THATCamp offers a gathering of individuals from many disciplinary and professional backgrounds, and that mix of experiences is one of the things that make it such a great opportunity for collaboration. But, so much work in the digital humanities is driven forward by literary and media studies, I’d like to propose that the historians in the crowd take an hour to talk about ways to form a loose affiliation of those individuals who share our disciplinary commitments and questions.
I think it might make sense to strengthen/create some channels that will let us share questions and methods with others historians (academic, public, independent, and enthusiast). I’m not sure that the outcome of this session might be: a working group? a group blog? an aggregator of conference sessions and meeting events? What do you think we need to grow the sense of community and innovation among digital historians?
I like this idea. I find that Twitter is a great tool to help us connect across distance and time, but the often asynchronous micro-messages can prove challenging to productivity. Some “else” is definitely needed.
This past week I was involved in several conversations about this need at two other conferences, “The Revolution Reborn” at the McNeil Center in Philadelphia, and then PhillyDH@Penn. The more specific topic was along the lines of finding ways for historians to share data, or collaborate on compiling data, especially for network-style analysis. I’d love to see this issue (opportunity) become part of the conversation.
So a while back I was playing around with ideas for “The Open Society of Digital Historians” . I never shared it with anybody but some of the ideas for it might be relevant to this conversation.
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