Great Lakes 2011 THATCamp

This year’s Great Lakes THATCamp is just around the corner, and MPublishing staff are busy getting ready.

Great Lakes 2011 THATCamp Logo

The Great Lakes THATCamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp) is a user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities originally inspired by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. Great Lakes THATCamp will be held on the Michigan State University campus on April 30th & May 1st, 2011 in the Residential College of Arts & Humanities, with half and full day bootcamps beginning on April 29th.

As an unconference, the Great Lakes THATCamp “is not a spectator event.” Participants are involved from the schedule creation to the wrap-up session, and actively present, discuss, and collaborate with fellow participants.

This year, MPublishing is a sponsor and several of our staff will be there as campers, organizers, and bootcamp leaders, including:

Kevin Hawkins & Becky Welzenbach from the MPublishing’s Digital Publishing Production unit will be heading up a full-day bootcamp called “Creating Digital Scholarly Editions: An Introduction to the Text Encoding Initiative.”  During this workshop, participants will learn about creating, working with, and publishing digital scholarly editions and other genres of text in print and digital form using XML and, in particular, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange. The TEI guidelines provide instructions for creating digital text for use across platforms and with various tools for querying data. They are recommended by the MLA and NEH and are widely used in digital humanities centers and by individual scholars. The workshop will consist of a mix of lectures and hands‐on exercises much like in these past workshops.

Greg Grossmeier & Bobby Glushko with Lance Stuchell, U-M alum and Digital Project Archivist at The Henry Ford, will also be leading a bootcamp on copyright and open access. This half-day workshop is designed give attendees a primer on copyright law (including important exceptions and limitations) and how it affects the study and use of digital texts.The Digital Humanities presents scholars, archivists, and librarians – as both creators and users — with a new set of challenges and opportunities with respect to copyright law. Because of ingrained complexity, uncertainty can and frequently does arise when reusing digital works from from your local library or archive to the Web.  The workshop will explore the purpose of Creative Commons licenses/waivers and how they can be effectively used in Open Access publications.

You can learn more about the Great Lakes THATCamp by: