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I’ve never met a person who liked Microsoft Word. Maybe I’ll meet that person this weekend, but I doubt it. Here is what Stephen Ramsay has to say about writing tools: “I don’t hear many people say that they love Word; people routinely say that they love Vim, Emacs, Scrivener, TextWrangler, and a few other high-performance writing tools.” That’s been my experience too.

I’d like to propose a session to talk about how to do scholarship in plain text. We can talk about syntaxes like Markdown and LaTeX, text editors like TextMate, TextWrangler, Vim, etc., tools like Pandox and pdftk, and best practices, such as how to collaborate with people who don’t use plain text.

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Posted on behalf of John Burt

LaTeX is an open-source, free typesetting system for producing beautiful books. It is available for almost every operating system, and is a stable, mature product with a large user base. With it, you can make camera-ready pdf’s of books and theses, plus other documents of many kinds. It has too many features to name in a short description, and  in power it is closer to a desktop publishing system than to a word processor. BibTeX is a bibliography database management system designed to work with LaTeX. It is similar in power to Endnote and Zoho. MakeIndex is a utility for making complex, multi-level indexes (indices?). It is designed to work with LaTeX, but can also be used to organize an index you prepare from galleys.

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Here is how THATCamp works. Other than the workshops, we don’t have anything planned—you’re the ones who do the planning. Over the next few days you can post your session ideas to the TCNE website. Also over the next few days, you should read other people’s proposals and comment on them if you wish. On Saturday morning, everyone will get to vote for the sessions you want to participate in, which will then become our schedule for the rest of the day.

Obviously this works better if more people propose sessions that they’ve put some thought into. Here’s what makes for a good session proposal:

• It’s NOT a paper, or a talk, or a lecture, but an idea for a conversation.
• It proposes a topic related to technology and humanities that a group of people can discuss in an hour or so.
• And ideally, the session will produce something useful: a list of resources, or some hacked code, or a syllabus.

There are more ideas and guidelines on the THATCamp website.

So please visit the list of session proposals, then add yours with your login to WordPress.

Also, if you’re interested in giving a lightning presentation, sign up here.

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The academy needs open-access. As Bethany Nowviskie has pointed out in a memorable (and revolting) phrase, much of the intellectual product of the academy is “fight club soap.” We produce scholarly work at great cost to our institutions and the donors and governments that fund them, only to hand them over to for-profit publishers, who sell them back to our libraries at ruinous cost. This cost is exorbitant for the wealthiest universities and prohibitive for everyone else, exacerbating the divide between haves and have-nots, and locking our scholarly work behind paywalls where hardly anyone reads it.

Thankfully, there is no reason why we need to continue in this way. The economics of publishing that favored the printed, bound, and distributed academic journal are now untenable, and instead we have the opportunity though the internet for open-access publications, that is, publications which are available online, for free, regardless of the user’s affiliation. Open-access scholarly publications are the academy’s chance to cash in on the idea that “information wants only to be free.” But like anything worth doing, creating open-acccess publications will take a lot of work.

I’ve recently accepted the opportunity to be the web editor for the Journal of Southern Religion, an online journal that has been open-access since 1998. (It’s remarkable how prescient the editors of JSR were about the opportunities of open-access in its first issue.) I’ve been tasked with a redesign of the site, but also with thinking through what the journal should look like in the future.

My session proposal, then, combines both the large question of open-access with the specific issues I’m going to face over the next year or so. I’d like to talk with scholars, librarians, technologists (anyone, actually) about the best practices and new ideas for open-access publications. For example, we might try answering these types of questions:

• What new ways of publishing can an online, OA journal take advantage of?
• What are the technical requirements of an OA journal?
• What is the best use of web 2.0 technologies?
• Is there a better way to handle citations than footnotes?
• How can an OA journal keep its back catalog useable into the future?
• What are the best software options for running an OA journal?

It would be best if this session could produce a deliverable, probably in the form of a report or syllabus listing best practices, useful readings, and possible future directions for open-access journals. We could write this collaboratively during the time we have for the session.

If you have any ideas, links to open-access publications that are doing good work, or readings that would helpful, please leave them in the comments below. Thanks!

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Are you working on an awesome digital humanities project? Are you using a great DH tool? Do you want people at THATCamp New England to know about it? Our lightning presentations (often called Dork Shorts) are your chance.

During our only plenary session on Saturday, October 22, we will have time for anyone who would like to give a very, very brief presentation of his or her project. Here are the rules:

1. You get two (2) minutes. No exceptions. No extensions.
2. First come, first served. We’ll let people present in the order that you sign up, first here on the website, and second on the morning of THATCamp.
3. All you get is a web browser. No PowerPoint! If you sign up below with one URL, I’ll have it ready for you in advance; otherwise you’ll have to waste some of your 120 seconds. Pro tip: use bit.ly.

So if you want to do a lightning presentation, leave a comment with a link below. Have fun!

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Your local THATCamp New England organizers have gotten together with the fine folks over at NERCOMP to create a partnership that we hope will be a big help to THATCamp.

First, let me explain the problem that THATCamp New England faces. The greatest strength of the regional THATCamps is that they’re lightweight. There is no bureaucracy. We don’t even have a bank account. Sounds ideal, right? It is, until you want to hold a second, or third, or tenth THATCamp New England. It becomes very difficult to transfer funds from one place to the next, and it becomes hard to maintain institutional continuity. In other words, the organizers have to build each new THATCamp New England from the ground up.

What if it were possible to keep the THATCamp New England organization lightweight, and have the advantages of long-term institutional stability, and get a pile of cash at the same time? Enter NERCOMP.

The NERCOMP officers have graciously drafted a memorandum of understanding with the THATCamp New England organizers. Its most important provisions are these:

• The agreement will last for four years, beginning July 2011. Each year both parties will have the option to dissolve the partnership if they chose.
• NERCOMP will act as THATCamp New England’s banker, accepting donations and disbursing funds on its behalf.
• THATCamp New England and NERCOMP will cooperate in organizing shared events that benefit both of their constituencies.
• NERCOMP will donate $3,000 per year to THATCamp New England operating expenses.

This partnership has the approval of the THATCamp New England organizers and we expect the approval of the NERCOMP board soon. We also have the blessing of CHNM via Amanda French. We plan to sign the memorandum in a couple of weeks. But since THATCamp New England is a community-organized event, we want to give you a chance to comment publicly. Leave your thoughts below by Friday, July 9. After that, we’ll feel free to put the agreement into place.

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Brandeis University is pleased to announce that it will host the second annual THATCamp New England, thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Department of History, Mandel Center for the Humanities, Library and Technology Services, and Office of the Provost. Here is the basic information about the 2011 THATCamp New England.

When: The main THATCamp will be held all day on Saturday, October 22, 2011. A BootCamp will be held the Friday afternoon before, October 21. See the schedule for more information.

Where: The conference will be held at Brandeis’s Mandel Center for the Humanities. Brandeis University is located in Waltham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. See the location and directions page for more information.

More information will follow soon.