(Cross-posted from retrospective.thatcamp.org/2020/01/31/announcing-thatcamp-retrospective-and-sunsetting/ )

The first THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) was held at the Center for History and New Media (now the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media) at George Mason University in the summer of 2008 (back when Flickr was a big deal — click the above screenshot to browse THATCamp photos on Flickr). I wrote a fair amount about how THATCamp first came to be and how it was turned into a larger initiative in a 2013 talk called “On Projects, and THATCamp.” Nearly seven years later, I’m still proud of THATCamp; I think it has been a model of sustainability among grant-funded projects, and I think it did a great deal to demystify the digital humanities and digital methods more generally for a whole generation of scholars and information professionals. The number of registered THATCamps has grown from 170 when I wrote that talk in 2013 to (my goodness) over 320 events today, a phenomenon that has taken place without a single full-time THATCamp employee, with just a dedicated distributed community and the hosting support of staff members at RRCHNM and Reclaim Hosting. The WordPress Multisite instance on thatcamp.org has 11,803 users, and while it’s true that several hundred of those might be spam or inactive users, I think that’s still impressive.

Nevertheless, as is natural, THATCamp is no longer as popular as it once was, and while people are still organizing and attending THATCamps and using thatcamp.org to do so, the rate has slowed so much that it no longer seems necessary to offer THATCamp website creation services. The THATCamp website network is a magnet for spammers and hackers, and keeping it secure is a significant amount of labor for RRCHNM sysadmins. We are therefore planning to “flatten” all sites on thatcamp.org, dialing them back to Web 1.0, as it were, by making them into plain HTML and removing their database-driven interactivity. This means no more blogging, no commenting, no forums, no new site registration, no new user registration, indeed, no user accounts at all. This also means that the content on all THATCamp sites, including the help documentation on how to organize a THATCamp, all session proposals for all THATCamps, and your contrbutions to the THATCamp retrospective, will remain in place to be read at the same URLs. We are also taking additional steps to preserve that content in other places (I’ll blog that process, as well, since it promises to be interesting.) We plan to thus “turn off” the THATCamp website on Friday, February 28th (just before Leap Day!). We still encourage people to organize THATCamps and to use the #thatcamp hashtag, and we ask that you still register your future planned THATCamp event with a new Google form, but we will no longer provide new THATCamp websites and user accounts on thatcamp.org.

As we approach this change, we think it’s a great time to do some reflection on the experience and impact of THATCamp. To that end, we have set up a website at retrospective.thatcamp.org and we would like to ask anyone who has been to a THATCamp (or to several THATCamps) to consider contributing a short reflective piece on THATCamp: its pluses, its minuses, the friends we made along the way, the hacks we hacked, the yaks we yakked. Video, audio, images, code, poetry, GIFs, glitches also welcome. If text, we ask that you limit your contribution to about 500 words. (Fewer is fine, as is a few more.) Please submit your reflection by February 21st, 2020February 25th. We might later seek to edit and publish your contributions in another medium, but if so, we will contact you for permission to republish them.

Looking forward to reading what you contribute.

Register for this site to contribute.

The next meeting of the THATCamp Council will be held Wednesday, October 5 at 8am East Coast USA / 11pm Canberra / 2pm Paris.

There are major topics on the agenda:

• Dissolve the THATCamp Council
• Archive thatcamp.org and close it to new users, sites, and forum content

Since these are clearly major decisions, we’d like as much feedback here from the THATCamp community as possible.

Some discussion questions at play are:

• Does THATCamp Council serve a purpose? Could it serve a new or better purpose? If it continues to exist, what might its role be? If it dissolves, what might be the repercussions?
• Is thatcamp.org needed to continue new THATCamps? Are new or continuing THATCamps needed in the first place, or is the model well-enough know that it doesn’t need the label/branding of THATCamp?

Please leave comments and thoughts about these issues to help us think through what THATCamp is now, what it might be in the future, and what the best way to meet the needs of people who have attended THATCamps might be.

The meeting will be held via Skype, and all are invited to share your thoughts there, too. Just leave your Skype username in the comments.

The THATCamp Council met today and ratified an anti-harassment policy based on the one pioneered by the Geek Feminism community. We are requiring every new THATCamp to agree to adopt the policy, and we hope that existing THATCamps will agree to adopt it as well. We’ll soon be integrating the policy into every new THATCamp site, as well.

Thanks, all, for helping us keep THATCamp a safe, welcoming, and fun environment for all.

At its meeting today, the THATCamp Council has agreed to post the following draft of an anti-harassment policy for editing and comment. This is revised version of the Code4Lib anti-harassment policy, which in turn is based on the Geek Feminism anti-harassment policy.

We envision this as a document that all THATCamp organizers must agree to adopt before they can register a THATCamp. We’ll be taking comments this summer until August 30th (please comment on this blog post) and will produce revisions in accordance with those comments. We’ll vote to adopt the Code at the next THATCamp Council meeting, which will take place sometime in September 2014.

I’m thrilled (on my last day) to announce the launch of the Proceedings of THATCamp! The Proceedings of THATCamp allows readers to browse blog posts from around the THATCamp network in several ways:

• Posts that many users have “favorited”
• Posts by most recent
• Posts by topic
• Posts by year and month

In addition, there’s picture gallery of snapshots from THATCamp and (of course) a page where you can keep an eye on what people are saying about THATCamp on Twitter.

Want to improve the Proceedings? You can “favorite” THATCamp posts others have written, categorize and tag THATCamp posts you’ve written, and post pictures to the THATCamp Flickr group. Read more about how to do all these things at About the Proceedings of THATCamp.

Many thanks to the design and development team: Kim Nguyen, Boone Gorges, and Aram Zucker-Scharff.

The results of the first THATCamp Council election are in, and no runoff election will be necessary. Thanks to the 89 people who voted. Here are the four who will be joining me, Tom Scheinfeldt, and Patrick Murray-John on the first THATCamp Council:

• Anastasia Salter
• Jeff McClurken
• Frédéric Clavert
• Micah Vandegrift

I can’t tell you how grateful I am to all who ran: we all know that this kind of service is driven much more by conviction than by systemic reward. All the candidates are people I’d be proud to work with.

As Chair pro tem until we appoint an official Chair, I’ll be arranging the first meeting (to be held sometime in April, most likely) and drafting an agenda. The agenda will be posted here on the blog and will be open for comment.

I’m still a fan of having fun and being productive in a informal and collegial gathering, even after all these years. Imagine that. Whatever happens next with THATCamp, that won’t change, I know. En avant!

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 info@thatcamp.org 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]

Now that we’ve revised the THATCamp Council Charter and have worked out the election process, I want to encourage everyone who thinks they might be eligible, able, and willing to run for the THATCamp Council to do so. In the last ten days or so I’ve been calling for candidates on the THATCamp organizers email list, and we do already have several excellent candidates for the 4 open seats, but I’m well aware that not everyone who has helped organize a THATCamp is on that list. If you haven’t been following the THATCamp Council Charter revision process, here are the answers to some questions you might have about the Council.

Who is eligible to run for the THATCamp Council?

Anyone who has helped organize a THATCamp will be eligible to serve on the Council.

What are the responsibilities of THATCamp Council members?

• Supporting THATCamp organizers, participants, and would-be participants, especially by
  • answering questions on the THATCamp forums
  • creating and revising help documents on thatcamp.org
  • managing THATCamp social media accounts
  • attending and/or organizing THATCamps
• Upholding core THATCamp values
• Setting the long-term direction of the THATCamp project
• Creating and revising community processes, policies, and governance documents
• Resolving community conflicts

How long is the term?

Council terms (including the term of the Chair and the RRCHNM representative) are two years long, but members can hold an unlimited number of terms if they are reelected or reappointed.

How often will the Council meet?

The Council will meet at least three times per year for the purpose of discussing and (if necessary) voting on issues of interest to the THATCamp Community. In general, meetings can take place online, via conference call, or in person.

How do I run for the Council?

Write info@thatcamp.org by Monday, 3/17 indicating that you’d like to run. Include a few lines about why you want to run for the THATCamp Council, perhaps also addressing why you think THATCamp is important and/or directions you’d like to see THATCamp go.

When will the election take place?

I’d like to open the week-long voting period by the end of the day on Monday, 3/17. I’ll post your reasons for running that day along with a link to your THATCamp profile, available from our People page at thatcamp.org/people. The election process is described more fully in the THATCamp Council Charter.

Please see the THATCamp Council Charter if you have more questions, or of course write me (THATCamp Council Chair pro tem) at info@thatcamp.org.

As the period of Mellon Foundation funding for THATCamp nears its March 31st, 2014 end date, it becomes time to set up a community-driven means of managing the overall THATCamp project. I won’t bother you too much yet with my thoughts about what it has meant to me to be the THATCamp Coordinator over the last four years, but I will just say here that it’s been a pleasure and a privilege.

