My first THATCamp was one officially sponsored by the Modern Language Association in January 2013 (there was also a “Digital Pedagogy Unconference” that year at MLA; that’s a lot of unconferencing tbh). I went because it was hosted by Northeastern, where I was a doctoral student in English. DH was increasingly on our radar in English thanks to Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s encouragement and to the recent arrival of Ryan Cordell, among other factors. In addition to attending, many graduate students were part of the labor involved in setting tables up and organizing session Post-It Notes and things like that.

I pitched a session on “Archiving the Archivists of the Twenty-First Century” that was inspired by my developing interests in born-digital poetry, the remediation of poetry in digital spaces, and the networks of poets, readers, critics, and scholars materializing on social media and around blogs (I ended up talking a bit about this stuff in my dissertation). I hadn’t worked a lot in physical archives or collaborated with archivists and librarians, which is why I was writing things like “Are we in an Age of The Archivist?” and “Why not allow an archive to interact more with the rest of the web?” like I was the first person to write such things (I still think that second question is a good one; nice to see Smithsonian Open Access launch this week, in related news).

My pitch got accepted and added to the morning schedule, where I was joined by a small crew of folks who had been doing and thinking about this sort of work for a while, including Matthew Battles, author of Library: An Unquiet History (which is sitting here on my personal library shelf in my office). And they were all super nice and encouraging and convivial and extremely patient with a doctoral student extremely new to this world. We talked about the use and over-use of the term “archive,” the roles classrooms and institutions play in shaping archival encounters, and interesting digital projects and tools, among other topics.

Re-reading my lengthy session notes, I can see how excited I was to be hearing and learning about these sorts of things. I’m not sure what my extremely-knowledgeable peers got from the conversation, but the session no doubt informed my decision to apply for a job on the Our Marathon digital archive project a few months later. And I started writing this post from my office at Brown, a place I never thought I’d be allowed to visit, let along work at, and I’m taking a break from a semester where I’m teaching two courses that work explicitly with archives and digital contexts (here’s the public-facing course site for one of them).

That’s a relatively neat and tidy narrative full of positive vibes up there, isn’t it? While I want to acknowledge the role THATCamp played in my own career trajectory, I also want to trouble the takeaways from a trajectory that too neatly inscribes cause and effect.

THATCamps and The Institutionalization of DH

Dan Cohen talked a bit about the non-hierarchical dimensions of his THATCamp experiences, and the memories of fun times at THATCamps. I don’t know if I’d say that my THATCamp experiences have been non-hierarchical or fun. I will say that, at the 2013 session I just described and at the event at-large, folks were extremely generous and seemed less concerned with hierarchies when it came to respecting other people’s points of view and sharing advice and resources. But I think it’s easier to set aside those hierarchies for a few hours when you’re occupying a particularly comfortable perch in a profession, or when you’re heading back to an institution that provides you with resources and networks to act on what was learned at a THATCamp. So it seems important to acknowledge where THATCampers go after the day has ended and how these professional contexts might shape what seems fun about them.

The first THATCamp was in 2008, a year more commonly commemorated as the arrival of The Great Recession. By 2013, digital humanities already had some pretty dominant cliques, institutional contexts, methodologies, and terminologies. And THATCamp’s affiliations with DH transformed some of them into spaces where the tensions, anxieties, and professional realities of the academic sub-field were readily apparent. MLA can already be a pretty tense place for attendees navigating the job market, and regional THATCamps hosted by particular institutions can yield a range of attendees but also remind folks of the hierarchies and power dynamics of a regional DH scene like Boston. I had and continue to have pretty strong professional ties with folks from a range of institutions in the New England area, but I acknowledge that my time at Northeastern and now at Brown has likely shaped those interactions in implicit and explicit ways.

In 2013, I was fortunate to be at an institution that needed graduate students to help them think through its relatively-new investments in digital humanities, one that was developing projects that required our input as well as our labor. I’ve been at other THATCamps where there was at times a clear disconnect between the recommendations and approaches described by their more vocal participants and the institutional and professional realities of attendees looking to get started or constrained by an absence of local collaborators, institutional resources, or job security. And I’ve been at THATCamps where administrators and senior scholars in attendance would, intentionally or unintentionally, come across as a bit extractive, asking junior scholars for recommendations but offering little to nothing in exchange. I’ve even seen some incidents of “THATCampsplaining” when a particular organizer has deviated in some well-intended way from the platonic THATCamp model. That’s not so fun.

