Some of the things I’ve been thinking about recently that might make for a session or a side-hacking:
1) Amazon Web Services for Poets. Father-of-blogging-among-other-things Dave Winer has started a tutorial called EC2 for Poets, showing non-techies how to run their own virtual server on AWS. CHNM has started to use these cloud services, from storage to high-performance computing needs (like MapReduce), but I suspect all of us should know more about AWS and its possible uses (and drawbacks).
2) Digital Humanities Registry. It’s 2011 and it’s still hard to find the blogs/twitter usernames/etc of our community. There are some scattered Twitter lists and Day of DH lists and combined feeds, but some merging of OPML files would be helpful; we’ve thought about doing this at prior THATCamps but never followed through.
3) What Can We Learn from Journalism? I’m increasingly of the mind that journalists (at least forward-thinking journalists) are about 3-5 years ahead of the humanities in dealing with changes brought about by digital media and technology (mainly because necessity is the mother of invention—their business is tanking), from information-gathering techniques to new business models to new genres to data mining.
4) New to Me. C’mon, show me a website, service, or tool I’ve never seen before but should know about. Different than dork shorts in that it can’t be a site/service/tool that’s yours. Surprise me with something that is oddly applicable to the humanities, to be emulated or used.
5) New Peer Review Models. If double-blind peer review is broken, what are some possible replacements?
6) THATCamp Sustainability. As I like to say, THATCamp is a movement, like the Olympics. It could use a less corrupted model than the Olympics, but still a sustainable one. A model that doesn’t rely on selling TV rights. For instance, would it be OK to move to a pay-ahead-of-time (but still modestly) system so that each camp is properly funded?
3 comments
1 ping
Tom Scheinfeldt
June 2, 2011 at 5:15 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Dan — Love the ideas. I’d like to talk about journalism too, including an idea Kari Kraus and I threw around a few weeks ago about embedding j-school students in digital humanities shops and vice versa.
Micah Vandegrift
June 2, 2011 at 11:51 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I second the journalism proposal. Similarly, Shana Kimball and I had a interesting back and forth about why LIS students don’t tend to go into publishing, and vice versa. I wonder if this could be a step toward expanding the idea of the alt-ac appointment outside of the university. Can journalists, publishers, tech bloggers, and gov’t analysts be digital humanists too? (thinking of Alex Howard and Audrey Watters here).
I also vote for a DH registry. Would be great for students just hearing about this and wanting to get involved.
Tim Carmody
June 3, 2011 at 11:19 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
I quite like the journalism proposal too. For me, long before I started working as a journalist, I became a digital humanist not through engagement with anything that was happening at my university really, but by working and talking with my friends who were working with journalism, especially at Snarkmarket.
And now that I’m writing for Nieman Lab, which takes digital journalism as its main topic, I’m continually amazed at how many smart ideas you can borrow from all the different corners of journalism — new media journalism, data-driven journalism, even sports and technology coverage.
They all have to build tools on the fly. What’s more, journalists always think about what they’re building in terms of what they’re presenting. And with all the talk about digital building versus digital presentation in digital humanities, it’s useful to have something to point to where that dichotomy really just isn’t one.
3-Pack Grab Bag: Engagement Analytics, RSS, and . . . Baby Photos! | THATCamp CHNM 2011
June 3, 2011 at 10:23 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
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