The task of turning THATCamp over to the community is in one sense utterly simple: it’s already a radically decentralized project, and there are plenty of THATCamps I have literally nothing to do with. In another sense, though, it’s hard — maybe the hardest task I’ve yet faced as THATCamp Coordinator. This is something I want very much to do right. I’ve therefore spent quite a bit of time thinking about how to do it, helped by an initial consultation session last October at THATCamp Leadership. I also read Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community, which gives practical advice from the perspective of the Ubuntu development community, and even got a bit of help from @jonobacon himself.

The result of all that study is the below document, a 3-page draft THATCamp Council Charter that describes a system of elections and governance. And now here comes the begging: please comment on the charter by March 10, 2014. You can use the regular blog comment box here titled “Leave a reply” to let us know if the system herein described looks good to you. (Don’t forget to scroll.) I’m particularly interested in how to ensure a diverse Council: I had thought about instituting quotas of some kind dealing with race, gender, country, rank, and so on, but frankly the math got too complex too quickly because of all the variables that could attach to any of the seven members: I wouldn’t want a Council with six white male American tenured professors and one black female Belgian grad student. We might want slightly more specific guidelines than those I’ve outlined here, though. My ears are open.

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at what was supposed to be the NEH Project Directors’ meeting, but which because of the shutdown instead turned into a hasty unconference at the Maryland Institute for Technology and the Humanities. Here are the slides and the text (download the text as PDF).

On Projects, and THATCamp by Amanda French is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

On Projects, and THATCamp
Amanda French
Friday, October 4, 2013
National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities
Project Directors Meeting
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities Unconference

Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,
Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls
Have given their loves, I give my love to you;
Not in a lovers’-knot, not in a ring
Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain
Semper fidelis, where a secret spring
Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain:
Love in the open hand, no thing but that,
Ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt,
As one should bring you cowslips in a hat
Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,
I bring you, calling out as children do,
“Look what I have! And these are all for you.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Fatal Interview (1931)

[SLIDE 2]
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnet “Not in a silver casket cool with pearls” was first published in 1931 in her book Fatal Interview. The poem is a pure and faithful Shakespearean sonnet in scheme, with seven perfect rhymes in the classic fourteen-line arrangement ababcdcdefefgg, but its logic is clearly Petrarchan, with a textbook example of a volta or “turning point” tidily dividing the substance of first eight lines, the octave, from that of the last six lines, the sestet.

Of course the poem is a love poem, suitable perhaps for reading at a wedding, but it is also a poem about the difference between things made and things grown. Things made with overly anxious craftsmanship, things carefully “worked” by human hands, are probably either empty or are hiding something unsavory, suggests the poem. Things grown naturally are sufficiently lovely unto themselves and need no special decorative container, just something plain and functional — whatever’s handy. And these cowslips and apples, these offerings, sound as though they haven’t even been deliberately cultivated, just found and picked up, serendipitously. But if that’s the case, as it surely is, what’s remarkable is that there’s so much pride in that finding and gathering.

It’s perfectly audible to me in that last line, the self-satisfaction of the child who has merely happened upon some wildflowers or windfalls and has brought them to someone, certain that her feat will be appreciated and applauded. And of course it is a child. Grownups know that we may not take pride in things that have merely grown without our intervention; we are only permitted a little conceit when we have become master artisans, when we have spent hours and days and weeks encrusting the casket with jewels and etching the motto into the golden band. When a child brings us a handful of rocks or shells or a jar full of ladybugs or fireflies, who among us would be so hard-hearted as to say, “So what? Big deal. You didn’t make those, and in any case these are totally ordinary. Anyone could have found them. Now go and play. Or, better yet, go create an intricate imaginary world like the Brontës or the young C. S. Lewis. Author some notable juvenilia, and then you will have done something worthy of praise.” No. Most (though I’m sad to say not all) of the adults I know will say to such a child, “That’s great, sweetheart! How pretty! Thank you so much!” and will then exchange an amused smile with some other adult in eyeshot. Certainly that’s what I always do. There may be a third way, some manner of telling the child the truth while also being kind, but if so, my own powers of creative imagination are unequal to constructing it. It’s one of many adult conspiracies: let the child have her fun and run away feeling pleased with herself. She’ll learn all too soon how little the real world values such contributions. [SLIDE 3] Consider the lament of Millay’s contemporary, Dorothy Parker, in her 1926 poem “One Perfect Rose”:

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet–
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

Between adults, especially wry and witty adults, the expensively engineered thing is pretty sure to have the higher value. Still, of course, even droll Dorothy would surely see the difference between that one perfect rose, doubtless an unscented long-stemmed cultivar bought at an urban florist’s by some economical gent of respectable income who should at least have sprung for a dozen or two in a nice vase with some baby’s breath, and a spontaneously gathered clutch of free meadow blooms offered by a winsome urchin. Millay’s image has a charm not to be denied.

I bring all this up not only because I like to get in a few licks of poetic commentary where I can (having usually no occasion for it these days), but also because as the THATCamp project winds down, I can see the day coming when I will catch up a hundred and seventy-plus THATCamps in my skirt and offer them up to our chief funder, the Mellon foundation, writing, in the final report due at the end of April 2014, “Look what I have! And these are all for you.” THATCamp, as a project, feels very much like something I’ve stumbled upon rather than something I’ve wrought, and it feels even more like something that has fruited and blossomed across orchard and field in the last four years without my having much at all to do with it. For those of you who don’t know the story, or for those of you who don’t know all the story, I shall now proceed to tell it to you.

[SLIDE 4]
The story of THATCamp can begin with the decision of new media publishing mogul Tim O’Reilly to begin holding an event called Foo Camp in the early 2002. “FOO” stood for “Friends Of O’Reilly,” and it was an actual camp: people brought or were given tents to pitch on O’Reilly’s California estate, and in a festival atmosphere they planned and plotted the future of technology. Foo Camp had unconference elements, some of which were probably drawn from a meeting model called “Open Space” that had been popular in Silicon Valley for at least ten years: certainly people weren’t showing each other PowerPoint presentations in those tents, but were instead self-organizing, talking and working together spontaneously. Within a couple of years Foo Camp had become one of the most expensive and exclusive tech events around. [SLIDE 5] Annoyed by the expense and the exclusivity, a group of software developers created a counter-event called “Bar Camp” in 2005. “Foo” and “Bar” were and are standard dummy text variables used by programmers, a bit like “X” and “Y” in algebra — some say there’s an etymological ancestry in the famous military acronym “FUBAR,” which in the clean version stands for “Fouled Up Beyond All Repair.” Bar Camp retained the self-organizing structures of Foo Camp, but it was from the first designed to be cheap and inclusive. And, unlike Foo Camp, it also became self-replicating: the Bar Campers set up a wiki that anyone could edit and encouraged others to organize their own Bar Camps. It’s also worth noting that the invention of Bar Camp was directly implicated in (of all things) the invention of the Twitter hash tag. [SLIDE 6] On the 23rd of August in 2007, Chris Messina, one of the Bar Camp founders who was using the then-fledgling microblogging service, tweeted “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?” The convention spread — and spread, and spread.

[SLIDE 7]
The invention of Bar Camp attracted a good bit of attention in the tech press, and that press was read by several people at the Center for History and New Media, who said to themselves and to one another for a couple of years, “Gee, we should really do something like that.” [SLIDE 8] Among this group were graduate students Dave Lester and Jeremy Boggs as well as postdoc Joshua Greenberg, aided and abetted by managing director Tom Scheinfeldt and director Dan Cohen. The name “The Humanities and Technology Camp” and its accompanying acronym “THATCamp” were invented after midnight at a Denny’s, which is of course the very best time and place to invent anything, and in late May of 2008, the first THATCamp was held.

[SLIDE 9]
This first THATCamp was shamelessly organized entirely without my knowing anything about it, which seems in retrospect like immense cheek. But I read all about it after the fact on Lisa Spiro’s digital humanities blog, and I knew at once that here was something interesting, and not just interesting, but energetic. When I heard that there would be another THATCamp in 2009, I made sure to go. [SLIDE 10] In 2009 THATCamp was held just after the big annual Digital Humanities conference, which that year was at the University of Maryland in College Park, and the two events were mere counties as well as mere days apart. That coincidence doubtless helped publicize THATCamp to the 300+ scholars who came to the Digital Humanities conference. And anyone who was present at either or both of those meetings will doubtless remember that 2009 was The Year Twitter Became a Big Deal in the Digital Humanities: I think I’m not the only one who’d say that it was those two conferences that put Twitter on my mental map as Something Not Just Fun But Useful. And the rise of Twitter undoubtedly also helped spread the word about THATCamp, what it was, of course, but also a bit about what it was like to go to one. THATCampers had used Twitter to some extent in 2008, but they had also relied heavily on IRC. In 2009, a much larger audience heard all about [SLIDE 11] session signups, [SLIDE 12] Dork Shorts, and [SLIDE 13] about exactly what people were talking about or doing (together!) within sessions. And of course they heard all about the t-shirts. [SLIDES 14-16]

[SLIDE 17] The first non-CHNM THATCamp was THATCamp Austin, speedily organized by a few THATCamp converts in time to coincide with the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists. THATCamp Austin was followed in quick succession by [SLIDES 18-21] THATCamp Pacific Northwest, THATCamp Columbus, THATCamp SoCal, and THATCamp Great Lakes. And all during this independent proliferation, grant-writing masterminds Tom Scheinfeldt and Dan Cohen were hatching a cunning plan. They asked if I would be interested in working on THATCamp full-time, and I naturally jumped at the chance. In January of 2010 they submitted a proposal to the Mellon foundation for a two-year project to be funded in the amount of $263,683, naming me as “Regional THATCamp Coordinator”; the proposal’s official title was “Digital Methods Training at Scale: Leveraging THATCamp Through a Regional System.”

