Meg & I were talking afterwards about the difficulties of standardising scholarly apparatus among by creating a kind of SourceForge equivalent for digital editions (as was suggested by one of the participants who added more detail in the Google doc summary). It is difficult, because as humanists we are trained not to be satisfied with the categories others create for us. Moreover, we have a strong ethos of working independently, so that the mode that software developers engage in – borrowing code rather than writing it from scratch, as it is quicker and easier – is not one that comes particularly naturally to us. It might be more efficient to use someone else’s literature review in your dissertation, with a few tweaks and additions here and there, but none of us are ever going to do it, even with the proper attribution, if what we need to prove is an original contribution to knowledge! Not to give up on the idea of a SourceForge equivalent for digital editions, just reflecting on the difficulties that face people who have one foot in the digital/developer world and the other in the world of the academy.

I also went to a session on Visualization. There are some very beautiful examples given in the Google Doc summary (http://ow.ly/27JSl). Unfortunately the session devolved somewhat into specialised technical talk between a handful of people and we moved away from the humanist-oriented questions I was interested in (eg. how best to get visualizations working in tandem with digital editions).

All in all, THATCamp was a new and very welcome diversion from the usual conference format (& yes, there is a particular pleasure in being geeky in a room full of other geeky people). It is also a new experience to be at a conference where there is a constant stream of tweets (hashtag #THATcamp) from people lamenting that they can’t be there to join in!