It’s been a month since I returned from a trip to South by Southwest Interactive where I was fortunate to be part of a fun panel on “Why Digital Maps Can Reboot Cultural History.” Has it taken me a whole month to recover from four days in Austin? Nope, I’m just lucky enough to have spent the last few weeks being busy with a number of digital humanities (DH) events and projects. Libraries/archives/museums/technology ended up being one of my themes for March, and that’s a theme I can always get behind.

Full scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope on display at SXSW.

For the past few years, there has been a small but strong contingent of library, archives, and museum (LAM) people at SXSW. Along with checking out the newest 3D printers at SXSW Create and visiting the full-scale model of NASA’s Webb Space Telescope, I also had the chance to attend some fantastic panels related to technology and its use in and by cultural institutions. Perhaps one of the most engaging was the “Culture Hack: Libraries and Museums Open For Making” panel with representatives from Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America, CLIR Digital Library Federation, and the Open Knowledge Foundation. I’m very excited for the imminent launch of the Digital Public Library of America on April 18 and intrigued by the possibilities for linking collections in order to support wider usage of current and historical materials.

Beyond the “official” SXSW sessions, I dropped by the ER&L + ProQuest #ideadrop house for more casual conversations with librarians and others interested in the combination of technology and cultural heritage materials. The house was a bit away from downtown Austin, but it was worth the trek for the great discussion on open source tools for cultural institutions. Unexpectedly stumbling upon the delicious food at a Korean/Mexican fusion food truck didn’t hurt either.

That collaboration and sharing of ideas is one of my favorites parts of the LAM and digital humanities culture.  Thankfully, we have an active DH community here in Philly so hearing about new innovations isn’t limited to annual conferences or only reading Twitter announcements. The Greater Philadelphia Digital Humanities Group (PhillyDH for short) partially grew out of THATCamp Philly, an unconference held in Philadelphia each fall that provides individuals with a place to discuss ideas and develop possible collaborations. I’ve been involved in THATCamp Philly for awhile and am happy to see the initiative expanding. Even though PhillyDH is just a few months old, the group has already held a Digital Project Incubator event with a PhillyDH@Penn workshop/conference day planned for June 4 and other workshops and events coming soon. PhillyDH is a decentralized organization (meaning we’re not linked to any particular institution) and anyone is welcome to join.

Other local Philly professional groups are also focusing more on how technology intersects with their work. Continuing with the “March = DH” theme, I gave a presentation at the March meeting of the Delaware Valley Archivists Group on the digital metrics we gather for PhillyHistory.org, the website that provides access to the historic photographs of the Philadelphia City Archives. We’re data geeks here at Azavea so we’ve implemented three different systems for tracking how people use PhillyHistory. That makes for a lot of data, which can be both useful and overwhelming. Evaluation of digital projects and user engagement seems to be a key issue as more organizations explore expanding their online and mobile presence. After we build these amazing digital projects, how do we actually measure whether they are meeting our intended goals? The group had some intriguing questions, and I’m interested to see the best practices and standards that will develop as the DH field wrestles with project evaluation.

Along with a few other DH related things, we ended March and kicked off April with an announcement of our recent Small Business Innovation Research award from the National Science Foundation to develop the Temporal Geocoder, a web-based tool that will enable historians, scholars, the public, and others to assign geographic locations to historical materials. After geocoding thousands of photographs for PhillyHistory.org, I can tell you all about the fun of finding the location of an address that no longer exists (I’m looking at you – portions of E. Noble Street!). With a large spatial component to many DH projects, we’re hoping a temporal geocoder will fit well with the work being done at the New York Public Library, OpenStreetMap, and other organizations around historic locations.

Temporal geocoders, historic digital maps, linked data repositories, and user evaluation metrics are just the start of what I’m finding interesting about DH these days. Gaming, user generated content, and digital storytelling are high on my list of topics to explore next. Perhaps April will need to be another month of digital humanities…

I recently returned from my first trip to South by Southwest Interactive. Everything I had heard about being overwhelmed, excited, surrounded by incredibly smart and interesting people, and exhausted because choosing to haul that laptop around was a really bad idea? All completely true.

Although it’s difficult to distill general themes from a five day conference with over 19,000 registered attendees, my experience seemed to focus over and over again on data (visualizing it, organizing it, crowdsourcing it, opening it up to others) and people (designing for the best user experience, opening technology for public use, creating communities both virtual and physical and both professional and public).

Admittedly, these themes are probably due to how I selected panels. I’m a public historian/project manager/archivist who works primarily on GIS related projects. Data, particularly historic or geographic data, and how to view it are relevant to my work. Working on publicly accessible web-based projects like PhillyHistory.org and Muralfarm.org has also greatly influenced my interest in freeing data for public access and designing the best user experience. Still, I felt that several communities in the technology world are very focused on the idea of how to best use and manage the rapidly proliferating amount of data in a digital world.

Of the many presentations I attended, two really stood out.

Time Traveling: Interfaces for Geotemporal Visualization: Displaying just time based data is easy, as is displaying just geographic data. Displaying the two of them together is often a nightmare that leaves designers and developers looking for the nearest office item to throw against a wall. This panel provided excellent examples of how to handle the geotemporal visualization conundrum, a discussion which is continuing on the Geotemporal Viz blog. Azavea’s work on PhillyHistory and HunchLab faces the issue of time/space quite frequently, and I’ll definitely be reading more on this topic.

The 2011 Open Architecture Challenge: Revisioning Decommissioned Military Facilities: I’ve never been so glad that a session was full (sorry HTML5!). This presentation by Cameron Sinclair, the co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, was inspiring. From a discussion of the Open Architecture Network to camel powered clinics to a design challenge to re-purpose decommissioned military facilities, the presentation provided ample evidence of their desire to “design like you give a damn.” By the end of the session, the audience was on their feet clapping and I was ready to give up public history to move to Haiti and help them rebuild schools.

While I had heard from many people that the conversations, the meet-ups, and the spontaneous lunches and dinners were more useful and enjoyable than the panels, I didn’t quite realize the truth of that statement until day two of SXSW. After the first day, I was on the fence about the conference. Then I went to the Librarians and Technology meet-up and I was sold. It was a great conversation that continued throughout the weekend at various lunches, core conversation sessions, meet-ups, and via Twitter. I’d strongly encourage any future SXSW attendees to use these official and unofficial casual events to meet people doing exciting technological work in specific fields, an opportunity that can be lacking from the overly large sessions and generally overwhelming size of the conference.

Sampling of Libraries, Archives & Museums Mashups, SXSW 2011 from Jon Voss on Vimeo.

I was fortunate enough to speak with Jon Voss, Danielle Plumer, and Michael Edson on a panel entitled Innovating and Developing with Libraries, Archives, and Museums (LAMs). We had a great crowd for a 9:30am session and had an excellent discussion in the Q and A portion on everything from APIs to copyright to public access. I truly feel that the LAM community is facing technology issues head-on and will develop some creative, useful, and educational new innovations in the coming years. What other group would start compiling a list of LAM APIs over lunch in order to keep the conversation going? My slides are available here on Slideshare if you’re interested.

So what did I come back with? Along with a minor case of sleep deprivation and a new found love for blackberry cobbler, I have twenty pages of stream of consciousness notes I’m excited to review and links I hope to explore further. Perhaps most importantly, I’m invigorated by the discussions I had and enthusiastic about the possibilities available as libraries, archives, and museums expand their technology efforts and seek further options for innovative collaborations.