Phew, what a year for THATCamp. In 2010, there’ve been seventeen, yes seventeen, THATCamps, and there are eighteen more THATCamps planned so far for 2011, including THATCamp Southern California, which is just around the corner. Much farther out are the ones most recently registered: THATCamp New York (yes! finally!), THATCamp Montréal, THATCamp NCPH at the National Council on Public History meeting in Pensacola, FL, THATCamp University of Western Ontario, THATCamp Switzerland, and THATCamp Saigon — which last will be our first THATCamp in Asia. If you’re interested in helping out with any of those, e-mail info@thatcamp.org or contact the organizer directly at the e-mail address listed in the registry.

There are a few things about this spate of THATCamps in 2010 that I find particularly awesome. First, it’s international. Working with THATCamp has put me in touch with an international community that I was simply closed off from before. This year, I helped to translate THATCamp Paris’s Digital Humanities Manifesto, I installed a translation plugin on thatcamp.org, and I am planning to teach a WordPress workshop at THATCamp Florence in the spring. And, of course, I spoke (virtually) at THATCamp Canberra:

Second, scholarly associations are taking notice; there’s an electricity about a THATCamp that’s simply missing from most annual meetings, and I’ve had plenty of correspondence this year with people on program committees who want to know how to bring some unconference energy to their conference. Whether or not that’s possible is another question — in some ways I think that a conference and an unconference might be as mutually exclusive as they sound — but what I do think is entirely possible and indeed necessary is for scholars to open up, in more ways than one. To speak with people in other disciplines and other professions, to publish hastily and informally on the free web, to be smart while wearing shorts and flip-flops, to admit ignorance and ask for help, to crack jokes, to make friends and make things. THATCamp is helping with all of that.

Speaking of admitting ignorance, another terrific thing we’ve seen with THATCamps in 2010 has been the addition of the “BootCamp” workshops, which are helping in a small way to teach humanists and their ilk new digital skills. What’s pretty amazing about that is that all of those workshops have been free to attend, and almost all of them have been organized and taught by people who were paid little or nothing for doing so, for the simple purpose of sharing knowledge.

And that’s the fourth, last, and by far most awesome thing about all these THATCamps: the passionate volunteers who did all the work of putting them together (and it’s no small amount of work, let’s be clear about that). Ave, THATCamp organizers. Hail to you, blithe spirits. We salute you. Here is a LOLpuppy for you.

UPDATE: All THATCamp themes now come with a template that’ll automatically generate a Campers page. Just make a page called “Campers” or “Participants” or the like, then go into Edit or Quick Edit and set its template to “Campers.”

For those of you who are administering hosted THATCamp sites on thatcamp.org, I’ve just installed a plugin called “WordPress Users” that’ll let you create biography pages for people who have registered for your THATCamp and a “Campers” page that lists them all. It’s called “WordPress Users,” and it will work with any theme. When you activate it, the plugin will add a “WordPress Settings” choice to the “Settings” menu in your administration panel:

When you click on “WordPress Users,” you’ll be given a number of options that will let you configure how the profile pages and the “Campers” page look:

You’ll need to create a page called “Campers” or “Participants” or “Registrants” or something similar and enter its ID number on the screen pictured above to automatically generate a list of people who are registered for your THATCamp. To find the page’s ID number, click on “Pages” in the admin panel and hover over the title of the page you want to use as your Campers page. The URL will contain the ID number, listed as e.g. “post=56″.

With the settings shown above, you’ll generate a “Campers” page that looks something like this (using the THATCamp Furvious theme — again, the plugin works with all themes):

You can play with the options till you’re happy with how it looks, and you can probably also change the look and feel a bit by using the already-installed “Edit CSS” plugin.

Happy camping! (It had to be said sometime.)

]]> http://thatcamp.org/12/10/new-plugin-installed-to-help-create-campers-page/feed/ 1 http://thatcamp.org/08/31/need-your-help-telling-analog-humanists-about-fellowships/ http://thatcamp.org/08/31/need-your-help-telling-analog-humanists-about-fellowships/#comments Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:37:58 +0000 Amanda French http://thatcamp.org/?p=1726 I’ve recently come to this sobering realization: Twitter has made me a bit lazy. I’m so used to reaching an [...]]]>

I’ve recently come to this sobering realization: Twitter has made me a bit lazy. I’m so used to reaching an immediate audience that way (and it’s not a negligible one; the THATCamp Twitter account has nearly 700 followers, and I have somewhere north of 3000 (don’t be too impressed; I’m sure many of them are bots and spammers). Announcements I tweet often get retweeted, and then they make it into Digital Humanities Now, and then I’m left with the comforting feeling that what I’ve said has been heard. I’ve also been known to blog and to post announcements to HASTAC and HUMANIST and H-NET, but at that point I tend to shut my computer and call it a day.

