Digital Humanties & Learning environments

 Collaboration, digital humanities, e-Learning, eresearch, Humanities Computing  Comments Off
Oct 202012
 

I wrote about this some time ago; about the connection between eLearning (blended learning etc.) and the Digital Humanities.  The problem is that the connection is a weak one and should be further developed. I know of very few Digital Humanities modules or plugins etc. that are be used in existing learning environments such as Moodle or Blackboard. And it is not as though the DH doesn’t have the learning materials and methods. There has been much work done on teaching digital humanities, but the work done (both research and development) seems to miss the enormous body of knowledge around LMS and educational design. This field is particularly strong in Australia and NZ and it would be good to see some movement in this area; in the same way that the DH has developed a good working relationship (if not an intellectual one), with eResearch.

Teaching Digital Humanties: Digital methods elective: PhD Coursework Subject

 digital humanities, e-Learning, eresearch, Humanities Computing, pedagogy  Comments Off
Aug 162012
 

I have started teaching in a PhD coursework subject here at the University of Melbourne; the first year that this type of subject have been offered in PhD research. And as part of this, we have started teaching our very first Digital Humanities subject in the faculty; a lot of fun and somewhat experimental.  There are 5 of us teaching it (and about 20 PhD students); and all the instructors have many years teaching, research, and computing experience (and ways of understanding and applying computing to teaching and research problems).  The aims of the course is as follows (and we have put together our syllabus from a number of excellent sources and thanks to University of Victoria in Canada and especially Brett Hirsch of UWA for blazing a path for us). It is only a 5 week course of 2 house sessions, so barely getting our feet wet in such a large and vibrant field (and sorry some of the links may not work as you will need particular University log-in credentials to access them).

Course Outline:

This subject alerts students to the range of electronic methods available to scholars for document and data capture, collaboration and communication, data analysis, publishing and dissemination, data structure and enhancement, practice-led research, and research strategy and project management. On completion, students will be equipped with a range of practical digital methods as they apply to their thesis (e.g. qualitative analysis of unstructured text using NVivo, use of digital archives and databases, semiotic analysis of text, metadata for describing research material), and also be able to critically assess the potential of digital methods and tools as they apply more broadly to their discipline

Session One: Introduction and Basic Tools

Reading:

What is Humanities Computing?
What is Humanities Computing and What is Not?
NINES – an example of digital methods
The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Teaching the Digital Humanities through Virtual Research Environment (VREs)

examine these examples…

Digital Humanities at Oxford (in particular, look at the ICT Methods)
Arts-Humanities.Net (have a look at methods, tools and projects)
An excellent overview of many aspects of DH is A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Also very useful is …

Berry, David M.
Understanding Digital Humanities [electronic resource]
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au:80/record=b4303134~S30

Basic Tools:

  • Referencing – Zotero, Endnote etc.
  • Searching Catalogues
  • Managing your literature
  • Word Processing a thesis
  • Mind Mapping
  • Coding qualitative data – word processing, NVivo
  • Express Scribe – a tool to assist with the transcription of digital audio

Library classes and tours
Library online tutorials
Library – RefWorks
Library – tools widgets and apps

Session Two: Modelling and representing knowledge in the humanities: Why do we do it?

Reading

  1. Ramsay, Stephen. “Databases.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 177-97.
  2. McCarty, Willard. “Modelling: A Study in Words and Meanings.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 254-70
  3. Lavoie, Brian, and Lorcan Dempsey. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Digital Preservation.” D-Lib Magazine 10.7-8 (2004)

Why digital methods?

Overview – why do we need to understand digital methods, aren’t we all digital natives?

    • fragility of digital records
    • potential of reusing research data
    • potential of linking between existing and future data
    • What databases are appropriate for PhD research and why would you need one?
    • Why do we model knowledge in the humanities?
  • What is an API and what are the debates around open data?
  • (Practical exercise: make a database and enter some research ‘field work’ into it), Excel? or a free online service?
  • Backing up your data for safekeeping
  • Open Access databases as a means for disseminating research
  • Repositories and persistent identification of research material

creating data so that it can be reused

  •   implications
  •   open source
  •   structured
  •   filenames have some system
  •   repositories understand discipline-specific issues
  • PARADISEC as an example of a discipline-based digital repository
  • OpenOffice or LibreOffice?
Many tutorials on the web, e.g.,

Session Three: Text Encoding, mark-up and meta-data

Reading

  1. Renear, Allen H. “Text Encoding.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 218-39.
  2. Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. “ Text in the Electronic Age: Textual Study and Text Encoding with Examples from Medieval Texts.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 6 (1991): 34-46
  1. Tooling Up for Digital Humanities: http://toolingup.stanford.edu/