In any case, one interesting complement to the blog reflections (which is likely underway) might be a data-oriented analysis of THATCamp attendees and their networks: where they were then professionally, where they are now, how these sessions fit into digital humanities trajectories, what percentages of folks began or continued doing work legible as DH, how this pool of THATCamp participants and organizers fits into the state of digital humanities in national and global contexts in 2020, what was happening beyond THATCamps between 2008 and now. I know that the story of the institutionalization of DH is an ongoing one that also precedes this time frame, but this period seems like a particularly compelling block of time to survey and analyze.

Moving Beyond the Conference / Unconference Binary (yes, this is about public humanities)

An “unconference” is legible to participants and attendees who have been to academic conferences. It can be more difficult to explain an unconference model when you’re developing programming for wider audiences. Why would you bring the unconference model into these contexts?

At Brown’s Center for Public Humanities, we have found the unconference to be an interesting foundational model for our annual Hacking Heritage event. But as the program enters its fifth year in an annual format, we’ve been reflecting on the limits of the unconference as implemented by THATCamp and similar initiatives like Bmore Historic (the latter of which was the catalyst for our own unconferencing).

Hacking Heritage architect Marisa Brown has provided a nice review of the last five years of unconferencing here. You’ll see that the first year of the event was primarily a way to survey various folks doing cultural heritage work in and around Providence, an opportunity to informally exchange ideas and share resources. In later years, you start to see that particular projects began as conversations at unconference sessions: the 2017 Fogarty Building “obituary” and “funeral” and the Year of The City initiative in 2019 were perhaps the most visible outputs from Hacking Heritage. The “Fogarty Funeral” was a playful subversion of established sites of commemoration and discourse that critiqued the gap between a city’s cultural memory and the preservation work needed to document and acknowledge these dimensions of its built environment. Year of The City aspired to be an non-hierarchical survey of Providence’s twenty-five neighborhoods, a conceptual connective that made the range of approaches to cultural heritage and their attendant practitioners more visible and more entwined with particular regions and neighborhoods. These projects and their attendant aspirations and methodologies could not be implemented in a single day, but the space of the unconference, like the spaces provided by various THATCamp initiatives, supported their journey from speculation to reality.

On the other hand, the work described above is often initiated by established institutions and known entities in the city’s cultural sector, and we’ve wondered where and how the “unconference” framing’s legibility as an academic adjacent has shaped its audience and value. For 2020’s Hacking Heritage event, Marisa and her collaborators have focused on the Silver Lake neighborhood of Providence, a decision designed to move the event off Brown’s campus and to center conversations and work on a particular region and the interests and perspectives of some of its residents. Unconference prep has involved outreach and planning meetings with interested Silver Lake residents, in addition to the now-expected pool of local practitioners from the city. These initial conversations have involved forms of preparation, development, and staging that would perhaps rankle the unconference purist, while also retaining the blanket call for proposals and the pitching and sorting of panels that takes place at the event.

Where an unconference designed explicitly for academics might lean into spontaneity and informality as a change or even a corrective to traditional modes of conferencing and dialogue, an event that aspires to reach and resonate with other audiences must navigate other sets of expectations and forms of exchange. If you’re inviting folks to share their perspectives and spend time with you on a weekend, the potential for transactional currencies should be acknowledged and refined a bit further. I don’t think attention to such issues means that unconferences have been absorbed by the neoliberal cultural heritage industrial complex. In fact, the disavowal of the presence of hierarchies, particular forms of communication, and cloistered dimensions of unconferences seems worse. Which is to say that like most things we do, unconferencing works best when it is self-reflective and open to critique and revision.

THATCamp and other forms of digital humanities unconferencing have seemed most successful in making networks of like-minded practitioners visible to one another, in making folks feel like their work and ideas have value, in trading strategies for moving forward. These are important things! And as digital humanities practitioners think more about the public-facing dimensions of their work and opportunities for collaboration, we should think about the development of programming that builds on the strengths of the unconference model: relatively affordable, invested in models of attendance and forms of participation that do not result in the prevalence of passive “spectators” (though I think spectators should also be encouraged), cognizant of what can and can not be accomplished in a limited time span. But we also might want to exorcise the specter of the conference that haunts these kinds of spaces. There’s a lot of potential for a variety of forms of interaction, curation, pedagogy, and speculation, but creating room for successful avenues of engagement and collaboration might require a bit more preparation and outreach and strategizing before the day gets underway.

Return of The Yack

(If Dan can break out the WAAF references in his post, then I can invoke Mark Morrison.)

More seriously, one of the things I’ve loved about Dan’s ongoing work is that it has really brought back “the yack” to DH: he’s got an active microblog, a podcast, a newsletter, and I’m sure he’s designing a zine to print with Huskiana Press over at Northeastern any day now. A commitment to these sites of dialogue and communication seems very much in line with the ethos of THATCamp, in that we’re seeing thoughts in various stages of development, work in progress, recommendations that expand our lines of sight, multiple perspectives represented via interview subjects and hyperlinks. There are formal and polished elements and limitations and conventions in these particular outputs (and, in the case of the podcast, collaborative dimensions), but much less so than the traditional conference panel presentation or session remarks. And the stream of updates is much more manageable than the comparatively endless and overpopulated feed of Twitter or Facebook, still very much social media, but much less of a hellscape or a cacophony.

I remember disliking the THATCamp blogging model back in 2013, because by then I had recently created a “professional” Twitter account (I first joined Twitter in the less hyperprofessionalized days of 2007, when it was more like a WhatsApp backchannel and there weren’t any hashtags) and I had my own WordPress blog, so it felt extraneous to share writing there on what seemed like a burner account. But the centrality of blogging in the THATCamp model does serve as a reminder of how important these spaces were as counter-sites to conversations happening in other professional and institutional channels.

I am sure some nostalgia is shaping this view of blogs, but I do wonder if the legacy of THATCamp might be most visible in a reinvigoration of these kinds of spaces. It’s hard to maintain a regular and active presence in a blog, a newsletter, or a podcast, as many folks can attest (I think I started writing this post last week? It’s been a long and fractured 2020 over here). And as many folks can also attest, other forms of written labor are much more valuable and legible to the various institutions and administrators keeping the gates here in digital humanities. But when I review the key characteristics of THATCamps — informal, lightweight, collaborative, inexpensive, not-for-profit, spontaneous, timely, online — these are the sorts of online spaces of meeting and reflection I get excited about. And I think there’s a lot of potential for growth here in 2020.

This post originally appeared on Jim’s personal blog; thanks to Amanda French for offering to host it on the THATCamp Retrospective site as well. Questions, comments? Feel free to email me at james_mcgrath@brown.edu or get in touch with me on Twitter @JimMc_Grath.

My partner Ben and I were both working corporate software development jobs when he mentioned there was this “un-conference” for digital humanities practitioners, that it was open to anyone, and he thought folks there might be interested in FromThePage.  THATCamp’s registration page had a field for this thing called a Twitter handle, so as folks registered many of them signed up for Twitter accounts. And because your Twitter handle was part of your THATCamp profile, they all followed each other.  All of a sudden my grubby open source hacker had an online network of interesting digital humanists. He loved it. So much so he organized the first regional THATCamp during a Society of American Archivists meeting in Austin a year later.

I see the legacy of THATCamp all the time:

• People still come up to him — more than a decade later — “I attended your class on regular expressions at a THATCamp and it changed my life!”
• Just this week, when reading a presentation from a digital librarian on a particularly gnarly facet of an open source library system, Ben said “She was at THATCamp; I can email her.”  
• Again, this week, a collaborator in Kentucky told a friend we had referred to him: “The Brumfields know everyone.”  Yes, that’s part of consulting work, but you don’t build those relationships from selling people your time.  You build them when you show up and work together on events like THATCamp.

Over time Ben transformed from “grubby open source hacker” to “valued digital humanities consultant”.  As he gained clients I was able to quit my corporate job and do my dream job of building a family business, focused on making FromThePage a great service, working with my best friend, collaborating with nice, intelligent people on projects that are so much more interesting than what we did before.

We wouldn’t be here without THATCamp.  That’s true of our life, but I like to think the digital humanities would be poorer without FromThePage, some of our projects like Mashbill, Slavery Images, or The Curran Index, and our involvement in IIIF.

I didn’t put the pieces together until now, but THATCamp Prime 2013 was one of my first academic gatherings. I wouldn’t present at my first “big boy” conference (SCSC 2013) until later that year. And I am convinced it colored my impression of every “traditional” conference since, even though it was the only THATCamp I ever attended. I didn’t learn entirely new skills or have a singular ‘a-ha’ moment that weekend in Fairfax – that would only come through much more elbow grease, privilege, and good fortune from my academic community at UMD. But what I did get was the sheer sense of energy and relevancy I could find nowhere else in my home field, and so much of it pointed at the digital systems that I gradually came to realize underpinned absolutely everything about how we performed art history in the 21st century. THATCamp made upending these systems seem possible to me, for the first time ever.

