I’m very much looking forward to THATCamp PMT this Saturday. I’m particularly enthused to hear what other folks are doing with social media, especially how they’re measuring success with social media integration.

I use a class blogs, we integrate some social media, and also use a lot of other current  blogs (i09, Jezebel, The Atlantic, NRO, various tumblrs, etc), as well as Skype interviews. This Fall, I’m ramping up my digital work by scheduling Twitterviews, moving 80% of student response to a blog in order to generate class discussion, and encouraging students to dissolve the separation remaining in their minds between “fun” stuff like Instagram, Pinterest, FB, Mashable, and Twitter and their “serious” work in class and school.

For my “Hip Hop, Gender, and Sexuality” class this fall, all students will have to have a SoundCloud and Spotify account, we’ll probably also develop a class hashtag for Twitter, and I’d like out blog to be robust (critical and creative responses, pics or vid of all art work go on it). I’m keen to have an archive for all the cool work that happens inside and outside of class. We’re also going to use Tahir Hemphill’s amazing The Hip-Hop Word Archive (I’m going to start contributing to the archive’s word count this summer).

Cheers!

SPS

@shanteparadigm

I know very little about things like text and data mining and would like to gain some skills in that area.

THATCamps promote themselves as “Unconferences,” which is to say that they are defined less by what they are, and more by what they are not. We are coming together to engage both in a set of practices that are celebrated for their spontaneity and lack of pretense as well as for the conversations and idea that they generate. Put another way, disassembling a conventional practice, the academic conference, makes space for (and perhaps can be said to cause) something else to be produced.

In a recent blog post, Mark Sample makes the provocative claim that “The Deformed Humanities . . . will prove to be the most vibrant and generative of all the many strands of the humanities. It is a legitimate mode of scholarship, a legitimate mode of doing and knowing. Precisely because it relies on undoing and unknowing.” I’m interested in this practice of deformation/deformance/deforming and therefore propose a session that considers the practice more fully, or perhaps unconsiders it, since we are unconferencing.

What might these Deformed Humanities look like in practice both pedagogically and critically. If we accept the premise that “deforming” can be productive, what could or would be produced? Practices? Insights? Something else entirely?

Lately I’ve been reading and thinking about APIs as a metaphor for library services. It’s useful for thinking about (1) the library’s role in facilitating a culture of remix and reuse and (2) the library’s place as a component in a distributed network architecture. I think a brainstorming session to concretize the metaphor by articulating some GET, PUT/POST, and DELETE requests to libraries as a server or from libraries as a client would be really helpful for articulating the values of our profession.

In the latest post to Library Journal’s Peer to Peer Review blog, Barbara Fister writes about the library as the people’s API. In it she takes issue with Steve Coffman’s article The Decline and Fall of the Library Empire by building on Hugh Rundle’s post about libraries as software. She argues that the library is not only “software” rather than “hardware” but more specifically non-proprietary software:

The library is not the Apple Store, or Amazon. At its best it’s open source software, an adaptable API for knowledge and culture, letting communities engage with ideas through rewriting, forking, and reinvention. In the People’s Library, the people are not customers or assets. They are the library, and the library is theirs.

Fister isn’t the only one to construct an elaborate API metaphor. In response to a tweet by James Gleick suggesting that Occupy Wall Street could be seen as an API, Alexis Madrigal wrote a full-length feature for The Atlantic called A Guide to the Occupy Wall Street API, Or Why the Nerdiest Way to Think About OWS Is So Useful:

A key feature of APIs is that they require structure on both sides of a request. You can’t just ask Twitter’s API for some tweets. You must ask in a specific way and you will receive a discrete package of 20 statuses. We decided that breaking down the inputs and outputs of Occupy Wall Street in this way might actually be useful. The metaphor turns out to reveal a useful way of thinking about the components that have gone into the protest.

Basically, Madrigal defined a lot of GET, PUT, and DELETE requests for the #OWS movement. I’d love to remix the metaphor for libraries. What would be the GET, PUT/POST, and DELETE requests to or from libraries, if we think of them as a component in a distributed network architecture?