What follows is my talk for a session at the 2012 MLA on “#alt-ac: Alternative Paths, Pitfalls, and Jobs in the Digital Humanities.” I’m thrilled to be speaking on the panel with a fantastic collection of alt-ackers that I admire: Julia Flanders, Matt Jockers, Shana Kimball, Bethany Nowviskie, and Lisa Spiro.

• Good afternoon, all. My comments today are titled, “Five Questions and Three Answers about Alt-Ac.”
• I’m tremendously pleased to see this panel and the one that directly follows it happening at this year’s MLA.
• The need for ongoing conversation about alternative academic careers was brought home to me again recently when I received a rejection notice—a very kind one, I might add—for a tenure-track job that I applied to this fall.
  
• Nine hundred applicants. You don’t need statistical analysis or to be a digital humanist to figure out those odds.
• As Amanda Watson put it on Twitter, these sorts of odds make it clear that we must rethink graduate education and not ignore different paths for employment after the PhD. And that’s exactly what alt-ac can be.
  

My Job

• In my current position as a CLIR post-doctoral fellow at Emory University’s Woodruff Library, I’m lucky to be exploring the alt-ac track.
  
• My principal responsibility is to develop and manage digital humanities projects in DiSC, Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons. I also taught an Intro to Digital Humanities this semester.
  
• In the past year, I worked to get DiSC off the ground, along with three colleagues. All of us are on the alt-ac track together.
• And this situation brings me to the first of my promised questions:
  
  What’s the relationship between DH and alt-ac jobs?

Relationship Between Alt-Ac and DH (Question 1)

• As many of you may have seen, Stanley Fish recently had a piece in The New York Times, where he talks about the rise of the digital humanities at the MLA. His observation is a bit behind those (Howard 2009; Pannapacker 2009; Howard 2011; Pannapacker 2011) who made similar statements about the 2009 and 2011 MLA…but we’ll give him a break. He is Stanley Fish, after all.
• What you might not have seen was the very smart response to Fish from Ted Underwood, who teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature in the English department of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
  
• Underwood suggests that one of the reasons why DH is not the future of literary studies is because it “is not a movement within literary studies.” It’s equally at home in history departments (the slate of DH activities happening at the AHA right now certainly bear witness to this fact), in art history, in linguistics, in libraries, and many more corners of the campus.
• Underwood calls digital humanities “extra disciplinary.” We might say the same thing about alt-academics.
• One of the obvious connections between DH and alt-ac, then, is how extra-disciplinary they both are.

The Future (Questions 2 & 3)

• Question #2: Is alt-ac the future of DH?
  
• Well…not entirely. We have the creation of tenure track positions—and occasionally cluster hires—at places such as Maryland, Nebraska, Iowa, Clemson, Northeastern, and more. These positions are clearly not alt-ac.
• But insofar as scholarship in the Digital Humanities tends to require collaboration on multiple scales, those in these positions will in fact be “alt”—marked by difference. The pursuit of tenure for these scholars won’t be the same as those who have previously been promoted.
• What’s more, I think alt-ac is the likely track for most positions in the digital humanities—and probably for the university as a whole.
• In fact, let’s face it: the university is already primarily populated by people who are non-fac. And many of the non-fac are the alt-ac.
• That being said, alt-ac cannot mean short, terminal contracts; alt-ac cannot be a continued casualization of labor in the university. Instead, we should look to models elsewhere in the university—libraries, administration, research only positions—for helping us structure these career paths, both within and without DH.
• What’s more, these must be career paths. We need to think about how to create opportunities for advancement.
• Now let’s turn it around (question #3, by the way): Is DH the future of alt-ac?
  
• No.
• There many different ways to get your “alt on” that don’t involve building things (as Stephen Ramsay would have it). You can find alt-ac careers in a library, in a museum, in an archive, in a federal agency, in a think tank, or even—dare I say it—in administration.
• So it’s not necessarily helpful for us to frame alt-ac as only being a thing that happens in digital humanities.
• Again, one of the lessons of “alt-ac” as a concept is that there is intellectual labor in getting things done, in accomplishing the very impressive and real work of the university, throughout the whole university.