[SLIDE 22] That title gives me the nudge to move from this bare history of the early days of THATCamp to a discussion of something perhaps more interesting: the inevitable slips ‘twixt cup and lip — the differences between what we originally imagined (and said) we would do and what actually wound up happening. For instance, as we’ve seen, much of the early language assumed that THATCamps would be “regional,” and of course all the THATCamps up until that point had indeed been regional. [SLIDE 23] But themed THATCamps began (I think) with THATCamp Liberal Arts Colleges in 2011, and others soon arose, including [SLIDES 24-34] THATCamp Pedagogy, THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy, THATCamp Games, THATCamp Publishing, THATCamp Oral History, THATCamp Museums NYC, THATCamp Computational Archeology, THATCamp Theory, THATCamp Feminisms (west, east, and south, all held at roughly the same time), and more. [SLIDES 35-41] Scholarly associations also began to organize THATCamps: the Museum Computer Network, the National Council on Public History, the Association for Studies in Eighteenth-Century Society, the Association for Jewish Studies, the College Art Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association, and more. Many THATCamps were still regional, of course, and I’m leaving out dozens of them like THATCamp Bay Area and THATCamp Kansas. [SLIDES 42-52] But I personally was astonished by the number of THATCamps that began to crop up abroad. Had I been assigned the task of fomenting THATCamps in even a couple of these regions, I’d have failed utterly. Paris, London, Cologne, Florence, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Poland, Canberra, Melbourne, Wellington, Caribbean, and more.

[SLIDE 53]
Our “regional” thinking, however, didn’t affect our grant deliverables at all except to render its language a little narrow in retrospect. We had four deliverables in that first grant, as follows:

1. To support 25 THATCamps over two years
2. THATCamp-in-a-Box
3. BootCamps
4. To award 100 micro-fellowships of $500 each

We met or exceeded all of these deliverables, as follows:

1. 49 THATCamps
2. Built thatcamp.org with WordPress Multisite & THATCamp Registrations plugin
3. Introduced BootCamps / workshops as a key feature
4. Awarded 113 micro-fellowships

[SLIDE 54]

We have five deliverables in the current grant, as follows:

1. 30 THATCamps over two years
2. Website redesign
3. More documentation
4. THATCamp Leadership
5. THATCamp Coordinating Council

So far, we’ve met or exceeded three of these deliverables:

1. 94 additional THATCamps (so far)
2. Website redesign (yep)
3. More documentation (yep)

I’m sorry to say that I’m fairly sure that there is no lesson at all for you as project directors in the preceding story I’ve inflicted upon you: I don’t know of any scholarly project besides THATCamp that pushes the needle so far into the cowslips end of the “made or grown” gauge. A great deal of academic writing, it seems to me (absolutely including my own) is carefully gemmed over with fine phrases and ideas and authorities, and although there’s probably some kind of spirit locked up in it somewhere it’s not always possible for a reader to find the key. There’s pleasure and edification in the crafting of such work, of course, and the result looks impressive when displayed upon a side table, but that just can’t be all there is, that endless solitary striving for mastery in metallurgy.

Ah, but so many digital humanities projects are collaborative, I hear you thinking. Not for us the solitary genius working alone. Yes, but I think that digital humanities projects, especially software development projects, often fall somewhere around the limousine band of the “made or grown” spectrum. No one person makes a limousine. The pride of having helped build even a really lovely Gatsby-era Duesenberg limousine is surely more muted than the pride of having written The Great Gatsby or an excellent piece of literary criticism on The Great Gatsby — especially since it’s likely that very few people will know about your contribution to the carburetor. Hence the laudable work of Tanya Clement and Doug Reside (among others) in insisting that collaborative digital humanities projects pay extra attention to giving credit where credit is due: see their white paper from the NEH-funded Off the Tracks workshop. Depending on how you look at it, THATCamp has either been one of the biggest DH collaborations to date with 6000+ participants and 150+ THATCamp organizers or else one of the least collaborative DH projects around, with only a single full-time person working on it: me. In the last three and a half years I’ve certainly had collaborative periods, such as during the major website overhaul, but, just like the THATCamps themselves (and like apples and cowslips) they don’t last long. I think when we talk about “collaboration” in the context of projects we usually mean long-term collaboration over a period of a year or more, and THATCamp isn’t necessarily the project to look to for a model of that.

There is, however, a certain philosophy behind THATCamp, and it is one that suffuses many other projects (though not all of them) at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, as well as many of the most famous technology companies and products: WordPress, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia. That philosophy is a willingness to provide an infrastructure that others can easily use, and then to let the cowslips and cow chips fall where they may. You could call it the Wiki Way, or crowdsourcing, or third-party extensibility, or the open source bazaar, or an API, or the Cluetrain, or simply trust. Although it isn’t trust, exactly, because it isn’t a belief that these other people we’re letting in will always do well. We know that they’ll do bad work sometimes. There have been bad THATCamps, oh yes, there have, and there have been bad sessions at good THATCamps. But we expect that, and we allow it, though we do our best to code automatic defaults into our systems and processes that will prevent it from happening in the first place. Departures from this lackadaisical philosophy have never turned out well. I’ve learned that when something is causing me trouble, it probably means that it’s not worth the trouble. For instance, during the most recent round of web development, I thoughtlessly decided to specify that only those who had an existing THATCamp.org account should be able to register a new THATCamp. My thinking was that only those who have been to a THATCamp should be able to organize one themselves; within a week of its implementation, I realized my mistake.

It’s unlikely that your project is much like the THATCamp project, although if you’re organizing an Advanced Institute for next summer, I can at least give you some one-off event-planning advice (don’t try to collect precise information about individual dietary requirements; just make sure that at one-third to one-half of the food at every meal consists of vegetables or fruits presented in such a way that people will actually want to eat them). But even if your NEH ODH project is to make a silver casket cool with pearls, or if it’s to build a really lovely replica of a Gatsby-era Duesenberg, or if it’s to hybridize one perfect red American Beauty rose with one perfect green Granny Smith apple in the very latest high-tech solarium and then eat it and plant the core, good for you. Decide for yourself whether one or none of those images accords with your vision. My only advice is to do the best you can, and to do it in a spirit of generosity as well as of pride. And, of course, please do remember, as if you could forget, to be grateful to the NEH. Now, especially now.

At last weekend’s THATCamp Prime, held at George Mason University (a.k.a., the Center for History and New Media, a.k.a. The Mothership), not even Friday’s torrential rain could put a damper on the 100+ participants’ spirits.

We had many session proposals to choose from: 30 potential sessions, for 18 slots. Most people proposed sessions before Friday morning, using our THATCamp site’s blog.

We took advantage of several new features on our THATCamp website. Most of all, we happily used Participad, now fully integrated into THATCamp sites, to take collaborative notes. Many commented on the awesomeness of having the links to the notepads built into the session pages, so that all of the information lives in the same location. The transition from notetaking with GoogleDocs to this new regime was fairly seamless.

On Friday, I went to the “Working Group for Digital Historians” session, where we discussed the need for an informal association of people interested in doing digital history. Sharon Leon set up a group on the spot, using Commons in a Box; the site currently has 134 active members and 17 subject-specific groups. Join us!

On Saturday, I attended a session called “Imagining THATClass,” convened by two high school history teachers who wanted to talk about their experiences running courses on a project model, using digital tools. As a highlight, the teachers brought two of their former students in to talk about project-based courses from that perspective. The two were enthusiastic about the approach and willing to be detailed and honest about their experience and that of their classmates.

A session that received rave reviews, but that I wasn’t able to attend, was Jeremy Boggs’ 3D Modeling and Printing Workshop. Throughout the weekend, people who were there kept pulling nifty plastic cars, rings, and other tokens out of their pockets to show off their work. Attendees enthused about the thrill of exploring Thingiverse, tinkering with a model, and watching the printer work.

On Saturday, our final event was a Maker Challenge. We gathered in the large auditorium to watch people who had created something during the two days of the THATCamp present their projects. The stakes were high: prizes included an iPad mini, a Samsung Chromebook, and a Kindle Fire. Entrants had previously posted on the blog about their projects, and got up to give a Dork Short-style mini-presentation of their features. The audience voted by clicking “Favorite” on the entries they liked the most.

The big winner was Boone Gorges, for his WordPress plugin that displays items from the Digital Public Library of America that are related to a post’s tags.

