Digital Methods Training at Scale: Leveraging THATCamp Through a Regional System

Digital Methods Training at Scale: Leveraging THATCamp Through a Regional System

Initial Grant

Digital Methods Training at Scale: Leveraging THATCamp Through a Regional System

In 2008, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) created an informal yearly conference on digital methods in the humanities called THATCamp—The Humanities and Technology Camp. The new style of the conference, with its emphasis on communicating new methods and trying things out rather than talking formally, helped to attract a wide range of curious scholars, and it spawned numerous locally-organized regional THATCamps in 2009. This proposal intends to leverage the energy and attendance of THATCamp to train hundreds of humanities scholars in digital methods, helping to create a new generation of scholars who can maximize their use of the countless digital archives and other electronic resources that are now at their fingertips.
The proposed project will keep much of the attractive informality and entrepreneurial spirit of THATCamp, but add new supports for training in digital methods and make it vastly easier for regional THATCamps to be established and run. A regional coordinator will help inexperienced THATCamp organizers set up, run, and follow up on each conference; a compilation of open source software will help support the proceedings from registration to archiving of social media used during the camp; and a full curriculum for inexperienced scholars, BootCamp, will be created and disseminated. In addition, a fellowship program will encourage humanities scholars to attend a THATCamp near them, increasing exposure to new methods.

04/01/2010

03/31/2012

Dan Cohen

Tom Scheinfeldt

Tom Scheinfeldt

Amanda French

Chris Raymond

Jeremy Boggs

1) THATCamp Regional Coordinator

2) THATCamp-in-a-box

3) BootCamp

4) Micro-fellowships

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

$260,000