With one foot firmly in corpus linguistics, Digital History has often been about finding, collecting, collating, manipulating and linking textual information.  However, just as historians have learned to move beyond the text in traditional historical research, so too do we need to move beyond the text in our undergraduate DH instruction. What can we do with digitised images, with our students, beyond merely viewing them.  How can we manipulate or otherwise analyse them with basic software (cloud or downloadable) tools in a way that is both ‘play’ and assists in developing in core learning outcomes.

I propose a “make” session in which we collaborate to great a seminar-ready package of

• Freely accessible historical images
• A basic historical or humanities framework in which to understand the image collection (blurb text!)
• An undergraduate-friendly activity that students can undertake with minimal software or hardware requirements but which encourages active use of the digital environment for understanding material, visual or audio-visual sources.

I would advocate putting it up on Github at the conclusion of the session to allow for re-use and further development via forking.

I would like to propose a gamestorming session to playfully combine technologies and applications, guided by current DH research questions.  The session can start with sharing the (technical and subject-matter) skill-sets, interests and data sources of the participants, then move on to brainstorm ideas, following by the rapid refinement and peer rating of these ideas.

We can use some of these

The outcome will be potentially viable research/development project ideas, which participants could either sign up to for further collaboration post-camp – or just use as personal food for thought.

Over the past year I have been project managing the content workstream of the British Library’s flagship digitisation programme with the Qatar Foundation, now launched and live on a bilingual free-to-use portal at www.qdl.qa.

This service offers a unique resource on the history of the Gulf region, drawing on primary collections at the British Library including the India Office Records, visual arts, digitised sound collections and the maps collections. You can learn more at www.qdl.qa/en/about.

My interest in this session is to riff with some digital tools proposed by the group for enriching the content without any further development to the portal. For example, that might mean:

• Developing learning resources with a tool like Creativist.com
• Drawing on the published contextual articles (see www.qdl.qa/en/articles-from-our-experts) to produce a Prezi.com
• Creating archives of transcriptions and translations of source material (www.qdl.qa/en/search/site/?f%5B0%5D=document_source%3Aarchive_source)
• Creating new collections of key content using a service like Diigo, Pinterest, Evernote or Delicious
• Mapping key pages on a digital maps service
• Extracting data from tables and charts to produce visualisations of issues like the history of slavery or trade
• Constructing bi-lingual dialogues between Arabic and English speakers on key topics on Twitter or elsewhere, using multi-lingual translation services , such as Transfluent.com or www.flitto.com/

Or many other ideas besides. I do hope you’ll join and contribute. Here’s a video to help you decide: