynamic mapping, etc.) and brainstorm accessible tools and methods for meeting these needs/accomplishing these tasks. We could generate our own lists of tools and tasks or draw on an existing resource like Bamboo DiRT or the Research + Tools section of the CHNM website.

A couple of caveats: This discussion might best be facilitated by another attendee. I’m attending virtually and, while I serve as a resource for the digital humanities center in my library, I’m not a digital humanist/digital humanities practitioner, so others probably have a better understanding of existing resources and the needs of the community.

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Some time ago I became involved with a primitive game called the Geowiki game that was being studied by Clair Dormann a postdoctoral fellow in the HOT Lab at Carleton. The work was being done in conjuction with the Cybercartography initiative.

The game involved sequentially picking three commands, one from each of three categories. The participants would then record their observations made while carrying out the commands. For example, groups of students from a class would go to some location [say the Market] and then pick their first command [something like “Find someone wearing a hat.”]. Once such a person was found, the group would pick a second command [something like “Follow the person until they go indoors.”]. Once the group was at the spot where the hat-wearing person went indoors, they would pick the last command [something like “Identify all the trees you can see.” or “Ask the first person that walks by about the history of this spot.”] The group’s observations where recorded in a wiki and they became entries in an atlas building exercise: the first two commands randomizing location and the last command identifying the info to be collected.

I have a class this term that is undertaking what I think is a similar activity, only this time in the blogosphere. They are finding content by choosing what sites to visit in a series of steps. The observation at each step is a word cloud of the site they have reached. I’m interested in how their “content map” compares to what various search engines reveal; the characteristics of the search paths; etc. This involves visualizing content and extracting content from word clouds.

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Hi everyone,

The schedule for a THATCamp of course is designed bottom up, emerging from the interests of its participants. (If you’re signed up, please do suggest some ideas by logging into the site and posting!)

But, we do have to have a bit of a framework for the day. This is what I’m proposing:

8-am – 8.30 – arrival, breakfast snack, getting settled.

8.30 – 9.45 – opening remarks, setting the schedule

10.00 – 11.15: Session 1 (Break out space in the Residence Commons Classrooms)

11.30 – 12.45: Session 2

12:45 – 2: Lunch upstairs at the Fresh Food Company (3rd Floor)

2.00 – 3.15: Session 3

3.30 – 4.45: Session 4

5.00 – 6 ish (or less) Closing remarks, chatting, eventual removal to the Graduate Student Pub.

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Logo for IMS and CUES

We are pleased to acknowledge the support and aid that our very own Instructional Media Services and the Carleton University Event Support groups have provided for THATCamp. IMS and CUES supports faculty and staff in the delivery of teaching and the use of classroom tech support. Through their generous support, we are able to equip the breakout rooms and the conference room with the necessary digital technology for Saturday’s event. Thank you, Patrick Lyons & the IMS team!

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Good Evening fellow and fella un conference goers,
I don’t necessarily have my own session to propose, but wish to add some thoughts based on my own experiences and work, as well as on the thoughts already expressed through this forum.
As a grad student researching and working in an online environment I have found it both frustrating and rewarding to use online resources and to be increasingly aware of those in hard copy elsewhere (physically elsewhere). The ideas presented by Peter about the plethora of resources available online is what intimidates me. With the immediacy of many resources I as a researcher often feel as though this almost forces me to cover all my bases and then some.
For example, in reading various newspapers online to extract information for a current school project, I realized that I did not have online access to the closest newspaper (geographically) to the event in question. I did not even have access to it in person at either of two major universities. In my undergraduate years I may have chosen to disregard this source and simply rely on the others due to the simplicity of the action.
Now, however I feel as though I will potentially be criticized for not including this source in my research because it is findable thanks to the power of the internet. Interestingly enough I ended up relying on a tried and true method, ordering microfilm through RACER (interlibrary loan system) and then reading it in a construction site (i.e. our university library). I am very happy to have read this particular source and to have the information which it provided for my project. Had I not read this source my project would be very different.
All of that said, the wide range of available materials is, I guess, keeping us researchers on our toes, forcing us to either stick to a small number of sources (and justify it) or cover all our bases (as much as possible) by taking advantage of the resources available to us.
So in the end, this has led to good, but I welcome your thoughts on the subject all the same.
Best,
Rebecca

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I’m dreadful at writing headlines, but that one, I think, captures the gist of it. We’ve now closed registration for physical attendance at Carleton on October 27th. However, virtual participation via our accessible online conference system will be available to all. We’ll be posting the exact links and access codes later this week. If you wish to participate virtually, but require ASL or real-time captioning, please contact the organizers before Wednesday.

