Jessica Backus – THATCamp College Art Association (CAA) 2015

Doing these activities now! Teaching with Digital Tools

Jessica Backus — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 16:08:22 +0000

Let’s work off of this doc to share activities

docs.google.com/document/d/1qLMhJpD87FwSHf26Hy1Ddc0GCHFGcqLAaVZYkKoFHhg/edit

Session Proposal: What are online resources good for?

Jessica Backus — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 19:55:28 +0000

This is an this as an open discussion of how users make use of (or don’t make use of) online art resources. What are online art resources good for? Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of online content providers, tools and resources for research and learning. Specifically: how do people use public online platforms for artwork search? What audiences do these platforms serve now, and why do we need them? What are the key challenges facing engagement with art online, and what do these emergent platforms need to grapple with in terms of accessibility, content, or structure?

Ellen Tani (Standford graduate student/Artsy) and I (also of Artsy) are proposing this and a few other sessions together. For this session, we’d love to interact with others involved in artwork search (in whatever capacity).

Workshop session proposal: Controlled Vocabularies and their applications in the classroom

Jessica Backus — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 19:54:50 +0000

How might the day-to-day considerations of creating and maintaining a controlled vocabulary translate to activities in the classroom? What might students learn from such exercises? On The Art Genome Project, we have a few activities we use in developing our own controlled vocabulary that we can share with participants, and would be interested to workshop other ideas.

Ellen Tani (Stanford graduate student/Art History instructor/Artsy Contributor) and I (also of Artsy) are proposing this session together.

Discussion Session Proposal: Digital Humanities: Imagining a Worst Case Scenario

Jessica Backus — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 19:52:57 +0000

It is something of a mantra in business that one should imagine the worst case scenario and prepare for it from both a logistical and an ethical standpoint. What if we apply this thought experiment to the digital humanities? Justified or not, digital humanities projects elicit fear and criticism from within and without the discipline — various working groups have warned of the dangers of siloed information and the neglect of physical archives, fellow humanities colleagues often see in the methods of DH an end to the narrative mode of history. We propose to anchor our conversation in a case study of one or more digital resources and come away with some clear proposals for avoiding a worst case scenario.

Ellen Tani and I are proposing to lead this session together.