Comments on d i a p s a l m a t a: Feast of Fools: a dispatch from the edge of the go...

One thing that Ethan Watrall built into the Great ...

2010-10-22T10:38:53.087-04:00

One thing that Ethan Watrall built into the Great Lakes THATCamp was a Harry Potteresque "Room of Requirement"---a room that was kept open for spontaneous sessions or discussions, or silent writing or reflection, or whatever else you needed it to be at any given time. I wasn't there, but I've heard that having this Room of Requirement was quite fantastic. Maybe this kind of space would allow for that openness and play, that carnival ethos?

Agreed; although I'm not sure we need another ...

2010-10-21T04:01:48.226-04:00

Agreed; although I'm not sure we need another category of conference -- as awesomely oxymoronic as the term "funconference" is -- so much as a delimiting of space within sessions. If a few local archivists want to use the time to plan a project they're collaborating on, that's awesome -- it should just be explicit up front, during the pitch. Alternatively, those who want to brainstorm should set aside the nitty-gritty, then create a space for the haze (which humanists seem generally bad at doing).

Which is all to say perhaps it's a genre we're still learning -- one that needs to be pretty clear about participants taking charge of sessions while honoring (not homogenizing) the diversity of the gathering.

THATCampRTP was great. I'm so happy Jade took the initiative to organize it, and genuinely hope we have another one on next year. We can only get better at this kind of play-work by doing it.

I'm all with you on the brainstorming haze. In...

2010-10-20T23:54:23.518-04:00

I'm all with you on the brainstorming haze. In most conferences, if this feast of ideas happens at all, it happens outside of the official conference---in the lobbies and bars and the train rides home.

The THATCamp unconference model is a powerful corrective to the typical conference, but it can, unfortunately, trend back toward the practical and the quotidian. For example, a chorus at THATCamp in Virginia last May was "less yacking and more hacking"---which, as much as I appreciate hacking, I take as a criticism of the pie-in-the-sky yacking-qua-scheming that in fact should be part of an anti-conference ethos.

Perhaps we need another category of conference---an explicitly funconference, in which the order of the day is play, not work.