I’m preparing to spend 1.5 days as a participant at THATCamp Columbus,and I’m really excited about the possibilities. Some of you may recall that I was also a participant in THATCamp Austin back in August,and I came away from that experience with some solid ideas and some good starting points for future exploration.
A partial description from the website of the Ohio Humanities Council:
THATcamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp) Columbus,a collaborative effort of the Ohio Humanities Council and the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University,is a user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities inspired by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. We’ve already received a lot of support from the Digital Humanities community,so we’re expecting this to be an exciting and entertaining event.
Looking back,I see that I never posted a review of my experiences at THATCamp Austin. Lo siento. While a full review may not be in the cards,I can say that I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest in the topic of crowdsourcing and archives/cultural heritage. As it turned out,Ben Brumfield and I ended up chatting with a decent-sized crowd in the large auditorium during the first session. Ben’s working on a neat volunteer transcription project called From the Page that he had previously demoed at THATCamp 2008. The Austin version of THATCamp was short,and Ben’s talked about some of the other challenges elsewhere. On the plus side,I found that this was a fantastic opportunity to meet/mingle with digital humanities folks that I’d wanted to meet for awhile,and while there were some familiar faces,I think this was a great way for a lot of newer,digitally minded archivists and programmers to share and receive ideas. There was a lot of positive energy generated even in that short evening,and because of the tie-in with the Society of American Archivists annual meeting,I had the chance to talk with some (though not all) of the THATCampers during the rest of the conference week. I’m hoping that something similar can be organized for the Washington DC meeting this summer.
I’ll be back to talk about THATCamp Columbus after it’s over! *fingers crossed*