In brief: everyone who goes to a THATCamp is invited to propose a session. Do not prepare a paper or presentation. Instead, plan to have a conversation, engage with a digital tool, or to have fun. On the morning of THATCamp all participants will choose from the proposals (and probably come up with several new ones), to create the THATCamp schedule together.
How to propose?
After you have registered and your registration has been accepted you will be able to log in to the THATCamp website. You will be redirected to the webpage’s dashboard, where you will be able to upload your proposal as a post.
To upload click “posts” in the left column of the dashboard. Make sure to update the website when you have completed your proposal (to do so click “update” on the right of the screen). You proposal will appear on the front page of this website (under home). For a more detailed instruction on creating and editing a new post, see codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts for help.
What’s a session?
Sessions at THATCamp usually range from general discussions (Talk sessions) to project-based hackathons or writeathons (Make sessions) to technology skills workshops (Teach sessions) to miscellaneous experiments (Play sessions). There should be no full-blown papers; we’re not here to read or be read to. See below for a list of session examples.
Remember that you will be expected to facilitate the sessions you propose yourself. If you propose a hacking session, you should have the germ of a project to work on; if you propose a workshop, you should be prepared to teach it or find a teacher; if you propose a discussion of the Digital Public Library of America, you should be prepared to summarize what that is, begin the discussion, keep the discussion going, and end the discussion. If you’re new to THATCamp and don’t feel ready to host a session yourself, share your thoughts on the type of sessions you would wish to see or contact someone from the CREATE team for assistance or advice.
Talk session examples
- Jeffrey McClurken, Archiving Social Media Conversations of Significant Events, THATCamp Prime 2009
- Sherman Dorn, The Ill-formed Question, THATCamp Prime 2009
- Eli Pousson, How do we share our knowledge of historic places?, THATCamp Columbus 2010
- Frédéric Clavert and Véronique Ginouvès, Les archives orales et le web (Oral testimonies and the web), THATCamp Paris 2010
- Zach Whalen, ARGS, Archives, and Digital Scholarship, THATCamp 2010
- Aditi Shrikumar, Text Mining and the Digital Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
- Jon Voss, Toward Linked Data in the Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
Teach session examples
- Kirrily Roberts, FreeBase workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
- Aditi Muralidharan, Visualization workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
- Amanda French, Advanced Omeka, THATCamp Kansas 2012
Play session examples
- David Staley, An installation, THATCamp Prime 2009
- Marta Rivera Monclova, Digital Tools for Research, THATCamp Caribbean 2012
- Donelle McKinley, Share Your Favourite Tools, THATCamp Wellington 2012
Make session examples
- Stéfan Sinclair, One Day, One Toolet, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
- Julie Meloni, Project develop self-paced open access digital humanities curriculum…, THATCamp Prime 2010
- Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, One Week, One Book: Hacking the Academy, THATCamp Prime 2010
Note that some (even most) THATCamp organizers prefer to arrange workshop sessions ahead of time (see THATCamp New England’s workshop series, THATCamp Virginia’s workshops series, and THATCamp Southeast’s workshop series), but you can still volunteer to teach something at the last minute, or even put in a plea for someone else to teach something you’ve always wanted to learn (though if no teacher volunteers, it’s best to nix the session). That’s what’s great about THATCamp.
