THATCamp Leadership & participad | DH Fellow’s Blog

Ben Hurwitz (2nd year Digital History Fellow)

On Thursday October 10, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and George Mason University welcomed DH’ers from around the globe to THATCamp Leadership 2013. For those of you who don’t know, THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) is an unconference series which was first held at George Mason in 2008. Since then, regional THATCamps have sprung up across the country and across several continents as well, hosted by universities or local DH communities.

THATCamp Leadership, generously sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was quite different from a typical THATCamp. The invitation-only event partnered experienced THATCamp facilitators with academic and institutional leaders to discuss the future of THATCamp and the Digital Humanities generally. As a result, there were very few tech-centered sessions. Instead, broader session titles like “Building DH Locally,” “Sustaining and Altering THATCamp,” and “Digital Humanities and Online Education” predominated.

In the spirit of collaboration, THATCamp Leadership 2013 debuted a cooperative “notepad” space for recording discussions. Using participad, a WordPress plugin, the DH fellows at CHNM created notepads for each sessions and served as dedicated note-takers. Participants could view and edit their sessions notepads, or view another session’s notepad in order to follow discussions elsewhere in the conference. While some participants preferred to tweet, take notes on paper, or just focus on listening, we did have some encouraging contributions which added to the richness of the record. To view our notes from all of the sessions, look here, and feel free to comment as well.