A researchathon is a long collaborative session that seeks either to answer a research question or to build a research resource. This is accomplished by bringing together a group of researchers, librarians, technologists, and students in one room for a full day of collaborative work toward a specific goal. The practice derives from the culture of hackathons familiar to technologists, in which programmers gather for long hours, often late into the night, to solve a software problem collaboratively. In the humanities we have already seen a similar phenomenon in the spread of wikithons, or marathons of wikipedia editing, and the exhilarating One Week|One Tool “barn raisings.” The word researchathon was coined, as far as we can tell, by David K. Park at Columbia University. Our Kamau Brathwaite researchathon follows on the footsteps of several researchathons at Columbia, starting with the Aimé Césaire researchathon of 2013.
Our researchathon will focus on building the largest existing bibliography of Kamau Brathwaite’s primary and secondary sources in one day. At the end of the day we hope to offer our work to present and future researchers of Brathwaite — open access on the open web. Unlike a print bibliography, ours can continue to update in perpetuity. We will build the bibliography on our own open Zotero bibliography. If we are able to attract enough technologists, we might even be able to build a well designed website to port our collective work out of the Zotero ecosystem, and have a stand-alone ‘publication’ of our results.
To prepare for the event, we ask that you do the following:
The day of the event—Thursday, December 4, 2014—we will meet at the Studio@Butler (Butler Library 208b) at 10am. Bring your laptop. We will begin with a brief introduction to Zotero and make sure everyone is set up properly to participate. Following that we will have a brief introduction to the concepts of descriptive and analytic bibliography. The rest of the day we will divide ourselves into teams according to genre, time period, or task, depending on the size of our team and the hour of the day.
Our tasks:
The main researchathon for Kamau Brathwaite will be hosted at Columbia University on December 4, from 10am to 5pm. That said, we are interested in coordinating sister events across the world. If you are interested in getting a group of Brathwaite researchers or enthusiasts together and would like to participate in the researchathon virtually, please drop us a line. Any group that joins us will be added to this page.