We’ve lined up a variety of workshops for THATCamp Canterbury 2014 this Friday.

People interested in learning the art of programming will want to attend an introductory workshop being run by Jonathan Harker from Catalyst IT. Jonathan will introduce the Python programming language, show us how to get started, and suggest a few tricks to help people with their research. We’ll be using the iPython notebook, which runs in your browser. We’ll learn how to get a basic Hello World going, construct loops and if-else statements, then move into fun stuff like reading data from a web source and graphing it.

Anyone interested in more advanced python programming will be able to work through specific issues they might be facing in a separate workshop with Stuart Charters, Senior Lecturer in Applied Computing from Lincoln University.

And people interested in something completely different can jump into a Raspberry PI workshop with Benet Hitchcock from Starlifter Digital. Benet will bring a couple of PIs for people to play with. The University of Canterbury Digital Humanities Programme has two more we can use if people are keen.

None of the workshops are scheduled yet! We’ll suss out what people are keen to do first thing, and tailor them to suit. If you know of anyone who should be coming and isn’t registered, send them here. If you’ve got an idea for a session, share it here.

See you on Friday! Remember, kick-off is at 9.00 am in the Undercroft seminar room at the University of Canterbury.

New Zealand universities are starting to invest more in digital humanities projects and eResearch infrastructure, but staff have difficulty implementing their ideas. VUW, Otago, and Canterbury are all developing digital strategies and guidelines for developing digital projects in the arts and humanities, and it would be good to share ideas and approaches at THATCamp Canterbury. The interesting thing about digital humanities projects, of course, is their sometimes radically interdisciplinary nature. Librarians, curators, IT departments, and academics and students from a range of university departments, need frameworks that can help them collaborate and deliver high quality digital outputs. Projects range in size from very small to very large, involve a variety of technologies (historical databases, websites, text analysis algorithms etc), and can be funded either internally, externally, or not at all. Sometimes a lightweight DIY approach is required, sometimes we have significant issues around sustainability, backup, and maintenance to consider. While there’s no reason for us to develop identical project development guidelines, the more alignment we have the more we’ll be able to collaborate across institutions and share knowledge and experience gathered along the way.

It’s time to start gearing up for THATCamp Canterbury, which will be held at the University of Canterbury on September 5^th 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:

1. Register! That will tell us how many people to cater for and what your main interests are.
2. 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 5^th. 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.
3. Learn about THATCamp!
4. 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.

• 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?

• 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.

The University of Canterbury Digital Humanities Programme, with generous support from the College of Arts and Catalyst IT, will be hosting THATCamp Canterbury on September 5th, 2014!

More details will be posted here as we get things sorted. Meanwhile, read more about the THATCamp movement, browse other THATCamps at thatcamp.org, and follow us on Twitter @THATCampCANT for updates.