This post moves away from the content of my projects and to new tools and methods I’m exploring at the NEH Doing DH Institute. The first week has been intense and overwhelming.
So far, I’m impressed with WordPress as a devise for putting information about my work on the web. I think I can use this for research communication while I am still researching. I should say this is a new concept for me. Beyond conference paper presentations the idea of communicating unfinished research to a wide and unknown audience is new.
Omeka seems like a useful tool for evaluating and presenting the visual components of my work.
I’ve already worked quite a bit with iMovie, but I’m excited about using it this fall to make Podcasts for my online U.S. survey course. This tool will allow me to continue lecturing in a robust fashion without the benefit of the lecture hall. See this article from The Atlantic, which makes an argument about why we should not give up on the lecture: http://m.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/11/dont-give-up-on-the-lecture/281624/
I’ve played less with Scalar, but I think it will allow the complex ideas with which historians work to be transferred to the web.
ThingLink is a tool that I will use to annotate images that I’m using on several different platforms.
That’s it for now, but stay tuned. I’m ready to learn about visualization today, GIS on Monday, and text and data mining on Tuesday.