The results are in! Thanks to all of you who participated in the THATCamp Wellington 2012 survey. Here’s a quick rundown of the highlights…

Top 5 things people liked about W12:

1. Meeting people from other fields/professions
2. Discussions
3. Barcamp format
4. Meeting people from their own field/profession
5. Workshops and session topics

Most people said one day is about right for a THATCamp, and quite a few would have liked it to be run over two days. This probably reflects the fact that many campers had attended 2-3 days of workshops and National Digital Forum conference sessions prior to W12.

Most people were keen for W13 to be run during the week, with only a handful (the organisers) preferring weekends.

The majority of survey participants said that one hour is sufficient for a THATCamp session, which surprised me. As a facilitator I felt this wasn’t sufficient time to produce anything of substance, so I guess I need to up my game!

From an organiser’s point of view it was also interesting to learn which communication channels worked best for informing people about W12. The majority of people had heard about the event through word of mouth, with others finding out through NDF conference communications and Twitter.

What most surprises and delights me is the number of people who said that W12 has inspired them to organise or assist with a THATCamp or barcamp event in the future. Share the love people!

1. Just do it

We hadn’t been to a THATCamp, but we had envied them from afar and thought it was about time we had one in New Zealand. If you know of some people in your region that would be keen to attend one and spread the word, go ahead and organise one!

The THATCamp website provides just about all the information you need – from registering your THATCamp to evaluation – and their fantastic support staff are available to answer your questions.

There are also a number of THATCamps popping up that focus on particular topics, so there’s nothing stopping you from running a THATCamp Digital Collections or a THATCamp New Zealand History for example. You might also consider scheduling the event alongside a conference, which will enable more people from out of town to participate.

THATCamp W12 ran the day after the National Digital Forum conference. This made for a magical mix of Humanities scholars, cultural heritage practitioners, information professionals and web stars from around the world, and a melting pot of challenging topics.

We had about 45 campers on the day, and split the group over 4 topics each session, which worked pretty well. If you have fewer people you could split the group over 2-3 topics each session.

2. Rally the troops (and the funding)

Rally the people who are willing to provide ideas, support, funding and feedback, and build yourself a THATCamp team. These may be people from different institutions and even different countries, and that’s all good – THATCamp is a brilliant opportunity for collaboration. On behalf of the W12 campers, many thanks to these wonderful people for helping to make it happen:

• Sydney Shep, Wai-te-ata Press, Victoria University of Wellington
• Jonny Flutey, Information Technology Services, Victoria University of Wellington
• Tim Sherratt, Digital Historian, University of Canberra
• Matthew Oliver, Ministry for Culture and Heritage/National Digital Forum conference organiser
• James Smithies, Digital Humanities, University of Canterbury

3. Re-use/remix other THATCamps

Don’t reinvent the wheel. The THATCamp website lists those who have gone before you, and you can delve into their blogs, Google docs, survey results, Zotero folders and Twitter feeds. Check out what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, what worked and what didn’t.

You might have already noticed the footer of this blog – “All text and code on THATCamp Wellington 2012 is freely available for you to use, copy, adapt and distribute under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License as long as you link to THATCamp.org and the Center for History and New Media.” – so don’t be shy.

Special thanks to THATCamp Canberra 2011 and THATCamp Bay Area 2010 for the information and inspiration.

4. Talk to someone who has done it before

I had been fortunate to attend the LODLAM barcamp in Nov 2011, so I had a wee bit of a clue but not much. What is a THATCamp like? What will people expect? While there’s no shortage of online resources, sometimes you just need to have a chat.

From what I know of THATCamp organisers, they’re a friendly bunch more than willing to help, so go ahead and ask. On that note, BIG thanks to Tim Sherratt (THATCamp Canberra 2011) for all his advice from start to finish.

5. Get in the zone

Jon Voss (THATCamp Bay Area 2010) recommended the book Open Space Technology : A User’s Guide by Harrison Owen. I found this extremely helpful for getting into the right frame of mind for organising a THATCamp.

While I (ahem) forgot some of the key points of OST on the day (having read it several months prior), I would aim to make better use of this approach next time I’m involved in an unconference.