Bonus Questions

• And finally, a question (#4) that I’ve heard no one ask aloud: how should the MLA deal with the rise of alt-ac?
  
  After all, sessions like this have little to do (on the surface at least) with the study of the modern languages.
• #5, and the kicker:
  
  Can the MLA shift its purpose from representing those who teach and research modern languages to those who study or studied the modern languages?
• This simple shift would be enough to make the whole of what we’re discussing—to say nothing of the panelists—belong unequivocally at this annual Convention. I’m not sure that it’s something that alt-ac needs so much as a way to keep the MLA relevant with what the transformations we’re facing.

Conclusions

• More than either an object or method of study, the digital is something that is happening to the humanities in the 21st century.
  
• And alt-ac is something that is happening to universities.
  
  It is not the only thing nor is it necessarily the most important. But it’s happening and in some cases it’s a very good thing.
• Perhaps in 2017 (or ’18 or ’19) we’ll be reading a piece from Stanley Fish talking about the rise of reconfigured, hybrid professionals at the MLA. And if in 2018 he’s a few years late in noticing the rise of alt-ac, well, so much the luckier for the rest of us who will have been the beneficiaries of the future’s accelerated arrival.
• Thanks.
  

I was flattered when Rob Nelson of the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab asked me to participate in a NITLE Webinar Event talking about Teaching DH 101. I’ll be joined this afternoon with my good friends (and fellow ProfHackers) Jeff McClurken and Ryan Cordell. We’ll each be speaking for about 10 minutes and then taking questions from the audience.

I’ll be talking about my just concluded “Introduction to Digital Humanities” course and these are some of the links that I’ll be sharing or referring to as I speak.

EDITED: The recording of the seminar is now available for viewing.

• Where I work: the Digital Scholarship Commons at Woodruff Library
• Resources for Designing the Course
• Student breakdowns
  • Class standing
  • Gender split
  • Majors
• The Course
  • Syllabus
  • Reading Schedule
  • Assignments
    • Mapping Mrs. Dalloway (KMZ)
    • Re-networking House of Leaves
      • Mark Sample explains the assignment
      • House of Leaves Forums
    • Final project
      • Carol Ann Duffy manuscripts at Emory
  • Key essays
    • John Unsworth’s “Scholarly Primitives“
    • Stephen Ramsy’s “Who’s In and Who’s Out”
    • Mark Sample’s “The Digital Humanities is Not About Building, It’s About Sharing”

In the haze of quickly writing something yesterday about the great workshop on alt-ac that will be happening at the HASTAC Conference, I forgot to do the most important thing: ask for your help. I have a few things in mind for how you can help the workshop be more successful, even if you won’t be with us in Ann Arbor.

1. Share job application materials with us. The workshop will include a discussion of how application materials for alt-ac jobs differ from tenure-track positions. We are particularly interested in looking at cover letters. If you have a cover letter for an alt-ac job to which you applied—whether that application was successful or not—and would be willing to share, please send a copy my way. If you have a copy of the ad for the position, that would be even better. We will of course redact your name and any other information that you feel concerned about.

2. Share advice with us. If you were going to give someone tips about alt-ac—about applying for jobs, about seeking mentors, about the positives or the perils, anything—what would it be? Please leave comments to this post or submit them via Twitter using the hashtag #altacadvice. We will collect this information and share it publicly with the workshop and with the wider world.

With your help, we can make this workshop better and more effective for those who are exploring the interesting interstices of the academy.

I’m excited to be attending the HASTAC Conference for the first time in a few weeks, but I’m most excited for the alt-ac workshop that is being organized by Fiona Barnett and Korey Jackson. Fiona has written a blog post explaining the format for the workshop, which is not only free (!!) but comes with dinner for attendees. In short, however, the workshop will begin with presenters talking about their own experience in alt-ac positions, will move to looking at some sample application materials, and conclude with smaller break-out groups to workshop CVs, cover letters, and more.