In orbital mechanics, it is generally least expensive to try and change the plane of your elliptical orbit when you are at the apogee, the point farthest from the mass you’re orbiting, when your velocity is slowest, and thus your application of energy the most efficient. 2013 was an apogee in my graduate career: my intellectual velocity had slowed to a crawl, I felt more distant than ever from the cares of both academic art history, as well as the museum curatorial world that was my original end goal of trying to get a PhD in the first place. THATCamp kicked me into an entirely different orbit. I’m still refining my relationship with art history, and even my relationship with digital humanities continues to evolve and mature. But it’s less and less been about giving that perfect 20 minute talk at RSA, or CAA, or even at the ADHO conference, and more and more about knitting together data, systems, and tools to help our community make sense of the cultural heritage that is our source of study.

Like Quinn and Trevor and others have noted in their retrospectives, THATCamp really only worked because it was coming at just the right time for the field, where it was good and useful for anything to seem possible, even if we didn’t know how yet. We know know that our future (if we’re to have it) will need to be more about moving slow and fixing things – doing the arduous work of “how”. THATCamp was our booster rocket, but now comes the much longer journey. So thank you, THATCamp, for being the kick I didn’t know I needed, at just the time that it could do the very most. You’re leaving us with so much more work to be done, but looking over these retrospectives, I’m reminded more than ever that this community is truly legion, and that it’s more than ready to get to work.

I must admit, I never expected that THATCamp would become a thing when Dave and Jeremy imagined it in 2008.

It made sense that an idea like THATCamp originated at the Center Roy built. Like many Center projects, it started with a simple idea to address a real problem. The costs were low and the payout was huge. THATCamp democratized the DH conference by breaking it into an unconference designed for folks interested in solving problems, building some things, and working collaboratively with a schedule built on-the-fly. It certainly didn’t break academic structures, but TC’s created a space for trading in titles and hierarchy for a t-shirt and a bag lunch. Experimentation was encouraged. Content experts admitted they were tech novices. Attendees were encouraged to get up mid-session to try something else. The wifi wasn’t always strong, but it was always available.

I missed the first one, because I had something planned on that weekend– a wedding or some family gathering. When I returned to work that Monday, I heard how well it all went. The first one was a success, and then, it became a real thing.

Participating in, and later running, THATCamps built my confidence and helped me to feel comfortable teaching, demonstrating, and sharing my own technical and professional knowledge. I was a graduate student and a project manager who didn’t feel like I belonged in academia. I belonged at THATCamp. TCs were fun, and exhausting. I connected with future collaborators, learned to tinker with new things, and sometimes I sat and wrote Omeka documentation or Wikipedia entries.

THATCamp became a signature event, and later a major project for RRCHNM. It was an alt-conference organized by alt-acs and graduate students. We couldn’t afford to attend the expensive DH institutes or conferences in the summer, but we could host and run an unconference. And people kept coming & organizing.

I appreciated the optimism that everyone brought… before the exhaustion settled in.

Thanks, Amanda, Jeremy, Tom, Dan, and Dave. I will always look back fondly on the movement you created and fostered. It will remind me of good times with you & the RRCHNM family, and the greater community created.

We’ll always have THATCamp!

“Less talk, more grok.” That was one of our early mottos at THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, which started at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in 2008. It was a riff on “Less talk, more rock,” the motto of WAAF, the hard rock station in Worcester, Massachusetts.

And THATCamp did just that: it widely disseminated an understanding of digital media and technology, provided guidance on the ways to apply that tech toward humanistic ends like writing, reading, history, literature, religion, philosophy, libraries, archives, and museums, and provided space and time to dream of new technology that could serve humans and the humanities, to thousands of people in hundreds of camps as the movement spread. (I would semi-joke at the beginning of each THATCamp that it wasn’t an event but a “movement, like the Olympics.”) Not such a bad feat for a modestly funded, decentralized, peer-to-peer initiative.

THATCamp as an organization has decided to wind down this week after a dozen successful years, and they have asked for reflections. My reflection is that THATCamp was, critically, much more than THAT. Yes, there was a lot of technology, and a lot of humanities. But looking back on its genesis and flourishing, I think there were other ingredients that were just as important. In short, THATCamp was animated by a widespread desire to do academic things in a way that wasn’t very academic.

As the cheeky motto implied, THATCamp pushed back against the normal academic conference modes of panels and lectures, of “let me tell you how smart I am” pontificating, of questions that are actually overlong statements. Instead, it tried to create a warmer, helpful environment of humble, accessible peer-to-peer teaching and learning. There was no preaching allowed, no emphasis on your own research or projects.

