How do I propose a session or Lightning Talk?
It’s easy! Just complete this form and we’ll take care of the rest.
What do I propose?
There are roughly four things people do in THATCamp sessions: Talk, Make, Teach, and Play. Sometimes one session contains elements of all these, but it’s also a fair taxonomy for THATCamp sessions. In a Talk session proposal, you offer to lead a group discussion on a topic or question of interest to you. In a Make session proposal, you offer to lead a small group in a hands-on collaborative working session. In a Teach session, you offer to teach a skill, either a “hard” skill or a “soft” skill. In a Play session, anything goes — you suggest literally playing around as a group with one or more technologies, or just doing something fun or original.
What is a Lightning Talk?
A Lightning Talk is a short presentation, 5 minutes or less, about a topic of your choice. It can be about a project that you want to promote, a digital tool you discovered and want to share with others, or a request for consultation or help with troubleshooting. If you are using slides, keep it to 5 slides or less.
Talk session examples
- Eli Pousson, How do we share our knowledge of historic places?, THATCamp Columbus 2010
- Frédéric Clavert and Véronique Ginouvès, Les archives orales et le web (Oral testimonies and the web), THATCamp Paris 2010
- Zach Whalen, ARGS, Archives, and Digital Scholarship, THATCamp 2010
- Aditi Shrikumar, Text Mining and the Digital Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
- Jon Voss, Toward Linked Data in the Humanities, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
- Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “how to transform something like CommentPress into a viable mode of open peer review,” THATCamp Southern California 2010
Make session examples
- Julie Meloni, Project develop self-paced open access digital humanities curriculum…, THATCamp Prime 2010
- Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, One Week, One Book: Hacking the Academy, THATCamp Prime 2010
Teach session examples
- Amanda French, Advanced Omeka, THATCamp Kansas 2012
- Note that some (even most) THATCamp organizers prefer to arrange workshop sessions ahead of time (see THATCamp New England’s workshop series, THATCamp Virginia’s workshops series, and THATCamp Southeast’s workshop series), but you can still volunteer to teach something at the last minute, or even put in a plea for someone else to teach something you’ve always wanted to learn (though if no teacher volunteers, it’s best to nix the session). That’s what’s great about THATCamp.
- Anne Flannery, Omeka THATCamp MLA 2013 (plea to learn about Scripto rather than offer to teach it; see also comments)
Play session examples
- David Staley, An installation, THATCamp Prime 2009
- Mark Sample, Zen Scavenger Hunt, THATCamp Prime 2010
- Zen Scavenger Hunt Results, THATCamp Virginia 2012
- Marta Rivera Monclova, Digital Tools for Research, THATCamp Caribbean 2012
- Donelle McKinley, Share Your Favourite Tools, THATCamp Wellington 2012
