“Less talk, more grok.” That was one of our early mottos at THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, which started at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in 2008. It was a riff on “Less talk, more rock,” the motto of WAAF, the hard rock stati...
THATCamp was non-hierarchical. Before the first THATCamp, I had never attended a conference—nor have I been to once since my last THATCamp, alas—that included tenured and non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, librarians and archivists and museum professionals, software developers and technologists of all kinds, writers and journalists, and even curious people from well beyond academia and the cultural heritage sector—and that truly placed them at the same level when the entered the door. ❧
I wish I’d known about them before they disappeared.
The only equivalent conference I’ve been to with this sort of diversity was the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Dodging the Memory Hole conferences. That diversity really does make things magical.