Tuesday, January 8, 2013

DHWI: Humanities Programming: Day 1

The Digital Humanities Winter Institute

(previous post)


Day One

We began with introductions.  Over half the class are graduate students.  Some librarians in the mix.

Our instructors are Wayne Graham and Jeremy Boggs of  the Scholar's Lab at the University of Virginia.

We began learning basic commands at the terminal prompt using Mac computers: cd for change directory, mkdir for make a directory, etc. This took me back to the early 1990's when I was learning how to use DOS.

We moved on to basic HTML and spent most of the time with CSS.  We learned how to put together elementary scripts and Jeremy and Wayne showed us some shortcuts, what to use and more importantly, what functions to avoid.

Keynote lecture by Sebastian Chan, Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City.  Dr. Chan talked about rethinking  museum collections from passive experiences to interactive, mobile opportunities.  He used the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia as an example. Some thoughts:

  • Porous border between the museum and myth, wonder, imagination
  • The museum without walls
  • Museum as data provider
  • Our authority is entirely contextual
  • Tensions between:
    • Exhibitions vs collections
    • Families vs Scholars
    • Galleries vs platforms and media
  • Museum metadata exchanges build collections more quickly
  • Seeking: 
    • Abundance
    • Shareable
    • Connected
    • Portable
    • Visibly curated
The Cooper-Hewitt is undergoing renovation so Dr. Chan sees "renovation as an opportunity to innovate."

Useful Tools and Web Sites encountered over Day One

Data Management Plan Tool
Bootstrap: new tool!
Sass--Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets:
Sublime Text 2.0: great text editor:  
Font Squirrel:  
Google Web Fonts:
The League of Moveable Type: (Open source typography)  

 

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