THATCampers might be interested in this conference hosted by the Center for the Humanities at Temple, where I’m currently a fellow. It will be a great opportunity to listen to really smart people talk about the politics of digital representation from a different angle!

Through THATCamp Philly, I became interested in using Omeka as a platform for presenting my own research and gathering materials from interested readers to effectively create a user-generated digital archive. Since I work on a topic of public interest in the very recent past (my dissertation is on African American AIDS activism) I think this would probably be a good way to present my work online while producing the raw material for others to do history on the same topic. Recent examples of this approach that I’ve seen include the Bracero History Archive and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Historian’s Eye. Perhaps we could talk about the pleasures and perils of merging our own research with such a platform, or theoretical and methodological issues related to curating user-generated content.