Regional THATCamps: A Movement

During this year’s Winter Games in Vancouver, I joked that like the Olympics, THATCamp was a movement, not an event. Well, only semi-joked. I did think there was something to trying to spread widely a new participatory and inclusive academic meeting, one that would spread the digital humanities, encourage collaboration and sharing, and disseminate knowledge better than the standard panels-and-lectures scholarly society annual conference. I’m incredibly delighted that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has now generously provided funding to support a network of THATCamps worldwide so that the unconference can serve many more people than we can here at the mothership.

THATCamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp was founded in 2008 by the Center for History and New Media’s Dave Lester, Jeremy Boggs, and Tom Scheinfeldt. (Dave is now the assistant director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.) A strange and wonderful thing happened over the last year: THATCamps started to spring up across the country and beyond, many of them hosted and run by those who participated in the yearly event in Fairfax, VA.

I strongly recommend that readers of this blog read Tom’s full post on the grant and regional THATCamps to get a sense of what’s involved (you can also read my prior posts on THATCamp), and hope that you consider hosting your own THATCamp. You don’t have to wait four years to light the torch.