THATCamp was non-hierarchical. Before the first THATCamp, I had never attended a conference—nor have I been to one since my last THATCamp, alas—that included tenured and non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, librarians and archivists and museum professionals, software developers and technologists of all kinds, writers and journalists, and even curious people from well beyond academia and the cultural heritage sector—and that truly placed them at the same level when the entered the door. Breakout sessions always included a wide variety of participants, each with something to teach someone else, because after all, who knows everything.

Finally, as virtually everyone who has written a retrospective has emphasized, THATCamp was fun. By tossing off the seriousness, the self-seriousness, of standard academic behavior, it freed participants to experiment and even feel a bit dumb as they struggled to learn something new. That, in turn, led to a feeling of invigoration, not enervation. The carefree attitude was key.

Was THATCamp perfect, free of issues? Of course not. Were we naive about the potential of technology and blind to its problems? You bet, especially as social media and big tech expanded in the 2010s. Was it inevitable that digital humanities would revert to the academic mean, to criticism and debates and hierarchical structures? I suppose so.

Nevertheless, something was there, is there: THATCamp was unapologetically engaging and friendly. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I met and am still friends with many people who attended the early THATCamps. I look at photos from over a decade ago, and I see people that to this day I trust for advice and good humor. I see people collaborating to build things together without much ego.

Thankfully, more than a bit of the THATCamp spirit lingers. THATCampers (including many in the early THATCamp photo above) went on to collaboratively build great things in libraries and academic departments, to start small technology companies that helped others rather than cashing in, to write books about topics like generosity, to push museums to release their collections digitally to the public. All that and more.

By cosmic synchronicity, WAAF also went off the air this week. The final song they played was “Black Sabbath,” as the station switched at midnight to a contemporary Christian format. THATCamp was too nice to be that metal, but it can share in the final on-air words from WAAF’s DJ: “Well, we were all part of something special.”

I remember that as we were approaching THATCamp (2010?), he paused and asked, with some trepidation, if it was okay if people knew we were related; I think he knew I was a little nervous, and he was willing to back off, to give me space to be my own person. I think I laughed, and I definitely said I didn’t mind people knowing he was my Dad.

My experience at my first THATCamp was that it created a space where emerging digital humanists – myself included – felt just as welcome and heard as “old farts” (his term) like my Dad. Everyone was welcome, there was little to no hierarchy, and in its place a space for collaboration and discovery. I was, and am, happy to be “George’s daughter” – and THATCamp was a place where I, very briefly, also got to be his colleague, a fellow-traveler in digital humanities computing, seeing him in a new light.

There’s a clear line from my first THATCamp to where I am now: Dad introduced me to THATCamp; THATCamp introduced me to RRCHNM and George Mason University; now I’m RRCHNM staff and a doctoral candidate at GMU. In addition, the people I met through THATCamp introduced me to an idea of digital humanities that is friendly, engaging, and collaborative. I was nervous that day because I wasn’t sure I “belonged;” what I found was a group of people who welcomed me and my experiences. Whether or not I found my feet as a digital humanist at THATCamp, it’s definitely where I started to be comfortable with describing myself as one.

Ten years later, Dad’s attendance at THATCamp is a gift. There are people I work with, both at RRCHNM and the broader DH community, who met my Dad at a THATCamp, who experienced his sometimes overwhelming enthusiasm, his deep knowledge of humanities computing, his generous spirit. It’s hard for me to articulate why this is so important – it’s more than just hearing someone say “he was very kind.” For me, THATCamp will always be tied to my memories of my father, and the possibilities he shared with me.

[As a side note, if you have memories of my Dad at THATCamp – silly, serious, or otherwise – I’d love to hear them. Find me on twitter: magpie.]

THATCamp 2008 Badges

My path to the inaugural THATCamp started at the Society of American Archivist’s 2006 annual meeting in DC. I was a local grad student presenting my first poster: Communicating Context in Online Collections – and handing out home-printed cards for my blog. When I ran out, I just wrote the URL on scraps of paper. I found my way to session 510: Archives Seminar: Possibilities and Problems of Digital History and Digital Collections, featuring Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, described in the SAA program as follows:

The co-authors of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web lead a discussion of their book and, in particular, the possibilities of digital history and of collecting the past online. The discussion includes reflections on the September 11 Digital Archive and the new Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, which collects stories, images, and other digital material related to hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.

The full hour and twenty-four minutes audio recording is available online if you want to dive down that particular rabbit hole.