There was a lot of good-humored competition, laughter, and general merriment. This was a great way to end a THATCamp, and highly recommended for future gatherings.

Long live THATCamp Prime!

(Twitter archive of THATCamp Prime tweets, courtesy of Aram Zucker-Scharff)

Hastily, as I prepare for our very own THATCamp CHNM, I wanted to bring our attention to some great new features we rolled out today, thanks to developer Boone Gorges.

• Participad (actually rolled out several days ago) has been enabled so that THATCampers can take notes collaboratively right in the WordPress interface without having to use Google Docs.
• There’s a new THATCamps Directory that’ll let you find THATCamps by region and/or date and will let you search for THATCamps by name.
• The home page of thatcamp.org now displays the start date, end date, and location of upcoming THATCamps.
• You can subscribe to a feed of New THATCamps by RSS or by email via the buttons on the home page of thatcamp.org.
• All THATCamp sites allow users to befriend one another.
• All THATCamp sites allow users to favorite blog posts. Visitors can see how many favorites a post has received, site administrators can see a list of the most-favorited posts on their THATCamp site, and network administrators can see a list of the most-favorited posts on all THATCamp sites on thatcamp.org. This is a feature that’ll help us immensely as we finally get ready to produce the long-awaited Proceedings of THATCamp.
• The THATCamp Registration form that lets people sign up to go to a THATCamp now has options for “Days Attending” and for “T-shirt Size” to help organizers plan.

Very soon, we’ll also enable an automatic THATCamp Registry that will automatically create a website for people who say, Hey, yeah, I want to organize a THATCamp! No more waiting for the sluggish THATCamp Coordinator to do it for you manually. We’ll be writing some help documentation for these features soon and will be fine-tuning how they work — send comments and suggestions to me at info@thatcamp.org. Though I won’t promise to answer until next week.

Today I asked someone about a project: “How long has it been in development, how much did it cost, and how many users does it have?” It occurred to me that while I could probably make a pretty good guess about those numbers for THATCamp, I had never sat down and done the math. So I did. Here it is.

THATCamp has been in development for five years, maybe almost six if you count the planning time before the first one. The first day of the first THATCamp was May 31, 2008, so the fifth anniversary is coming up on May 31, 2013. (Ooh, maybe that’s the day to release a commemorative edition of the first t-shirt — the dark blue one with the yellow tent.)

How much has THATCamp (broadly conceived) cost over those five years? It turns out there’s a nice round number: a million dollars. That’s a rough estimate, of course, but it’s about right. The Mellon Foundation has given us two two-year grants of approximately $250,000 apiece, so that’s half a million dollars. That money has gone to pay my salary (in full) and parts of the salary of various other people at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and beyond who’ve spent time on THATCamp: designers and developers and sysadmins such as Chris Raymond, Jeremy Boggs, Boone Gorges, Tammie Lister, and Ammon Shepherd and administrators and managers and assistants such as Tom Scheinfeldt, Rebecca Onion, Andy Privée, Jeny Martinez, and Sarah Kahler. The money has also funded my travel budget, which has allowed me go to 19 separate THATCamps (at least!) to teach workshops and to help the organizers. The Mellon money has also gone to fund fellowships for grad students and junior scholars to go to THATCamp, and to pay stipends to reviewers of fellowship applications and to workshop instructors. There have been plenty of other miscellaneous expenses, as well (stickers, stickers, and more stickers).

Most of the other half million dollars has come from the many organizations and individuals who have supported individual THATCamps. We estimate (and it’s a pretty rough estimate) that the average THATCamp costs about $4000 to put on, so if you multiply that by the 105 THATCamps since 2008, you get $420,000. (See the THATCamp Directory for the best THATCamp count.) Added to that $420k are the funds from organizations such as Microsoft Research, the Kress Foundation, and the Council on Library and Information Resources who have given money for fellowships and for other forms of general THATCamp support, so half a million is a fair guess.

How many people has that million dollars over five years benefited? Well, there are just over 5,000 registered users on thatcamp.org, but there have been several THATCamps that either don’t register their participants or don’t host their sites on thatcamp.org, so that number doesn’t include everyone who’s ever been to a THATCamp. The last time I ran the numbers (we don’t collect the data systematically), I figured that the average THATCamp has about 70 people, so if you multiply that by the aforesaid 105 THATCamps, you get 7,350. We get lots of recidivists, um, repeat THATCampers, of course, so we might as well split the difference: call it about 6175 people. Which means that the humanities and technology community as a whole has spent about $162 per person on THATCamp.

I must say: that’s good value. The average rating of THATCamp’s usefulness is 4.46 on a 5-point scale, and while those evaluations come from a smallish subset (N=728) of people who’ve been to THATCamp (and while I’d love to get us back up over that 4.5 mark), I don’t get the sense that there’s a huge population of people who hate THATCamp and get nothing out of it. Just the opposite.

So that’s the math — at least, my math. I wonder what the math looks like for other digital humanities projects.

***UPDATED 7/19/17 with a working link to THATCamp average rating of usefulness. The average may change as new respondents submit ratings.***

As you may know, last weekend all sites on thatcamp.org went down after being infected with malware. Turns out that an old theme used on a couple of archived THATCamp sites included the “TimThumb” script (thumb.php), which is vulnerable to a well-known hacker exploit. Read more about it at krisztianpanczel.com/timthumb-is-your-wordpress-blog-hacked/.

Because that hack might possibly have given some unsavory people access to login information, we’ve had to reset everyone’s password on thatcamp.org. To get a new password, go to this URL:

thatcamp.org/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword

Put in your username or email address and click the “Get a New Password” button. You will then receive an email with a URL to click on that will open a form where you can type in a new password.

So sorry for the inconvenience, but we do want to make sure that the network of THATCamp websites remains safe. Email info@thatcamp.org if you have any trouble logging in.

We are coming to the end of our public beta period for the redesigned thatcamp.org, and to celebrate, we’re going to host a live question and answer session on Twitter. On Friday, December 7th at 10am Eastern, we’ll take half an hour to answer your questions about the process and product of our redesign. If you’re interested in either THATCamp or website redesign in general, keep an eye on the #thatcamp hashtag and/or the @thatcamp Twitter account at 10am Eastern on 12/7 to participate.

All the members of the team will be available to talk about the project:

• Tom Scheinfeldt, project lead, @foundhistory on Twitter
• Amanda French, project manager, @amandafrench on Twitter
• Boone Gorges, web developer, @boone on Twitter
• Tammie Lister, web designer, @karmatosed on Twitter
• Rebecca Onion, content writer, @rebeccaonion on Twitter
• Ammon Shepherd, systems administrator, @mossiso on Twitter

In case you hadn’t seen, some of the new features of thatcamp.org include the following:

• A network-wide Activity page that shows what people are doing on THATCamp sites around the world
• A network-wide People page where you can search for people who’ve been to a THATCamp
• User forums where THATCampers and THATCamp organizers can ask and answer questions of one another
• Lots of new social features, including friending, favoriting, and messaging — log in and look at your own user profile or see my user profile to check them out
• Built-in collaborative note-taking with Participad (coming soon)
• A lovely new look and feel

Talk to you soon!

It’s long been the practice at THATCamp to use Google Docs to take notes on sessions; with Google Docs, everyone who’s in a particular session can contribute to the notes. Some really terrific documents and sets of notes have been produced this way — see for instance “Brainstorming a Digital Humanities Creator Stick” from THATCamp Piedmont or “Intro to Project Management and Planning” from THATCamp CHNM 2011.

Using Google Docs for this purpose, however, has one big drawback: finding the documents afterward. Usually note-takers will put the link to a set of notes on the THATCamp blog, but many people forget to do so. It’s also true that since these documents are owned by one particular person, the persistence and preservation of any one Google Doc depends on that person maintaining a Google account and keeping that document around, well, forever.

Therefore, as part of an ongoing redevelopment of thatcamp.org (look for a new site in late November), we asked Boone Gorges to see what he could do about developing a WordPress plugin that would enable the same kind of collaborative real-time editing as Google Docs and Piratepad while keeping the content within the THATCamp site. We also knew that this kind of functionality would be really useful for other people with other purposes.

Boone, as we knew he would (after all, he’s the creator of horse_thatbooks), has built a terrific tool for THATCamp: Participad. Try it out and download it at participad.org, or mess around with it on GitHub at github.com/boonebgorges/participad. You can read more about Participad on Boone’s blog, and I append the official CHNM announcement below.

Participad will be available on all THATCamp sites within one month. Can’t wait.

***

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media is proud to announce the release of Participad, a WordPress plugin for real-time collaborative editing. Participad was developed for THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) to help participants take notes on unconference sessions, but we anticipate that it will be broadly useful for anyone who wants to co-author a blog post. If one historian in Canada and another in Australia are watching a U.S. presidential debate, for example, they can use Participad to live-blog their reactions.

Participad runs on Etherpad Lite and is open source software released under the GNU General Public License. Participad was built by Boone Gorges, the lead developer for CUNY Academic Commons and Anthologize. You can try the demo and download Participad at participad.org.

