Day 1 at THATCamp, and it’s been such a refreshing experience. I’ve never been among a group with such a high proportion of PhDs in History, American Studies, English, and Social Studies etc. (blogger not in this category) who are just passionate about the use of technology in teaching, in research, or in building applications from faculty research, and who are willing to say, “I want to know more about that … or I’m interested to talk about this area I’m not quite sure about …” It’s also neat to meet scholars and innovators who are actively at the intersection of humanities research and digital scholarship, and making real contributions to their fields.

The interests and expertise represented at this first-ever THATCamp organized by CHNM is wide-ranging, and this is apparent by the schedule put together in the morning by THATCampers corporately under the able leadership of Tom Scheinfeldt, Jeremy Boggs, and Dave Lester. It was sad when it was apparent I put my hand up for more sessions than I could actually physically attend — where are my clones when I need them !!

Anyway, while I’m sad I missed so many sessions, I benefited from the sessions I chose to attend:

  1. RDF (Resource Description Framework) – facilitated by Patrick Gosetti-Murrayjohn
  2. Research Methods and the changing nature of it – facilitated by Lisa Spiro
  3. Museums – facilitated by Matthew MacArthur
  4. Processing – facilitated by Dan Chudnov

And there were the dork shorts over lunchtime which were essentially five-minute lightning talks about projects people are working on, like Using PicLens at the NYPL Digital Gallery (Josh Greenberg), History Wired & The Object of History (Matthew MacArthur), Text Visualizations inspired by Brendan Dawes (David M. Reider), Omeka (Jeremy Boggs), and American Social History Online (Susan Harum).

As observed by Josh who made the closing plenary remarks at the close of Day 1, it is so neat to see academia and humanities scholars come together with folks from the library, museums and archives world and getting a better understanding of some of the common as well as unique issues, and to learn from one another’s experiences and ideas.

My plan for Day 2 (at least for now at 10:46 pm on Saturday night):

  1. Mashups
  2. Bibliographic Standards
  3. Time (or perhaps Visualization if I change my mind last minute)

Can’ wait …