6. Myth-busting: Unconferences don’t need organising

Whenever you bring people together there is always a certain amount of organization involved: time, place, space, wireless access, furniture, food, communications etc. THATCamp HQ provides a checklist, which I clutched to my chest for several weeks, and I created a Google spreadsheet for venue-specific things-to-do, which Sydney and I checked off in the couple of weeks leading up to the event.

And then there’s the organisation on the day.

If I could do THATCamp W12 over again, the first thing I would simplify is scheduling sessions. In my absurdly optimistic fashion, I envisaged a THATCamp where no one would miss a session they wanted to attend because of a clash. I know. It’s impossible (duh). Fortunately a much more sensible mind (thanks Sydney) was there to suggest that we simply order the topics by popularity, and endeavour to ensure the most popular topics don’t clash.

Borrowing the words of Michael Lascarides, this is a case of having a better problem. First problem: NZ has never had a THATCamp. Better problem: People at NZ’s first THATCamp want to go to two sessions at the same time.

The second thing I would simplify is catering. This is no reflection on the yummy treats provided by Good Chemistry, but more a question of how you want to spend your time (and that of your helpers) on the day. If you don’t have the funds, I say run THATCamp any way you can, and point participants in the direction of the closest cafe. If you do have the funds, keep it real simple (read: cold food), so you can keep time spent in the kitchen to a minimum.

7. Ask for help

When people offer to help, say YES! Even if you don’t know how they can help just yet, say YES. Make a list of all the wonderful souls who offer their assistance in the lead up to the event, and when it suddenly dawns on you that you only have one pair of hands, delegate!

Big thanks to the W12 campers behind the scenes who we couldn’t have done without:

• Katherine Clarke
• Flora Feltham
• Vanessa King
• Sienna Latham
• Lucy-Jane Walsh

8. Go with the flow

Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology includes 4 key principles that I like to think of it as THATCamp zen:

1. Whoever comes are the right people
2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
3. Whenever it starts is the right time
4. When it’s over it’s over

A fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants unconference was a big challenge for a control freak like me, and keeping these principles in mind really helped. I did struggle with the last one though – THATCamp W12 was so much fun I didn’t want it to end!

9. Share the experience

THATCamp is not a case of what goes on tour stays on tour – it’s about teaching, learning, and sharing knowledge. By making use of the THATCamp W12 blog, the twitter hashtag #thatcamp #wgtn12, campers’ websites, numerous Google docs and other digital tools, we opened up the event to the wider community.

From an organiser’s perspective, it’s important to alert campers to the key tools and communication channels, and explain how they can be used. This way, everyone can contribute to sharing the THATCamp experience.

Sienna Latham has compiled a list of THATCamp W12 workshops and sessions along with relevant links, which she’s happy to add to/amend/update on request. Thanks Sienna!

10. Do better next time

Early on I trawled some of the evaluations of past THATCamps to get a feel for what was important to participants. Boy, are people obsessed with food!

While the surveys gave me a starting point, what it really came down to was scaffolding for participation as best I could, so that campers could get the most out of the day. The proof of the pudding will be in the post-W12 survey – more on this later.

For me though, it seems that the test of a good THATCamp is not the catering or the wireless speed, the length of the sessions or the venue. It’s about making connections with other people and those very special light-bulb moments. I figure if there was a generous sprinkling of those, it worked.

Sienna Latham has compiled a list of THATCamp W12 workshops and sessions along with relevant links, which she’s happy to add to/amend/update on request. Thanks Sienna!

THATCamp Wellington 2012 summary

Well folks, we did it. We are officially a THATCamping nation! Thanks to everyone who participated in such a great day, and to Amanda French and THATCamp HQ for all the support. More to follow on what worked, and what we could do differently next time. First, a cup of tea and a lie down.

The notes for this session are on Google Docs.

Room plan

Schedule

Session voting

How do I facilitate a session?

Evaluation

How can we induce positive, inquisitive experiences for visitors to our online collections? Can we evoke a natural, unguided sense of curiousity? Do online collections feel liberating and free or are their objects seemingly compartmentalised and isolated? Exploration involves seamless transitions from place to place, yet the online world is blockaded by arbitrary walls : the boxes, borders, categories, page refreshes and transitions that characterise the current nature of interaction on the Web.

Borrowing from concepts presented by new media theorist Janet Murray, I will articulate the Web as a medium of human and cultural expression, and hint at the opportunity to think beyond the current conventions on how we represent our collections online.