I’m expecting to speak quite a bit about the CLIR Postdoctoral Program (applications are due December 19!), but also about my experiences applying to many different alt-ac positions over the last several years, which I wrote about in this year’s alt-academy project.

I think it’s especially valuable to be having this workshop about alt-ac right at the height of the job market for many fields in academia. Kudos to HASTAC (and Fiona, who originated the idea) for taking on the problems of reforming graduate education in a very public way.

I’m tremendously excited to announce Eat Talk Teach Run, a new project I’ve been working on at Emory for the last few months. Over the summer, my colleague, Howard Chiou, and I found ourselves thinking about grad student teaching. For many years, the Laney Graduate School has had a three-day event (TATTO) focusing on pedagogy that all of its students are required to complete, in addition to pedagogy courses in one’s own department. The advantage of this program is that it puts students from different disciplines into the same seminars to discuss teaching on a general level, being coached by faculty members from across the disciplines. But once you’ve done TATTO—typically at the beginning of your second year in grad school—the conversation stops.

Continuing the conversation about teaching across the Laney Graduate School is what we wanted to do. Furthermore, we wanted to recognize that some of the most innovating teaching is likely to come from those people who are experimenting in the classroom—experimenting per force because it is their first time. This is, of course, the graduate students.

Our solution is to put grad students front and center. Eat Talk Teach Run promises to be a monthly event, featuring lightning talks (4-minutes, tops!) by graduate students about an innovative assignment, classroom technique, or observation. We’re going to eschew the typical academic thing and not have any Q&A afterward. Instead we’re hoping to have conversation develop organically among the participants. How do you do that?

Well, we have a couple of theories, but the one we’re trying to begin is making people stand in line. For food. We all know that grad students love a free lunch, but we’ve upped the ante a bit by getting outside the normal university food vendors and have contracted to bring in frozen yogurt from a local store, Yogurt Tap, and bánh mì from our local ethnic food haven, Buford Highway. We hope that the food gets people excited enough to wait a bit and talk about teaching or the presentations with whoever they end up next to. The whole event takes less than an hour, and then people can run back to the lab or library. It’s an experiment. And we feel almost as if we’ve conned someone, but we’ve got the Laney Graduate School funding us.

Along with recognizing that grad students can teach very well, we’re also hoping to recognize the importance of learning across the disciplines. We’re working to get scientists, social science students, and humanities people involved. That’s one of the exciting things about working with Howard, who is not only a current grad student (I having lost street cred some three years ago), but is a current MD/PhD student. We’ve found that at least one humanist and one scientist have a lot to learn from one another.

As I said, it’s experimental in many ways. But perhaps the most is the fact that we’ve got a grad school that is willing to recognize the importance of graduate student teaching. We look forward to reporting on the outcomes.

I was thrilled to learn this summer that I would be teaching again in the fall. Both the English department (where I’ve taught previously) and the Library (where I’m a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow) had supported the idea during the previous year, but this is the first that we’ve been able to make it work out. I was even happier that the English department was willing to support my teaching “Introduction to Digital Humanities” as a junior-level course. Not only do I continue to work on digital scholarship in the classroom as well as during the rest of my fellowship duties, but I got a chance to design a new course.

It’s always struck me as dishonest that my syllabi don’t have “Acknowledgments” sections like books or some journal articles. These courses tend to have obvious lines of evolution. I had some clear inspirations as I was working, including courses by Meagan Timney, Jeff McClurken, John Theibault, Michelle Dalmau, and many more. Both Ryan Cordell and Paul Fyfe were designing similar syllabi at the same time as me, and I corresponded with each of them individually about his ideas and mine. Others wanting to go about designing a digital humanities class need to be aware of the two tremendous resources that are Lisa Spiro‘s “Digital Humanities Education” Zotero group and the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative’s collection of syllabi. Lisa’s presentation at Digital Humanities 2011 was especially useful for me to hear as a preliminary to most of this work. In beginning to design one of the assignments, I realized that I needed to know more about textual studies than I already did, and I asked for assistance in a previous post and at DH Answers, where several friends weighed in. Finally, Erin Sells shared with me her assignment for mapping novels.

