Below you will find a map with markers to help orient you during your time at THAT Camp. The Omni Shoreham Hotel, where THAT Camp will take place is marked with a dark red marker and label. There are quite a few places to go for lunch in the area. Some options are marked in light green. Other lighter-red color markers represent places where you might find coffee or a light snack during the day.

For grad students and faculty alike, digital components to dissertations present opportunities to consider the nature of scholarly inquiry, research, and publication.  I am imagining a session designed for graduate students (and faculty who are interested, but more for the benefit of students) who either are or would like someday to include digital components to their dissertation.  In the session, we would share challenges, opportunities, best practices, lessons learned, and also hear from others about what worked and what was less useful along the way in completing such a dissertation.  I’m happy to share my experiences completing a dissertation with a significant digital component, but I’m also eager to help graduate students from across institutions connect and to create support networks and share lessons learned.  The purpose here is not just to commiserate over the challenges, but to help brainstorm alternative approaches.  The ideal outcome would be a Google document with suggestions for 1.) what challenges are most frequently faced 2.) ways in which those challenges have been addressed and 3.) challenges graduate students feel still need to be overcome as they move ahead with their work.

One session I’d like to propose is a very general one about visualizing your data.  For those of us who have found or who generate datasets that they’d like to visualize, actually producing effective, informative, and visually compelling arguments through images remains challenging.  Large social network graphs are more often compared to hairballs than something that conveys useful information, for example.  From pie graphs to maps to scatter plots, our methods for visualizing humanities data have remained relatively static.

In the session, I’d be interested in hearing from people about the types of datasets they’re interested in visualizing, the challenges of turning that dataset into a visualization, and their hopes for what they’d like to do if they could visualize their data in a particular way. Such a session, I would hope, would result in a sharing of various tools and methods, as well as a brainstorming of what visualizations we wish we could do if we had the means to do it.