ThatCamp
Posted by John Theibault on June 27th, 2009
As I sifted through the twitter stream for DH09, I discovered that I missed a chance to get in to ThatCamp after all, because a couple of participants had to drop out at the last minute. Initially, ThatCamp was my first choice for immersing myself in the digital humanities community, ahead of DH09. ThatCamp is structured as an “unconference.” Instead of having people write papers and present them to an audience on a schedule developed by a program committee, ThatCamp asked people to write in about what topics they were interested in and then assemble a program Just-in-Time at the conference itself. People will spontaneously assemble themselves in discussion groups and all people in the panel participate directly. Some people may indeed spend 20 minutes (or more) showing off some new tool that they have developed, but there is room for lots of flexibility in how things get presented. I thought that the give and take of such a group would give me an even better sense of where the exciting work is being done. But alas, the ThatCamp unconference was so popular that they had to turn away potential participants, one of whom was me. Indeed, that seems to be the down side for the unconference format. Because everyone is a potential presenter, there is an upper bound to how large the groups can be. In a regular conference, the bigger the audience is, the better.
So… In any case, DH09 was a very rewarding experience and I’m glad I made it there. I’m sorry that I’m not at ThatCamp because it looks as if they are covering lots of fascinating stuff. I’m not sure I would have made it through both conferences without reaching brain lock; they are so overwhelming. I’ll be curious to see what happens to the dozen or so participants in both. While it’s not the same as actually being there, you can get a pretty good sense of just what is going on from various sources, which I will be following intently.
First of all, it looks as if the Twitter Feed from #thatcamp is going to leave the feed from #dh09 in the dust. In half a day, they have half as many entries as DH09 had for the whole three-day conference. Here’s the twapperkeeper link.
There’s also live-blogging on the ThatCamp home page. Here’s a link.
And Vika Zafrin of Boston University, who live-blogged DH09 is also live-blogging ThatCamp at this link.
(and a small note to the Stockton community: Vika recognized the name Richard Stockton College because she knows Scott Rettberg.)
There’s probably more, since this is such a keyed in bunch of scholars, but that’s enough to keep you (and me) going for a while…