There appear to be as many ways to teach DH as there are definitions of the subject. Along with reading some of those definitions—print and blogged—I’ve decided to organize the class around a few different projects. We’ll begin with geospatial work, building an interactive map of Mrs. Dalloway. The next big project is a cross-campus collaboration between my class and four others that are reading House of Leaves this semester: Paul Benzon (Temple U), Mark Sample (George Mason U), Erin Templeton (Converse College), and Zach Whalestoe Whalen (U of Mary Washington). Our students will be reading the book at the same time; we will have some joint Skype sessions between the classrooms; and we’ll be attempting to build something as convoluted as the House itself, which Mark has already blogged about. My initial inspiration for asking for people to participate in this project was just to see if it could be done. And then Mark’s post on sharing in the digital humanities solidified the idea. What this project will investigate is the degree to which digital networks can change our experience of reading a print text, albeit one that resists being comprehensible by a single reader.

The last assignment for the semester will tackle Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry. We’re fortunate to have her papers in our Library. In these papers is a letter about her 1999 volume, The World’s Wife. She is writing to her publisher to explain why she taking the volume from one press to another. In explaining her reasons, she mentions her belief that the volume is very different from the previous ones that she’s written. We’ll spend the last month of the semester testing this assertion—first with close reading and then with text analysis. For a final project, the students and I will write a joint paper about our findings, an assignment inspired by Gideon Burton’s recent ebook project.

As the number of links here should make quite plain, the creation of the syllabus was very much a joint effort. That’s just setting the stage for what I anticipate will very much be a collaborative experience with my students. It’s going to be a semester-long experiment, which is the best thing I can imagine doing at the moment.

The syllabus itself is available after the jump, and you’re welcome to watch the course website for developments.

Syllabus in PDF

Complete all assigned reading before coming to class. Please keep in mind that all reading assignments are subject to change. All page numbers refer to the editions/ISBNs that I have ordered. For some readings, you will find the text in the Reserves Direct system, indicated by (RD).

Aug. 25 Th

• Introductions, Syllabus

———————

Definitions / Histories / Practices

Aug. 30 T

• Hockey, Susan. “The History of Humanities Computing.” In Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
• Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “What is Digital Humanities and What’s it Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin 150, 2010. (RD)
• Pannapacker, William. “‘Big Tent Digital Humanities,’ A View from the Edge, Part 1.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 31 July 2011.

Sep. 1 Th

• Unsworth, John. “Scholarly Primitives.” Transcript of a presentation. 13 May 2000. http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html
• Flanders, Julia. “The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.3 (Summer 2009).
• “Bloomsberg U. Undergraduate ‘Manifesto’ on Digital Humanities.” 4Humanities.org. N.d.

———————

Mapping Digital Humanities

Sep. 6 T

• Lahiri, Jhumpa. “Sexy.” In Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Houghton, 1999. (RD)
• Forster, Chris. “I’m Chris. Where am I Wrong?” HASTAC.org. 8 Sept. 2010. http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cforster/im-chris-where-am-i-wrong (read the comment threads too)
• *Bring laptops with Google Earth installed*

Sep. 8 Th

• Moretti, Franco. “Maps.” In Graphs, Maps, Trees. 35-64.
• Ramsay, Stephen. “Who’s In and Who’s Out.” Stephen Ramsay. 8 Jan. 2011.

———————

Sep. 13 T

• Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 3-64
• Ramsay, Stephen. “On Building” Stephen Ramsay. 11 Jan. 2011.

Sep. 15 Th

• Mrs. Dalloway, 64-128
• Reid, Alex. “The Digital Humanities Divide.” digital digs. 17 Feb. 2011.
• Reid, Alex. “Digital Humanities: Two Venn Diagrams.” digital digs. 9 Mar. 2011.

