Warwick Week Seven
Proposed Agenda: 4-6 pm, Tuesday, May 1st, 2018
(1) Reviewing work from last few weeks and trying some new material
(2) Opportunities to work with MarineLives and/or the Signs of Literacy community over the summer
- Assisting with organisation of a MarineLives Virtual Summer School in July, and repeated in August
I am musing about running a Virtual Summer School in July 2018, with a possible repeat in August 2018. This would be organised by Chronoscopic Education & MarineLives, with the potential for involvement by other organisations as faculty or supporters.
MarineLives has run successful summer events before, ranging from Summer Transcription programmes in 2013, 2014 and 2015, to a Digital PopUp Lab in 2016 (with a focus on exploiting the technical features of our semantic media wiki).
The Virtual Summer School idea is at an early stage and if I am going to go with it I would want to decide by end May at the latest. I don't require funding (the cash cost is miniscule - simply creating a Google Group and using our existing ZOOM MEETINGS capability, plus some organisational and faculty time. We would make no charge to participants. Recruitment of participants would be through the MarineLives Twitter account, and through the Twitter accounts of any supporting organisations.
Depending on how many people show an interest, I might put in place a group of three or four volunteer facilitators or moderators, who would work with participants AFTER video calls to answer technical questions and to promote discussion. Twenty participants would be a good target - I would propose to target participants in the GLAM sector, plus PhD candidates and Early Career Scholars working in history (and corpus linguistics).
The trick to these things is to create a bit of buzz AND to keep the time commitment manageable, so that participants are not put off, and to allow for varying degrees of subsequent engagement. We find such programmes a great way to build community spirit and to generate future volunteers for our activities. Hence I am proposing the minimum commitment to be attending four one hour video calls spread out over four weeks in July (with possible repeat for a second batch or participants in August). For those interested, there would be follow-on documents to read and practice exercises, made available on a private Virtual Summer School Google Group, which I (and possibly others) would moderate, facilitate and support.
- Creating a tagged dataset for a Kaggle Research Competition in late 2018
- Working on a conceptual framework for an Early Modern Maritime Gazetteer, in collaboration with MarineLives, Pelagios/Recogito and the World-Historical Gazetteer project
(3) Feedback to Ben and Colin on the Warwick Transcription Programme
- What did we get right?
- What could we do better?
- Would you recommend the programme to friends, and if so, why?
- Should this programme be run again in 2019/20?
(4) And finally, a big thanks to you all
