The central Gulf Coast’s first THATCamp was held on May 17, 2013, in New Orleans. THATCamp NOLA was a successful “unconference” held at the Louisiana Humanities Center Building. Digital Humanities folk in New Orleans based at the University of New Orleans and several from the University of Southern Mississippi collaborated on introducing THATCamp to the area. Volunteers from Loyola and Xavier Universities also contributed to the successful unconference, which featured 63 registrants and drew participants from as far as Kentucky.

Any one interested in helping with planning for the next THATCamp NOLA should contact Michael Mizell-Nelson: mmizelln@uno.edu

If you would like to learn a bit more about who participated and what some of the sessions were like, please visit some of the pages from our 2013 event.

Some of the first old media to be transformed by digital technology does not occupy much discussion at THATCamps. (Neither film nor video have earned their own categories for our THATCamp posts.) The first THATCamp New Orleans features an intriguing number of distinguished filmmakers, documentary producers, and media scholars. One filmmaker was awarded a Guggenheim. Another serves as editor of Television and New Media. One worked as a producer for PBS’s Frontline. I hope we might have one session with such people and the archivists charged with the extremely difficult task of preserving film and video collections and making them available for present and future audiences. The WWII Museum is involved in a fascinating project funded by the IMLS using Annotator’s Workbench to encode their video oral histories. Another IMLS grant funded a planning project for the Louisiana State Archives and Louisiana Public Broadcasting to preserve and catalogue the state’s film and video resources. I know one person at UNO has been struggling with similar issues regarding digitized video storage. Anyone want to talk about some of these topics?

In the spirit of the very well received session proposal Tech Learning Modules Travers posted, I would like to propose this as a “session module,” one that might either be discussed on its own or fitted into another session. I want to discuss how best to engage undergraduate students in meaningful work with digital humanists working in libraries, museums, and archives. This might be a good forum through which to address what possibilities digital projects as engaged service learning offer both for undergraduate students and participating institutions. Greg Lambousy (Louisiana State Museum) and I have piloted one such digital partnership in one of my US survey history courses. One of the best examples I know of is László Fülöp’s UNO film students who learn documentary video production at UNO while producing PSAs for community non-profits.

I understand that Tulane, LSU, and USM offer a “best practices” approach for these sorts of partnerships, but I am interested in how these partnerships might work in the real world of public institutions whose interests are never well-served or properly funded. My best partnership experiences are with other public institutions, such as New Orleans Public Library and the LSM. We are the Coalition of the Unwillingly Underfunded.

We will have a 30-minute Dork Shorts session during the last part of our 90-minute lunch break.
12:00-1:30 Lunch and 1:00 -1:30 Dork Shorts

THATCAmp Central states:
“Dork shorts, known in some corners as ‘lightning talks,’ are brief (2-minute) presentations in which attendees discuss current or upcoming projects, demonstrate new tools, or call for collaborators. Like most of THATCamp, Dork Shorts are meant to be as informal as possible. Although the concept might be unfamiliar to new THATCampers, veterans think it’s one of the most fun and useful parts of each meeting: Dork Shorts let you learn a lot in a little bit of time.”

Since not everybody will be able to attend, we want to follow the approach taken by THATCamp New England, whose instructions we borrow.

“Tell us about your project, the great tools or apps that make your life worth living or anything that you think is relevant and worth telling about. You have two minutes, one topic, and you get to use one URL. No PowerPoint, no time to load anything, no USB sticks.”

This comment thread will allow those people having a great lunch break the opportunity to learn a little bit about your project regardless of how late they may be in rejoining THATCamp. If you’d like to present, sign up by adding a comment and URL below. We will have time for about 15 presentations. If there’s space available, one can sign up on Friday. The order we follow in this session will be based upon when you post your comment.

Some Dork Shorts in action:

I have been fortunate to attend a few THATCamps connected to academic conferences for historians, and I have wanted to work with others to create a THATCamp (and, we hope, a series of unconferences) rooted in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. UNO and USM folk from various backgrounds started to collaborate on digital projects several years ago via content development for the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, whose project funding birthed the precursor to Omeka. Therefore, we sought to begin the process of making connections and building a community that transcends the typical borders separating people engaged in digital projects.

One of the best features of THATCamps is their ability to facilitate interdisciplinary exchanges. The conversations that take place when librarians, archivists, museum curators, graduate students, K-12 faculty, public historians, humanities faculty, and others gather together are invaluable. I hope our first gathering will help us to develop a supportive community. I had the pleasure of teaching history and writing classes in a computer classroom starting in 1993 and presenting at Computers & Writing in 1997, so I know how much good comes from getting out of disciplinary ruts or sinkholes.

Maybe we will come up with some solutions to a few of the common problems facing most who work on noncommercial digital projects in the Deep South:

*lack of funding and/or the constant threat of losing meager funding sources;

*lack of administrative support, including attention to key issues such as time & labor & technical support; and

*lack of interest and/or respect for non-commercial digital work, regardless of whether it’s presented as “digital humanities” and if DH’s time as the latest academic fad may seem to have come (and gone).

The arrival of Gena Chattin and Jennifer Jackson on UNO’s campus in concert with the long-term interest shown by Jeanne Pavy and others at UNO as well as Jeanne Gillespie and Diane Ross on USM’s campus have served as the catalyzing energies that have allowed us to move forward. More recently, UNO’s History Department has partnered with Vicki Mayer in Tulane’s Communication Department for a mobile history (ios and Android or Google Play) project using omeka known as neworleanshistorical.org.

Let’s begin to collaborate to build a more effective DH community.

Desire streetcar on Royal Street during its last day of service in 1948. Photograph by the late W. Bernadas.

A THATCamp is being planned for May 17, 2013, in New Orleans. It will take place in the Louisiana Humanities Center Building, 938 Lafayette Street, in downtown New Orleans. Digital Humanities folk in New Orleans hope that participants from throughout the Gulf Coast will help with planning.

THATCamp New Orleans’  Friday, May 17, date coincides with the Mid-City Bayou Boogaloo Festival. This is a smaller-scale, free festival held in the center of the city May 17-19 along Bayou St. John; it’s particularly popular among residents and visitors who have been priced out of Jazz Fest.

Come for THATCamp NOLA 2013; stay for the festival.

thebayouboogaloo.com/

Yes, “you are the big factor in providing this service,” so please contact any of the organizers with questions or planning suggestions.

University of New Orleans
*Michael Mizell-Nelson, Associate Professor, History
mmizelln@uno.edu
*Gena Chattin, Digital Initiatives Librarian
gchattin@uno.edu
*Jennifer Jackson, Learning Commons & Instruction Librarian
jmjacks9@uno.edu
*Jeanne Pavy, Scholarly Communications Officer
jpavy@uno.edu
 

University of Southern Mississippi
*Jeanne Gillespie, Senior Associate Dean, College of Arts & Letters
Jeanne.Gillespie@usm.edu
*Diane DeCesare Ross, Assist. to the Dean for External Publications & Digital Humanities
Diane.Ross@usm.edu

Loyola University New Orleans
*Elizabeth Kelly, Digital Initiatives Librarian
ejkelly@loyno.edu

Stephen F. Austin State University
*Linda Levitt, Assistant Professor, Languages, Cultures, and Communication
levitt.linda@gmail.com

Xavier University of Louisiana
*Lisa Flanagan, Assistant Professor, Communication Studies
lflanaga@xula.edu

Please help us to move these plans ahead and chime in on some crucial elements. Meanwhile, read more about the THATCamp movement and browse other THATCamps at thatcamp.org.