Your friendly THATCamp organizers received an inquiry from someone who can’t attend the unconference itself, but wants to participate in the discussion on the site beforehand, and stay in the loop on digital humanities developments afterwards. Our response? What a great idea!
As of now, THATCamp OSU is open to a new category of registrants: Virtual Campers. Keep reading to learn more.
I’ve been using both iMovie and prezi as platforms for composition assignments in my classes. I’m wondering if we could get a a group together and collectively compose some short project in one of these platforms. Obviously there would be several issues:
First, captaining such a ship of fools. According to the “propose a session” post, I would be responsible for chairing. I believe I could handle this. I’ve been in numerous student organization, where I have been responsible for making a decision happen without making the decision myself. I’d be managing editor and we would have no editor-in-chief.
Second, the subject. With limited time, I think we’d have to jump straight into composition choices. So we’d need to have big picture content issues decided ahead of time, via commenting here I presume. My suggestion for content is actually THATcamp itself. If we have this session late in the day, our composition can share our collective experience of the un-conference. We’d probably also want to decide which platform ahead of time.
Third, technology constraints. I think we’d be pretty safe with Prezi. But if we decided on a short movie, there’s importing/exporting time constraints as well as the gathering of raw footage. If this session goes forward, perhaps people planning to attend could check out flipcameras in the morning and shoot bits during the day. As managing editor, I could collect these at the lunch, or at least sometime before the session begins, and start importing. We could export at the close of the session. This way, we could spend the majority of the session selecting clips, sequencing, adding titles, and other editing details.
I’d like to hear thoughts on which platform people would prefer to work with, if it even seems feasible to try to work with iMovie, and also about the content. We could decide content live in the room as this is certainly part of the composition process. I’m just afraid that too much time spent in initial brainstorming wouldn’t leave us enough time to do the actually composing and editing.
**4/24/12: We have added an additional FAQ post.**
As you can see from the Participants page, THATCamp OSU is well over half full! We expect more registrations to keep trickling in over the next couple of months, but in the meantime, the floor is open for session proposals and discussion. Unconferences are different from conferences in that all sessions are proposed and led by participants, and the schedule for the day isn’t set until the morning of. We will make a more concerted push for session proposals when we get a little closer to the day, but if you already have an idea, why not throw it out there? It might inspire someone else with an idea or spark conversation about your topic or project. Lots of details about unconferences and proposing sessions can be found on the About and Propose a session pages, but here are some additional frequently asked questions…
Julia Flanders, Director of the Women Writers Project at Brown University (and the facilitator of THATCamp OSU!) recently announced that Women Writers Online will be free and open to the public for the month of March, in celebration of Women’s History Month. She also notes that WWO will be offering a sneak preview of a new WWO interface. Consider sharing your discoveries with other THATCamp OSU participants through a comment.
As registrations are rolling in, how about another post about digital humanities? (If you haven’t yet registered, you can do so here.)
Think Google is a giant, faceless behemoth concerned only with search results and AdSense? You’re only partly right. It turns out Google is a giant, faceless behemoth with an interest in advancing the field of digital humanities! This post is a round-up of Google-initiated or Google-sponsored projects.
***Update: Amanda French at THATCamp.org reports that the bugs in the registration plugin have been fixed as of 2/22, so new registrants should get the appropriate messages and correct passwords. If you are still having problems, please let us know.***
We count ourselves very lucky that the good folks at the Center for History and New Media provide such incredible support for THATCamp, including a very easy-to-use WordPress site template and plugins for managing registration, etc, all completely for free.
That said, the registration plugin is still in development, and there seem to be some quirks. When your registration is accepted, you should get an email that contains your username and password for the site, as well as this message:
Your registration for THATCamp OSU has been accepted! Please visit the site to see who else is coming or to propose a session: osu2012.thatcamp.org. You can also contact the organizers, Melanie Schlosser () and Louie Ulman (). We look forward to seeing you there!
Due to some bugs in the software, however, the email just contains the username and password, and the password doesn’t work on the site. They’re working on it. In the meantime, if this happens to you, don’t worry. You ARE registered, and you can use the ‘forgot password’ link to change your password.
THATCamp OSU will take place Saturday, April 28th, from 8am to 5pm, in William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library. If you are interested in the intersection of technology and the humanities, and enjoy interacting with your colleagues in an informal, unconference setting, please consider joining us for the day. Go here to register, or click ‘Continue reading’ for more details.
For those of you wondering what digital humanities (DH) is, you’re in good company. Even die-hard digital humanists sometimes have trouble agreeing on a definition of the field. However, since we are going to be talking about what DH means at OSU, your THATCamp organizers wanted to provide some background info to get the conversation started. Over the next couple of months, we will occasionally post thoughts about DH and links to DH resources on the site, and we invite participants to do the same.
To get the ball rolling, here are two DH-related resources. If you prefer your info in text form, we recommend the excellent CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide.
If you’re more of a visual person (or if you’re just in a big hurry), Melissa Terras‘ Quantifying Digital Humanities sums up her quantitative research on DH into a beautiful and accessible visualization. You can learn more about the research behind it here. Here’s a sneak peak:
Registration for THATCamp OSU will officially open on February 20, 2012, and the call for participants will go out later that week. In the meantime, save the date (4/28, 8am-5pm), and spread the word!
THATCamp OSU will be held from approximately 8am to 5pm on Saturday, April 28th. Most of the day will consist of unconference-style participant-led sessions, but the organizers are setting aside the last time slot for a special plenary session that we hope all of the participants will attend. The plenary will be a discussion session meant to synthesize the results of the day and begin creating two documents – a definition of ‘digital humanities’ that fits our local environment, and a list of desired support for digital humanities work at OSU. These documents will be shared with our sponsors and with OSU administration, and are meant to serve as a jumping-off point for discussion and development of a local digital humanities program.
The plenary session will be led by our guest facilitator, Julia Flanders. Julia is the director of the Women Writers Project at Brown University, and a member of Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship. The Women Writers Project is “a long-term research project devoted to early modern women’s writing and electronic text encoding.” (Learn more about the Project here.) Julia is also the Editor in Chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, an open access, peer-reviewed journal covering all aspects of digital media in the humanities, and has held leadership roles in the Association for Computing in the Humanities and the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium. We are very excited to work with Julia at our THATCamp, and are grateful to the OSU Libraries for providing the support for us to bring her here.