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Hi everyone!

We’ve got a great group of campers signed up for THATCamp Accessibility. Some session proposals are starting to come in – if you’ve got an idea of what it is you’d like to talk about or explore, please post it, no matter how nebulous! I’m hoping that there will be a session on getting started with Accessibility and Digital Technology. As one of your hosts, it has been an enormous learning curve for me personally to consider all of the various issues that come with trying to make an event fully accessible. Already, I realize just how un-accessible much of my teaching has been. Do I make pdfs that are readable by screen readers? Why don’t I record my lectures? The READ Institute has been developing a crowd-sourcing approach to screen-captioning that I hope to see demonstrated on Saturday the 27th too.

Tomorrow evening, we’ll close the registration for physical attendance of THATCamp – we have badges to make, rooms to set up, food to order, webcams and microphones to test. If you can’t make it to Carleton on the day, don’t despair! On Monday, I’ll be posting instructions on how to use our fully accessible conferencing system (provided for us courtesy of Citizens with Disabilities Ontario, to whom we are enormously grateful).  On Saturday, if you follow the instructions, you can beam into one of our four ‘rooms’ to follow along, participate, and contribute to THATCamp!

What’s the difference between an ‘accessible’ conference system and say, a combination of a Google+ hangout or live blogging/tweeting etc (as THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy is trying out)? Our system is designed to work with screen readers etc – it allows for real-time sharing of documents within that kind of environment. It will also keep an audio recording of each session (from which we hope to extract a transcript using our crowdsourcing platform, eventually). On Saturday morning, we’ll try to develop our schedule with contributions both from people on the floor and in the aether. Will it work? Well, whether it does or not, we’ll certainly learn an awful lot about how to design and run these sorts of blended events, opening up participation well beyond our walls.

Won’t you join us?

Shawn

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My post is written in dialogue with Peter Holdsworth’s latest post, which I read as being focused on the methodological questions around the increasing accessibility of data for the historian. I hope that some of us might wish also to discuss what specific practical tools allow us to deal with the avalanche of material that is now at our fingertips. Primary sources are increasingly accessible online (both as image and text files). Googlebooks, scholarly databases (e.g. Project Muse, Persée) or National Libraries (e.g. Bibliothèque Nationale de France) multiply the secondary literature now searchable by a few keystrokes. But how to make sense of the thousands of hits that Googlebooks offers us, even after we discount the many false positives? How do we keep track of so much information? How do we avoid reduplicating our effort when rechecking databases that keep expanding significantly every six months? How do we display this information to readers? While text (articles, books) remains the endpoint of scholarly production, are there other ways that we can present our evidence and allow our datasets to be used by others? Most importantly, however, for this proposed discussion, is what are the tools available now to historians, to pursue this kind of work.

My interest in these questions arise from my work establishing a scholarly edition of a twelfth-century chronicle which –despite relative obscurity– has nonetheless garnered limited but sustained interest for several centuries. While it is relatively straight forward to keep track of where and when scholars wrote about the chronicle using bibliographic software like Endnote (and establishing who cited who, by using a bit more brainpower), the task becomes much more difficult when trying to account for other factors. To judge whether a stupendously inaccurate seventeenth-century scholar actually saw a copy of the chronicle, necessitates plotting the locations over time of the fourteen now extant manuscripts as well as the nine centuries of movements by scholars themselves. What digital tools, I ask, allow scholars to keep track and arrange this sort of information (temporally, spatially)? And  what tools exist to make sense of the information, so that it has something relevant to say to historians? And after conclusions are reached, what tools can we used to display this web of information to an audience?

