We’re pleased to announce that THATCamp Southeast will include a BootCamp. A BootCamp is series of educational, hands-on sessions to introduce Campers to various digital skills related to research and teaching in the humanities.

Our BootCamp will take place on Friday, March 4, the day before the full THATCamp begins. This schedule (borrowed from our friends at THATCamp VA) will allow “analog” humanists, librarians, and museum professionals to learn alongside passionate and expert technologists and still participate fully in Saturday’s and Sunday’s THATCamp. And yes, you should feel free to consider this a THATCamp Southeast pre-party.

Campers should mark on their applications if they are interested in participating in the BootCamp. Tuition is free, but a handful of fellowships will be available — through the generosity of the Mellon Foundation, the Kress Foundation, and the Council on Library and Information Resources — to defray travel costs for qualified applicants.

At present we are still refining ideas for sessions. Possible sessions include the following:

• Creating a Web Presence for Yourself and/or Your Projects
• Text Encoding Fundamentals
• Digitization Fundamentals
• Introduction to Python
• Geographical Information Systems in the Digital Humanities
• Intro to CMSes: WordPress, Drupal, Omeka
• Transcribing and Describing Primary Sources

However, this is your BootCamp. What would you like to learn? Please send us suggestions via the comments, Twitter, or email at . If you need help brainstorming ideas, see this range of topics that can be taught as BootCamp curriculum.

When we announced THATCamp Southeast at the end of August, the dates of the Camp were not yet firm. We’re pleased to say that the Camp will take place on 5-6 March 2011.

Of course, you want to know how you (and your librarian, museum, graduate student, technologist, and faculty friends) can attend THATCamp Southeast. For that, you will need to apply. We are working on the backend at the moment, but can now confirm that we will be opening up for applications on 1 December. We will accept applications until 9 January and hope to notify selected attendees by 15 January.

But don’t think that there won’t be anything happening here until 1 December. Keep your eye on this spot (and our Twitter stream) for still more exciting news!

It’s been a while since you’ve heard from us. In the past few months, the THATCamp SE planners have been ironing out details and working on our new website. While we plan to iron one or two last wrinkles out of the website design, we’d like to thank Regional THATCamp coordinator Amanda French and CHNM’s Jeremy Boggs for their work on “THATCamp-in-a-box,” which is providing the backbone for organizing the event. It’s great to know that the crowdsourcing starts well before the THATCamp itself does.

And speaking of crowdsourcing, we put the call out to our Google Group (you’re a member, right?) for assistance with a logo. The result was our awesome new THATCamp Southeast image designed by Chrisitan Steinmetz, the Creative Manager at Georgia State University’s Library. We’re very grateful for his wonderful work.