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CONTEXT: Many (most?) of you will remember the “One Week | One Tool” event hosted in 2010 by CHNM (and funded by the NEH) that resulted in Anthologize. The event was described on their site as “a unique summer institute, one that aim[ed] to teach participants how to build an open source digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week.” The resulting tool, Anthologize–on which development continues–is designed to “[u]se the power of WordPress to transform online content into an electronic book.”

For more information about Anthologize, check out Julie Meloni’s ProfHacker post on the experience as well Tom Scheinfeldt’s “Lessons from One Week | One Tool”:

• “Part I, Project Management”
• “Part 2, Use”
• “Part 3, Serendipity”

PROPOSAL: Inspired, in part, by the locally-hosted “Random Hacks of Kindness” 2011 events taking place on the same weekend as THATCampCHNM and THATCampLAC, I am proposing “One Session | One Solution.” Can we learn from the much blogged experience of those who created Anthologize to attempt something similar on a smaller scale: a high-speed hackathon taking place during an unconference? Building a tool from scratch is probably beyond the scope of one THATCamp session (or one THATCamp, for that matter). However, a smaller solution to a well-defined problem has a good chance of being found if a group of talented, motivated campers combine forces and hack something together. Even if the result is a technical plan, rather than a finished product, the days (or weeks, or months) after the face-to-face unconference could be spent collaborating on making that plan a reality.

Interested? Please leave a suggestion as to what problem (related to higher ed or the digital humanities–both broadly defined) might be productively addressed by such a session. You don’t have to have a solution already in mind, though if you do you should feel free to sketch it out here. Since the start of THATCamp is more than a week away, we have a pretty good amount of time to brainstorm possibilities and reach some consensus before we all meet face-to-face.

Thanks!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by dullhunk]