Hi folks. First off, thank you to <span class=”handle-sign”>@</span>caitlinduffy49 for facilitating HCSummer Camp as well as to everyone else who’s ideas and work I had the chance to read and think about over the past few weeks. Secondly, and in a combined response to both Challenge #5 and #6, I’ve updated my HumCom site and written a bit about my thinking and plans for a digital presence in the coming academic year. Best of luck to everyone in the Fall semester.

/Charlie

1. I’m happy to have discovered some more groups to join and people to follow. Although I didn’t create a HC site in challenge 4, the focus on widgets has me thinking about porting my existing WP site into HC.
2. No specific questions.
3. I’d like to keep working on networking with other researchers. HC sends me a daily digest of activity in the groups I belong to, and I skim through those when they appear. I’m going to continue my goal of tweeting at least one thing about my research/writing and one thing about my teaching each week.
4. If I were to do this again, I’d like to see more challenges about reaching out and talking to other people, or maybe challenges that include a list of individual tasks. This is the part of academic networking I struggle with most.

Thanks so much for setting this up! The pace was great, and I learned a lot.

Hello everyone! Like Charlie, I took this challenge as an opportunity to write a little bit about my experience doing this summer camp and my plans for my website/overall digital presence going forward. I tried to answer all of the questions in the challenge, albeit in a slightly different order. You can read it here.

Thanks again to Caitlin for guiding us through the process and to HC for coming up with such a fun project!

Thank you for this summer camp experience.

I’m most excited about finding a home for Virtual Hemingway, which now lists more than 400 Hemingway-related sites! I am also pleased to have a site about my academic accomplishments. I plan to add the URL to my email signature to show off all this work!

Austen scholar Devoney Looser just published an article about the importance of this kind of work in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Writing-a-Book-or-Article-/243911

Her article validated the time I was spending on creating my site. (You might want to consider using it in future summer camps.)

One question I have is whether there’s a maximum size limit for what we create on Humanities Commons. Another question I have is whether Virtual Hemingway will turn up in search engine results–would students have to search Humanities Commons in order to find it?

I hope to maintain the site–in fact, I hope to grow Virtual Hemingway to more than 500 links, which seems pretty doable. I plan to update at least quarterly, which seems more reasonable to me than trying for weekly or monthly, given my heavy teaching load.

I think the pace of this course was just right. The explanations of how to do various tasks were very clear and did not assume much technical knowledge, so that was a huge plus. I think it might be helpful to be clearer that the plug-ins and widgets seem to pertain only to blogs.

I wish more people had stuck with the summer camp–the attrition rate seems to have been awfully high. But I don’t know what you could have done to improve that.

MLA needs to publicize the Humanities Commons more effectively and demonstrate what faculty can do with it. I’m a longtime member and didn’t really understand what was available to me for free!

Thank you for all your work, Caitlin. My experience was positive, and I would recommend this camp to others.