Workshops and Sessions

For those who are new to the THATCamp genre, it’s important to distinguish between ‘workshops’ and ‘sessions.’ The former are lead on a specific topic or skill and generally have a single facilitator/educator. The latter are the sets of meetings that we will collaboratively decide to have during our first group gathering. These might be conversations about feminist interventions in interface, or a session devoted to writing up a list of goals for a year of feminist networking, or the development of a pedagogical module to be used in a GWS-DH course.

In the workshop genre we’ll have:

Mia Ridge’s “Data visualisations as gateway to programming,” in which participants will be thinking about how to structure data for use in software, learning basic programming concepts, and moving towards tinkering with scripts. This is a great workshop for humanists who want a friendly intro to the world of programming.

Miriam Posner’s “Building Online Exhibits with Omeka,” in which participants will learn how to use Omeka to develop exhibits for classroom, research, and project use.

And, if there is enough interest, I will host an “Intro to DH” session where we’ll cover a quick background, some basic terms of art, and a few example projects. If you’d like to be a part of this workshop – drop in a comment below so that I have a sense of the need.

In terms of sessions – this is your job!

It’s up to you – the campers – to propose our sessions. Here’s the basics on how to propose a session, as borrowed from thatcamp.org:

Once you register for your THATCamp and are approved, you will receive a user account on the THATCamp website. You should receive your login information by email. Before the THATCamp, you should log in to the THATCamp site, click on Posts –> Add New, then write and publish your session proposal. Your session proposal will appear on the front page of this site, and we’ll all be able to read and comment on it beforehand. (If you haven’t worked with WordPress before, see codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts for help.) The morning of the event, all THATCamp participants will vote on those proposals (and probably come up with several new ones), and then all together will work out how best to put those sessions into a schedule.

You can also check out the session types (talk, teach, make, and play) and you might want to read over the “More Hack Guide” that was produced at a recent THATCamp for tips on how to get the most out of a session.

So let’s start the session proposing! Feel free to leave a comment or contact me at jwernimo at scrippscollege dot edu if you have any questions about the process.