All That Camp

Well, they didn't throw me to the Oompa Loompas. This weekend I attended THATCamp, a BarCamp-style"unconference" on the humanities and technology (hence, THATCamp) hosted by the Center for History and New Media. It was terrific, and my earlier wibbling proved unjustified. While I was certainly in awe of the digital kung fu being thrown down, I could in fact follow 95% of the conversations, and I had a great time. Many, many thanks to the CHNM crew, especially Jeremy Boggs and Dave Lester (who I gather were the real architects of THATCamp) and to all the other great folks I met. Now I've got that post-conference power-up of enthusiasm, not to mention a lot of new blogs to follow, friends to correspond with, and things to think about. All should be fodder for future posts. But if I had to summarize what I took away from the weekend as a whole, I'd say this:

First, a lot of very smart people are thinking very hard about how best to apply the tools of the digital world to history and the humanities. It's actually not an obvious or an easy question to answer, and I have to say I don't think we as a community have entirely cracked it yet. There seemed to be more exciting and promising tools at the conference than there were obvious problems to apply them to. That's not a dismissal. I think"more tools than problems" is a great position to be in. I just thought many sessions were stronger on"here's what you can do with these tools" than on"here's why you'll want to do it." Case in point: the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities is seeking ideas for humanities supercomputing. Supercomputing! They want to give historians and other humanists access to supercomputers! But there's an unfortunate dearth of historians who need a trillion calculations done in one second. This is what I really want and need to put my brain to. Not supercomputing, but the whole"OK, so what should we do with these tools" question. We really need some canonical projects that anybody can point to and say,"oh, so that's why this stuff is valuable to the humanities." It's going to happen soon--like I said, there are some very smart people thinking very hard about it. Once it does, we'll probably stop calling this endeavor"digital history" at all. It will just be"history", part of how it's done.

Second, there's money in them there digital hills. If you're a history or humanities graduate student looking to set yourself apart from the crowd, I strongly suggest thinking about getting involved in digital research. I'm afraid I don't just mean a blog about robots. Demonstrate some programming chops along with your humanities education and there ought to be people who'll want very much to hire you. (Edit: See? Here's some THATCampers wondering where to find programmers.) Better yet, come up with some answers to the questions in my last paragraph. You don't need a compsci degree, and you don't need to be a math whiz. But you can't be scared of your computer, and you do need to put in some time.

Third, I really like these people, the ones tearing down walls between the two Cold War cultures of science and the humanities. You could say there's an element of preaching to the choir at any meeting like this. Nobody at THATCamp was unsympathetic to the project of digital humanities. But so what? Choirs need to get together, to practice and to sing. A big reason to go to any conference is for validation--the formation in physical space of a community linked more by outlook and interest than geography. As I said before, these people feel like my tribe. So even if I don't crack the digital humanities riddle, I'm going to keep turning up for things like THATCamp as long as they'll have me.

If you'd like to read more specifics about the conference, I've posted notes on all the sessions I went to back at my other blog, along with links to many of the shiny gewgaws that were demoed and displayed.