This past weekend, following on a year of learning from digital humanities podcasts and blogs and investigating new media resources and tools, I participated in the Center for History and New Media’s unconference, THATCAMP 2008. My thanks to Dave Lester and Jeremy Boggs for organizing the event and to the Center for History and New Media for making it possible!
Instead of a process of submitting and accepting or rejecting proposals for papers and sessions, participants sent in brief descriptions of topics that they would like to present or discuss. We shared these ideas in more discursive detail on the THATCAMP blog and others, with similar interests, responded. Gradually sessions took shape from these overlapping and shared interests. The first hour or so of the conference was spent organizing the unconference schedule. I arrived late due to a missed connection and found, quite happily, that the session I had proposed was already on the schedule. The program was so rich that there was no way to attend every session that I wanted (I never did learn about the Arduino kits but I’m bringing one back to our Jump Start student workers). I attended sessions on Omeka, Zotero, teaching, Digital Humanities at NEH, museums, civic engagement, visualizing events, and oral history. Some involved presentations in a more traditional sense because this was the best way to respond to the audience’s interests. Many sessions began with a round robin presentation of works in progress augmented by questions, discussion, comparisons, and collaborative problem solving. The conversations spilled over into all of the breaks. Over lunch, we watched “shorts” or brief presentations of digital humanities projects.
T. Mills Kelly came away from the event proposing that the AHA dedicate 5% of its conference time to unconferencing and I agree. I’ve spent much of the past eight months working on plans for the Oral History Association conference in October and carried this organizing experience with me through the unconference. I would not give up the traditional sessions with papers and roundtables but I do think future academic conference should create collaborative spaces in their schedules. For Oral History 2008, we borrowed a more open ended format from the National Council for Public History, the Working Group and we added book discussions and the Digital Showcase (sponsored by CHNM). This is a beginning but next year in Louisville, I imagine Mark Tebeau, an OHA 2009 Program Committee Co-Chair who was also at THATCAMP will have some even more innovative strategies.
See THATCAMP photographs at
http://www.davelester.org/2008/06/05/the-humanities-and-technology-camp/
and in Flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/fa/2537703427/in/set-72157605353680737/
[...] on the American Historical Association to dedicate 5% of its program THATCamp-style activities, and Margie McLellan is hoping to encourage the Oral History Association to do the same. I’d also encourage [...]
Thanks very much Margie, I’m glad you could make it. I hope to see you at THATCamp 2009!
[...] in summary that I completely agree with Mills Kelly’s sense (echoed by Tom Scheinfeldt and Marjorie McLellan, among many others) that going to THATCamp made me yearn for a serious makeover of the standard [...]