The academy is not a platform
#THATCampAAR #sblaar14 #DigitalReligion
It has to have been some kind of sign of something that the website was broken for the past week. THATCamp AAR — The Technology and Humanities Camp franchise at the American Academy of Religion — is an earnest and necessary space for tinkering with tech in academic religious studies. As the one-day “unconference” approached, participants were supposed to post proposals of sessions on the event’s WordPress site, hosted through THATCamp’s headquarters at George Mason University. We tried: 500 Internal Server Errors, over and over again. Maybe religious studies just isn’t meant to catch up to the twenty-first century after all.
Several dozen THATCampers, undeterred, arrived at San Diego’s convention center on the morning of November 21. After thank-yous to AAR for the space and De Gruyter for the coffee, proceedings began with proposals for sessions, and then votes, and then the compiling of a schedule on a Google Doc: three sessions, three tracks, “lunch on your own.”
How does one summarize a mish-mash? Tweets, I guess.
A lot of know-how emanated from the podcasting panel.
And then the commons. How can this ancient concept, being revived in tech culture, inform scholars’ approaches to doing digital humanities?
Some folks talked about video games — and others created one:
The first session was interrupted by a fire alarm.
A series of discussions revolved around the challenges of peer review and academic credentialing in the midst of proliferating online platforms. This continued after lunch in a discussion about digital publishing. Survival strategies:
Others shared tools and tricks:
Before the day was over, there was a discussion of who was not in the room who should be, and whom the supposedly bias-free digital tools might be leaving out along lines of race, gender, and class. Notably, the THATCamp AAR tweets were skewing more male than than the participants of the sessions themselves.
THATCamp facilitator Chris Cantwell expressed a hope that, in years to come, THATCamp might not be necessary. Over time, scholars might incorporate technology naturally into what they do and how they work — not treating it always as a shocking revolution that overturns everything. If the scholars can ever catch up.
Over the course of the day, the same set of pressing problems kept coming up — academic credentialing, doing right by students, public engagement, inclusivity. In many people’s experience, advances in technology seem to have made these things harder, not easier. But computers didn’t invent these problems, either; they create new spaces in which long-cultivated values and norms haven’t yet been applied. Digital spaces offer opportunities to advance these values, as well as to let them fall by the wayside — particularly if the newness of it all gets to scholars’ heads.
By the end of the day, anyway, folks were ready for more.
