Example courses? Syllabi? Sites? Projects? Lessons? Prompts?
How do we introduce undergraduates to the digital humanities?
(20 posts) (18 voices)-
Posted 7 years ago Permalink
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I'd say there are many ways at it, but to start with existing goals and projects for your course, then imagine what it might look like in digital form and have a go at a small addition along those lines.
For example, if an annotated bibliography has been a regular part of your course, ask them to do that in a course blog so they can share their work more easily. Or, ask them to share their annotated bibliographies with Zotero.
The key thing is that there needs to be solid, well defined activity for the students the get their hands on. Digital Humanities isn't really a spectator sport! :)
Hope that helps,
PatrickPosted 7 years ago Permalink -
I've been teaching a first year multimedia course at McMaster for several years. It's called multimedia, but I really consider it a digital humanities course. It's a big course, currently with over 400 students. It's evolved over the years, and has benefited greatly from Geoffrey Rockwell's input.
The course is structured with a lecture component (two one-hour sessions a week) and a tutorial component. The tutorial component is mostly about building web pages. The technical baseline for the course is low, but we think it's important to give students the experience of doing some coding while creating something compelling.
For the lectures, we've found that the most effective approach is to identify some contemporary reality of digital society (like Facebook or iDevices) and work backwards from there to talk about some of the following:
- what's the significance of this for us today?
- where did this come from and where might it be going?
- how can we engage with this as humanists?
- are there social or ethical aspects that we should consider in particular?
- how can we become involved as creators?
The course website is unfortunately hidden by our LMS, but here's an overview:
- Lectures:
- Understanding Multimedia & Digital Society (historical and contemporary uses of multimedia, social networking, etc.)
- Hardware and Digital Media (devices, text, images, sound, video)
- Design & Development (interface usabilty, interactiving, coding)
- Tutorials:
- XHTML & Dreamweaver (tags, templates, etc.)
- Cascading Stylesheets (CSS)
- Media (images, sound, video, Flash, etc.)
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @Jentery Sayers's post:
Well, I'm glad you asked. This semester a group of us at the University of Virginia, Jerome McGann, myself and Chris Forster (@cforster), are teaching a class with a digital workshop component meant to give undergraduate literature majors three basic DH skills: producing a pdf image/text, TEI-lite mark-up and diff analysis.
If you would like to learn more you can visit our blog at: uvatango.wordpress.com
There are many other exciting such ventures out there. I'll try to find as many of these projects as I can for a longer post later.
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
Replying to @Jentery Sayers's post:
Just this past Friday I taught a two-hour digital research methods workshop, which was really an introduction to digital scholarship in the humanities. This was not a semester-long course, nor was the audience undergraduates (they were incoming doctoral students); but since you asked for prompts, here's one that went over pretty well:
"How many pigeons can fit on the grill of a cooker made by the Cannon company in the 1950s? Bring the answer to class. Write down how you found the answer, and bring that too."
Students need to make two cognitive leaps in order to answer the question. You can't just use Google's text search to find an answer.
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
tanyaclement
MemberWe are also implement a year long course within the Digital Cultures and Creativity program at the University of Maryland, College Park (see http://www.dcc.umd.edu/content/academic-courses). The first semester is "big ideas" including AI, Security, What is Reading?, Algorithms, etc. and in the second semester we'll be creating a class archive of Civil war letters. They'll learn XML, TEI, XSLT, PHP, MYSQL, JavaScript, video, and how to install and use Omeka.
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
Cara
MemberJulie and I taught an intro to DH class for a visiting group of academically advanced high school students. Thanks to a bit of miscommunication about the group and resources, we ended up having to make up exercises on the fly. There were three things that went over really well:
-- Group transcription exercise: The group worked together to digitize and transcribe a 19th-century apprentice's indenture document. Having to work together and come to consensus about what they were reading helped them engage with the object. With more time/computers we would have gone on to encoding.
-- Visualization tools: We showed them how to make a word cloud and asked them what words they thought would show up most frequently in texts they were already familiar with. Then they suggested texts to use and offered interpretations of the results.
-- Talking about copyright issues and remix culture.
