Sheesh, What’s With All the THATCamps?

October 16, 2012

MITH Conference Room

Amanda French

THATCamp Coordindator, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University

THATCamps (The Humanities And Technology Camp) are a rapidly growing set of user-generated unconferences for technologists and humanities professionals. THATCamps are

Collaborative: Everyone participates, including in the task of setting an agenda or program.
Informal: There are no lengthy proposals, papers, presentations, or product demos. The emphasis is on productive, collegial work or free-form discussion.
Spontaneous and timely: The agenda / schedule / program being mostly or entirely created by all the participants during the first session of the first day, rather than weeks or months beforehand by a program committee.
Non-hierarchical: THATCamps welcome graduate students, scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers and programmers, K-12 teachers, administrators, managers, and funders as well as people from the non-profit sector, people from the for-profit sector, and interested amateurs. The topic “the humanities and technology” contains multitudes.
Productive: Participants are encouraged to use session time to create, build, write, hack, and solve problems. THATCamp Coordinator Amanda French will discuss the THATCamp phenomenon’s implications for the digital humanities as well answer practical questions about running one of your own.

Speaker Bios

Amanda French is currently Research Assistant Professor and THATCamp Coordinator at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, helping scholars worldwide organize their own version of The Humanities and Technology Camp, “an inexpensive, open meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.” Before that, she was an Assistant Research Scholar in the Archives and Public History program at New York University, where she helped develop a model curriculum emphasizing digital skills, and where she developed and taught the graduate course “Creating Digital History.” Before that, French taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Victorian poetry and poetics, the Victorian period, and academic research methods for the digital age as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. She held the Council on Library and Information Resources Postdoctoral Fellowship from 2004 to 2006.