Continue reading »]]>

Thanks to all who attended and who organized, especially the thoughtful and thorough Olin Library staff.

There’s always some kind of magic at a THATCamp, including the mystery that there will never be enough information to know in advance about all the good sessions, everyone will always miss some good ones, yet that uncertainty is part of what makes it possible for the great sessions to be great. All the possibilities were not figured out in advance.

What I especially like about THATCamp is that the very form is a discovery process. We don’t know what we are collectively best suited to talk about or do until we all show up. So much tacit knowledge can be discovered and shared when people from different institutions, job descriptions, experiences, disciplines, and side interests try to have conversations with each other that are low stakes, speculative, practical, and motivated in the best way.

May there be another THATCamp in the St. Louis region again before too long!

Continue reading »]]>

Among the many cultural heritage materials that are now in digital form are things that were organized as “data” in some sense even before they were digital: reference works, indexes, directories, concordances, censuses, inventories, card catalogues, etc. I’ve worked on several projects that make some use of such materials, and they present interesting challenges, practical and conceptual. If we make a database now from resources created by a historical bureaucracy, how much of that bureaucracy do we still have to negotiate? If others are interested, I would enjoy a conversation that could range from questions of what we can learn from how and why people organized “data” before digital methods, to what we can learn from media studies, and not least to what kinds of practical projects we might imagine. It would be especially interesting to try to bridge archival, library, scholarly, and technological perspectives. Whenever I browse the Internet Archive, for example, I’m struck by how much past effort of predigital “data modeling” (we might call it) is both available and hidden in ways that full-text search and text mining tools don’t begin to do justice to. What else?