Thanks again for coming out. We hope that you’re now back in the swing of things, perhaps a little wiser for a day or so’s discussion with other folks.

If you have a moment, we (and the good folks at THATCamp headquarters) would very much appreciate it if you could complete this survey on your THATCamp experience.

Please also feel free to use the blog to comment on sessions you attended or ask questions; one of members has begun constructing a Twitter list of THATCamp CNY attendees, so you can find some of those folks you met in sessions but whose twitter id you forgot. Your can also find a Storify collection of all the tweets from the #thatcampcny hashtag here.

A comment on another proposal mentions algorithmic text analysis. I would love a session focused on how people are taking advantage of digital tools to deal with particularly textual information and questions of textual (or even literary) analysis. This could include tools like Voyant, approaches like topic modeling (with software like MALLET), or using a language like Python (with a package like NLTK) to manipulate text in other ways. (Indeed, I’d be just as interested to learn about other things that I’ve never heard of!) And, as I hope my title suggests, just as interesting as questions of what software to use, and how to use it, are questions of why folks are doing such analysis. What sorts of questions can we ask?

If there is a critical mass of interest in these sorts of questions, we could have a couple sessions focused on different technologies—one on topic models, one on Python and NLTK (for instance), et cetera.

I’m interested in the use, and usefulness, of what I’ll call here (both for want of a better term, and as a deliberate provocation) “scholar-scale” collections of materials. To flesh out what I’m talking about, let me given an example: for a while I have been fascinated by a French painting which had a truly remarkable, and remarkably productive, afterlife in the United States in the first half of the twentieth-century: Paul Chabas’s 1913 September Morn. After inspiring a short-lived obscenity controversy (featuring American anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock), the painting was reproduced on postcards, pennant flags, watch fobs, and many other places; it was turned into a musical, a short film, and continued to be a key point of well into midcentury. An online archive uniquely allows one to capture and share the mass of material related to this painting, and the way in which an unremarkable French academic painting became an occasion for American popular cultural reflection on art, obscenity, and (most pressingly) race.

I have collected all sorts of material related to this painting and at one point started putting it all in an online “archive” (I now regret that term); while I haven’t updated or improved it in age, it is still online at septembermorn.org.

I’m interested in both big questions of why (and maybe when) one would want to share one’s personal research archive, and whether it is worth the effort, as well as the smaller practical questions of how to do so (my own collection of September Morn material, for instance, is built on Omeka—a platform made more attractive with the release of Neatline).

I would be happy for this session to turn into a practical discussion of the hows of Omeka (installation, use, etc), or a more conceptual conversation about the way that web technologies may potentially allow us to tap the scholarly potential of odd, personal, hobbyist, semi-scholarly, or para-scholarly collections.

Bird Library, Syracuse University

On April 11 and 12, we will be hosting a THATCamp at Bird Library on the campus of Syracuse University. Additional details and registration information will be available soon. For now, just save the date!

In the meantime, if you have questions don’t hesitate to get in touch at thatcampcny2014@gmail.com

Meanwhile, read more about the THATCamp movement and browse other THATCamps at thatcamp.org.