**Cross-posted from my blog.**
Today is the first day of THATCamp London, and I can already feel my inner geek singing with joy to be back with the DH crowd. In the pre-un-conference coffee room, I met up with some friends from DHSI (hello Anouk and Matteo!). Here are my “written on the fly” conference notes (to borrow from Geoffrey Rockwell’s methodology for his DHSI conference report):
– We begin in a beautiful lecture hall, the KCL Anatomy Theatre and Museum. I already feel the intellectual juices flowing.
– Dan Cohen provides introductions and a history of THATCamp. Notes that unstructured un-conferences can be incredibly productive. (We are creating, synthesizing, thinking). He recalls that the first THATCamp was controlled chaos.
– Dan setting some ground rules. He is adamant, “It’s okay to have fun at THATCamp!” (Examples: A group at one THATCamp who played ARG with GPS, another created robotic clothing!)
– We are asked to provide a 30 second to 1 minute summary of the proposals before we vote. Other sessions are proposed as well. Looks like a great roundup.
Sessions related to my own research that I am interested in attending:
– social tools to bring researchers and practitioners together
– living digital archives
– Participatory, Interdisciplinary, and Digital
– critical mass in social DH applications
– visualization
In my mind, the winner of the best topic/session title is “Herding Archivists.”
The beta schedule of the conference is now up: http://thatcamplondon.org/schedule/
Session 1: Data for Social Networking
The main questions and ideas we consider:
– What kind of methods/tools are people using for analysing data?
– Ethical issues in data collection and gathering?
– How do you store ‘ephemeral’ digital content
– What do we want to find out from our social network data?
– What Tools for Social Network Interrogation and Visualization?
– Our wishlist for working with social network data …
You can also check out the comprehensive Google Doc for the session.
Session 2: Stories, Comics, Narratives
– Major issues: 1) Standards, 2) Annotation, 3) Visualization
– narratives and semantic technologies
– difficulty of marking up complex texts such as comic books, tv shows
– Dan Cohen, how might we go about standardizing or making available different documents? Is markup always the answer?
– One participant asks, does it matter what format the document is in as long as the content is there?
– Once again, standardization is a key question. Once the data is collected, shouldn’t it be made available?
– Question of IP and copyright is also raised, and generates some heated discussion.
– “Semantic Narratives” and the BBC’s Mythology Engine.
Session 3: Digital Scholarly Editions
– A productive round-table on the future of the digital scholarly edition.
– Major issues: standardization, resources, audience
For discussion notes, please see the Google Doc for the session.
Session 4: Using Social Tools for Participatory Research Bringing Researchers and Practitioners Together
– Framework for academics to connect
-Finding connections, drawing on enthusiasm and community: http://en.logilogi.org/#/do/logis and http://www.londonlives.com.
– We need tools that collate information and resources
See the Google Doc for the session.
All in all, it was a very productive day.
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And just for fun: Doctor Who Subtitle Search (Thanks, Anouk!)