———————

Sep. 20 T

• Mrs. Dalloway, 128-end

Reading on a Networked Device

Sep. 22 Th

• Hayles, Katherine N. “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine.” ADE Bulletin 150, 2010. (RD)
• Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Introduction and Chapter 1 from Remediation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. (RD)

———————

Sep. 27 T

• Borges, Jorge Luis. “Museum: On Exactitude in Science.” In Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking, 1999. (RD)
• Woolf presentations

Sep. 29 Th

• Joyce, Michael. afternoon (read for at least 90 minutes)

———————

Oct. 4 T

• afternoon (read for at least 90 minutes)
• Carmody, Tim. “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books” The Atlantic. 25 Aug. 2010.

Oct. 6 Th

• afternoon (read for at least 30 minutes)
• Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Save as: Michael Joyce’s Afternoons.” In Mechanisms. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. (RD)

———————

Oct. 11 T

• Fall break, classes canceled

Reading in a Network

Oct. 13 Th

• Sample, Mark. “The Digital Humanities is Not About Building, It’s About Sharing.” SampleReality.com. 25 May 2011.
• Danielewski, House of Leaves, front cover – 24 (Read all materials: prefatory, cover, appendixes, footnotes, exhibits as you come to them)

———————

Oct. 18 T

• House of Leaves, 24-79
• Mullen, Lincoln. “Digital Humanities Is a Spectrum; or, We’re All Digital Humanists Now.” LincolnMullen.com. 29 April 2010. http://lincolnmullen.com/essays/2010/04/29/digital-humanities-is-a-spectrum.html

Oct. 20 Th

• Class canceled (I’m going to NYC!)

———————

Oct. 25 T

• House of Leaves, 80-245
• Digital Humanities Project Evaluation Presentations

Oct. 27 Th

• House of Leaves, 246-346
• Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image, Music, Text. (RD)

———————

Nov. 1 T

• House of Leaves, 347-422

Nov. 3 Th

• House of Leaves, 423-528

———————

Nov. 8 T

• House of Leaves, catch-up
• Pressman, Jessica. “House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel.” Studies in American Fiction 34 (2006). (RD)

The Intentional Fallacy

Nov. 10 Th

• Duffy, The World’s Wife, 1-41

———————

Nov. 15 T

• Duffy, The World’s Wife, 42-end
• Moretti, Franco. “Graphs.” In Graphs, Maps, Trees. 3-30.

Nov. 17 Th

• Duffy, Mean Time, 1-29

———————

Nov. 22 T

• Duffy, Mean Time, 30-end

Nov. 24 Th

• Thanksgiving Break, classes canceled

———————

Nov. 29 T

• Rockwell, Geoffrey. “What is Text Analysis, Really?” (RD)
• Michel, Jean-Baptiste et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” Science. 16 Dec. 2010.
• PAPER DUE

Dec. 1 Th

• Duffy project

———————

Dec. 6 T

• Duffy project

Dec. 8 Th

• FINAL EXAM: Duffy Project, 4:30 – 7:00 pm

One of the things that I love about Twitter is the #lazyweb feature: the ability to ask the world to help you find the answer to questions. Unfortunately my query today needs a bit more space to explain. And it’s not that I’m lazy in this case, it’s just that I’m short on time and I know that many of my colleagues will be able to quickly point me in the right direction.

I’m super excited to be teaching again this fall, and even more excited to be teaching an “Introduction to Digital Humanities.” It’s the first time a course like this will be taught at Emory, and it’s going to give me a great chance to dive more deeply into aspects of the field that I’m less familiar with. As I’ve been turning over the course in my mind, I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do one or more projects with the students, probably using our special collections, which tend to be quite strong in particular swaths of literature. This week I sat down with Liz Chase, one of our special collections librarians, and brainstormed. We came up with a great project involving our holdings of Carol Ann Duffy’s notebooks. In short, we want to do some comparisons between how she writes in her 1999 volume, The World’s Wife, and her previous volumes. We’re interested in thematic material, vocabulary she uses, poetic styles, and so forth. But as I’ve been working to design the project, I’ve come to realize that the students’ work (to say nothing of my teaching) will be improved by the inclusion of some readings on textual scholarship along these lines. But I don’t know this field at all.

