Thoughts on THATCamp CHNM!

I had the good fortune to attend THATCamp CHNM last week and it was awesome!!!

After a day long English language nerd field trip, I arrived at THATCamp CHNM. The workshops offered were wonderful and I’m super confident about my Omeka and newly acquired Viewshare skills. I particularly enjoyed the mobile apps workshop which made something seemingly beyond my scope of learning, all the more accessible. Thanks Mike!

I met some of the #transformdh folks in person for the first time and had the opportunity to geek out about blogging pedagogy with Mark Sample and others. We started  a dichotomy for when/how to use class blogs that I hope folks will try to finish. It was inside that session that I realized what I like most about THATCamp is a call to create something in the moment and to fix a problem within our allotted hour and a half.

I really wanted that for the future of digital publishing session. There’s so much amazing work that people are creating that doesn’t “count” towards tenure and promotion in the current system. The question was posed, if we love doing the work does it matter if it doesn’t count? It seems people have different answers at different stages of their academic careers with tenured professors much more likely to take risks while grad students and junior faculty ask is this ok? The session left me wondering how a collective DH call to university administrators and departments could help shift current standards. I still wonder why some DH is visible as such and others is not.  So much of what I see in af-am and other oppressed peoples studies tries to make work accessible/accountable to communities outside the academy which more often than not includes a digital component. How can THATCamps attract a more diverse academic audience from a wide range of humanities disciplinary backgrounds?

I’m super excited about the practice of THATCamps being connected to other conferences and I wonder if that might remain a strategy for engaging new communities of scholars. I’m already dreaming up a session proposal for my next THATCamp experience 🙂