The call for THATCamp reflections in the wake of the project’s sunsetting has generated a lot of interesting writing, as well as an informal record of some of the networks that intersected with (and, in some cases, emerged from) this “unconference” initiative (if you are unfamiliar with THATCamps and are still reading these words, here is a general overview). I wanted to get some thoughts in writing here on my experiences with THATCamp and the value of the unconference model in public humanities and academic contexts.

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.

When folks ask me how we started FromThePage, our crowdsourced transcription software, I talk about the family diaries, and how, inspired by Wikipedia, we sought to build a place that made transcribing a collaborative experience.  But when I talk about building the business–Brumfield Labs, our digital humanities consultancy that runs FromThePage–I say “there was this unconference called THATCamp.”

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.

In 2013 I was nearing the end of my PhD coursework and feeling truly despondent about the specter of writing a proposal for my dissertation. Nothing in the field seemed to be the right combo of interesting, feasible, and novel. I was supposed to be itching to read more, and build a research plan around some new and exciting thing in seventeenth-century Dutch art history, but I was spinning my wheels. With a little nudge from my department chair, and the leaders of the Michelle Smith Collaboratory in UMD’s department of Art History & Archaeology, I went to THATCamp Prime at GMU.

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.

Saying farewell to THATCamp is saying goodbye to an era. That era probably ended a few years ago, but it’s ethos and enthusiasm lives on in all of us campers.

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!

It was my Dad, George H. Brett II, who told me about THATCamp. He was my introduction to many DH things – html, the world wide web, twitter, and RRCHNM. I was working in public history, and after he attended a THATCamp in Fairfax he encouraged me to attend the next year.

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.

I began by just trying to figure out how many THATCamps I attended.  I knew that I went to the original one at CHNM in 2008, presenting on a class that I had just finished teaching for the first time, and undergraduate Digital History course.

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.

Sometime toward the end of 2010, the organizers of ThatCamp Lausanne asked me to come and give a keynote to get the event started on the right foot. ThatCamp in Switzerland? Um, sure. I can definitely make it.

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.

We at the Samuel H.  Kress Foundation are proud to have been among the early philanthropic sponsors of THATCamps. Our key interest was in jump-starting the evolution of digital art history. In retrospect it is abundantly clear that supporting a series of THATCamps for art historians – including THATCamps held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the College Art Association – was the best way of encouraging that development. If digital art history has reached a significant state of maturity in the short span of the past decade, THATCamp is to a significant degree responsible for that success. Thank you, THATCamp!

I don’t remember how I first learned about THATCamp – perhaps it was from the HNN website, or perhaps it was from Twitter. I’m pretty sure the inaugural one passed me by entirely unnoticed. But when the call for participation came out for the second THATCamp in 2009 I was very eager to participate. I was at a crossroads in my own work and had decided that digital work was the direction I wanted to go. THATCamp seemed like the ideal place to discover the cutting edge work in the field. So I applied. And I was rejected. There were too many applicants for the room available. I felt terrible.

Ironically, my rejection from THATCamp 2009 meant that I was more or less present at the dawning of the “franchising” of the THATCamp brand. (A second irony is that, since I could not go to THATCamp, I decided to spend the money to go to DH2009, where I met a number of people I have come to associate with the THATCamp community.) I quickly learned from Twitter that I was not alone in being rejected. (Indeed, my personal experience of THATCamp is closely connected to my early experience of Twitter and evokes many of the same feelings today.) I recognized several despondent Twitterers as being located fairly close to me. Discussion online quickly shifted from “Oh, gee, why didn’t they want me?” to “you know, we could organize something like that ourselves.” And then Ben Brumfield, Lisa Grimm, Peter Keane, and Jeanne Kramer-Smyth did just that – organizing a THATCamp to be held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists held in Austin just a few months after THATCamp 2009. The organizers of THATCamp Austin helpfully produced a written template for organizing a meeting on the cheap. I had already been in contact with some of the people I had encountered on Twitter about holding a similar gathering at Richard Stockton College. Now, it made sense to align it explicitly with THATCamp.

There were a handful of regional THATCamps between Austin and THATCamp “Prime” 2010. And then came the deluge. I applied for THATCamp 2010 with the explicit idea of learning “how to THATCamp” and being part of that deluge (I was reluctant to try organizing a THATCamp without ever having attended one!) in addition to learning DH. This time I was accepted. My timing could not have been better. The RRCHNM had decided to actively support the development of regional THATCamps and had received a small subsidy to encourage first time participants to attend regional camps and to support Amanda French as a coordinator of THATCamp planning (Thanks, Amanda!).

By the time THATCamp Jersey Shore took place in April, 2011, it was already the 23rd regional camp. Two more followed the next week. But THATCamp Jersey Shore was the first to be held in the Northeast of the US. It was attended by organizers of subsequent THATCamps in Philly and for Community Colleges, among others. For me, the years 2011 and 2012 were the moment of my most intensive involvement in THATCamp. The experience was new enough that it was worthwhile for me to go up to Poughkeepsie for THATCamp Pedagogy and to seriously consider (though not ultimately go) going to DePere, Wisconsin for THATCamp Small Liberal Arts Colleges. I returned to George Mason for one more THATCamp Prime. But mostly, I became more or less a regular at THATCamp Philly which ran every year from 2011 to 2016, by which time the concept had lost its energy.

