About

On Saturday, November 12th, The Humanities And Technology Camp Pacific Northwest (THATCamp PNW) 2011 will be held on the University of Washington’s Bothell campus.

The theme of this year’s event is technologies and social justice. What are the relationships between technological literacy and social change? Online and offline forms of participation? Projects in the cloud and projects on the ground? Come engage these issues and more. The program will emerge during the day of the event.

But wait . . . what’s a THATCamp?

THATCamp stands for “The Humanities and Technology Camp”, where “camp” implies a participant-driven “unconference.” Check your papers and suits at the door, and just be ready to talk about the work you’re doing, the work you want to do, how you might collaborate with others, and how you can help and be helped by a community dedicated to the intersection of the humanities and technologies. THATCamp was created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. You might also know CHNM as the institution behind Zotero and Omeka. CHNM supports this and other regional THATCamps.

Ok, then what’s an “unconference”?

The Wikipedia entry for “unconference” will give you a good idea of what to expect. An “unconference” is “a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose.” These unconferences came up from the hacker world—for instance, see BarCamp—as a way to avoid high conference fees and sponsored presentations. Unconferences are not spectator events. Participants are involved from the schedule creation to the wrap-up session, and actively present, discuss, and collaborate with fellow participants.

So, no suits, no papers . . . what do you do, exactly?

Show, tell, collaborate, and share. Read through the participant blog posts from a previous THATCamp to get an idea of the types of things people discuss. But NO PAPERS. We’re looking for application demos, research and pedagogy discussions, project ideas, tutorials, and similar approaches to the humanities and technology.

Who should attend?

Anyone interested in studying, supporting, teaching, researching, creating or otherwise shaping digital humanities, new media, community-based research, social change, and allied fields. You can be a professor, a programmer, a student (grad or undergrad), a librarian, an independent scholar, a community knowledge worker, or any combination thereof (as many of us are). You can be an expert or a newbie. As long as you have something to talk about and things you want to learn, THATCamp is a good place to be. The list of “who should attend” is as broad as the field of “digital humanities” itself.

How much?

Free! THATCamp PNW 2011 is sponsored by a generous grant from Microsoft Research, with additional support from the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Center for Serious Play, and the University of Washington Bothell, all of whom are committed to supporting the growth of digital humanities projects in the Pacific Northwest.

(Image care of Wikipedia.)