What’s more, I’ve been trying to think about what sort of software we might most profitably use to help push our analysis after creating a dataset of the texts. I’m guessing we’ll want to represent word counts, word clouds, line structures, and more. My first thought is SEASR, but I’m not familiar with the tool and I’m not sure if it’s overkill or underkill or totally off the mark. I can always use Wordle, but I would like to have more options. And perhaps if I really knew this field of scholarship then it would be easier for me to know which tools I should be using.

What I really need, then, is a suggestion of books or articles that I should read so that our class proceeds thoughtfully on the project with an understanding of what’s been done in the past. Any tool suggestions would be welcome as well.

Last month I attended THATCamp Prime and along with re-connecting with colleagues at The Well and making new friends throughout the three days, I left with a mission: THATCamp Jr. I was more than a little excited. David Morgen, Leeann Hunter, Raf Alvarado, and I had a plan. David and I had kids, and we’d drafted Pete Rorabaugh to bring his kids along too. We were going to make a movie and—following the THATCamp and unconference model—let the kids be in charge. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, it’s possible that plenty could have gone wrong, with the main thing simply being the difficulty of getting three dads (two of them single fathers) to find a time when vacations, work, and other responsibilities made it possible to try something new and novel. While some last minute dissertation edits tried to interfere, we found a weekend, invited as many people as we could, and just did it.

We got our eight kids (ages ranging from 5-13) together on a Friday afternoon to hash out themes and characters. David’s and Pete’s kids had already had a chance to discuss what they wanted the movie to be about and they’d reached a conclusion that appealed to mine as well: zombies. Much excitement ensued at this point.

We distributed the eight kids around the Emory Writing Center, where David is Assistant Director, and got them to start thinking about possible plot points. Some kids drew pictures of their characters; others created possible scenarios; all of them started talking about props. David, Pete, and I were joined by Leeann and Katy Crowther, allowing us to give individual attention to most of the kids and ask them questions about the ideas that they were rattling off. After everyone had some time to brainstorm (pun completely intended), we circled the wagons and gave everyone a chance to share their ideas. Continuing to talk with the kids, we coalesced several suggestions into some workable set pieces, getting a storyline together using something from each child. At the end of about two hours, we had a good sense of the props we needed and the costumes that everyone would bring to the next day’s filming. Our family was in charge of ninja swords, police badges, limes, and plastic food (trust me on those last two).

The next day, we met bright and early (9am) with our props and good attitudes. Since it’s summer in Atlanta, we decided to start with filming the outside portion. David had scouted a great spot for one portion of the film and when we arrived, we found everything we needed within 100 feet. The only problem was that we were near some massive part of Emory’s physical plant that created so much noise it would be impossible to capture any spoken audio. In true THATCamp fashion, however, we decided to roll with that sucker punch and make a silent film. Doing so would eliminate the need for the kids to remember lines.

As we started filming the scenes we asked the kids how they thought things should play out, who should enter scenes from where, and what their characters would do. We started with a series of shots of the ninja grocery store (stick with me here) and the beginning of some battles. The kids were having so much fun being ninjas, and the dads were having so much fun thinking of different angles we’d like to have in our dailies that we spent a lot of time on the first group of scenes. We eventually moved on to the zombies—although the convincing it took for some kids to shed their ninja gear for zombie lurches was not insignificant. As the morning wore on, it got progressively harder for the kids to reshoot scenes and for people some (read, my kids [and me]) to stay on task and focused.

