2011 Preconference Proposals

Proposals will close Friday November 19 so we can finalize the list and add them to registration!

We'll have space for up to 3 full-day pre-conferences and 3-6 half-day pre-conferences.

Please include a "Contact/Responsible Individual" name and email address so we know who is willing to put on the proposed precon.

• Description: This workshop will describe and demonstrate the principles of text mining and other digital humanities computing techniques. With the advent of so much full text content available in libraries, and with the increasing ease in which people can find content, the question to ask one's self is, "What do I do with all of this content?" Or, as Gregory Crane said, "What do you do with a million books?" Text mining, visualization, concordancing are some of the answers -- process for making sense of large full text corpora -- something often called "distant reading". Participants will go away with a better understanding of what the digital humanities are and how they can applied in a library setting.
• Duration: half-day
• Speaker Bio: Eric Lease Morgan considers himself a librarian first and a computer user second. His professional goal is to discover new ways to use computer to provide better library services. Some of his more notable projects included Mr. Serials, Index Morganagus, the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts, and MyLibrary. Currently he spends his time investigating the digital humanities and integrating them into VUFind.
• Contact: Eric Lease Morgan (emorgan at nd.edu)

• Description: The library world is fired up about Solr. Practically every next-gen catalog is using it (via Blacklight, VuFind, or other technologies). Solr has continued improving in some dramatic ways, including geospatial support, field collapsing/grouping, extended dismax query parsing, pivot/grid/matrix/tree faceting, autosuggest, and more. This session will cover all of these new features, showcasing live examples of them all, including anything new that is implemented prior to the conference.
• Duration: half-day
• Speaker Bio: Erik has spoken at several code4lib conferences (Keynoted Athens '07 along with the infamous pioneering Solr preconference, presented at Providence '09, and pre-conferenced Asheville '10). Erik co-authored "Lucene in Action", and he's a Lucene and Solr committer. His library world claims to fame are founding and naming Blacklight, original developer on Collex and the Rossetti Archive search.
• Contact: Erik Hatcher (erik.hatcher at lucidimagination.com)

• Description: Functional programming is a topic that is becoming increasingly important for programmers to be aware of. Unfortunately it also has the reputation of being an area of programming that is particularly difficult and academic. Languages like Haskell, while being very powerful, certainly live up to this reputation. However many of the essential features of functional programming can be explored through a language as simple and commonplace as JavaScript.

This preconference talk will cover what makes a language ‘functional’ and the usage and implementation of essential features of functional programming: first-class functions, lambda functions, higher order functions, closures, and function currying. It will show how many of the powerful abstractions in a language like Haskell can also be implemented in a language like JavaScript, this will include a discussion of the trade offs between purity and performance.

The aim of this talk is to prepare participants to both implement functional techniques in everyday programming, as well as start exploring the topic more academically. Even if you never plan on coding in a purely functional style this workshop will give you an understanding of topics that should improve your programming in other languages with functional features such as Ruby, Python, and C#. At the very least after this workshop you can go to the bar and throw around words like “lambda function”, “closure” and “currying” with confidence!

• Duration: half-day
• Speaker Bio: Will Kurt is the Applications Development Librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he is also working on a master’s in Computer Science. He has spoken at several library conferences including Computers in Libraries and Internet Librarian on topics including the Microsoft Surface and Visualizing Information.
• Contact: Will Kurt (wkurt at unr.edu)

• Description: Coming to code4lib to write code? Want to hack on a team full of coders you might not have worked with before? Interested in digital curation? Well, this hackfest is for you. Not familiar with the concept of a hackfest? See Roy Tennant's "Where Librarians Go To Hack" and the page for the Access 2010 Hackfest. I propose a full-day hackfest with a focus on the domains of digital curation, preservation, and repositories. Here's how it works, roughly: we assemble in the morning and do some whiteboarding, mostly to gauge folks' interests and jot down project ideas; then we separate into teams and hack on stuff for the rest of the day and present our progress at the end. Not a hacker? No worries; all skill sets and backgrounds are valuable!
• Duration: full-day
• Speaker Bio: Mike Giarlo will not be a speaker but is proposing this session and will be on the hook for finding an experienced hackfest facilitator to move things along.
• Contact: Mike Giarlo (michael at psu.edu)