Vote in the first THATCamp Council election

Voting

Voting is now open for the first THATCamp Council. We have nine candidates for the four open seats on the seven-person council: read more about them below. The ballot will be visible at the bottom of this post after you log in.

• You must log in with your THATCamp account to vote.
• Vote once for exactly three (3) candidates for the four open seats. Choosing more or fewer candidates may invalidate your vote.
• Voting will be open for one week, until midnight on Tuesday, March 25th, 2014.
• Results will be displayed after the voting period ends. The four candidates with the most votes will serve on the THATCamp Council.

You can read more about the THATCamp Council structure and the “partial bloc” election process at Creating Community Governance for THATCamp. Write Amanda French at with any questions.

Please try to elect a Council whose members are of diverse countries, ranks, fields, ethnicities, and genders.

Candidates

Craig Bellamy

I have been working at the intersection of the humanities and computing for most of my career as an educator, researcher, and practitioner. I ran one of the first THATCamps in Australia, THATCamp Melbourne, and plan to do another one this year with a pedagogical focus.

I was a co-founder of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities and have been the Co-Chair of the Program Committee for our first two conferences. Plus I have worked in the field at Kings College London, the University of Virginia, and the University of Melbourne. Recently I have moved into the eLearning field and am keen to build a level of understanding between eLearning and the Digital Humanities, especially through THATCamp Pedagogy.

Frédéric Clavert

I found in unconferences a very efficient way to mobilize and get in touch with the DH community. All the THATCamps I have attended (CHNM 2009, Switzerland 2011, Saint-Malo 2013) or co-organized (Florence 2010, Paris 2010 and 2012, Luxembourg/Trier 2012) gave birth to new projects, helped participants to discover the works of other participants, sometimes helped them discovering whole parts of DH they were not aware of. This is what makes THATCamp so great and interesting and this is why I wish to run for THATCamp council.

Furthermore – and this is the other reason why I am running for THATCamp council – THATCamps are very good tools to give the DH community a multilingual and multicultural dimension that is sometimes lacking in the DH world. In Paris in 2010, we collectively wrote a Digital Humanities Manifesto, which is today the basis of the future French-speaking DH organisation (to be created in Lausanne this Summer). It also helped getting in touch with many other actors of the French-speaking (and beyond) DH community. In Luxembourg, we could mix both German and French DH communities – two neighbour communities that were not in the habit of working together.

Diane Cline

Diane Cline is an Associate Professor of ancient Greek history who is also deeply committed to the development of GWU’s initiative to support innovation through cross-disciplinary collaboration. With her B.A. in Classics from Stanford and Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from Princeton, Diane became a tenured History Professor at CSU Fresno before she joined the University of Cincinnati’s Classics department, winning the University’s Dolly Cohen Teaching Award in 1999. She was involved in VROMA, an early Classics digital project in the 90’s and also was an early adopter of online syllabi, before BlackBoard and other tools made it easy. Her current Classics research focus is on the application of social network analysis to the study of ancient history, a digital humanities effort. The students in her seminar “Digital Humanities and the Historian” are hosting DC 2014 THATCamp on April 26, 2014. Diane has attended the University of Kentucky THATCamp in June 2013 as well as the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science in 2012 and the Case Western Freeman Symposium on Digital Humanities in 2013. Her passion is ”network weaving”: finding people with similar intellectual interests but who are in diverse departments and serving as a bridge to bring them together. Kind of like a THATCamp! Diane is also a cellist with the Washington Sinfonietta and the Avanti Orchestras in Washington, DC.

Kimon Keramidas

I went to my first THATCamp at George Mason University in 2010, and had one of the most interesting, enriching and enjoyable experiences I have had as an academic. As opposed to traditional large conferences I had attended I was greeted with a sense of collegiality, felt encouraged to participate and make my voice heard, and experienced environments of intensely enjoyable and stimulating intellectual discussion. But, most importantly I found myself immersed in a community that was was able to hold itself to high standards of academic rigor and investigation, while understanding that the rigors of exploring the intersection of the humanities and technology are best experienced in a humane and relaxed environment. Since that first trip to the Center for History and New Media, I have attended and organized THATCamps regularly hoping to both foster community growth within different sectors of the humanities, including pedagogy, museums, and the performing arts, and to expose more people to the possibility of more fruitful, constructive and humane environments. I believe strongly that the unconference model and the THATCamp project can be instruments for change in the humanities, can play a role in negating many of the harmful effects or rigid academic hierarchies, and can foster the sense of experimentation and freedom of thought that is necessary for us to truly tap the potential of new technologies in the academic realm. It is for this reason that I would like to participate in the THATCamp Council, as I would be honored to play a role in helping to shape the future and continuing the success of this truly worthwhile endeavor.