For years, lists, tables and categories have been a staple convention for information organization and are reminiscent in the dominant ‘database model’ and its associated fetish for compartmentalization : objects in online collections are often grouped by department, exhibition, medium category and class. In many cases, these (arbitrary??) groupings are the sole basis of their contextualisation. Aside from the infamous “stingy” search box, they are often used as a way of providing an entry point into the collection. Does this characterise the mindset of someone who would want visit our online collections? Are they the destined compartmentaliser who is enticed by a series of doors? Or perhaps they are more like Alice, who would rather tumble down the rabbit hole and experience the wonders within?

While the established convention of containment is immensely useful for storage and retrieval (which follows from decades of established conventions within the library and information sciences, and from current affordances that originate from the historical task-based nature of our interactions with computers in general), should we question its effectiveness as a means for giving us experiential browsing experiences within our online collections? Can current conventions recognise the nuanced and multiple relationships that objects have with one another, or do they provide nothing more than a series of filing cabinets with pretty pictures?

We’ve already seen a shift in representation that emphasizes generosity and showing everything. This gives us a top-down and liberating view of collections that are made possible only within the digital medium. As we know from Lev Manovich’s captivating example of his aggregation of TIME magazine covers and more recent works by Mitchell Whitelaw, giving an expansive, immense and generous view of collections allows visitors to gain insights in new and unprecedented ways. Showing everything emphasises the homogeneity and heterogeneity of our collections, yet perhaps we can establish a new conventions that establishes boundaries between unexpected collations and the surprising (and multiple) relations that objects have with one another? Should we conceptualise our online experience of in terms of landscapes rather than containment? Should we frame our design decisions, or daresay, establish new design conventions that exploit the incredibly expressive power of the digital medium to provide a sense of space, immersion, curiousity and wonder?

I propose that we move beyond the idea of menus, categories, classes and containers, and open our mind to much more expansive means of expression of our collections within our digital medium. In this workshop, I will introduce Murray’s concept of the landscape as a metaphor for expression within the digital medium, and provide examples on how this way of thinking could support new interfaces that realize the multiplicity of relationships and aggregrated suprises that are present within our collections.

Let’s have a real think about the qualities within our collections and how we could better express them online outside the confines of containers, and for how we can seed new ideas and conventions that support the natural desires of wonder, engagement and curiosity.

If you’re coming along to my workshop on learning to break stuff if would be good if you could install a few bits and pieces of software that we’re likely to use:

• Chrome web browser
• TamperMonkey (a Chrome extension)
• JSONView (a Chrome extension)
• XPath Helper (a Chrome extension)
• XML Tree (a Chrome extension)

See you on Thursday!

Ever wished you’d heard about a digital tool a year ago, before you started that big project?

Ever discovered a new app and wondered how you ever managed without it?

How about a “show and tell” session to share our favourite working tools? They don’t have to be fancy or the latest shiny thing, but I think it would be useful to share how we’re using them for everyday tasks, projects, teaching, learning and research.

So if linked data and general shareability relies on good metadata, and good metadata is created across many memory insitutions, what is the metadata model by which all this stuff, across all of these types of insitutions, is managed?

Libraries, archives and museums all have different frameworks within which their respective metadata standards are created and applied (to varying degrees of actual standardisation), but is there something that we could be doing as a memory sector that could help better expose our stuff across professional and insitutional boundaries – like some common entities with some common relationships?

So maybe we should discuss a national memory sector entity model as either a bunch of baloney or a potential way to better enable federated access and reuse?

Possible entities:

Creating Entities: Organisations, groups, families, people

Content Entities: Collections, Series (in the archival sense and are they they same as collections for this purpose?), items (which could include documents as lower level agregations of items with parts relationships), objects….

Relating to entities (but with a better title): Places, subjects, functions

Questions:

If there are some of these we can standardise across the sector, what would the benefits and challenges be?

And if it is possible, what are the two authorities to start with? People and places maybe?

And if we has such a model, how could it be flexible enough for archives, libraries, museums to implement their different description or cataloguing standards and still allow for better shariness. This is also, the how the heck would it work question.

What are the obvious relationships?

So it goes.

Since the delineation between “The Digital World” and “The World” becomes less clear on a daily basis, and advances in technology seem to happen twice as fast, what’s the importance of digital preservation?

