It’s time to start gearing up for THATCamp Canterbury, which will be held at the University of Canterbury on September 5th 2014! Watch this channel for future irregular updates and reminders.
Everyone is welcome, and we mean everyone: students, teachers, librarians, museum and gallery staff, academics of all stripes, IT professionals, computer scientists, mathematicians. You get the idea! We want to use this THATCamp to prompt a conversation about what technology has to offer the arts and humanities in Aotearoa-New Zealand. There are lots of models to look at overseas, but we’ve got an opportunity to build something just for us!
If you’re interested in attending we need you to definitely do one thing, ideally do another, and perhaps read a little something so you know what it’s all about:
- Register! That will tell us how many people to cater for and what your main interests are.
- Propose a Session! You don’t need to do this right away – we’ll remind you again – but we do encourage it as soon as possible before September 5th. THATCamp is your camp, so you decide the sessions. Proposing a session doesn’t mean you’re committed to seeing it through: it’s just a way to offer ideas so others can line their ideas up alongside yours. We’ll decide the actual sessions on the day.
- Learn about THATCamp!
- Follow us on Twitter! We’ll use Twitter in the lead-up and the unconference itself.
To help you think of ideas for sessions we’ve listed a few below. Don’t take these as prescriptive in any way – we’re meeting to hack and/or talk about how we can use technology for teaching and research in the humanities – anything is allowed and the more different ideas the better!
- Find out where to start if you want to build a tool or website.
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Discuss the use of digital tools and platforms for teaching in the humanities.
- Discuss the importance of ‘digital cultural competence’. What is it, and what might it look like in the New Zealand context?
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Learn about markup languages used for textual criticism.
- Learn how to query text corpuses large and small.
- Deploy and use a cloud-based server for your projects.
- Discuss the ethics of hacking: white-hat and civil.
- Develop a project plan or scope document for a digital project.
- Work out how to get to the big global DH conference being held in Sydney in 2015.
- Discuss what Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are, what opportunities they hold for research and teaching, and how to use one.
- Explore the use of GIS in the humanities.
- Work out how to encourage the use of open source and open access in institutional contexts.