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Hi everyone,

I would be interested in exploring how the recent digitization of traditional archival sources can be used to help expand methodologies in multiple fields.  Increasingly, organizations including national archives, the Internet Archive, Google, and more local groups, such as the Niagara Historical Society, are involved in this digitization process.  Many documents previously confined to the physical archive are now more readily accessible to scholars, although there can be issues of intellectual property rights, particularly in relationship to Google’s involvement. How can this contribute to scholarship and what does it imply for methods in history and other fields. Does this increased digital accessibility allow scholars of the humanities and social sciences to find new directions and angles by using digital tools and methodologies (e.g. text mining and social network theory) and does it also encourage them to use sources from other fields? Can this lead to a blurring of the divide between the social sciences and the humanities in a way that the analysis and conclusions still stand up to the assumptions of knowledge and standards of the respective fields?  This is of particular interest to me as my M.A. work on the commemoration of the War of 1812 deals with such questions.  More broadly, it also has the potential to help multiple fields interrogate previously held conclusions from their disciplines.

This work by Peter W Holdsworth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Hi everyone,

I wonder if there is a discussion to be had concerning intellectual property law and accessibility. The thought is prompted by a tweet I saw last night, concerning this article: “Guy Creates Open Source Free Font for Dyslexic Readers; Gets Copyright Cease and Desist Threat”. (More information about the font may be obtained here.) I suppose the issue is that there is a tension between trying to profit from providing services and digital items that meet accessibility needs, and broader movements in open access and creative commons type modifications and adaptations. I have no grounding in legal issues whatsoever, but perhaps there might be folks wishing to explore this terrain? What guidelines exist to help creators avoid falling into legal IP trouble?

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Tom Pokinko has designed a fully accessible pdf poster promoting THATCamp Accessibility. Most pdfs that you might come across are filled with hidden elements that can trip up a screen reader device. Tom took our promotional materials, and redesigned everything so that they can be read by a screen reader without let or hinderance! Thank you Tom!

THAT Camp Accessibility Poster Accessible PDF

THAT Camp Poster for Print

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Logo for the BrailleSC project

Profhacker today has an excellent post on accessibility issues and the digital humanities. It is an excellent post and worth a read by all who are interested in the intersection of DH and accessibility. I’m very intrigued, also, by the new project they announce, which is in partnership with WordPress

For the 2012-2013 academic year, the BrailleSC project and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities have partnered to extend WordPress–a system recommended frequently here at ProfHacker–to the blind and low-vision communities by creating a plug-in that will allow anyone to translate WordPress content to braille text. We’ve titled our efforts “Making the Digital Humanities More Open.”

Given the importance of WordPress as a platform for all kinds of projects, this is extremely exciting. At the BrailleSC project page, there’s a bit more information, explaining how the system will be built on the Anthologize plugin for WordPress. Anthologize has its genesis in One Week|One Tool, a very THATCamp-ish experiment.

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Citizens With Disabilities Ontario Logo

We are pleased to announce that we are partnering with Citizens With Disabilites – Ontario to provide the accessible online conferencing system on October 27th. CWDO “actively promotes the rights, freedoms and responsibilities of persons with disabilities through community development, social action, and member support and referral.  [Their] primary activity is public education and awareness about the social and physical barriers that prevent the full inclusion of persons with disabilities in Ontario.”

We are enormously grateful to CWDO for making their system available. The ‘IDEAL Conference‘ system “provides the most accessible conferencing and collaboration experience available, anywhere in the world.  No new hardware is needed. All you need is a PC with a soundcard, headset, and a high-speed connection to the Internet; and you can hold fully accessible, 508 compliant online conferences from your desktop, from anywhere in the world, right now!”

Details about how to access the system will be provided to those who have indicated in their registration that they wish to attend online, closer to the date.

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It’s an Android app that uses OpenStreetmap format data. So basically an off line electronic map with routing etc.

In theory it can use accessibility plug ins.

Is any one aware of such a plug in?

Thanks John

Update 2012/9/17
Apparently a blind person has written a plug in for the blind and is using it but no documentation is available at the moment.

Cheerio John

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‘New York’s Smelliest Block’, Kate McLean

Recently on Twitter I saw links to sensory maps by Kate McLean. These put me in mind of Kevin Lynch’s work in the 1960s on the ways urbanites imagined their spaces. McLean’s work is beautiful, and draws attention to alternative ways of understanding the way spaces work. She’s also done work on tactile mapping, representing historic or natural spaces through touch.