2006 was early in the “archives blogging” landscape. It was the era of finding and following like-minded colleagues. RSS and feed readers! People had conversations in the comments. 2006 was the year I launched my blog. My post about Dan & Roy’s session was only the 9th post on my site. I was employed full time doing Oracle database work at Discovery and working towards my MLS in the University of Maryland’s CLIS (now iSchool) program part-time. So I added Dan’s blog to the list of the blogs I read. When Dan invited people to come to THATCamp in January of 2008 and I realized it was local – I signed up. You can see my nametag in the “stack of badges” photo above. For a taste of my experiences that day, take a look at my 2008 THATCamp blog posts.

In 2008, the opportunity to sit in a room of people who were interested in the overlap of technology and humanities was exciting. As a part-time graduate student (and wife and mother of a 6-year-old), I spent almost no time on campus. I did most of my thinking about archives and technology at home late at night in the glow of my computer screen. There was not a lot of emphasis on the digital in my MLS program at UMD. I had to find that outside the classroom.

The connections I made at that first THATCamp extend to today. As mentioned elsewhere, I was part of the group who put together the first regional THATCamp in Austin as a one-evening side-event for the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting in 2009. I swear that Ben Brumfield and I were just going to meet for dinner while I was in Austin, where he lives, for SAA. Somehow that turned into “Why not throw a THATCamp?”. How great to have no idea of the scale of what we were taking on! Ben did an amazing job of documenting what we learned and tips for future organizers, including giving yourself more time to plan, reaching out to as diverse a group as possible, and planning an event that lasted longer than four hours. All that said, it was a glorious and crazy evening. I still have my t-shirt. While our discussions might have been more archives-skewed than at most THATCamps, it also gave lots of archivists a taste of what THATCamp and un-conferences were like. Looking through the posts on the THATCamp Austin website, there was clearly an appetite for the event. We could easily have had enough topics to discuss to fill a weekend – but only had time for two one hour session slots, plus a speed round of “dork shorts” lightning talks.

I know I went to other THATCamps along the way. I graduated with my MLS in 2009. I started an actual day-job as an archivist in July of 2011 at the World Bank. Suddenly I got paid to think about archives all day – and I didn’t need my blog in the way I used to. I started writing more fiction and attending conferences dedicated to digital preservation. Somewhere in there, I went to the 2012 THATCamp Games at UMD.

THATCamps brought together enthusiastic people from so many different types of digital and humanities practice — all with their own perspectives and their own problems to solve. We don’t get many opportunities to cross-pollinate among those from academia and the public and private sectors. Those early conversations were my first steps towards ideas about how archivists might collaborate with professionals from other communities on digital challenges and innovations. In fact, I can see threads stretching from the very first THATCamp all the way to my Partners for Preservation book project.

Thanks, THATCamp community.

When I think of the THATCamp era, 2008-2014, I think of the Wordsworth lines from The Prelude: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven” (see at Hathitrust). Wordsworth was writing about the French Revolution, which started out so promisingly: his initial passionate enthusiasm for it, and indeed for transformative social reform generally, an enthusiasm that later turned to disillusionment and disaffection as the Revolution turned into a bloodbath.

THATCamp was just part of a kind of general tech optimism that had its peak in the mid- to late 2000s, back when “Web 2.0” signaled forward thinking. I was certainly part of that tech optimism: what was appealing about it was not so much anything about actual technology but about the social reforms that seemed to come along with it – the increased egalitarianism, especially. Disintermediation. The Wiki Way. As a recent Wired magazine article about Wikipedia puts it, “Not too long ago, techno-utopianism was the ambient vibe of the elite ideas industry; now it has become the ethos that dare not speak its name. Hardly anyone can talk abstractly about freedom and connection and collaboration, the blithe watchwords of the mid-2000s, without making a mental list of the internet’s more concrete negative externalities.” Or as Trevor Owens just put it in his piece “Growing Up with THATCamp,” “It also feels like we’ve lost a lot of the optimism that surrounded those events, I think in part as it feels like the community became more aware and engaged with how problematic the values at play in digital technology ideologies are” — that very much nails part of my own attitude these days.

Yet THATCamp never did have a major fall from grace, and I still believe strongly that THATCamp was (and is!) a lot better than traditional conferences at things like de-emphasizing hierarchies, and that a lot of people learned a lot, a lot! And had fun. Like Wikipedia, I think THATCamp has managed to retain the values and methods of its inception, although perhaps that’s because the project has been quiet for the last six years, though by no means moribund.

