I propose to create an implementation toolkit for social reading.  I’d personally like to create a toolkit for academic libraries, but that’s open to the participants – we can make the toolkit as general or as specific as we need to serve the entire group’s interests.  There are many directions in which this could go, depending on interest.

What does the toolkit look like?  Whatever we want.  If we create one for an academic library, things we might want to include are:  educational objectives and standards, outreach/marketing, resources for software, resources for content, identification of potential collaborators in the academic community, etc.  Non-library students and faculty would be fantastic contributors and collaborators for this type of toolkit.

A projector/desktop set-up would be helpful for this make session, but not required.

In the final paragraph of his essay From Reading to Social Computing, Alan Liu asks,

[W]hat is the differentia specifica of literary social computing? That is, how does engagement with literature or literary communities inflect, extend, or criticize the culturally dominant tools and practices of vernacular social computing?

I would like to turn this question on its head to ask, How might reading in a social-computing environment inflect, extend, or criticize culturally dominant tools and practices for engagement with literature and literary communities?

But I would like to take the discussion a step further, giving it a practical turn: If a platform for social reading is to perform these functions – inflecting, extending, criticizing – what features must it possess? And how might we build them?

For example:

• Small-group discussion – in the classroom, in self-organized readings clubs – is a culturally dominant tool for engagement with literature. Social reading platforms such as CommentPress and Digress.it already operate at some level as implicit critiques of this tool by enabling and encouraging conversations that are broader and more inclusive. But can they also be made to operate so as to extend and inflect what is valuable about small-scale conversation? After all, small-scale conversation is not merely an artifact of technological limitations but a way of focusing discussion among particular people or for particular purposes. There are things we’d like to say to the world about a text, but there are also things we’d like to say to just these people, even if we don’t mind letting the world listen in.
• Speaking to questions. The conference session is a dominant tool for engagement with texts that is often question-centric rather than text-centric. Can we build an online social reading platform that combines – at multiple scales – engagement around a text and engagement around questions?
• Speaking on occasions. The conference itself, or in book form the festschrift, is a way of organizing textual engagement around a particular occasion. The always-on nature of social engagement on the web usefully breaks the occasion model, allowing us to converse whenever we please, but it thereby loses some of the focus that occasions (like particular questions) can provide. Is there a way for social reading platforms to allow both occasion-less and occasion-focused conversation to co-exist? To re-purpose the former (occasionally) for the latter?

THATCamp Western New York 2013 will take place February 18-19, 2013 on the campus of the State University of New York at Geneseo.

Join us for a two-day unconference of workshops and discussions on all forms of social reading, from open annotation (e.g., Candide 2.0, The Open Utopia) to peer-to-peer review (e.g., Planned Obsolescence, Complex TV).

Code for America fellow Eddie Tejeda, the creator of Digress.it and the lead developer of Regulation Room, will be among the participants.

Registration, which pays your way to lunch both days and to a Monday (2/18) evening reception and a t-shirt, is $20.

Who should come to THATCamp Western New York?

THATCamp Western New York is for people interested in social reading as a tool for scholarship, pedagogy, or public engagement.  Anyone is welcome to attend and propose a session.

What is THATCamp?

THATCamp is an unconference — an inexpensive, collaborative gathering in which participants create the agenda. It stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp,” and explores the interactions between technology and humanities teaching and research. Learn more at thatcamp.org.

THATCamp Western New York 2013 is generously funded by an Innovative Instruction Technology Grant from the State University of New York.