Thanks for coming to THATCamp! Please add your thoughts about how it went and especially if you’d ike there to be future THATCamp AHAs at the link below.

www.surveymonkey.com/s/thatcampeval

Just some reminders about THATCamp AHA tomorrow:

We’ll be starting with coffee and mingling at 8:15am on Wednesday, January 3rd, just before AHA itself, at Funger Hall, 2201 G Street NW, Washington, DC. Travel information is on the site at aha2018.thatcamp.org/travel/, as is the (still blank of course) schedule information at aha2018.thatcamp.org/schedule/

And speaking of blank schedules, why not propose something to fill it in? If you haven’t been to an unconference before, you can read about proposing a session at aha2018.thatcamp.org/propose/. If you don’t get around to proposing something before January 3rd, or if you’re unsure about the process, no worries: you can always suggest an idea on the morning of the unconference or even after it’s underway.

Most THATCamp sessions in my experience tend to be discussions (Talk sessions), which are plenty valuable in themselves, but we *strongly* encourage you to propose hands-on collaborative writing or coding sessions (Make sessions) or digital skills workshops (Teach sessions) that will let everyone learn and work together productively. You’d be surprised at how useful even a spontaneously organized workshop can be: I’ve been at THATCamps where someone mentions a tool in one session and then by popular demand agrees to teach it in the next: unconferences are great at determining what the people in the room really want to learn and do.

To propose a session, click the “Log in” link on the site’s home page, then choose Posts –> Add New, write notes in the text box, and hit “Publish” when you’re done. See codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts for more help, or just play around in the THATCamp AHA website itself.

Finally, a word about food. We’ll provide coffee, but you’re on your own for breakfast and lunch. There are plenty of great places to eat around Funger Hall. See you tomorrow!

I’ve taught many Omeka and WordPress workshops at THATCamps, and am happy to do so again if there’s interest. One thing I’ve taught less often but still a few times is Scalar, found at scalar.usc.edu,  which resembles Omeka and WordPress in that it’s a content management system that can be used to build a humanities-flavored website but differs from those systems in that it’s particularly good at allowing you to collect and feature content that already exists on the web from places like YouTube and the Internet Archive — other systems are designed more for you to upload original content. Scalar also describes its end products as *books,* and indeed it is more geared toward that model too than Omeka and WordPress are: it’s a good system for a multimedia web version of “longreads.”

One of my favorite Scalar projects is also the most simple: a book about American Bandstand called The Nicest Kids in Town at nicestkids.com/nehvectors/nicest-kids/index This site (or book) was created with the first version of Scalar. To see other examples of what can be done with Scalar, see scalar.usc.edu/scalar/showcase/