Like Trevor Owen, it has now been many years since I attended a THATCamp. I guess I was one of the most vocal opponents of the proposal four years ago to dissolve the THATCamp council and archive the THATCamp.org website. I think it was the right call then not to shut things down. Fifty-five new THATCamps were registered at the site between the proposal to close the site and today. But it makes sense to make this orderly exit now.

It is easy to underestimate how important it was that the founders of THATCamp prime responded to the idea of regional THATCamps with encouragement and support rather than circling the wagons around “their” un-conference. May this archived site serve as a fitting memorial to the wisdom of that decision.

For those who are interested. While rummaging around trying to refresh my memory, I uncovered my reactions to experiencing THATCamp 2009 vicariously via Twitter here: https://blogs.stockton.edu/southjerseydigital/2009/06/27/thatcamp/

The Humanities and Technology Camp (THATCamp) has announced the program is sunsetting and is hosting a retrospective on the site. I’m crossposting some quick reflections there and here. 

I think I’ve been to at least 9 THATCamps. I was at the the first one at CHNM in 2008. I missed 2009. But I was at the CHNM ones in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. I also went to THATCamp NCHP in 2012 and then that I went to THATCamp Leadership in 2013, THATCamp DC in 2014, and THATCamp AHA in 2014.

In piecing that together, I’m realizing that I think it’s been six years since I’ve been to a THATCamp. So I went to 9 of them in one six-year period and apparently haven’t gone to any of them in the subsequent six-year period. Time is strange. The first one in 2008 feels like forever ago and the more recent ones feel like things that happened not that long ago. But I realize and recognize that the strangeness of time is also connected to how the camps fit into my career.

Running the registration desk with Dave Lester at THATcamp 2012 https://20.rrchnm.org/items/show/388

My First Camps

In 2008 I was finishing a masters degree and working on Zotero at CHNM. We got a lot of work done and we had a lot of fun. I kept buying shirts on Shirt.woot.  I have fond memories of going out to lunch with the group, setting up websites, buying up domain names, going out on the road to push open source software for reference management. The first THATcamp was wild. People came from all over and it was invigorating.

The idea of the unconference felt really powerful. Reserve some space on campus, set up a wordpress instance, buy some coffee and donuts, and let people sign up to propose things they wanted to talk about and then all of a sudden there was a whole conference happening. It was a great conference too. Folks left with a whole bunch of new connections and awareness of a bunch of projects that related to work they were interested in.

That was very much my experience at least. At those first camps I found myself meeting all these new folks and connecting with new work and ideas. There were undergrads there that just figured out how to do some cool thing and they were teaching full professors about it. The ‘un’ ness of it was really strong. It felt like there was buy in that

There was just a lot of inversion of hierarchies. As I wrote about in 2011, it felt like there was this DIY spirit that animated many the work in the space and that was invigorating. It’s also funny looking back on that blog post and seeing that people left comments there. In a lot of ways the early days of blogging feel like part of the THATCamp heyday when we operated in some pretty fundamentally different conversation spaces.

My Later Camps

At THATcamp NCPH 2012 https://ncph.org/history-at-work/return-of-thatcamp-ncph/

I have less vivid memories of some of the later camps. That said, when I did that run of them in 2012, 2013 and 2014 it felt like the concept of the camps had become a rather well-functioning system. It also started to feel like a lot of the same conversations were playing out again at some of the camps.

It was fun to take part in that. It felt great to become more of a facilitator of some of that. That said, in some of the later camps there would also be times when someone would pitch “Shouldn’t there be a thing like X, what if we started making it right now!?” and then one of the folks who had been coming for a while would chime in with something like “That sounds a lot like A, B, C, D, or E and four out of five of those letters ended up being unsustainable for somewhat intractable reasons 1, 2, and 3.” In that context, I think I burned out a little from some of the can do attitude of just roll yourselves up and make a thing ideals that I feel like were so central to THATcamp. The hustle of that DIY world and impulse gets exausting. It’s also clear that the big, hard, challenging seemingly intractable things keep coming up and don’t lend themselves well to the format. 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.

THATCamp Temporal Vertigo

Thinking back over the 12 years from the beginning of THATcamp makes me feel something a bit like a professional vertigo. When the first camp happened, I was 23 and half way through a master’s program and about two years into really working my first full-time job. It felt so exciting to be connecting with folks at all levels of their careers and getting positive feedback about ideas I had for projects. It’s hard for me to process through what parts of my feelings and thoughts about the camps are about the events themselves and what parts are really about my growth and development. So take all of my reflections on this with a grain of salt. I don’ t believe I can separate out what parts of this are about me and what parts of them are about the events.

Growing through and and from THATCamp

With that said, it does feel like things have substantively changed in the digital history and digital humanities spaces since those camps. As areas like digital history and the digital humanities went through a range of periods of growth and faced substantive criticism they changed. In many ways I think they changed for the better. It feels like a more critical set of approaches and thinking going on across these spaces these days. As the fields THATCamp helped to energize have grown up it feels OK that we may have outgrown it as a tool.

With that said, I also accept that I can’t extract my history and experience from this perspective. I grew up professionally in dialog with those THATCamp events and I know they were formative in shaping how I think about and approach things and many of the collaborations and relationships that my career is anchored in.

A told, I think I mainly am left with a lot of gratitude for the chance to be in the place and time where THATCamp came together. I owe so much to the people who I was able to learn from in those events and they are going to forever be a foundational part of my career.