Workshops

We are proud to present what we think is a pretty impressive list of workshops at THATCamp Museums NYC. They cover a wide variety of tools and provide a wide range of experiences for people of different types of technical proficiency. Because of space limitations, participants must register for workshops. Please see the Schedule page to see at what time a workshop is taking place and email thatcampmuseumsnyc[at]bgc[dot]bard[dot]edu with the workshops you would like to attend.

A Comparison of Low-Cost 3-D Scanning Techniques
Instructor: Don Undeen (@donundeen), Metropolitan Museum of Art Media Lab
Time and Location: 11:30am, Digital Media Lab

In this hands-on workshop, we will be exploring a variety of low-cost 3-D scanning methods, including photo-based scanning, and the NextEngine tabletop 3-D scanner. We’ll be comparing output resolution, quality, and formats, as well as the affect that different object materials have on the scanning process. We’ll also play with some free tools for manipulating those 3-D models, and placing them in virtual environments. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own cameras and laptops. A list of software you may want to install will be provided to registered attendees.

Conversation and Interpretation
Instructors: Beth Harris (@bethrharris) and Steven Zucker (@drszucker), Smarthistory
Time and Location: 1:30pm, Seminar Room 

Smarthistory, now part of the Khan Academy, is a sustainable, award-winning open educational resource in art history that uses conversation as a pedagogic strategy. Our workshop will cover a short history of Smarthistory, review our conversation-based approach to interpretation, demonstrate our technology workflow (from recording audio, gathering images, and producing a video), and offer a back-end view of Smarthistory’s website (which uses an open-source CMS, MODx).

Creating Interfaces to Digital Collections with Viewshare
Instructor: Jefferson Bailey (@jefferson_bail), Library of Congress
Time and Location: 3:15pm, Seminar Room 

You will leave this hands-on workshop with everything you need to start using Viewshare.  Briefly, Viewshare is a free, Library-of-Congress-sponsored platform that empowers historians, librarians, archivists and curators to create and customize dynamic interfaces to collections of digital content.  Starting from an example spreadsheet or data harvested via OAI-PMH, you will use Viewshare to generate distinct interactive visual interfaces (including maps, timelines, and sophisticated faceted navigation), which you can copy-paste to embed in any webpage.  This workshop does not require any particular technical proficiency.  Participants will leave the workshop ready to use Viewshare to help understand and provide access to digital collections of cultural heritage materials.  Participants are encouraged to bring their own collection data in excel spreadsheets to experiment with.

Digital Archaeology
Instructur: Doug Reside (@dougreside), NYPL Performing Arts Division
Time and Location: 3:15pm, 4th floor classroom (458)

In this session, Doug Reside, NYPL Digital Curator for the Performing Arts, will lead users through the process of imaging two types of floppy disks, selecting emulators, and recovering data from old file formats.

Git it? => branch yourself (and join the rest of us)
 Instructor: Zeeshan Lakhani (@zeeshanlakhani), New York Public Library Labs
Time and Location: 11:30am, 4th floor classroom (458) 

Git’s the revolutionary piece of software that’s changing the way code gets written, books get authored, data gets published, and defining how collaboration happens. This workshop will cover the underlying beauties and necessity of version control, whether you code, write, design, or take notes about things you’ll never look up and how and why git is the tool that makes it all worthwhile. We’ll talk social coding with github, collaboration, open sourcing, good techniques to prevent destruction. We’ll fork, push, fetch, and merge.

Introduction to Omeka
Instructor: Amanda French (@amandafrench), Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University
Time and Location: 11:30am, Seminar Room 

Omeka is a simple system used by scholarly archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts; to put such digital objects online in a searchable database; and to create attractive web exhibits from them. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll create your own digital archive of images, audio, video, and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, look at examples of Omeka archives and exhibits, and talk a little bit about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects.

Leveraging TourML & TAP for managing and deploying Tours
Instructor: Kyle Jaebker (@kjaebker), Indianapolis Museum of Art
Time and Location: 3:15pm, Digital Media Lab

TAP is an open-source toolkit for the creation of mobile tours currently consisting of authoring tools, an iOS application, and a web-based application.  All of these tools are connected using the TourML specification, which has been developed to provide a portable representation for museum tour content. TAP and TourML have been successfully used for mobile experiences at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Balboa Park Online Collaborative, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The workshop will provide a better understanding of what features and functionalities are provided by the TAP toolkit and the TourML specification. In addition, attendees will learn how they can leverage TAP and TourML for use in their own institution.

Presenting Geographic Data with Google Earth and Google Maps
Instructor: Markley Boyer, Freelance Cartographer
Time and Location: 1:30pm, Digital Media Lab 

This workshop will look at Google Earth and Google Maps for presenting data with a geographic component.  We will explore the use of these two programs for generating presentation graphics and for developing interactives for web or kiosk use.   The focus will mostly be on using the off-the-shelf capabilities of Google Earth and Google Maps rather than getting into the coding that allows more complex interactions, although we will learn to recognize when that would be worth the trouble!  We will also investigate the use of Google’s free 3D software Sketchup for building models that can be integrated into Google Earth. Finally, we will review some museum-related projects that have used these tools effectively.  This workshop requires no particular experience, just a willingness to fool around with software.

Twitter Bootstrap for Prototyping (and how to start thinking about design patterns)
Instructor: Zeeshan Lakhani (@zeeshanlakhani), New York Public Library Labs
Time and Location: 1:30pm, 4th floor classroom (458) 

Twitter Bootstrap is a collection of CSS and HTML fixtures (and some Javascript plugins) that provide grids, menus, modals, forms, buttons, and a means to laying out your web application. This workshop will tackle Bootstrap hands-on while also explaining why it’s great for rapid prototyping and, yet, surprisingly precarious for real-world output. If you wield its powers for good (meaning, we’ll talk about some advanced uses and examples), then you’ll be much closer to designing that site or app that you’ve been putting off to the side.