About W12

THATCamp Wellington 2012 is an informal, collaborative, one-day unconference. It’s inspired by the original THATCamp, organised by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and is one of a growing number of regional THATCamps popping up around the world.

If you’re passionate about the humanities and technology, and want to learn/share/hack/build/brainstorm/discover with like-minded adventurers, THATCamp Wellington 2012 has your name on it. And if that passion needs a little nudge in one direction or the other, this might just be the ticket (a budget friendly $20 ticket to be exact).

W12 campers are a mix of information professionals, cultural heritage practitioners, Humanities staff and students, and IT stars, who are keen to talk:

• linked open data
• gamification
• reuse of online collections
• crowdsourcing
• visualization
• data mining
• Digital Humanities
• Javascript
• APIs
• geospatial mapping
• authority control
• auto-tagging
• digitisation
• mobile access
• digital archiving
• licensing of digital content and more…

At THATCamp Wellington we hope you’ll be able to pick up new skills, meet like-minded people, share your experiences and challenges, ask lots of questions, and maybe even find solutions. That said, it will only be as inspiring, constructive, empowering, and fun as we all make it…

We’ll kickstart the day by proposing session topics, and voting for the sessions we’re keen to attend. Next, we’ll create a schedule based on the most popular topics. We’ll break out into groups for each session, which will last about an hour, and get together in the breaks to swap stories, share some brain food, and top up with caffeine. If you feel you’re not learning from or contributing to a particular session, or have a burning desire to be in two places at once, you’re encouraged to move about between sessions.

While the idea is to create the schedule on the day, we invite you to share your ideas for a session beforehand.

Perhaps you’d like to discuss the nature and future of Digital Humanities, or some of the legal and social issues related to technology and the humanities.

Maybe you’re keen to know more about finding and managing humanities information, using online tools and open source software.

Or there’s the big wide world of digitizing, editing, organizing, publishing, and preserving humanities materials, and collecting, interpreting, analyzing, and manipulating humanities data…

Others may share your interest in creating, presenting, and publishing humanities study, or working collaboratively.

And if you have knowledge to share or questions to ask about using programming languages and tools, this might be a great opportunity to do so.

Think about what you’d like to get out of THATCamp Wellington, and what you bring to the table that others may be able to benefit from. We look forward to seeing you there!

You can sign up here, follow the blog for updates, and stay tuned @thatcampwgtn 

For more information about the THATCamp movement see thatcamp.org. Here are the basics:

What is a THATCamp?

• It’s collaborative: there are no spectators at a THATCamp. Everyone participates, including in the task of setting an agenda or program.
• It’s informal: there are no lengthy proposals, papers, presentations, or product demos. The emphasis is on productive, collegial work or free-form discussion.
• It’s spontaneous and timely, with the agenda / schedule / program being mostly or entirely created by all the participants during the first session of the first day, rather than weeks or months beforehand by a program committee.
• It’s productive: participants are encouraged to use session time to create, build, write, hack, and solve problems.
• It’s non-hierarchical and non-disciplinary and inter-professional: THATCamps welcome graduate students, scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers and programmers, K-12 teachers, administrators, managers, and funders as well as people from the non-profit sector, people from the for-profit sector, and interested amateurs. The topic “the humanities and technology” contains multitudes.
• It’s open and online: participants make sure to share their notes, documents, pictures, and other materials from THATCamp discussions before and after the event on the web and via social media.
• It’s fun, intellectually engaging, and a little exhausting.

 Tell us what you think!

What worked well? What didn’t work so well? How could we do things differently next time?

Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts (anonymously): THATCamp W12 Evaluation