What camp? I’ll be off to Virginia at the end of the month to participate in an intriguing variation on the academic conference — a participant-generated and collaborative unconference. THATCAMP stands for The Humanities and Technology Camp. The participants submitted topics that we would like to share and discuss. We share some of these ideas online before the event and then assemble, from these interests, working groups, discussions, sessions, collaborative experiments. I even signed up to learn how to build a “history appliance” with an Arduino kit–I’ll have to explain that one when I get back.
Curious about the format, I did a little digging. This seemed like a case where Wikipedia could help me out and it did — read more about the unconference format here. I particularly liked the links to other types of collaborative inquiry. Some participants have praised another unconference event, the beCAMP in Charlottesville. My sister recently attended and blogged about a journalism unconference, News Tools 2008. Here’s a description of what to expect at a “barcamp” — another name for this type of event.
This is a little addition to my post — I read yesterday about another upcoming BarCamp — the BATHCAMP in Bath, UK this September. The planning for the BathCamp focused first on museums and cultural heritage but it has evolved into something more open ended.
I’m already learning a lot about new dimensions of digital humanities from the THATCAMP blog and camper profiles as well as from their linked Websites and blogs.
