This week CCNMTL’s Adrienne Garber and Mark Phillipson presented Mediathread during THATCamp CAA, an “unconference” preceding the College Art Association’s annual conference in New York City. Mediathread is CCNMTL's innovative, open-source platform for exploration, analysis, and organization of web-based multimedia content.

THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) is an open, informal meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot. THATCamp CAA was hosted by Columbia University and Khan Academy and took place at Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.

About 60 art historians, art teachers, and graduate students interested in digital art history scholarship attended the session. Garber and Phillipson described how Mediathread was used at Columbia in the undergraduate art history course “Northern Nudes from Van Eyck to Rubens.” They also demonstrated how students and scholars can bring images from ARTstor into Mediathread for annotation, study, and incorporation into essays.

The code for Mediathread is publicly available. The platform is now running at higher education institutions beyond Columbia, including MIT, The New School, Wellesley, and The American University in Cairo.

Columbia University instructors can get started with Mediathread by sending an email to ccnmtl-mediathread@columbia.edu.