Yesterday I read Brian Croxall’s post “Why the 2013 MLA Digital Pedagogy Unconference Isn’t a THATCamp” with interest. And although it may sound like unhealthily low self-esteem, I’d say that on the whole I agree with Brian that “within academia–or at least in the humanities, where I spend most of my time–unconferences have become synonymous with THATCamp. And I don’t think that’s healthy.” As I wrote a few months ago in a post called “The Unconference is Alive,” there are plenty and plenty and plenty of unconferences besides THATCamp, on all

When I first started as THATCamp Coordinator, I thought that people would be much more interested in “hacking” the THATCamp format than they have been. Most of the queries I’ve gotten from people thinking of organizing a THATCamp have been questions on what exactly they should do, not what else they might do besides the usual. Basically, I think, THATCamp has been as popular as it is partly because it offers a standard model that can be easily followed: set up a WordPress website, recruit participants, call for participants to post session proposals to the blog, organize sessions into a schedule during the first 90 minutes, have workshops, have discussions, have Dork Shorts, then repair to the nearby Irish pub for a few beers. Certainly I could take some of the blame for the increasing rigidity of that model, but I’ve found that most people are just unnerved enough by the idea of organizing a THATCamp that they’d like to keep it as simple as possible, go with what works, use existing templates. Even Brian and Adeline have used some THATCamp.org text on their own website, and more power to them — that’s why it’s licensed CC-BY. One of the real innovations of THATCamp, after all, is that anyone can organize one without needing the infrastructure of a scholarly association: one of the real difficulties of organizing a THATCamp, as well, is not having the infrastructure of a scholarly association. When you’re going it alone, it helps to have a model to draw on, even if you decide to alter that model.

I do think that people going to MLA might get a bit confused about what the difference is between THATCamp MLA and the Digital Pedagogy Unconference, or wonder why they might go to one instead of the other, but to those hypothetical people I say, go to both! THATCamp MLA is January 2nd and the Digital Pedagogy unconference is January 3.

What I also hope will happen is that more people in academia will try out more new kinds of meeting formats. You can make them up, of course, but if that sounds a bit intimidating, try the book Open Space Technology (e.g., get everyone in a circle and ask them to address one question) or the book Mob Rule Learning (especially the section on “Facilitation Styles,” including “appreciative inquiry,” “dotmocracy,” “birds of a feather,” “fishbowl,” and more). Happy unconferencing …

We’re both pleased and grateful to announce that Microsoft Research has given $10,000 in support of THATCamp. An early sponsor of THATCamp Pacific Northwest, Microsoft Research has now made funds of up to $500 available for sixteen separate THATCamps. These funds will be administered and distributed by THATCamp Central at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. If you are organizing a THATCamp in the U.S. and are interested in receiving these funds, please write info@thatcamp.org for details.

MS Research has supported the work of Internet ethnographer and privacy scholar danah boyd, has produced such useful open source tools for the humanities as ChronoZoom, and has organized an annual Faculty Summit for the express purpose of bringing academic researchers and educators together with Microsoft’s computer scientists and engineers. We’re proud to be associated with them. Special thanks are due to Donald Brinkman, program manager for the Digital Humanities at MS Research, whose vision made this happen.

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve hired Rebecca Onion as the new Assistant THATCamp Coordinator. As her website will tell you, Rebecca is “a Ph.D candidate in the Department of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, with research interests including the history of childhood and youth, cultures of science and technology, environmental studies, and visual and material culture.” She’s on Twitter at @rebeccaonion.

Starting in May, Rebecca will be revising our THATCamp help documents, producing new help documents, and adding help documents in new formats (PDFs! epubs! video!). This project to make sure we have useful and complete information for THATCamp organizers, participants, sponsors, and friends will be particularly important as we embark on a major redesign of thatcamp.org this summer (forums! groups! user profiles! cross-THATCamp searching and browsing! cross-THATCamp activity streams!). Later on, Rebecca will help us support ongoing THATCamps and may help us find, preserve, and make accessible older THATCamp content circa 2008-2011.

Welcome, Rebecca!

We’re now hiring an Assistant THATCamp Coordinator. The duties of this position will be to

• create, revise, and maintain support documentation for THATCamp organizers and participants, and
• assist with ongoing THATCamp support tasks such as creating THATCamp websites, reminding THATCamp organizers of pre- and post-THATCamp tasks, and answering questions by e-mail and Twitter about THATCamp.

This is a part-time, temporary position at no more than 10 hours per week for two years (April 2012 – March 2014) at a starting salary of $16 per hour. Work can be done remotely. The position is especially suited to a graduate student in a humanities discipline who is a THATCamp enthusiast. We’ll hire someone who can do the following:

• Write clearly and concisely, especially when explaining technology to a general audience
• Build websites, preferably with WordPress (HTML, CSS, some PHP)
• Explain THATCamp and unconferences to scholars and others based on personal experience
• Work independently, completing tasks with minimal supervision
• Keep track of what’s going on at various events (THATCamps happen often!)

Please send a résumé or a curriculum vitae and a couple of paragraphs about why you’re right for this position to Amanda French, THATCamp Coordinator, at info@thatcamp.org. We’ll begin reviewing applications April 1 and will let all applicants know the outcome by May 1.

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) is the leading producer of open source tools for humanists and historical content on the Web (e.g., Zotero, Omeka, the Teaching History website, and the Gulag History website). Each year CHNM’s award-winning project web sites receive over 16 million visitors and over a million people rely on its digital tools to teach, learn and conduct research.

Thought I’d post a bit of history: the IRC (Internet Relay Channel) log from the first THATCamp in 2008, presciently saved by Bess Sadler. We do still have a room called thatcamp on the IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, but Twitter has taken over much of the function that IRC then served. Do feel free to use the thatcamp IRC channel whenever you like!

I’ve edited the log so that it can be more easily read, taking out all the lines about so-and-so leaving or joining the IRC. Enjoy.