So, how to sum up? Well, I’ll do my best. First, I’ll quickly repeat a few statistics that I’ve shared elsewhere:

• There have been over 320 THATCamps since the first one took place in 2008, and nearly half of those were organized after the project’s grant funding ended in 2014. Hooray for sustainability! Costs for that post-2014 period, not inconsiderable, were chiefly for website hosting and systems administration, which were borne by RRCHNM. I myself did some volunteer work fixing bugs and user accounts and so on, but I swear I never spent more than a few hours per month on that.
• There are at least 8,000 people who have been to a THATCamp. Hooray for broad impact!
• Of the 1145 people who’ve filled out an evaluation form, over 95% of them agreed or strongly agreed that they found their THATCamp useful. I find that especially telling since all the THATCamps have different organizers and different content — surely, therefore, there’s something about the method or format that’s producing all that usefulness (cough, peer-to-peer learning).

Going beyond the numbers, I’ll say that I think the chief contribution of THATCamp was (as I’ve said above) that it really helped a lot of people learn a lot. Or rather, learn a little, through workshops, discussions, and perhaps above all the Dork Shorts, and then feel emboldened and motivated to learn more. This, I might add, was perhaps not its original purpose: I think THATCamp did begin as a place for “experts” to get together and build things, but it became much more friendly to the “yak” side of “More hack, less yak,” and much more friendly to what I always termed “the digicurious,” and that was partly by design.

I’m also very glad we encouraged so many workshops at THATCamps, because I had a great time teaching those (especially Omeka workshops) and a great time attending them. I especially liked when people put together workshops on the fly, when it became clear that someone could teach something that others were keen to learn — that happened relatively often, but the two I remember are when Jason Puckett offered to teach Zotero down at one of the THATCamp Southeasts (I think) and when someone offered to do a demo of the new features of HTML 5 in some hotel lobby somewhere. It was all very “Hey, my dad’s got a barn / I have some knowledge — let’s put on a show / have an impromptu lesson!” I also loved going to Tom Scheinfeldt’s project management workshops, which I did at least a couple of times. I also remember teaching a workshop on regular expressions and having someone ask me “So, what would you use this for?” That was a tough one, because if you’re working with code or with text as data, good heavens, what DON’T you use regex for? But not everyone does! (I never taught regex again, but Ben Brumfield did, several times.) I remember learning R (well, “learning” R) from Lincoln Mullen at THATCamp AAR (American Academy of Religion); I remember learning about using Layar for augmented reality at THATCamp Museum Computer Network from Markus Wust, and I remember NOT getting to learn about Google Fusion Tables from Mano Marks at THATCamp Prime 2011 because I was busy running around organizing everything and couldn’t go to the workshop. I remember having a working session with Nancy Ross at THATCamp College Art Association where we drafted an intro to Art History textbook right there in the room; I remember Michael Mandiberg, he who would later print out all of Wikipedia as an art project, helping run a Wikipedia editathon; I remember proposing a weird meditative session at THATCamp Virginia where Brandon Walsh and others where we sat around and listened to Listen to Wikipedia while free-writing.

I remember the people. Thanks to all of you for a great four years and beyond.

Then I realized that I actually had a section on my c.v. at one point that actually stated “THATCamp Sessions and Workshops”

• THATCamp AHA MLA (Chicago) 2019; proposed “Digital Fluency in an Information Age” again
• THATCamp AHA Denver 2017; proposed Digital Fluency in an “Information Age”
• THATCamp AHA 2016; proposed “Open Educational Resources in History: Where to Start and What to Do” and “Obligatory Valuing Digital Scholarship and Teaching Session”
• THATCamp Prime 2015 (I think I did Implementing DH Programs, but honestly, I’m not sure).
• THATCamp AHA 2015, proposed “Session proposal: What Should the Next THATCamp(s) Look Like?“
• THATCamp Council member, 2014-2015
• THATCamp AHA 2014 (co-organizer)
• THATCamp NCPH 2013 (helped run because Tom was sick); led Omeka Workshop; and proposed a session on “Digitally enabled museums”
• THATCamp Virginia 2013 (co-organizer): led workshop, “Teaching Digital History”
• THATCamp Leadership 2013; co-led session on “Show Me Your Data“
• THATCamp AHA 2013 (co-organizer): led workshop, “Teaching Digital History,” proposed session on “Classrooms and Learning Spaces of the Future”
• THATCamp AHA 2012: led workshop, “So, You Want to Teach a Digital History Class?,” proposed session on “The Problem of Old Digital History Sites”
• THATCamp Pedagogy 2011: (was supposed to lead) workshop with Amanda French, “Teaching with Omeka,” but got food poisoning and follow-up session on “Omeka in the Classroom”
• THATCamp CHNM 2011: proposed session, “Is Digital Literacy a Done Deal?”
• THATCamp Virginia 2010 (co-organizer): proposed session on “Classroom Technology.”
• THATCamp CHNM 2010: co-proposed session on “Cultivating Digital Skills.”
• THATCamp CHNM 2009: proposed sessions on “Archiving Social Media Conversations of Significant Events,” and “Strategic Planning, Digital Humanities, and Academic Computing: How to Get Money for Wild and Crazy (Academic) Times.”
• THATCamp CHNM 2008: proposed session on “Integrating Teaching and Research through Digital History.”

