DH in the classroom

Ran across this interesting video digging around for stuff about DH in the classroom.  I like this because it gets beyond the notion that DH is something special or discrete from the rest of the curriculum.  Instead it is embedded in the entire way we do thing in the humanities classroom–the kinds of assignments students do, the things they write, the way we lecture.  I like this expansive notion of DH even as we are thinking of specific projects that could guide and direct an broad-based effort.  At the same time we need to think about how DH might become just the norm of doing business, not some special different project that students can participate in.

Literary DH: Shakespeare, World Shakespeare Project Home

Found this interesting DH project through the linked-in group I belong to.  Looks like it is still up and coming, but I like how they’ve internationalized Shakespeare and are using digital tools to do so, connecting performers and artists from around the world with scholars and others interested in Shakespeare.

Shakespeare, World Shakespeare Project Home.

Open Educational Resources (OER)

I came across some information on OER resources

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

 

Cultural Data Project

Had a great conversation with Tony Caito of our Collaboratory last week, touching a bit on some of our dreaming conversations about Digital Humanities at Messiah College.  Tony directed me to the Cultural Data project supported by the Pew Charitable Trust.  Started in Philadelphia and has a wealth of information about arts and culture, with data that is designed to support grants seekers and researchers.  Haven’t yet had a chance to fully engage with the site, but it really looks like it could be a good resource to look at if we keep going down the road of trying to do some kind of Digital Harrisburg Project.

Collaborative Authorship in the Humanities

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?

Read more… 1,812 more words

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.

A Conversation with Digital Historians

This is a really informative piece about doing digital history.  It covers careers, projects, audiences, funding, and challenges.  I think it is definitely something we should read before we commit to a project.

Should all humanities curricula require an introductory course in Digital Media?

In a recent blog on Inside Higher Ed,  Bethany Nowviskie makes some strong recommendations on blowing up the current methods courses in graduate education in favor of something more focused on digital humanities.  I wonder what this would look like on the undergraduate level.  From Nowviskie

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.