We want to extend a huge thank you to the Chemical Heritage Foundation Conference Center and their wonderful staff for hosting THATCamp Philly for the past five years. We are so grateful for their support in providing a welcoming atmosphere for our gatherings.

The Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) is a library, museum, and center for scholars that fosters dialogue on science and technology in society. Our staff and fellows study the past in order to understand the present and inform the future. We focus on the sciences and technologies of matter and materials and their effect on our modern world, in territory ranging from the physical sciences and industries, through the chemical sciences and engineering, to the life sciences and technologies.

We collect, preserve, and exhibit historical artifacts. We engage communities of scientists and engineers. We tell the stories of the people behind breakthroughs and innovations.

We’re trying something new this year! If you’re interested in building a project, start-to-finish, check out the day-long ARIS project. Campers who participate in this project will create a walking tour of Philadelphia, using clues and images from local cultural heritage institutions to direct people to various sites around town. For more information about the day-long project, click here. If you’ve never heard of or used ARIS before, start with the Intro to ARIS workshop.

Coincidentally, THATCamp Philly 2015 overlaps with the ARIS Global Game Jam 2015! We’re a registered Basecamp for the Game Jam.

How do we work both on the academic and library ends to make sure that distance education students are properly engaging with library materials? How do we promote the in person library experience? How do we continue to promote good research practices?

Proposed by: William Patrick Wend, @wpwend42

We have now done two iterations of THATCamp Community College at RCBC. While we have definitely seen some things that work and some that do not, we would like to propose a session for brainstorming about what makes for a successful THATCamp generally and how to do good promotion and improve attendance.

Proposed by: William Patrick Wend, @wpwend42

Interested in helping us think through crucial design issues in a DH project that brings together literature, theater, music, and history, among other disciplines? We’re looking to pilot a site on The Beggar’s Opera (1728), among the most influential, enduring, raucous, and fun eighteenth-century English texts and the inspiration for The Threepenny Opera and adaptations by Vaclav Havel, Wole Soyinka, Dario Fo, and others. Yet despite its ubiquity and importance and despite its congeniality to a digital environment where its blend of text, music, and image might properly be brought to life, there is no site that comes close to realizing the potential of The Beggar’s Opera to inform and stimulate students and scholars. Our proposed site aims to fill this gap by giving students and others a readable scholarly edition that links to clips of music and dramatic performance, to essays that illuminate the contexts of the play, and to a range of tools that track its remarkable influence. We also hope it will serve as a proof-of-concept for others looking to do DH projects in musical theater, from The Marriage of Figaro to Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

At this point, we have: access to the editions we need, an Omeka and a WordPress site, an excellent advisory board, TEI and MEI-encoding for most of the scene we’ll use for the pilot, drafts of some of the contextual essays, and a range of other objects. But we need help thinking through some key matters of design and process that we’ll present at our session. We hope to see you there!

Proposed by: Steve Newman, @SteveNewman70

The HTC is growing their research portal to provide more built-in tools for analysis of their public domain collections and more access to data for use in other tools. This session would provide a basic intro to their portal workset builder and pre-loaded algorithms, which I have used in my own work. If time, we could also look at the API or genre dataset that has recently been published.

Proposed by: Liz Rodrigues, @letsshall

If you would like to submit a proposal for an unconference session, please fill out this form: goo.gl/forms/bzqRwNMblL

We will post all submissions here on the website so everyone can see and comment on them.

For suggestions on what makes a good unconference session proposal, visit: thatcamp.org/help/go/proposals/

Head on over to the Eventbrite to sign up to attend THATCamp Philly 2015!

As a reminder, this year’s event is only one day (Friday, October 23) and will feature both scheduled workshops and unconference sessions. We’ll post info about the scheduled workshops as soon as we have the final details worked out. Thanks for your patience!

THATCamp Philly 2015 will take place on Friday, October 23. This is our fifth year and we will once again be hosted by the Chemical Heritage Foundation Conference Center. As in 2014, this year’s event will be a one-day event featuring a mixture of attendee-driven unconference sessions and hands-on workshops.

Check back for more information soon!