What I learned at THATCamp Philly

• By Janneken Smucker
• September 29, 2011

I had the pleasure of attending last week’s THATCamp, short for The Humanities and Technology Camp, an initiative started by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media. My fellow campers were a mix of academics, museum professionals, librarians, archivists, students, and other digital humanities practitioners from around the region.

As an academically trained cultural historian now helping cultural institutions share their content through interactive projects, it was fun to find myself straddling these two worlds. I’ve learned a whole skill set through my work at Night Kitchen that is so different than what I learned through excessive years of school. But at THATCamp, both were equally valuable. 

Here’s the top 10 things I learned at THATCamp:

1. The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University developed an opensource tool, Omeka, that combines aspects of content management systems like Drupal, digital asset management systems like ContentDM, and collections management systems like Past Perfect into a free and accessible platform for users to publish collections and exhibitions online.
2. As a content manager on many of our projects, I am well aware that data can be a challenge to organize, particularly with tricky export scripts from one database to another. Google Refine is a downloadable free tool that can help you clean up and organize a messy spreadsheet or data set. Full disclosure: I’m not a programmer and am pretty fuzzy when it comes to writing small strings of code. But I now am able to execute simple commands to clean up spreadsheets. I applied this to one of our client projects just yesterday!
3. Digital place/map-based history projects are all the rage. Night Kitchen collaborated with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to create PhilaPlace, a place-based story telling project we’ve converted into a platform available for non-profits we call AnyPlace. But this is just one of a number of innovative projects that utilize the great aspects of Google maps to tell stories, share user generated content, and archive photos, videos, and audio. Historypin.com, a website and mobile app developed by the not-for-profit company We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google, allows users from across the globe to add content, curate collections, and lead tours of historical place-based content. PhillyHistory.org, a project of the Philadelphia City Archives, lets users search for historical Philadelphia images and view them juxtaposed with Google streetview. The Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond is at work on several projects visualizing slavery, the Civil War, and emancipation using map interfaces.
4. Philadelphia has a very active group of digital humanists developing a variety of projects sharing local history, including the aforementioned PhilaPlace and PhillyHistory.org, but also the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, Temple University’s Urban Archives’ Friday Photos, and the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections’ (PACSCL) “Hidden Collections in the Philadelphia Area: A Consortial Processing and Cataloging Initiative,” sponsored by the Council of Library and Information Resources and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 
5. Project management of collaborative projects can be akin to herding cats. 
6. But with some of the strategies of project management schools of thought like Agile, the cats can be corralled. One such technique is Timeboxing, a potentially fun and useful way to limit discussion and make decisions on time-sensitive projects. Often projects get held up by difficult decisions and theoretical discussions. And more discussion does not necessarily lead to better decisions. With timeboxing, discussion is limited to a set amount of time and the project team makes a temporary decision at the end of the time box. You can revisit the decision later if necessary, but typically the temporary decision works and allows the team to move forward with concrete steps.
7. Legendary folklorist Alan Lomax hauled some 300 pounds of equipment with him into the field during the 1930s and 1940s when he collected traditional stories and music from across the globe for the Library of Congress. Today, oral historians can bring a recorder the size of an iPod to capture their informants’ stories; but oral historian Charlie Hardy recommends that oral historians also bring a portable scanner and digital camera in order to not just record audio, but also gather primary sources and capture images of the informant’s environment.
8. This is one of the recommendations that will be highlighted in “Oral History in the Digital Age”, an Institute of Museum and Library Services funded project identifying the best practices for collecting, disseminating, and preserving oral histories using digital platforms and technologies. 
9. There is a Philly Museums and Technology meet-up!
10. The Chemical Heritage Foundation, generous host of THATCamp Philly, has a sweet lactation lounge. Thank you!

 

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