I was an invited participant at THATCamp Chicago (The Humanities and Technology Camp), “a user-generated unconference where humanists and technologists work together for the common good” which was held on November 20th. I participated in a number of great sessions. Of particular interest to me was the GeoTools/GIS session. Jo Guldi, a historian at Harvard, was interested in what she calls ‘geo-parsing’– identifying place names in text. She is interested in detecting subaltern agency in Britain by analyzing books published between 1848 and 1919. It sounds like a fun named entity extraction task and I volunteered to help her. I also attended sessions on GIT and XML/TEI.