One Hour, One Project – or – The Incredible Lightness of the Work of Many Hands

I’m a big fan of talking. I like to talk, to share ideas, to chit-chat, shoot the breeze. This being my third THATCamp, I’m done with all that. I’ve yacked about DH and Libraries, twice. I’m ready to be a maker, a doer, a hands-on digital humanities guru. What’s holding me back, you might ask? Well, I haven’t gone back to the basics and become the self-taught coding hacking machine of a DH-er that I once thought I’d be. But, I know what I’m good at, and I’m ready to give that to the DH community.

I propose that we take one hour-long session, pick a project from DHCommons (an amazing little site that lists DH Projects AND the work that they need done to help them along) and just freaking do it. Need data entry and looking for librarian collaborators? Great! I’ve got 5 people sitting around with laptops who are excited about DH work and ready to do something! Need Beta Testers to break your site? Cool! Let’s all access it from smart phones simultaneously! Have a pile of “reference” questions that need answered? You got it! Our powers united creates Captain DHBrarian! Want to create a bibliography of THATCamp? Been there. Done that (still needs work!)

Simply, lets find something DHish that needs to be done, organize our efforts and quickly accomplish it. A range of skills and proficiencies can participate in this session, and there’d be only one rule: Lets do this thing.