Shakespeare, World Shakespeare Project Home.

The Center for American Progress has an Open Educational Resources primer at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/02/oer.html

Check out Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative as well at http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/

Free open and college textbooks at http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

Bernardo

Reblogged from Digital Scholarship in the Humanities:

Recently I heard the editors of a history journal and a literature journal say that they rarely published articles written by more than one author—perhaps a couple every few years.   Around the same time, I was looking over a recent issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing and noticed that it included several jointly-authored articles.  This got me wondering:  is collaborative authorship more common in digital humanities than in “traditional” humanities? “Collaboration” is often associated …

Today at the School of the Humanities Luncheon we had a robust discussion about the collaborative nature of the Digital Humanities and whether it ran against the grain of our traditional assumptions about how to do humanities scholarship. I may blog more later on what I see as a false dichotomy between introversion and collaboration since I think effective collaboration requires moving between poles of individual reflection and collective engagement. But in the meantime I ran across this really fascinating blog on collaborative authorship in the Humanities. I do think that Digital Humanities often/usually?? puts a premium on interactivity, and so there is a way in which I think ongoing, perhaps unending, collaboration is the “goal” of this “work”–a work that is primarily about process rather than finished product.

First, kill all the grad-level methods courses.

Kill them, that is, to clear room for something more highly evolved — or simply more fruitful — to take their place. Think: asteroids clobbering dinosaurs. Choking weeds ripped from vegetable gardens. The fuzzy little nothings and spindly cultivars in this scenario, squinting cautious eyes or uncurling new leaves into the light, are:

• those research methodologies and corpora (often but not exclusively gathered under the banner of the “digital humanities”) that address hitherto unanswerable questions about history, the arts, and the human condition;
• and the new-model scholarly communications platforms we can already recognize as promising replacements to our slow and moribund systems for credentialing and publishing humanities scholarship and archiving the cultural record on which it is based.

What do these critters need to grow up? The same thing our colleges and universities so desperately need: a generation of faculty and alternative-academic scholar-practitioners who have been trained to work in interdisciplinary contexts and who can not only take advantage of computational approaches to their own research, but who have been instilled with enough of a can-do, maker’s ethos that they feel empowered to build and re-build the systems in which they and future students will operate.

Reading this I wondered whether we ought to ask whether our methods courses on the undergraduate level need an overhaul that recognizes the increasing centrality of digital methodologies in all our disciplines.  Since the premium here is on interdisciplinary, could we imagine a central methods course that all humanities students would be required to take in the digital humanities?  If engaging this stuff is actually not optional for the future, as, indeed, I think it is not, it may not be enough to create certificates or discrete concentrations in digital humanities, a class here or a class there.  Maybe it is something every humanities major must be requires to take.

This, of course, would imply that all of our curricula need to address the questions that a central introductory course in the digital humanities is raising.  Otherwise our students would be engaged with the current and future possibilities of our disciplines in a way that the rest of us aren’t.

• The Digital Durham Project: Creating Community through History, Technology, and Service Learning
• Students as Historians: Lessons from an “Interactive” Census Database Project

Another possible model for a local regional-based project is Digital Pittsburg: http://digital.library.pitt.edu/pittsburgh/

Here are a few links worth considering:

At the United States Intellectual History blog, Andrew Hartman, who attended the THATCamp-AHA, writes about the “Utopianism of the Digital Humanities.”

And here is AHA president Tony Grafton discussing digital history.

For what it’s worth.

So what exactly is that new insurgency? What rough beast has slouched into the neighborhood threatening to upset everyone’s applecart? The program’s statistics deliver a clear answer. Upward of 40 sessions are devoted to what is called the “digital humanities,” an umbrella term for new and fast-moving developments across a range of topics: the organization and administration of libraries, the rethinking of peer review, the study of social networks, the expansion of digital archives, the refining of search engines, the production of scholarly editions, the restructuring of undergraduate instruction, the transformation of scholarly publishing, the re-conception of the doctoral dissertation, the teaching of foreign languages, the proliferation of online journals, the redefinition of what it means to be a text, the changing face of tenure — in short, everything.

Once again, as in the early theory days, a new language is confidently and prophetically spoken by those in the know, while those who are not are made to feel ignorant, passed by, left behind, old. If you see a session on “Digital Humanities versus New Media” and you’re not quite sure what either term means you might think you have wandered into the wrong convention. When the notes explaining the purpose of a session on “Digital Material” include the question “Is there gravity in digital worlds?”, you might be excused for wondering whether you have become a character in a science fiction movie. And when a session’s title is “Digital Literary Studies: When Will it End?”, you might find yourself muttering, “Not soon enough.”

This is pretty dramatic stuff.  I was at Duke when the theory wave was at its peak–studying with Stanley Fish, in part. Whatever you think of the changes theory wrought, its also the case that it couldn’t be ignored and in some practical ways it changed everything about the work of English departments, and in its broader manifestations the work of other humanities departments as well.

I wonder, frankly, whether the changes wrought by digital humanities might not be more profound.  Digital humanities are not a theory so much as the deployment of a certain set of tools and techniques.  Theory-heads and traditional scholars disagreed profoundly about texts, but they still mostly read books and wrote papers.  The tools of the trade were understood;  it was more a matter of how you used them.  I think the challenge of digital humanities is that they are changing the tools and the objects, not just the modes of interpreting the objects.

Wish I had gone to MLA this year too.  I actually find myself missing it occasionally.  Bizarre.