So what if those text messages you sent last year are gone? Since nobody uses Lotus 1-2-3, MacPaint, or PageMaker any more, why should we care what happens to the files?

This discussion will look at a few aspects of digital preservation, and why it might be important. Some topics considered:

• The Digital Dark Age
• How to know what’s important
• The long tail of research
• Preservation for access
• Hardware/software emulation

Some more conversational fodder can be found here: www.youtube.com/user/wepreserve

A growing number of academic and collecting institutions are crowdsourcing to create and enhance online collections and resources more cost-effectively, engage the wider community, and enable research. Online volunteers are assisting with a wide range of tasks such as tagging, identification, proofreading, transcription, text encoding, translation, and contextualisation.

For those of us in the early stages of crowdsourcing project development, and others investigating this approach, there are many questions to be addressed:

• What are the projects that serve as precedents?
• What are the risks and advantages of crowdsourcing the task?
• Who is ‘the crowd’ and what are the benefits to the volunteer?
• What are the resources required, and how long will it take to achieve our objective?
• Does an appropriate crowdsourcing tool exist, or do we need to build a custom solution?
• How do we optimize the system and website for participation?
• What level of volunteer support and moderation is needed for quality control?
• What metrics should we use to evaluate the project?

I’m keen to talk shop with folks interested in these questions and others.

We’ve (Conal Tuohy, Anna Gerber, Anne Cregan and Ingrid Mason) just run an Introduction to Linked Data workshop at eResearch Australasia 2012 conference (see wiki for presentations).  I won’t be bringing these fabulous computer scientists with me to NZ sadly to get their dose of great coffee, paua fritters and nice locally made tipples but I will be bringing a growing obsession with linked data with me and I’m looking for the similarly obsessed at the Wellington THATCamp.

A kindly participant in the Linked Data workshop we ran said we faced the challenge of working with a wide range of skill sets: made it hard to workshop but boy we had a good session nonetheless.  Discussions and interest in linked data seems to reflect the domain of eResearch and the conversation goes from the technical to the philosophical, to the very pragmatic and back.

Guess it all boils down to whether linked data as an approach is going to solve problems and help to deliver services that researchers need or want to use.  We are certainly working on that premise in the HuNI virtual lab project.  So that seems like a good topic to work on and possibly we could crowd-source more topics to talk about on the day or via comments here.

btw Conal has managed to expose the Australian Women’s Register (“a growing source of information about Australian women and their organisations”) as a graph.  Yeah – even that word had me flustered.  Think of a network of nodes not bar chart like I did!  The cluster at the top is politicians, the cluster at the bottom are sports-people and the interesting complex set of constellations in the middle are a mix of caring professions and more… lots to be discovered by “distant reading” helped massively by connecting that to “close reading” of the data too.

Australian Women’s Register as a graph | Conal Tuohy | From HuNI virtual laboratory project @HuNIVL

If you’re interested in joining a group working on demonstrators of linked open data, try looking at the lodlam Google group discussions (even join) or follow #linkeddata or #lodlam on Twitter, the LODLAM website or subscribe and keep in touch with the @HuNIVL Humanities Networked Infrastructure virtual lab project (underway in Australia, funded by NeCTAR).

CC-BY 2.0 | 20120108-NodeXL-Twitter-SciFri network graph | Marc_Smith

Welcome! THATCamp W12 kicks off on Thursday 22 November at Victoria University of Wellington and we’d love to see you there. Find out how it works and sign up here.

Check out some of the session proposals below, and when you’re ready, go ahead and propose a session yourself!

Mapping the “degrees of separation” of the people attending THATCamp W12
Session proposal by Nancy Marquez

My session proposal idea is to create a network map of the participants in attendance; I’d like to see how people with experience creating this sort of map would think through the planning of a visual representation that communicates information about relationships when there are probably a variety of approaches to the question of how we ‘know’ one another (or know someone who knows the other).

I’m thinking about the usefulness of making particularly well-connected people into nodes (or centres) for the sake of visual clarity over a more layered (and visually unintelligible) complexity, and how to define ‘knowing another person’ whether it takes more than sharing the same work space, one face-to-face conversation, an email reply, or simply ‘feeling that we know’ the other person from conversations with mutual friends/acquaintances.