So, something like 17 THATCamps in 11 years. [I may have missed some.]  I was a THATCamp devotee.  I felt from the beginning that I had found my people, at least some of them.  A significant percentage of my Twitter follows (and followers) came from these sessions.  The people that I met have become colleagues, collaborators, partners in digital pedagogy and work.  I have no doubt that I have been published, have been offered leadership positions, have received grants, have even been a finalist for jobs because of the community and what I learned and what I discovered among and in the THATCamp communities that sprung up around and between the various THATCamps I attended.

Perhaps not surprisingly though, my own experience at THATCamp changed over the years as increasingly my role was not to learn new things, but to teach others new things. Or to teach things I had already learned or at least could speak about from the increasing age and experience (if not wisdom) of a tenured faculty position.  [To be clear, there was (is) still so much for me to learn in DH, but by 2011 I was going to THATCamps as an organizer, as a workshop leader, as a DH-friendly department chair and explainer-of-how-to-get-tenure-promotion-while-doing-DH and not typically to learn new things myself.] Given that almost every time, most of the people who attended THATCamps were new to THATCamp and to DH more generally, so fulfilling those roles with a number of like-minded THATCamp true believers made sense. There were (and still are) people who want and need a low-key, friendly environment in which to learn about DH for teaching, for research, for themselves.  THATCamp’s role always worked best (in my observations) as an introduction.

And I think that’s part of why it has run its course.  [That and the fact that there wasn’t funding underwriting the coordination of it anymore.]  There wasn’t a clear next step for THATCamp to play in people’s own DH development.  THATCamp 2.0, THATCamp at the next level, THATCamp for Advanced Users never took off (for a variety of reasons both philosophical and practical).   Other options have emerged for people who wanted more than the introduction, who wanted to know what was next.

But I will always cherish the connections we made, the work we did, the fun we had, and will always be grateful for the home, the foundation, the scaffolding, THATCamp provided me over the last 12 years.

Off I went with some appropriately vague ideas of what I would say in my keynote. It was a ThatCamp after all, so too much preparation felt like I would be doing it wrong. And then I arrived at the University of Lausanne auditorium and there were lots and lots of people there — maybe half graduate students — and they were all looking so serious, like they expected ThatCamp to be serious business.

Being me, I threw out my initial remarks and told everyone to stand up. Out of 200 or so people there, I think about 20 stood up — almost all of them graduate students (or very young faculty). The rest just looked at me like I was insane. So being me, I insisted. “I’m standing, so you need to stand up too.” With a fair amount of grumbling and eye rolling, everyone else stood up. Or almost everyone. Then I made them take what I called the “ThatCamp Pledge.”

Repeat after me, “I am here to have fun.” Their first response was really, really weak. So, I made them all do it again. “Louder, please.” The second rendition was much more satisfying. And it tickled me to see that many of the younger people in the room were smirking at the discomfort of some of their older colleagues (people my age).

Having forcibly extracted my pledge, I then invited them all to sit back down and went on with whatever it was that I’d prepared to say. At which point we came up with topics of the event in good ThatCamp style, and started moving on to our respective rooms.

If you were there, you may remember the “Occupy Mills” movement that occurred when Mareike König and Eva Pflanzeter came in and “occupied” my session on graduate students and DH — as they should have done. It was truly a perfect ThatCamp moment — an unconference schedule being subverted in the middle of its unscheduledness.

Toward the end of the first day, one of the older scholars taking part came up to me and said, “I am having fun now!” And he was. He had a big smile on his face and was hustling off to another unstructured event…far from his comfort zone. I’ve often wondered if that moment of fun carried over into the rest of his professorish life?

My last ThatCamp was ThatCamp Digital Appalachia. I was at the very beginning of my new project on the history of the Appalachian Trail and right away I made a number of new professional connections that have helped sustain me over the past five years. That day I was just a participant, not a speaker, and even though there were only a few dozen of us in attendance, our time together was just like all ThatCamps — exciting, generative, collaborative, and, of course, fun.