ThatCamp Harvard 2014

Posted September 30, 2014 by Gemma Doyle

On Saturday I attended THATCamp at Harvard University.  THATCamps are popping up all over the place these days – the name stands for The Humanities and Technology Camp, and they are meant to be a collaborative day between people working in the humanities and people working in technology.  As the THATCamp website describes it, “an open, inexpensive meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.”

THATCamps are meant to be very informal and spontaneous, not at all like a regular conference.  (Much better than a regular conference for promoting productive work, which is one of the goals behind THATCamps.)  Sessions on Saturday ranged from Wikipedia and conversations about how to foster more collaboration to archival tools and discussions of using social media and ways to visualize music.  Sessions were informal groups chatting; no lectures or hierarchies.  Professors and students spoke as equals as they tried to solve problems.  Most important of all: it was fun!  It really was.  (And you know I am not a big fan of big groups or chatting with strangers.)  

Many, if not most, of the participants were professors and students from Boston-area colleges and universities, though there were a few working librarians and archivists who were able to give a lot of perspective about how technology is being used in actual professional settings.  There is no doubt that technology and work in information repositories are now fundamentally linked, and as time goes on they will only become more entwined.  It is very important that we begin conversations with people who understand how to build the technological tools we’ll need to be able to do our jobs, so that we can work together to create exactly what we really want and need.  THATCamps are one way to do that.