But there’s a pressing need, I’ve realized, to reach an audience who does not frequent those digital halls. The BootCamp fellowship program is specifically designed for the benefit of “analog” humanists as well as digital humanists; the program is meant to introduce people who don’t necessarily have a great deal of digital expertise to people who do, to the possibilities of what computers can do to further and enrich the humanities, and, most importantly, to their own capacity to learn digital skills. Making things more difficult is the fact that THATCamp is not only interdisciplinary but interprofessional: we can’t just post an announcement in the Publications of the Modern Language Association and forget about it. We want to reach philosophers, historians, archaeologists, classicists, art historians, cultural critics, religious historians and theorists, and everyone like that there, but we also want to reach librarians, archivists, art museum staff, K-12 educators, and, well, just about anyone we can get our hands on.

To that end, I’m planning a mass physical mailing sometime in the next couple of months of a brochure describing THATCamp and the BootCamp fellowship program. But until that goes out, perhaps those of you who are reading this would consider e-mailing your departments, your co-workers, and your Aunt Nancy who works in the Analogville County Library to let them know that they’ve got as good a chance at anyone at a $500 fellowship that will help defray their travel costs to a THATCamp near them, or even not so near them. I’ve provided some sample text below. Please, as they say, disseminate widely.

***

The Humanities And Technology Camp (THATCamp): Fellowships available

THATCamp, The Humanities And Technology Camp, is a free, open, interdisciplinary “unconference” where humanists and technologists meet to work together for the common good. Through the generosity of the Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the Kress Foundation, $500 (USD) fellowships are available to academics in the humanities, librarians and archivists, and art museum professionals of all ranks and fields to help defray the cost of traveling to a THATCamp for the purpose of attending both THATCamp and an accompanying “BootCamp” workshop series. BootCamp workshops are free, introductory workshops held at THATCamp that will enable humanists to begin acquiring digital skills that can help further humanities study: examples might include text encoding, data visualization and mapping, and website development.

Applications for BootCamp fellowships to THATCamps across the United States, Europe, and Australia are continually accepted; graduate students are particularly encouraged to apply. No advanced computing skills are necessary. Learn more about BootCamp workshops and apply for a BootCamp fellowship at thatcamp.org/fellowships. Note that while not everyone is eligible for a fellowship, everyone is eligible to come to THATCamp: find an upcoming THATCamp near you by visiting thatcamp.org and learn more about THATCamp at thatcamp.org/about. E-mail info@thatcamp.org with any questions.

***

Tim Sherratt, organizer of THATCamp Canberra, asked me to say a few words when the event commenced. Here’s the written version:

***

THATCamp, like Fortune, favors the bold. So congratulations to you on boldly going where only a few have gone before, exploring a new type of academic conference. It can be a bit disconcerting for both organizers and participants, but that’s part of the fun: who wants a flat roller coaster?

Here are the ground rules for THATCamp, as beautifully expressed by Tom Scheinfeldt: THATCamp is fun, productive, and collegial. It’s fun, which means you are enjoined to be creative, witty, and above all short: it’s productive, which means that while we do hope you’ll have many wonderful conversations today, we also hope you’ll take the opportunity to begin writing articles, begin writing code, begin planning events, takeovers, partnerships, and love-ins. Finally, it’s collegial: we’re here not to compete but to collaborate, to meet amazing people who are, like us, devoted to the idea that ideas can make a difference, that it is not only technology but also the study and practice of humanity can lead to the betterment of humanity, and that the only thing worse than an impoverished mind is an impoverished heart. As Mita Williams memorably put it after attending Great Lakes THATCamp, “An unconference runs on love. “ And the proof of that is the careful genius of Tim Sherratt; only the separation of continents could prevent me from embarrassing him with my fervent admiration.

Hi all — as the new THATCamp Coordinator, I’m busily converting thatcamp.org from a site dedicated to the THATCamps held at the Center for History and New Media to a site about the global THATCamp movement, with help for organizers, participants, and lemurs. Please pardon our dust as URLs change at my whim, content appears and disappears with the tides, and information architects everywhere have a collective seizure.