April was a month of learning, sharing, and inspiration for me, thanks to several conferences and workshops.

First, I attended the annual meeting of the National Council on Public History (NCPH), held in Pensacola, Florida this year.

I bumped shoulders with several hundred other public historians from around the country and learned about how others are tackling various challenging issues, from shaping new historical narratives to engaging new audiences to measuring student learning. You can read attendees’ commentaries about these and other topics on the NCPH conference blog.

While in Pensacola, I also attended a one-day THATCamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp) at the start of the NCPH conference. Billed as an “unconference,” THATCamp is a collaborative information-sharing, training, and problem-solving event for people working in the digital humanities (like me!).

Among the topics on the agenda: mobile apps and mobile technologies, how people are crafting digital oral history projects, and the differences (if any) between "digital history" and "digital public history." Notes from these and other conversations are available on the THATCamp NCPH blog.

Finally, I was on the road again last week -- this time to Providence, Rhode Island for a text-encoding seminar.

Led by the talented folks at the Women Writers Project at Brown University, the workshop focused on how to include contextual information in text encoding projects like our Greenfield digital project. My colleagues Tammy Gaskell, Faith Charlton, and I also had a chance to get feedback on the technical side of our project. Next up: putting that advice into practice in our project's custom encoding schema.