— Log opened Sat May 31 10:19:27 2008
10:19 < epistemographer> just imagine if we were all piling on one collaborative spreadsheet
10:19 < asolove> so can whoever controls thatcampbot consider the room-specific IRC channels?
10:19 < thatcampbot> ok
10:20 < jgsmith> a wiki page for the schedule?
10:21 < thatcampbot> give me a sec to figure this out
10:21 < dancohen> is it possible to simultaneously irc chat, twitter, blog, and podcast? I’m going to try.
— Log opened Sat May 31 10:26:08 2008
10:29 < asolove> thatcamp450 for rdf discussion
10:30 < willynills> about to start the text mining session
10:31 < DruidSmith> RDF… am curious if anyone is working with AJAX or JavaScript browsing and navigation of OWL ontologies
10:34 < willynills> text analysis software: www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/philologic/
10:35 < willynills> philomine: philologic.uchicago.edu/philomine/
10:37 < dancohen> in the text mining session in the lab (rm 462)
10:39 < dancohen> sean takats is explaining CHNM’s upcoming NEH-funded text-mining project
10:40 < epistemographer> Sean’s not a “better” historian, he’s a “different” kind of historian
10:40 < dchud> dancohen: hooray for funding
10:41 < bess_> the techies are having an impromptu “keeping the wheels on” meeting — sustainability from a technical point of view
10:42 < dancohen> good thing we’re inside–just got a tornado watch alert from the fairfax messaging system, active until 10:30 tonight
10:42 < epistemographer> yowza
10:42 < doug_knox> RDF group talking about bibliographic data, citations, Zotero, data about museum/library objects
10:43 < willynills> according sean: three aspects of text mining: locating or finding documents, automatically extracting data from documents (instead of manually reading), analysis of corpus
10:45 < willynills> according to laura mandell: text mining can be used to identify terms of analysis not within your discipline
10:45 < matthewgaventa> wow. really doesn’t LOOK like tornado weather (at least through my small window)
10:46 < jackflaps> it feels like it, though
10:48 < davelester> it’s great to see everyone on IRC!
10:51 < elli> RDF: used to define relationships in restricted domains, perhaps more interesting. But movement in developing it is to make it applicable to broader and broader domains.
10:52 < bess_> davelester: I set up thatcampbot to record the channel. I’ll give you the logs afterwards.
10:52 < davelester> thanks bess_
10:56 < asolove> can someone add thatcampbot to thatcamp450
10:56 < davelester> asolove++ great idea. can you do that bess_?
10:57 < willynills> dan cohen: text mining tools need to useful for historians and may not be
10:58 < willynills> text mining tasks: summarization, classification, extractions
10:59 < bess_> asolove and davelester : I’ll give it a shot
10:59 < bess_> asolove and davelester : I’ll get to it on the break, I’m in the middle of a good conversation
10:59 < davelester> np
11:03 < asolove> ok thanks
11:06 < karindalziel> I will be posting the URL’s we are talking about on del.icio.us with tag thatcamp
11:07 < jackflaps> I’m going to start doing that for the RDF session as well
11:10 < willynills> text mining does more than speed up historical thought; it should give us a new level of comprehension
11:11 < clioweb> FYI – I updated the schedule, so that should be current based on the last change we tried to implement downstairs
11:11 < clioweb> thanks to everyone for patience and input
11:11 < clioweb> schedule at thatcamp.org/schedule/
11:12 < dancohen> clioweb: thanks–you did a great job with the schedule; hard to optimize something that complicated
11:12 < clioweb> I think it worked out well
11:13 < davelester> clioweb++
11:14 < clioweb> people should feel free to use other rooms and spaces for ad hoc meetings
11:20 < BenBrumfield> Karin, is there any chance you could let us use your wiki?
11:25 < karindalziel> ben – sure, pass is karin
11:25 < karindalziel> I’ll clean up later
11:29 < dancohen> www.dancohen.org/2006/08/08/mapping-what-americans-did-on-september-11/
11:30 < dancohen> my best effort on text mining + geolocation
11:32 < BenBrumfield> Karin, can you paste the URL?
11:35 < BenBrumfield> Got it
11:35 < davelester> could people post their session notes on the blog? that’d be great
11:35 < dancohen> so far, been able to blog, tweet, and irc chat all at once; adding in the podcasting might be hard…
11:36 < DruidSmith> There was a GREAT discussion of technology and sustainability at EPA’s Science Forum last week – William McDonough, author of The Cradle to Cradle Revolution – www.amazon.com/Cradle-Remaking-Way-Make-Things/dp/0865475873/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212248155&sr=8-1
11:37 < davelester> dancohen: I’d love to see a live digital campus
11:37 < epistemographer> me too – do it, Dan
11:37 < karindalziel> actually, just set up a new wiki www.nirak.net/thatcamp/pmwiki.php?n=Main.HomePage
11:37 < dancohen> davelester: tom and I were thinking of doing it
11:37 < BenBrumfield> Oh. Sweet!
11:38 < dancohen> anyone mind if I look like I’m manning a McDonald’s drive-thru?
11:38 < BenBrumfield> Well, I need a place to put the DorkShorts material now, so I’ll get started with Karin’s
11:38 < davelester> there’s already a whiteboard in the main room for dork shorts with a list of names
11:38 < karindalziel> feel free to do whatever you want there
11:43 < willynills> Bill: text mining, given abundant texts, can ask questions about simultaneity and co-incidence.
11:43 < sgillies> epiphany!
11:44 < DruidSmith> add geotagging to the mix and you also have geo-enabled text mining
11:45 < DruidSmith> and temporal coincidence / simultaneity?
11:50 < asolove> what is the method for getting slides in to Dork Shorts?
11:51 < BenBrumfield> Karin, can you enable uploads on the wiki? www.nirak.net/thatcamp/pmwiki.php?n=PmWiki.Uploads
11:52 < foundhistory> asolove … thumbdrive?
11:53 < asolove> hmm
11:53 < asolove> I can just download from email
11:53 < foundhistory> if that works. what kind of slides? ppt? keynote?
11:53 < BenBrumfield> Will we be able to hook up the projector to our own laptops?
11:53 < asolove> it’s actually just xul
11:54 < foundhistory> oh
11:54 < foundhistory> np
11:54 < foundhistory> ben… that’s going to be tough
11:54 < foundhistory> we’re going to be pretty pressed for time
11:54 < BenBrumfield> Okay — wiki it is
11:54 < foundhistory> but we could add another dork shorts session maybe
11:55 < sgillies> session 1 made me think of “glass house”
11:56 < foundhistory> Lunch is served!!!
11:56 < foundhistory> and Dork Shorts is starting!
12:00 < sgillies> great adhoc session in 402. thanks, everybody
12:13 < karindalziel> lunch is teh awesome. Great spreat, guys!!
12:22 < sgillies> syndication architecture ++
12:29 < asolove> lunch was excellent
12:33 < epistemographer> omeka in action: exhibitions.nypl.org/eminent/
12:37 < dancohen> enjoying the dork shorts
12:39 < bess__> oooh, pretty! typographia
12:41 < bess__> can anyone read the url?
12:42 < jackflaps> www4.ncsu.edu/~dmrieder/typographia
12:42 < jeanne_kramer-sm> www4.ncsu.edu/~dmrieder/typographia
12:47 -!- Netsplit calvino.freenode.net < -> irc.freenode.net quits: asolove, karindalziel, bess__, bess_, matthewgaventa, epistemographer, jgsmith, dancohen, sgillies
12:53 -!- Netsplit over, joins: dancohen
12:53 -!- Netsplit over, joins: sgillies
12:54 -!- Netsplit over, joins: epistemographer
12:55 -!- Netsplit over, joins: bess_
12:58 < travis> Collaborative annotation: ecomma.cwrl.utexas.edu/0.2.0/
13:02 < tjowens> #thatcamp401
13:02 < tjowens> doh
13:06 < dancohen> In session on search, listening to Karin Dalziel show some interesting, wide-ranging examples.
13:07 < sgillies> i’d never seen etsy
13:07 < sgillies> nice
13:08 < bess_> etsy++
13:10 < bess_> All of the stuff Karin’s talking about is also available at www.nirak.net/2008/05/29/alternative-search-analyzing-document/
13:13 < tjowens> learning about iggy pop’s beat down
13:14 < sgillies> etsy beer can hat: www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=10966874
13:14 < jackflaps> cleveland rocks
13:16 < davelester> tinyurl.com/3cmfdy
13:17 < dancohen> davelester: thanks, dave.
13:17 < tjowens> that better not be atsly
13:17 < bess_> Josh G. says “It’s all about leveraging solipsism.” Love it!
13:17 < asolove> that’s cruel
13:33 < jeanne_kramer-sm> www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/battlelines/chapter3/chapter3_1a.html
13:36 < erazlogo> crowdsource transcribing first, then present like this: dohistory.org/diary/exercises/lens/index.html
13:41 < davelester> twitter is down again? boo
13:44 < asolove> the rain must have gotten it
13:46 < bess_> omg the rain!
13:46 < jackflaps> twitter’s a little slow
13:46 < jackflaps> if you poke at it with sticks a little it eventually loads
14:06 < epistemographer> we got crazy geeky in the Search session
14:12 < jeanne_kramer-sm> hoping that folks might post what was discussed in the Search session on the wiki…
14:14 < nowviskie> lisa spiro takes kick-ass notes and will be sharing a summary of the “research methods” session on the blog.
15:00 < epistemographer> quick call out: what’s being talked about in the sessions people are in?
15:01 < epistemographer> in “Museums” we’re talking about the difference between how museums, libraries and archives approach digita vs. physical issues
15:03 < jackflaps> in Games we’re talking about how to evaluate history-based video games based on their value as teaching tools
15:50 < dancohen> www.zotero.org/download/dev/zotero-1.5a.sync1.xpi
15:51 < shekhar> is patrick in here?
16:08 < dancohen> sustainability has been moved to rm 450
16:11 < BenBrumfield> Dorkshorts is nearly empty. We’ll probably wrap up early.
16:12 < davelester> aw
16:28 < elli> open street maps project offers lots of potential for dh projects to create maps for their own purposes (historical, not street based, available)
16:37 < bess___> elli: would you please post any notes you have on historical applications for open street maps? I was sorry to miss that session.
16:38 < shekhar> bess___: we’re not talking about historical maps in OSM… yet…
16:39 < shekhar> openstreetmap.org
16:39 < elli> bess_: I”ll do my best,
16:43 < elli> Now we are discussing how you might use the technology to walk places and map traces of roads, settlements, battlegrounds, and use the OSM software to incorporate this information
16:45 < dancohen> discussing sustainability models for zotero
16:46 < dancohen> anyone who is not in rm 450 who has ideas, drop them into IRC or Twitter
16:46 < elli> Mapping: freemap.in site with links to open source mapping software
16:49 < elli> Mapping: Shekhar is showing a free map of Mumbai with historical layers overlaid from the freemap site.
17:00 < bess___> I’ve heard a bit about processing, but I had no idea how awesome it was. What a great session!
17:05 * shekhar just showed mumbai.freemap.in and the testing version of a zotero openstreetmap plugin web.mit.edu/shekhar/zotero-maps.xpi
19:30 < davelester> howdy all
19:34 < kerri> Hi Dave. Wish I was there.
19:35 < davelester> aw, maybe next year?
19:36 < kerri> Sounds like it has been great!
19:36 < kerri> Elli will surely debrief me when she returns.
19:37 < davelester> definitely
19:51 < cg_> #thatcamp port 7000 at GMU.
19:51 < cg_> #thatcamp port 7000 at GMU
21:45 < bess_> hello?
21:53 < karindalziel> hiya. I am just hanging out in here while working on a blog post.
22:03 < karindalziel> soooo….is everyone else exhausted, or is it just me?
22:21 < bess_> karindalziel: also exhausted
