2011 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool

I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome welcome everyone (both students and those who are watching remotely) to the inaugural Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool.  The CHI Fieldschool is an outgrowth of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative at Michigan State University, and is intended to introduce students to the tools and techniques required to creatively apply information and computing technologies to cultural heritage materials and questions.

Over the next 5 weeks, students will think, read, discuss, learn, experiment, hack, prototype, build, and deploy.

The the public (those who are purposefully watching the fieldschool or those who wander upon it by chance):

I encourage you to read what we are doing, explore what we are building, and interact with us.  The CHI Fieldschool very much adheres to an open access philosophy.  We encourage constructive comments and stimulating discussion.

To the fieldschool students:

Before we get seriously rolling, you’ve got a (short) to do list:

• Sign up for a Twitter account (if you don’t have one already) – remember to use the #msuchi hashtag when tweeting about fieldschool related stuff.
• Sign up for a Gravatar account (if you don’t already have one)
• Activate your course blog account (you should already have received an email)
• Introduce yourself to the world on the blog.  Tell us a little about your background and your interests. Be sure talk about why you are taking the fieldschool – why is cultural heritage informatics important to you?
• Have a look at the Creative Commons Licenses.  For each thing you post to the fieldschool blog, you will need to choose the license that best works for you – which means you need to have at least a passing familiarity with what the licenses actually mean. Earlier this month, the incomparable Bethany Nowviskie (Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library and Associate Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute) wrote a thoughtful piece about why she was switching the license on her blog and Flickr stream from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY.  It is definitely worth a read.