At the very first THATCamp, the registration page required a participant’s Twitter handle.  The effect was to force all of the attendees who didn’t already have a Twitter account–which was most of us–to sign up.   Afterwards, the obvious next step was to follow the other participants, since maybe this Twitter thing would help us get to know each other before the unconference.  I don’t know if this was intentional on the part of the organizers, but I suspect that that one required field has played a role in making Twitter such a vibrant place for practitioners in the digital humanities.

THATCamp LAC has two hashtags (#thatcamp and #lac) for participants to use in addition to the THATCampLAC account used for organizational announcements.  It turns out that you can search for both hashtags at the same time, so it’s easy to follow discussions about the unconference.  I’ve also created a public list from all the participants who listed handles (all but me, actually, since I wasn’t able to figure out how to add myself to a list) which should track all the breakfast- and cat-related tweets from participants as well.

Growing numbers of digital humanists don’t have access to digital humanities centers.  While they may get energized at a THATCamp, it’s hard to sustain that energy back on the home campus.  The vibrant online digital humanities community helps by keeping us connected via social media as seen in Digital Humanities Now.  I’m interested in exploring a more organized form of digital humanities development.

What would a digital humanities MOOC look like?  A MOOC is a massively open online course, where course materials and interaction take place online.  MOOCs thrive on networked learning; those participants  who learn collaboratively by networking around the material get much more out of such a course than those who take it in a silo.  Since the digital humanities community already has a strong ethos of online interaction, it seems ripe for participation in a MOOC.  Granted, such a course might not be truly massive like Sebastian Thrum’s course with 90,000 signed up, but I think we could get enough critical mass to generate some good discussion and interaction.  I imagine a target audience of faculty, grad students, advanced undergrads, librarians, technologists, museum professionals, and anyone else who is interested.

So, let’s get together and plan a MOOC.  Seriously.  My colleagues and I at NITLE plan to pilot this idea in the last two weeks of July.  This is your chance to request your choice of topics.