I also wonder about whether it is possible to visually represent, to good effect, strong links (e.g. having known each other for a minimum amount of time) between the participants BEFORE attending THATCamp W12 versus DURING as we would presumably meet new people we have shared interests or training with and strengthen older ties throughout the day.

This is a fairly unwieldy topic, but a lot of my conversations seem to be veering in this direction. I’d like to propose a session to discuss what a future digital humanities infrastructure might look like in New Zealand. We don’t need to ‘go large’ and try for a huge and unachievable project, but we do need to keep up with Europe, and countries like the UK, US and Australia and at least consider what an integrated approach might look like. Some countries have been working on these issues for a while, as expressed in projects like HUNI, Bamboo / DIRT, and groups like JISC. There’s also a wealth of ‘big picture’ reports like Our Cultural Commonwealth. Some of the questions I’d like some bright sparks to consider:

• What group / organisation would be most appropriate to lead the development of such a strategy?
• What existing infrastructure components (DigitalNZ, NeSI etc) could we cobble together?
• What services would we need from such an infrastructure (IAAS, SAAS, basic web hosting etc)?
• Should such an infrastructure be only for the academic community like the ones overseas seem to be, or would it be better to include central / local government agencies and perhaps the general public too?
• Is it worth considering next steps, or is the issue too big?

Here’s how it works. We have a schedule, but other than the workshops, we don’t have anything planned—you’re the ones who do the planning.

Over the next three weeks you can post your session ideas to the THATCamp W12 blog. Take some time to read other people’s proposals and comment on them if you wish. On the morning of the event we’ll vote for the sessions we want to participate in, and this will become our schedule for the day.

The more thought we put into this, the better it works. Here’s what makes for a good session proposal…

What makes a good session proposal?

It’s NOT a paper, a talk, or a lecture, but an idea for a conversation.

It proposes a topic related to technology and humanities that a group of people can discuss in an hour or so.

We’ll be looking to you to facilitate the sessions you propose, so if you propose a hacking session, you should have the germ of a project to work on; if you propose a workshop, you should be prepared to teach it; if you propose a discussion, you should be prepared to summarize what that is, kick off the discussion, keep it humming, and wrap it up.

Ideally, the session will produce something useful or at least some actionable “next steps”. There are more ideas and guidelines on the THATCamp website.

How do I propose a session?

1. Log in to WordPress with your username and password
2. Go to Posts – Add New
3. Select the category “Session Proposals”
4. Write, publish, and hey presto!

If you haven’t used WordPress before, you may find this helpful: codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts

Alternatively, you can email your session proposal and I’ll post it for you:
thatcampwgtn@gmail.com

It’s not long until New Zealand’s first THATCamp kicks off on 22 November – if you want to sign up you can do so here.

And if you’re wondering whether there will be anyone who shares your interests, check out what the W12 campers have thrown in the pot so far…

• network mapping
• linked open data
• gaming
• reuse of online collections
• crowdsourcing
• visualization
• data mining
• Digital Humanities
• Javascript
• APIs
• geospatial mapping
• authority control
• auto-tagging
• transformative learning
• digitisation
• mobile access
• digital archiving
• licensing of digital content
• hands-on experience with digital tools

If you want to add your interest/question/obsession to the list and meet like-minded adventurers, sign up here!

If you would like to be part of New Zealand’s very first THATCamp at Victoria University of Wellington on Thursday 22 November, sign up here. There are only a limited number of places, so don’t drag your feet! For updates and inspiration we encourage you to follow the blog and THATCamp Wellington on Twitter. The more questions, comments, and ideas shared the merrier, so don’t be shy – and spread the word!

Maybe you’ve been to one… perhaps you’ve heard about them… Quite possibly, you’re wondering what IS a THATCamp? Either way, you’re in the right place!

THATCamp Wellington is a user-generated/crowdsourced/everyone in boots n all and no one on the bench ‘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.

If you’d like to be part of New Zealand’s very first THATCamp at Victoria University of Wellington on Thursday 22 November, we encourage you to follow the blog and THATCamp Wellington on Twitter for updates. The more questions, comments, and ideas shared the merrier, so don’t be shy – and spread the word!

If you’d like to learn more about what makes a THATCamp, go here: THATCamp

And if you’re ready to start thinking about what THATCamp W12 can do for you, and what you can do for THATCamp W12, go here: About W12

Over and out for now,
Donelle.