7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 9:15am Welcome and Introductions

9:15am – 10:45am Doing Pedagogy on a Shoestring Budget

Annotation: A Super-charged DH Online Learning Activity
Speaker: Roger Travis, Associate Professor, Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, University of Connecticut

Enlisting a shared document platform like Google Drive to teach students how to take humanist perspectives on primary and secondary texts is as easy as learning to use the "Comment" function. Travis will demonstrate an activity he calls "annotation," in which students both develop and display key humanist skills in criticism and collaboration.

Doing Pedagogy on a Shoestring Budget
Speaker: Rebecca Darling, Asst Dir, Instructional Technology, Wellesley College

This presentation will involve Digital Storytelling using iPads (no additional hardware or software).

10:45am - 11:00am Break

11:00am – 12:30pm Doing Research on a Shoestring Budget
Virtual Hartford: Collaborative Research and Teaching in the Digital Humanities at the University of Connecticut
Speakers:
Kevin Finefrock, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, University of Connecticut
Mary Mahoney, Ph.D. Student, Department of History, University of Connecticut

Virtual Hartford is an interactive digital history website (to be released in Summer 2014) that explores Hartford’s past through a microhistorical lens. By uncovering and retelling Hartford’s dynamic and often hidden histories, it seeks to examine the political, social, cultural, and economic identities within this community as well as residents’ relationships with other communities beyond the city’s boundaries. A pilot project of the University of Connecticut’s Scholars’ Collaborative, the site brings together the work of undergraduate students in the History Department, the School of Fine Arts, and MAGIC (the Map and Geographic Information Center); graduate students and faculty members in the History Department; and numerous archivists and digital humanists across the university and the broader Hartford community. This year’s microhistories revolve around the theme of “Order and Disorder in the City” and range from a 1722 jail riot, a 1766 schoolhouse explosion, and the 1854 steam boiler explosion at Fales & Gray to the use of Hartford’s city parks to teach citizenship in the post World War I city and the race riots of 1967-68. This presentation will highlight the possibilities and challenges of collaborative research and teaching in the digital arts and humanities with a particular emphasis on digital microhistory and its potential for better understanding the histories of urban communities.


Digital Tools on the Cheap: Finding the Right Resources
Speaker: Brandon Hawk, Ph.D. candidate in Medieval Studies, University of Connecticut

How is digital work possible when so many tools are expensive, or need to be built with unavailable funds? With the emergence and proliferation of more open-source tools, digital research without big money becomes more possible and accessible. This presentation features a discussion of how to figure out which types of tools are right for a project, how to find the diamonds in the rough, how to get a hold of them, and how to implement them--all without major funding.

12:30pm – 1:30pm Lunch

1:30pm – 3:00pm Doing Preservation on a Shoestring Budget
Digital Preservation on a Shoestring: Preserving our Cultural Heritage and Scholarship
Speaker: Michael Howser, Digital Scholarship & Data Curation Team Leader, Digital Repository Program Coordinator, Connecticut State Data Center Director, University of Connecticut Libraries

This presentation will highlight best practices and tips for digitally archiving and preserving your digital scholarship and cultural heritage materials. Participants will explore file formats, data structure, and archival vs access derivatives concepts, and options for archiving data.


Big Data, Small Budget: R&D on The Open Data Analytics Initiative (ODAI) in Three Phases
Speakers:
Alan Girelli, Director - Center for Innovation, University of Massachusetts – Boston
Christian deTorres, Instructional Technologist, University of Massachusetts – Boston
Kevin Harris, Lead Software Designer CIEE, University of Massachusetts – Boston

In this presentation we describe two prior and one current phase of the Open Data Analytics Initiative (ODAI) [see http://www.openedudata.org ] . ODAI is designing a learning analytics tool and building a consortium of partners. Through this learning analytics agenda we seek to address the need for quantitative research regarding the impact of specific instructional design models for individual online learners of diverse learning styles and backgrounds. These research questions involve analysis of big data using algorithms and computing power only recently available and require ana analytics “engine” that industry simply has not built. We formed the ODAI team through a university-corporate partnership between the Center for Innovation (CIEE) [housed in UMass Boston’s College of Advancing and Professional Studies], and CollegeMiner,Inc ( a startup database engineering company of Quincy, MA). Keeping costs down has mattered every step of the way. In this presentation, both sides of the partnership will discuss honestly how a low budget has helped us focus our efforts, but also when we’ve been hampered by funds in short supply.


3:00pm End