What was both the most enjoyable and the most productive conference I went to last year? THATCamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp. OK, I’m slightly biased because THATCamp takes place at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, but you can get confirmation from last year’s other attendees. THATCamp is the brainchild of CHNM’s Dave Lester, Jeremy Boggs, and Tom Scheinfeldt.

For those new to the concept, THATCamp is an unconference, which means that there are no stodgy panels or fussy exchanges. Instead, the attendees self-organize on the first morning into sessions of interest, and then plunge right into learning from each other. Everyone is a participant, and subgroups often break off to try out new things. It is a very casual but fairly intense two days of conversation, coding, and comraderie. And it’s free. (We do pass around a trucker’s hat for donations to provide coffee and snacks.)

THATCamp 2009 will take place on June 27–28, right after Digital Humanities 2009 at the University of Maryland. You need to apply if you would like to come, and slots are limited, so unfortunately the organizers will have to be selective. We have a larger number of slots this year, but still expect to be oversubscribed, so please put on your application what you would be willing to share with the other attendees.

Also, there are a limited number of sponsorships available to organizations, institutions, and companies. It’s a great way to get the word out about your program or product, so if you’re interested in sponsoring THATCamp, send an email soon to info@thatcamp.org.

THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp), which brings together scholars, librarians, curators, technologists, and developers for a two-day “unconference” that interactively explores the cutting edge of the digital humanities, was such a success this year that we’re bringing it back in 2009. Better yet, we are pairing it with the Digital Humanities 2009 conference being run by our friends on the other side of the Washington beltway, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. THATCamp 2009 will immediately follow DH2009 on June 27-28, 2008. Stay tuned to the THATCamp site for a more formal announcement and application guidelines.

On this episode of the Digital Campus podcast, Tom, Mills, and I think in greater depth about whether the stodgy academic conferences we often go to could be (at least partially) recast into more informal affairs along the lines of THATCamp, a “barcamp” or “unconference.” We also look at the upcoming iPhone 3G (soon to be the cell phone on campus at its lower price) and what mobile apps might mean for teaching and learning. [Subscribe to this podcast.]

I was hoping to provide a wrap-up of THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) in this space many days ago, but other commitments got in the way of my blogging.

Let me just say in summary that I completely agree with Mills Kelly’s sense (echoed by Tom Scheinfeldt and Marjorie McLellan, among many others) that going to THATCamp made me yearn for a serious makeover of the standard professional conferences I’ve gone to my entire career, especially the annual conference of the American Historical Association. (The digital humanities are not immune, by the way: the panels-and-papers format has infected these meetings as well.) In my opinion, such conferences tend to focus too much on the job market, padding the CV, and showing how clever you are, rather than building the discipline collaboratively. THATCamp showed how informative, engaging, and constructive a conference can be when everyone participates, there are no lectures or read papers, the format is highly flexible, and everyone feels open to speak—including candidly about the gaps in one’s knowledge as well as what one feels knowledgeable about.

For those looking for a more comprehensive sense of what happened, check out the Google Blog Search feed for THATCamp posts or scan the raw feed of our IRC channel. And if you’re interested in the digital humanities, it’s really worth making your way through the entire THATCamp blog for ideas and perspectives from THATCampers on the state of the art and the issues we face.

Hope to see you at THATCamp 2009!

After an incredible first day (I’ll do a full roundup of THATCamp when I get the chance), I’m starting off the second day by attending a session on mashups in the humanities. Raymond Yee is giving a quick master class on the technology behind mashups, and a great discussion has quickly started.

I’m at the Center for History and New Media this weekend for our first annual THATCamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp, a spontaneous, participant-generated 48 hours of collaborative advancement of the art of digital humanities. It has started off with a bang: almost 30 ad hoc sessions have been planned, ranging from search technologies to interface design to civic engagement.

Unfortunately we had enormous interest in THATCamp and had to limit the size of this year’s edition, but those who can’t be here can follow the proceedings live on Twitter (follow @thatcamp or my Twitter feed @dancohen), IRC (irc.freenode.net, port 7000, room thatcamp), or on Flickr (the THATCamp set).