22:21 < bess_> karindalziel: it’s so great to meet you! We have a lot of the same research interests.
22:22 < karindalziel> I am somehow wired too. Brain is racing. Which is good!
22:22 < karindalziel> bess: Great to meet you too!
22:23 < karindalziel> I feel like I have SO much to learn.
22:23 < bess_> karindalziel: You might enjoy this paper: www.ualberta.ca/~sruecker/links/07_Ruecker_Pill_Identification.pdf
22:24 < bess_> It’s an interface I worked on while at U of Alberta.
22:24 < bess_> Stan Ruecker was the primary investigator, and if you don’t know his work you might also enjoy it… www.ualberta.ca/~sruecker/
22:24 < karindalziel> cool- thanks! Something to read ont he plane ride home.
22:26 < karindalziel> Are you leading any discussions tomorrow?
22:26 < bess_> no, I don’t think so
22:26 < bess_> I plan to be an “active participant” in the omeka one, though!
22:27 < karindalziel> I can’t decide betwen that and interface design. So many tough choices.
22:27 < bess_> oh damn, did they schedule those across from each other?
22:28 * bess_ runs off to check the schedule
22:29 < bess_> Dammit, I want to attend every single one of the first sessions
22:30 < bess_> I mean the second session
22:30 < karindalziel> I know. :/
22:30 < bess_> I’m sure all the first sessions will be great, too, but mashup is the only one for me.
22:30 < karindalziel> Hopefully people will blog their sessions/
22:30 < bess_> but GIS, interface design, omeka, and bibliographic standards… I’m working on every one of those right now.
22:31 < karindalziel> I will go to management since it pertains most to my job. Unless I change my mind tomorrow morning.
22:31 < bess_> management? really? what kind of management?
22:32 < karindalziel> Project management.. lemme go find link
22:32 < karindalziel> thatcamp.org/2008/05/2-ideas/
22:35 < karindalziel> geez, linking blog posts takes forever
22:36 < karindalziel> hi ben
22:41 < karindalziel> Done with THAT Camp day 1 recap
22:41 < karindalziel> www.nirak.net/2008/05/31/that-camp-day-1/
22:41 < karindalziel> and with that, off to read for a bit before bed. *yawn*
22:41 < sgillies> anybody else got a 5:11 flight from dulles and want to share a cab? lemme know
22:43 < karindalziel> hope I didn’t get anyone’s name wrong.
22:43 < sgillies> good recap
22:43 < karindalziel> wow, you’re quick!
22:43 < karindalziel> ok, really going now.
22:44 < jeanne_ks> where is the recap?
22:45 < sgillies> www.nirak.net/2008/05/31/that-camp-day-1/
22:46 < jeanne_ks> thanks!
22:46 < sgillies> see you all in the morning
22:53 < davelester> anyone in #thatcamp coming to the ‘hacking omeka’ session tomorrow? I’m still deciding what I want to show
22:55 < bess_> davelester: I’ll be there
22:55 < davelester> nice, I saw your tweet
22:56 < davelester> I’ll definitely show off the OAI-PMH ingestion plugin
22:56 < bess_> davelester: NYPL and UVA are both very interested in how we can bring digital repository objects into omeka exhibits.
22:56 < bess_> davelester: I’d also like some advice on how to get started writing omeka themes and plugins
22:57 < bess_> davelester: I think the more eyecandy themes we can provide for omeka the more people will oooh and ahhh.
22:57 < davelester> agreed!
22:58 < bess_> davelester: I’m really looking forward to it, but now I have to go to sleep so I can wake up on time. See you tomorrow!
23:15 < jeanne_ks> Having trouble deciding ‘Hacking Omeka’ vs ‘GIS/Maps’ vs ‘Interface Design’!
— Day changed Sun Jun 01 2008
07:11 < dchud> mornin’
07:11 < dchud> how do i see what everybody has twittered to @thatcamp all at once?
07:44 < sgillies> morning
09:14 < sgillies> asolove breaking free of xml!
10:09 < asolove> text session has been interesting
10:10 < bess__> mashup session is fascinating.
10:10 < asolove> what was covered?
10:10 < elli> what was covered in text?
10:10 < asolove> just using Yahoo/Google/Simile tools, or something additional?
10:11 < elli> mashups talked more about APIs, permanence and guidelines for APIs, and not so much about tools and implementations.
10:11 < asolove> uh huh
10:11 < asolove> we discussed some uses and issues with TEI, alternate storage formats
10:11 < elli> (importance of spending the time to develop APIs and make available)
10:12 < asolove> and cool graphical interfaces for creating digital texts without knowing XML
10:12 < elli> what alternate storage formats
10:12 < asolove> very interesting
10:13 < bess__> asolove: we’re talking about everything from google maps, to library of congress web services, to the importance of permanent urls and the implications for scholarship
10:14 < bess__> excellent conversation, I’m generating way more ideas than I’ll possibly be able to implement
10:14 < asolove> sounds very interesting, sorry I had to present this round
10:15 < bess__> asolove: I get the feeling there will be lots of blog posts and writeups about this one
10:15 < elli> Raymond closed with programmableweb,com
10:36 < jkramer_ks> fyi.. I posted a summary of the Text Mining session from yesterday: www.spellboundblog.com/2008/06/01/thatcamp-2008-text-mining-and-the-persian-carpet-effect/
10:41 < asolove> INTERFACE DESIGN IN 401
10:41 < asolove> whoops
10:43 < epistemographer> asolove: what’s the discussion about in 401?
10:43 < asolove> funny
10:43 < asolove> I think we’re looking at the JGAAP interface
10:46 < nowviskie> can’t believe I didn’t realize you can put a URL to a KML file like this in the search blank for Google Maps!
10:46 < nowviskie> pleiades.stoa.org/places/archaic.kml
10:47 < bess_> nowviskie: wow! I didn’t know you could do that either!
10:49 < nowviskie> yeah, bess — guess what’s going to be on Joe’s to-do list when we get home!
10:49 < elli> Bibliograph session
10:50 < elli> I mean Bibliography
10:50 < elli> Zotero is a good tool for moving bibliographic information from one place to another
10:51 < elli> Bruce D’Arcus style language for bib (CSL)
10:51 < dchud> bibliograph(y or ic)
10:52 < nowviskie> re: mashing up georeferenced data — this also works in Google Maps: pleiades.stoa.org/places/archaic.atom
10:52 < dancohen> if the biblio group would like me to come over to 450, let me know
10:52 < elli> we have Trevor here!
10:53 < dancohen> ok, just checking
10:53 < erazlogo> for future thatcamp – find software for all urls opened in all sessions to be automatically saved into one big links file (coins-enabled?) so people could later follow links from sessions they missed
10:55 < elli> zotero/content/tools/csleit.xul
10:59 < bess_> nowviskie: maybe we could give David G. access to the google sat imagery that way… allow people to export a kml file of the layer he wants and open it in google maps / google earth
11:00 < dchud> tjowens: note the second author at rfc.net/rfc1165.html
11:05 < dancohen> in the interface design session (rm 401) we’re debating how much to ask users what a good UI is for a tool or collection
11:07 < jgsmith> re ui: unix tends to optimize for the most common use case, which is the experienced user — explains why man pages tend to be cryptic for those unfamiliar with a particular command
11:08 < dancohen> jgsmith: right. good point.
11:10 < bess_> in the omeka hacking talk we’re making unreasonable demands of the omeka dev team
11:10 < davelester___>
11:11 < dchud> jgsmith: does unix optimize for the most common use case, or the simplest, decomposed, filterable use case?
11:11 < asolove> it optimizes for the case of people who have write access to the man page in a project
11:11 < bess_> asolove++ # so true!
11:12 < jgsmith> well, most people using unix are experienced in unix — the inexperience period is short compared to the rest of a person’s career
11:12 < matthewgaventa> nice parallel: in bibliography, we’re bordering on making unreasonable demands on the zotero team
11:12 < bess_> matthewgaventa: I’m going to make my unreasonable demands during the lunchtime zotero session
11:13 < jgsmith> doesn’t mean an interface should be poorly designed — but designed for the person familiar with the process or the concepts involved
11:13 < asolove> the design might encourage users to learn the underlying system
11:14 < jgsmith> asolove: -nod- — easier to do in a GUI than a CLI
11:15 < dancohen> note to people making unreasonable demands of CHNMers: don’t make us release the hounds on you.
11:18 < epistemographer> unreasonable demands++
11:19 < dancohen> fluidproject.org/ and Yahoo UI provide open source nice-looking widgets for websites
11:19 < dancohen> that are tested across many browsers
11:20 < epistemographer> for reference: URL I demo-ed is labs.nypl.org/projects/maps/transparent.html
11:40 < bess_> OAI/PMH plugin for omeka is fantastic. I’ve never cared deeply about OAI before, but I think I just started.
11:42 < elli> bibliographicontology.com/
11:50 < erazlogo> use for upcoming mapping plugin in zotero–map your research trips by where archives are located–could be done if there is an archival collection item type with a “place” field
11:58 < dchud> simile.mit.edu/wiki/Zotz
12:21 < davelester_> Lightning talks: first up, Mark Tebeau presenting the Euclid Corridor
12:28 < matthewgaventa> next up in dork shorts: jeffrey talking about CSS file structure and organization
12:37 < asolove> dancohen is about to start the zotero demo
12:39 < matthewgaventa> dave lester is talking about scholarpress
12:41 < asolove> zotero demo starting
12:49 < elli> Goodbye and thank you to everyone at ThatCamp, enjoy the rest of the day. It’s been great camping with you all.
12:49 < asolove> leaving early?
12:50 < sgillies> cheers, elli. great to meet you
12:50 < elli> yes. have to take a train. It’s been great to meet you, too.
12:53 < asolove> Twitter seems to be down
12:53 < asolove> just thing
12:53 < asolove> Jobs at WWDC, Cohen announcing Zotero server
13:20 < karindalziel> The librarians on twitter are asking me lots of questions about Zotero server. Much excitement.
13:32 < dancohen__> good visualizations anyone? post them to IRC
13:33 < jgsmith> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte – Tufte’s done a lot of work on data visualization in general
13:34 < asolove_> Interesting discussion of event microformat standard
13:35 < asolove_> and now the event discussion is moving into visualization issues and we ought to be talking to the people in 402
13:36 < dancohen__> hey people talking about time in rm 462: why not join us in rm 402?
13:37 < asolove_> winds changed and now we’re into interdisciplinary discussion
13:39 < dchud> if only we could fold time and space. and then visualize that.
13:41 < dancohen__> come on down!
13:42 < dchud> somehow i read that as “interplanetary”
13:44 < asolove> whoops, misunderstood visualization
13:48 < karindalziel> asolove: What did you think visualization meant?
13:49 < asolove> I thought we were talking about GIS type issues and graphing not quick display of information
13:50 < karindalziel> asolove:ah, OK
14:02 < bess__> we solved all our problems in the international issues session, so we’ve dispersed to other sessions
21:27 < shekhar> any thatcampers want to grab a drink in DC?
21:28 * shekhar opens a beer for thatcampbot
22:02 < davelester> hey shekhar, where in DC are you at? I’m in Arlington right now
22:14 < shekhar> davelester: i’m in columbia heights
22:14 < shekhar> a bit far, i imagine
22:14 * shekhar passes the pipe to omeka-bot
— Day changed Mon Jun 02 2008
14:03 < davelester> sgillies and jgsmith: great to meet you both this weekend!
14:03 < davelester> hope you enjoyed #thatcamp
14:04 < sgillies> davelester: it rocked
14:04 < sgillies> i have a feeling that good things will ripple out of it
— Day changed Tue Jun 03 2008