Tools

Voyant tools

  • Introduce XML editors (OxYGEN)
  • TEI. Why do we use it in the humanities?
  • Metadata: What is it and why is it important for the outputs of digital research?
  • Tutorial on using regular expressions to search and change text (http://zvon.org/comp/r/tut-Regexp.html)

Exercise:

A great site with lots of guidance on text encoding, including a stepped approach to XML and more complex methods is The Brown University Women Writers Project

If you are into the whole XML and encoding enterprise, then you can try to mark-up a text in XML TEI using one of the web-based virtual environments.
http://tbe.kantl.be/TBE

Session Four: Scholarly Communication and collaborative and interdisciplinary research and crowd-sourcing

Reading:

  1. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen.”Peer-to_Peer Review and the Future of Scholarly Authority’ Cinema Journal 48.2 (2009): 124-29 .fitzpatrick.pdf
  2. Krause, Steven D. “‘ Where Do I List This on My CV?’ Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites.” Kairos 12.1 (2007)
  3. Boyd, Danah. “A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium.” Reconstruction 6.4 (2006):

Virtual environments, crowd-sourcing, managing interdisciplinary relationships

  1. Norcia, Megan A. “Out of the Ivory Tower Endlessly Rocking: Collaborating across Disciplines and Professions to Promote Student Learning in the Digital Archive.” Pedagogy 8.1 (2008): 91-114.
  2. Dan Cohen ‘Can History be OpenSource: Wikipedia and the future of the past http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42
  3. Rockwell, Geoffrey ‘Crowdsourcing the Humanities: Social Research and Collaboration’, in ‘Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities (Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty eds.) (Craig will hand this last essay out in class)

Discussion

  • Why Blog? (WordPress and twitter and building your scholarly networks)
  • What is the ‘blogosphere’?
  • What is OpenPublishing

Exercise:

  • Why is the ‘blogosphere’ important for my research? Will it get me a job!
  • Write a blog post and optimise it using a set of online strategies

Session Five: Tools and critical methods for analysing source materials

Reading:

  1. Burrows, John. “Textual Analysis.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 323-47 (John Burrows is one of the most influential Australian contributions to computing in the humanities)
  2. Rockwell, Geoffrey. “What is text analysis really” Literary and Linguistic Computing 18.2 (2003): 209-19
  3. Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, 2005 (this book is an excellent reflective analysis of quantitative methods and visualisation in book and literary history)

Reading on CAQDAS (Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis)

  1. Marshall, H (2002) ’Horses For Courses’: Facilitating Postgraduate Research Students’ Choice of CAQDAS” Contemporary Nurse 13/1 pp29-37
  2. The CAQDAS networking project
  3. Richards L Handling Qualitative Data, (2nd Ed Sage, London, 2009) Lyn Richards’ website resources for her book
  4. Lewins, A. and Silver C. Using Software in Qualitative Research: A step-by-step guide (Sage London 2007)

Resources:

Voyeur tools, Old Bailey Online, Founders and Survivors, (quantitative and qualitative approaches to using computing in humanities research).Tools:

People
Sage publishers
RMIT’e l s Qualitative Interest Group meets first Tuesday each month. Contactlyn.richards@rmit.edu.au for details
Association for Qualitative Research

Session Six: Wrap-up session: the ethical and legal implications of computing and technology in research

  1. (Reading) Lesk, Michael. “From Data to Wisdom: Humanities Research and Online Content” Academic Commons. 16 Dec. 2007 lesk-commons.pdf
  2. (Practical exercise) How to make your digital research available under a Creative commons License?http://creativecommons.org/choose/
  3. (Practical exercise) How to deposit data into a repository and set ethical access rights

 

 

Our Digital Age: implications for learning and its (online) institutions (HASTAC)

 digital humanities, e-Learning, eresearch, Humanities Computing  Comments Off
Aug 142012
 

Our Digital Age: implications for learning and its (online) institutions
CATHY N. DAVIDSON, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, Durham, USA 
DAVID THEO GOLDBERG, University of California Humanities Research Institute, Irvine, USA

HASTAC co-founders Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg have co-authored an article that was published in the most recent volume of E-Learning and Digital Media. The article is entitled “Our Digital Age: implications for learning and its (online) institutions”.

Abstract:

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a vast range of Internet sites, from Pokemon Web pages to Wikipedia? This chapter, excerpted from our book, The Future of Thinking, does not promote change for the sake of change. Implicit in its sincere plea for transformation is an awareness that the current situation needs improvement. In advocating change for learning institutions, this chapter makes assumptions about the deep structure of learning, about cognition, about the way youth today learn about their world in informal settings, and about a mismatch between the excitement generated by informal learning and the routinization of learning common to many of our institutions of formal education. It advocates institutional change because our current formal educational institutions are not taking enough advantage of the modes of digital and participatory learning available to students today.

http://dx.doi.org/10.2304/elea.2012.9.3.249