THATCamp London 2013 is tomorrow – post your session ideas here or bring them with you to our scheduling session at 11.30am.

You can also comment on existing proposals, or start tweeting #THATCampLdn.

What should 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 with the aim of producing a draft document or piece of software. 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 a game, or you suggest some quality group playtime with one or more technologies, or what you will.

Talk session examples

• Jeffrey McClurken, Archiving Social Media Conversations of Significant Events, THATCamp Prime 2009
• Sherman Dorn, The Ill-formed Question, THATCamp Prime 2009
• 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

• David Uspal, Hackfest: HTML5, THATCamp Philly 2011
• Wayne Graham, Mostly Hack Zotero hacking session, THATCamp Prime 2010
• Stéfan Sinclair, One Day, One Toolet, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
• Ben Brumfield, Hackfest, THATCamp Austin 2009
• 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

• Kirrily Roberts, FreeBase workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
• Bethany Nowviskie and Bill Turkel, Hacking Wearables and E-Textiles Workshop, Great Lakes THATCamp 2010
• Aditi Muralidharan, Visualization workshop, THATCamp Bay Area 2010
• 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 and Scripto Workshop, 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
• Anastasia Salter, THATCamp Games Invasion, THATCamp Games 2012
• Anastasia Salter and Amanda Visconti, Q’s Quest, THATCamp CHNM 2012
• Anastasia Salter and Amanda Visconti, THATCamp Prime Alternate Reality Game, THATCamp CHNM 2012 (postmortem account of “Q’s Quest,” a game invented for and played at THATCamp Prime 2012)

At Europeana we’re working with the development of tools that would make it simple for a GLAM collection manager to upload content to Wikimedia Commons with good metadata quality.  We’ve come some way but there are two aspects of development where we think we could make good progress in a day with some Wikipedia developers.  And of course, if you’d like to work with something else we’d be happy to introduce the tool and its code to you.

Hacking ideas:

Adapting the Wikidata content handler to Wikimedia Commons
The added value would be to store metadata for uploaded media as semantically meaningful structured data rather than as wikitext.

See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/ContentHandler and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ContentHandler

Adding a OAI-PMH client and repository extension to MediaWiki
Some thought and work (see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/OAI-PMH and http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:ProofreadPage/Improve_index_pages#API) on this seems to have already taken place in the Wikipedia community and we would like to take it further.  The added value within the GLAM-sector is that it would make MediaWiki capable of harvesting metadata using the most frequently used data exchange protocol in the GLAM-sector.

Cheers and welcome!

David Haskiya

Product Developer at Europeana
david.haskiya at kb.nl
twitter.com/davidhaskiya

We recently released an upgraded version of the Europeana API and would be happy to facilitate a hack session on it.  With parts of the Europeana team coming to THATcamp via GLAM-WIKI 2013 we’d be especially interested in working with Europeana – Wikipedia connections!

Some ideas:

– A bookmarklet that would use the API to allow its users to with a few clicks upload an object from Europeana (portal, exhibitions or Europeana 1914-1918) to Wikimedia Commons. We’re thinking something as simple as the PinIt-button, but with a richer mapping of metadata to the Commons templates

– A widget for creating embed snippets combining Wikipedia article extracts with selected related Europeana objects. We’ve got a prototype for this already that could be improved, embedded outputs look like this, http://kadmeianletters.wordpress.com/2012/04/01/another-test/

– Or pitch your own idea in the comments! Really, the Europeana team will be here mostly to facilitate your hack ideas!

Here are some useful links to the Europeana API if you would like to start looking around a bit.

• API key registration link. It’s easy, automatic and you can get as many keys as they need/want.
• API documentation
• API Forum (also, for questions during the day and peer-2-peer interaction)
• Europeana datasets
• API Console, where you can explore and test the API before starting to code

Cheers and welcome!

David Haskiya

Product Developer at Europeana
david.haskiya at kb.nl
twitter.com/davidhaskiya

So it looks as though the long-awaited, messianic “tipping point” has come for the Open Access movement, particularly in the UK. RCUK have mandated and, it seems likely that HEFCE will mandate, a combination of green and gold routes to open access scholarship. Predictably, though, owing to the way in which “gold” has been made synonymous with “article processing charges” in the popular academic imagination, the resistance has not abated.

I am currently leading a project, along with Dr. Caroline Edwards, called the Open Library of Humanities. We’ve solicited a great deal of academic capital in order to address as much of the social problem ahead of the technological, along with an innovative funding model of distributed Library Partnership Subsidies (LPS).

In this session, we’d like to tell you more about the project but also begin a discussion around the technological elements that could feed into the success of a massive humanities megajournal system. The primary aspects that we’d like to talk about are:

1. Pluses and pitfalls of existing journal implementations (Ambra, OJS etc.)
2. TEI or NLM? Best route to an automated workflow including XML-first typesetting
3. Third-party technological partnerships vs. in-housing for independent OA projects