Since yesterday, the digital humanities blogotwittersphere has been discussing a post by digital marketer Mitch Joel somewhat misleadingly titled “The Death of the Unconference.” (Reminds me a bit of famed literary critic Harold Bloom, who apparently also likes to pronounce things dead.) Joel writes, “I was a massive proponent of the unconference movement (I still am!), but that word has been used so poorly by so many groups that it seems to have all but disappeared.”

I’ve had a most instructive Google Alert on “unconference” for awhile now, which has taught me that there’s an unconference on Christianity, an unconference on real estate, and an unconference on coworking. I like to tweet these unconferences from the THATCamp account when I find them, just to show support from one unconference to another, and to remind myself that it’s not just coders and librarians and digital humanists engaging in “mob rule learning,” as the title of the recent book has it. But that Google alert has also taught me that Mitch Joel may have a point: the term “unconference” is sometimes used in cases where it’s hard to see what’s so “un” about the conference. I specifically remember deciding not to tweet the otherwise intriguing-sounding “Indigenous Innovation Unconference” when I saw how much they were emphasizing their six eminent speakers and how little they were emphasizing any kind of participant-driven program. Similarly, plenty of events that call themselves unconferences seem to have whole slews of presentations, which strikes me as odd.

Early on in my position as THATCamp Coordinator I was surprised to realize that I would occasionally have to enforce — not just explain — the unconference “rules,” and that’s been even more the case as THATCamp and digital humanities general have grown. Some have wanted to limit THATCamp attendance to members of their own community, some have wanted to charge registration fees, some have wanted to name a facilitator and/or a note-taker for every session, some have wanted to have presentations and keynote speakers, some have wanted to vote on sessions online beforehand rather than in the first session on the first morning, and so on and so forth. Some of these ideas made me uncomfortable — they seemed rather unTHATCampy — but then the idea of saying yes or no to such ideas and determining what is or is not THATCampy also made me uncomfortable. Suffice it to say that when I first began, I would have entirely agreed with Timothy Burke’s impassioned declaration that “‘Do as thou wilt’ and ‘Ur doing it wrong’ don’t add up,” but these days I’m more willing to take the latter position.

That being said, I hope that the rules we (and in some cases I) have set up for THATCamp, the rules I’m willing to be Madame Enforcer about, are rules that allow the kind of fluidity Timothy wants: “Improvisation has signal, it has pattern, it has structure, it has plans, but it also has the freedom to say or play what it seems right to say or play at that moment. Whatever works is what I want to be free to do … ” You bet. And of course improvisation has rules. Always say yes. Give the other guy a turn to solo and don’t step all over him. Put all the leftovers into the pasta except the pudding. The rules of THATCamp, ideally, are like that, or like the rules of copyleft. They are rules that require you to be free. In fact, one of the seminal texts of THATCamp is Tom Scheinfeldt’s “THATCamp Ground Rules”, in which Tom violently demands that THATCamp participants 1) have fun, 2) get some work done, and 3) be nice to each other. (Fascist.)

We also developed some rules for THATCamp organizers, which, similarly, are pretty much rules that require you to be free:

I agree that our THATCamp will be

• FREE or CHEAP to attend (registration fees of up to $30 USD are fine)
• OPEN to anyone who wishes to apply or register (no institutional, professional, or rank restrictions)
• INFORMAL and participatory (no presentations, papers, or demos longer than 5 minutes)
• PUBLIC on the open web (sessions can be blogged, twittered, photographed, recorded, and posted)
• SELF-ORGANIZING (no program committee: all participants are given a chance to help set the agenda, either before or during the unconference)

As long as you adhere to those rules (and keep our logo in Whitney), you can pretty much do whatever you want at your THATCamp. I’m full of advice on planning a THATCamp and a little advice on going to a THATCamp, but you’re also free to ignore that. Mitch Joel gives a whole stern list on the topic of “Your conference is not an unconference if…” I’m glad to say that even according to his strict definition, THATCamp is an unconference. Long may it live.

I’ve been shamefully lax about blogging on thatcamp.org — I can’t think why. In any case, I’ve set myself some firm deadlines (and startlines), so you can expect to see more here from now on. I’m also going to post copies of THATCamp News here as well as e-mails that I’ve sent to the THATCamp organizers e-mail list (which is populated by those who have registered a THATCamp). Here’s one such e-mail below about changes in the THATCamp fellowship program, deprecation of the term “BootCamp,” and a couple of other issues.

***

Hi THATCamp organizers,

I wanted to alert you to a couple of changes in the fellowship program.

First of all, I’m deprecating the “BootCamp” terminology, because it winds up causing confusion about whether “BootCamp” is a separate event from “THATCamp.” I’m recommending the more generic term “workshops” now, and have changed the text on the main thatcamp.org site to reflect that. This is of course a recommendation only, so if you’ve been calling it “BootCamp” on your site, you can continue doing that if you like.

Second, we’re offering both more and fewer fellowships now, depending on how you look at it. We have awarded (or rather are shortly about to award) all remaning available Kress fellowships to museum professionals and students, so the only fellowship funder is now the Mellon foundation. However, due largely to an excellent suggestion by THATCamp New England organizer Lincoln Mullen, we are offering four additional $250 fellowships per THATCamp in addition to the current number of four $500 fellowships. The idea is that so many people are relatively local to THATCamp, some don’t need as much as $500 for travel money, so we’re going to see whether making smaller amounts available is useful for people. These can all be called “Mellon THATCamp Fellowships” now, should you need a name for them. I’ve updated the page at thatcamp.org/fellowships with current information.

In general, I do want to figure out various ways to attract more fellowship applicants, as well, so let me know if you have ideas on that score. I am going to start automatically adding a page to new THATCamp sites with a description of the fellowship program and prominent link to the fellowship application, for instance, and will start providing sample e-mail templates for organizers that should help you publicize both your THATCamp and the fellowship program, but let me know whatever else you think might work.

We’re also going to start mailing (yes, by snail! well, not literally) a publicity kit with things like posters and stickers (and possibly bookmarks, thanks to an excellent idea by THATCamp Bay Area organizer Scott McGinnis) to new THATCamp organizers, so unless your THATCamp is happening in September or early October, keep an eye out for that.

Let me know if you have questions. Thanks, as always, for all the hard work you do, for no other reason than that it’s a bloody good idea to get people together to learn from one another once in awhile.

Cheers,

Amanda

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.)

]]> https://thatcamp.org/2010/12/10/new-plugin-installed-to-help-create-campers-page/feed/ 1 https://thatcamp.org/2010/08/31/need-your-help-telling-analog-humanists-about-fellowships/ Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:37:58 +0000 http://thatcamp.org/?p=1726-en

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.

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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.

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

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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.