Mapping Paris by Smell

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Just seen on Twitter:

Interactive stories motivate dyslexics to read more than the same story non-interactively. #IVA2012 update on this: ow.ly/1OvnW9

— Noah Wardrip-Fruin (@noahwf) September 14, 2012

Abstract: To overcome their substantial barriers to fluent reading, students with dyslexia need to be enticed to read more, and to read texts with carefully controlled lexical content. We describe and show examples from a prototype of the new R2aft story assembly engine, which generates an interactive text that has A) variable plot and B) lexical content which is individualized
by decoding pattern.

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The Technology Quarterly of The Economist has a thought provoking article about the legal, ethical, and moral implications of the latest advances in what could be called ‘cyborg’ systems. Consider this quote by Hugh Herr:

[Herr] described disabilities as conditions that persist “because of poor technology” and made the bold claim that during the 21st century disability would be largely eliminated. What gave his words added force was that half way through his speech, after ten minutes of strolling around the stage, he unexpectedly pulled up his trouser legs to reveal his bionic legs, and then danced a little jig. In future, he suggested, people might choose to replace an arthritic, painful limb with a fully functional robotic one. “Why wouldn’t you replace it?” he asked. “We’re going to see a lot of unusual situations like that.”

In a world like that, the Humanities are only going to become more important, not less, when what it means to be human will be challenged like never before. Perhaps this is something we should be discussing at THATCamp?

Illustration from ‘You, Robot?’, Technology Quarterly Q3 2012, The Economist, by Belle Mellor.

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We came across the ‘Game Accessibility Guidelines‘ website this afternoon. Like a good video game, it has recommendations for basic, intermediate, and advanced actions one can do to ensure the accessibility of a video game.  The site is ” a collaborative effort between a group of studios, specialists and academics, to produce a straightforward developer friendly reference for ways to avoid unncessarily excluding players, and ensure that games are just as fun for as wide a range of people as possible.”

If you’re designing a game, have you thought about accessibility? What about these guidelines? Are they feasible? What kinds of issues do they bring up? There’s a vibrant game design community here in Ottawa: are those folks thinking about accessibility?

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“Awesome Doodle”, cc Evan Hahn

Registration is now open. We will close registration on September 21st. Registration closes on October 20th! We ask, as you fill in the registration form, that you please indicate if you have any particular needs that we can help to accommodate. We will do our best to meet them, as we are committed to making every reasonable accommodation we can.

Please pass the word, and we hope to see you in October!

Once your registration has been accepted, we will give you author privileges on this site so that you can propose ideas to your fellow campers, comment on each others’ ideas, and generally, get the conversation going before the date. In the meantime, feel free to use the ‘All Our Ideas’ poll to brainstorm.

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THATCamp Accessibility is pleased to be partnered with Carleton University’s new ‘READ Initiative‘. READ stands for ‘Research, Education, Accessibility, and Design’, and is under the direction of the Dean of Engineering. From their place-holder website,

celebrate and cultivate Carleton’s expertise in the fields of disability and accessibility. The READ Initiative will build on Carleton’s strong reputation as a leader in this area and will:

• Increase Carleton University’s profile as a leader in accessibility research and design.
• Support increased program emphasis in all faculties in areas of disability, universal design, accessibility and inclusion.
• Support research and projects on accessibility in all disciplines and promote connections among varying approaches with an emphasis on solutions to issues affecting persons with disabilities
• Engage students and faculty at Carleton with people with disabilities and the broader community locally, nationally and globally, offering interactive learning opportunities for students and support and solutions to the community.

The Initiative has great potential to provide experiential learning opportunities to students, both undergraduate and graduate, giving them greater access to academic and community expertise. At the same time, individuals with disabilities and the local, national and international organizations in the disability field will benefit from the research and participation of Carleton students and faculty in the development of new frameworks and solutions to the pressing cultural and practical issues they face every day.

We are enormously grateful for the energy, enthusiasm, and wisdom of Dean Mellway and Dale Stevenson in helping to plan and carry out THATCamp Accessibility!