On THATCampVA and Augmented Notes

On Friday and Saturday, I attended THATCampVA held here at the Scholars' Lab in Charlottesville, VA.  It was a wonderful experience!  In case anyone is unfamiliar with the idea of THATCamp, it's an "unconference," where people who share an interest in digital humanities come together to share ideas and projects in an informal setting.  Rather than conventional conferences, where people read papers and attend pre-scheduled panels, at an unconference, people pitch panel ideas both online in the days before the event and in person, and the panels are then scheduled on the spot.  The panels often have someone leading the discussion or demonstrating a tool, but the majority of the time focuses on everyone sharing their ideas:  essentially, everyone is a panelist.  I attended a very informative session on digital pedagogy on Saturday morning in which we discussed such tools as NowComment, class wikis, class-wide digital projects, and helping undergraduates cultivate their digital presence.  At another great session, we learned to make twitterbots, and I created my own based on one designed by Wayne Graham.  During lunch, we all heard some #dorkshorts, in which attendees have three minutes to demonstrate a digital project.  We heard fascinating presentations on the new design and features of the Collective Biographies of Women project and QLTP, a project that helps people create editions of Latin texts.  I also presented on "Augmented Notes" and "Songs of the Victorians" during this time, and got some great feedback.  In the afternoon I attended a really interesting panel on tools to analyze audio.  THATCampVA was wonderful, and I'm glad I was able to participate.

In other digital news, the code for "Augmented Notes" is now up on GitHub. If you want to look at how it works and to play with it, you can fork it and make any changes you want!  Also, I added a new feature:  on the "Box Drawing" page, users can now click on the "Align Boxes" to make all boxes the same height.  This should help produce a cleaner archive page for those who wish their boxes to be uniform.