News and Events 2011

The Humanities and Technology Camp at Ryerson

On 22 October 2011, the Centre for Digital Humanities at Ryerson will host the Humanities and Technology Camp – Greater Toronto Area (THATCamp GTA). Organized by Dr. Jason Boyd in the Department of English, the event is presented in partnership with the Ontario College of Art and Design University, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and the University of Toronto. THATCamp is a workshop where students, scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, developers, programmers and others of all skill levels learn together in sessions proposed on the spot. THATCamp started in 2008 at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, which is renowned for developing cutting-edge humanities computing applications such as Zotero (for collecting, organizing and sharing research sources) and Omeka (for scholarly multimedia web publishing). To date 34 THATCamps have taken place around the world. In the coming academic year alone, 20 new THATCamps are scheduled for places as diverse as Cyprus, Saigon, the Caribbean and, of course, Toronto.

“I want to use this event to make the digital humanities community aware of the exciting digital scholarship going on in the Faculty of Arts and in other faculties at Ryerson, and provide opportunities for interdisciplinary and inter-university networking and collaboration,” says Boyd. “I’m hoping the dialogue that begins at THATCamp GTA can be continued online via a scholarly information sharing platform I have been collaborating on for some time. Called DiSc (Digital Scholarship), the platform is intended to transcend disciplinary and other boundaries that restrict the spread of information and therefore potential opportunities for collaboration.”

THATCamp GTA is preceded on 21 October 2011 by BootCamps at all four sponsoring GTA universities, including ”How to Build a Born-digital Project from the Ground Up” at the Centre for Digital Humanities, to be run by Professors Janzen and Denisoff and their team of undergraduate and graduate research assistants.

“We are very excited about hosting the Humanities and Technology Camp at Ryerson as this workshop builds on the strength and expertise of several colleagues in the English Department involved in digital humanities and digital media ecology, ” says Jean-Paul Boudreau, Dean of Arts.

Anyone with an interest in digital humanities is encouraged to attend, even if new to the field. To submit an application to participate, please visit the THATCamp GTA website: http://gta2011.thatcamp.org/. For more information on the BootCamp and THATCamps check out www.ryerson.ca/english/news/events/bootcamp.html and http://thatcamp.org/. For more on the Centre for Digital Humanities: www.ryerson.ca/cdh.

Sponsored, in part, by the Faculty of Arts, the Department of English, University Advancement and the Centre for Digital Humanities.