Herding cats has got nothing on filming kids. #thatcamp Jr #THATCAMPjr

July 9, 2011 9:50 am via txtReplyRetweetFavorite

@briancroxall

Brian Croxall

Of course, keeping focused is perhaps not in the purview of a THATCamp. After all, shouldn’t we be free to un-organize ourselves? Still, we all had a goal, and I like to think that we fathers were there to play the role that caffeine and fructose perform at most other THATCamps. Eventually, though, we needed some real fructose. We were all glad to get a break for lunch somewhere not too far after noon. At that point we’d finished all the outdoors scenes, and the two indor scenes proved quick to do. The filming was finished at 2pm…

One red ant bite, a few sai wounds, and a pound of Swedish fish later, we've wrapped the filming at #thatcamp Jr. #fb #thatcampjr

July 9, 2011 12:49 pm via txtReplyRetweetFavorite

@briancroxall

Brian Croxall

Celebrations included brownies, laughter, large draughts of water, and some bonus kids courtesy of Katy and her family.

One of the oaths that I took outside the CHNM’s Research 1 Building was that when it came time to edit the film that I would put in as many terrible iMovie special effects as the kids saw necessary. I’d had in my mind that we would finish filming, import the clips into iMovie, and all sit around the computer editing collaboratively. The absurdity of that vision was much more apparent (even to me!) when we had eleven people in a room, all of them wanting to type on the computers that were already there. We decided not to attempt the editing that day. At a remove, this decision makes a lot of sense when I remember that our vision of THATCamp Jr evolved when I realized my kids aren’t ready to learn programming, even in Alice or Scratch. David, Pete, and I decided that we would try to get everyone a copy of the raw footage and then work on editing in our own homes.

For a number of reasons, that hasn’t happened. (#1: As big as storage media is these days, video files are still larger than is convenient. #2: We were already quite charmed to have pulled off 8 hours of collaboration. Asking for more is like asking for a unicorn hood ornament on the Lamborghini Countach your cousin gave you for your birthday.)

Once again, we hit a potential snag. We’d done the hard part of our project (see my incredibly clever “herding cats” comment above), but we didn’t have anything to show for it. Fortunately a champion emerged out of the mist at this point, and David began editing the files. He had the advantage, of course, of everyone discussing the vision of the film as we were making it. But that doesn’t do the editing for you, and David worked on several versions of the film before reaching what is for now the final cut. (I’d still like to get a raw copy of the footage and see what sort of a remix I can achieve.)

It’s with a slight quaver in my voice and a tear in my eye that I’m pleased to present…

Fish & Chips: Zombies vs Ninjas
A THATCamp Jr Project

www.youtube.com/watch?v=60C1OhVthLM

All of this was done at the cost of approximately $15 for supplies and about $8 for parking. Our gear included one Canon camcorder that is two or three generations old, two Flip cameras, a DSLR, and iMovie.

What did I learn? I learned that working with young adults in college has got nothing on working with kids…especially your own kids. These kids were so creative and willing to try new things. They were also ridiculously high energy and wore us out.

Honestly, I'm really exhausted after a full, full day of #THATCampJr filming #thatcamp.

July 9, 2011 1:09 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@Scrivenings

Scrivenings

I also learned that it’s really possible to convert something from a Twitter “Wouldn’t it be great if we did this?” to a completed project. I think it’s safe to say that we’re all tremendously proud of our kids, and I had a great time working with David, Pete, Leeann (who edited her behind-the-scenes footage into a great montage), and Katy.

What did our kids learn? I can’t speak for David’s and Pete’s kids, but I think mine would say that they learned how to fight vampires, how to film fights, and how to break a katana. Well worth a Friday afternoon and a Saturday morning.

What’s next for THATCamp Jr? At the risk of doing the predictable thing, I’m going to say that it depends on you. What will you try with your kids, your nieces and nephews, or the children you volunteer with? Pete, David, and I haven’t figured out what the next THATCamp Jr Atlanta will look like, but you can be sure that you and yours will be welcome. This is the South, after all, y’all.

I’m pleased to announce that our THATCamp Junior project—making a film with our kids—will take place on Friday and Saturday, 8-9 July, in Atlanta. We know it’s not much advanced notice, but we invite others to come and play along with us. Get in touch with me via Twitter if you’re interested!