Jeffrey McClurken

From the first THATCamp at RRCHNM, I have been energized by the format, the opportunity to talk, create, and build with other digitally inclined people, and the chance to introduce new people to the digital humanities. I’ve attended nearly a dozen THATCamps, run numerous bootcamps/workshops, and helped to organize four THATCamps (2 iterations of THATCamp AHA and 2 of THATCamp Virginia). I want to join the THATCamp Council so that I can help to continue the open, non-hierarchical, inclusive, productive spirit that has infused THATCamp for so many.

Scott McGinnis

Organizing THATCamp Bay Area 2011 was one of the highlights of the last few years for me. A handful of us had worked all summer to bring together more than 100 people, many of them first-timers. Just ten months earlier, I was myself a noobie to THATCamp, and I was immediately impressed with the unconference model and the community it attracts. Sessions were energetic, conversations dynamic, participants diverse in view and background, and the whole time, the only pressure I felt was from my inability to take it all in. To me, this is special. So when I learned THATCamp will transition to a new governance model, I quickly decided to toss my name in the hat, that I might endeavor to help this great community continue to flourish and grow.

Serge Noiret

What I could bring to the THATCamp governing body, is my international experience organizing THATCamp’s and trying to understand how best rethinking and developing the program internationally. In March 2011, at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, I organized THATCamp Florence during three days and with more than 200 registered attendees together with a THATCamp in Digital Humanities; the AIUCD, Italian Association for DH and Digital culture was founded during THATCamp Florence and the Manifsto for DH written during THATCamp Paris 2010 was approved during the meeting. I attended, proposed and coordinated panels for THATCamp NCPH Pensacola (2011), THATCamp NCPH Milwaukee (2012), THATCamp Lausanne Switzerland (2012), THATCamp Luxembourg during DIHULU2012 and attended THATCamp Leadership in Fairfax (2013). I was asked University of Bologna in Rimini and the AIUCD to coordinate a THATCamp for 2015; other two THATCamp may be organized in Amsterdam in October 2014 during the IFPH annual meeting (International federation for Public History) and in Jinan, China in August 2015 during the CISH (Comite International des Sciences Historiques) and IFPH meeting. I followed THATCamp as a movement from its very beginning and was very much interested to its organization, it’s open, genuine and disinterested way to work collegially in the field of DH and especially in digital history, fostering the knowledge of the impact of the digital turn on the history discipline. I very much like to work with other people.

Thanks to the EUI, my university, the unique European post-graduate and post-doctoral university in the humanities and social sciences with members coming from EU countries and other continents, I am in contact with a very important international network of stakeholders and scholars. I know different languages and worked for many years with dozens of different professors, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers coming from many different academic systems.

I would very much like to contribute to develop internationally the THATCamp movement specifically with regard to Digital Public History issues if I would have the honor to be elected in the THATCamp Council Charter. I would be able to meet “physically” at least once a year during my bi-annual travels to the USA at the NCPH annual meeting and in NYC for Easter, although I don’t really think that living in Los Angeles or in Florence, Italy would be very different for participating in THATCamp Council Charter meetings.

Anastasia Salter

I’ve attended many THATCamps across the country and organized my own, THATCamp Games, which spawned a successor. I write for ProfHacker, a blog on technology and pedagogy that has its roots in THATCamp, so I’ve seen firsthand the ability of THATCamp to build projects and ideas that last long after any particular camp ends. I’m very interested in the many ways the model can evolve: I’ll be running a next iteration of THATCamp Games this year in conjunction with a conference, altering the formula to fit the new setting and bring together practitioners with the DH community. I’m very interested in ways we can play with the unconference model and keep our idea of what THATCamp is constantly evolving. I’d like to help other organizers experiment with THATCamp’s structures to create lasting value for DH “veterans” and “noobs.” This council is an important opportunity to build on THATCamp’s foundations and experiment with ways to further share, curate, and preserve knowledge generated by the community.

Micah Vandegrift

The formalization and governance of THATCamp underscores an important point in our collective history; we have reached the time when an idea has become an institution. The idea behind THATCamp inspired me as a graduate student, and now, as I grow into my career as a librarian I continually reflect on the THATCamp’s I participated in as wholly formative for the professional values I now hold. The ideas that all voices (untenured, non-academic, the public(s), diverse, ranked or not, etc) are welcomed in the debate, that the conversation is always developing, and that “yakking and hacking” can and should coexist define my approach to the academy, despite the fact that the academy does not often see it as so. I believe that TheseCamps will be/are a force for change and I’d be honored to play any role therein. I’d like to see THATCamp continue to grow, to be locally-invested while globally-digested, and to institutionalize the ideals that inspired me to become a rabble-rousing member of a system that teaches creative free-thought but rewards falling in line.

With that, I am very pleased to indicate my desire to run for a seat on the inaugural THATCamp Council.

Ballot

[hidepost]

Every THATCamp user can vote once only for exactly three (3) candidates for the four open THATCamp Council seats. Choosing more or fewer candidates may invalidate your vote.

[yop_poll id=”3″]
[/hidepost]