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
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In my first-year Introduction to Digital Humanities class at UVic, I take a broad approach, and introduce them to a little bit of everything. We start with a general introduction to digital humanities, and then move into issues of digitization, remediation, and metadata. Once they have a background in some of the main issues and concerns about managing data, we start looking at examples of DH projects, use some text analysis and data visualization tools, and even take a brief look at GIS and mapping. The last few weeks of class are devoted to final group projects, in which students learn to collaborate and work towards a common goal as a team. Feel free to take a look at the syllabus, if you're interested.
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
It really depends if it's a course *on* Digital Humanities or if it just integrates Digital Humanities tools into the content. I have two classes I run in each of these areas:
1) TechnoRomanticism (http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/TechnoRom_F09/News.htm):
We create our own digital edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Along the way, we create a collaborative timeline using MIT's SIMILE & Timeline script. We don't even begin to create a website until some of the preliminary assignments are done -- assignments that look at the construction of this novel, both linguistically and bibliographically. Every 2 weeks, we held a workshop on some digital assignment and acquired 1 new skill, not even necessarily a new tool, but a skill. It helps that we were in a gorgeous space where every student receives a laptop at the outset of class meetings. Even those not accustomed to posting to fora and blogs got something out of it. But, we reflected on the technology a couple of times throughout the semester: a) mid-semester to see if the tech was becoming too overwhelming (which I then adjusted) and b) at the conclusion of the semester to see what worked and what didn't.2) Digital Humanities: The Death of Print Culture? (http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/DigLit_F10/Introductions.htm)
I'm teaching this one right now, also in the gorgeous room (not even really a lab, but more). We're theorizing all facets of DH while at the same time critiquing the tools for our thinking and dissemination. Thus far, it's been a real love fest in the class, but it's an Honors Colloquium, one that took 3 years for our department curriculum committee to approve. We're in Week 6 and now they're really seeing the benefits and pitfalls of DH (with much thanks to our latest virtual guest). We will also explore multi-modal arguments, i.e., the video essay. This is extremely new to these English majors and will be interesting to see. We have 3 Digital Media Artist majors in the class as well and they certainly push us all to discuss the digital beyond the linear narratives that we've become accustomed to in literary studies. They use art to critique our readings; it's been a fascinating ride so far.3) and a third type of course, one in which content and DH are intertwined -- the British Literature survey course 1800-now: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/harris/BritLitSurvey_F10/Engl56B_Frame.htm
So for this course, we're not practicing any Digital Humanities, but we are looking at Digital Literature in the continuum of the survey, which is mighty difficult considering we're still figuring out what that means. This is a lower-division English major's requirement, which means students typically haven't had the requisite course on how to evaluate literature in various genres. I find that these skills are imperative to then leaping into e-lit. And, I have to admit, I don't really get to now, but my students do in their final projects. The last time I taught this, someone did work on Grand Theft Auto and narrative voice. It was awesome. But, that student already had web designing skills in DreamWeaver so we didn't spend much time on the tech skills. Instead, she really achieved an argument.
I'm at a university in the middle of Silicon Valley, but we are surprisingly conservative for a variety of reasons. This isn't a knock against my university; it's a reality that probably many other faculty face in non-DH focused departments. This is how I've managed to get around that issue over the last 5 years. It's been a long journey, but one well worth it. I have to say that the students coming in, those traditional 18 y.o. in the Frosh Comp, can go away and create a blog without any handholding. 4 years ago, even, we spent a day on blog creation and posting to the class listserv. I like the idea of posting screencast tutorials for those who are still struggling.
Great ideas here! Thanks DHAnswers!
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
I've heard Greg Crane and Chris Blackwell make very good cases for how technology allows undergrads to get involved in serious humanities research. That is, rather than just teaching undergrads *about* the digital humanities, we should also get them to actually *do* it and feel they are making a real contribution. Greg notes that in the sciences, it is much more common to see undergrads working in labs and actually being productive parts of the research effort. Why not in the digital humanities?
Here are articles from both of them on this topic:
"Technology, Collaboration, and Undergraduate Research"
Chris Blackwell and Thomas Martin
Digital Humanities Quarterly
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/1/000024/000024.html"Give us editors! Re-inventing the edition and re-thinking the humanities"
Greg Crane
The Shape of Things to Come
http://rup.rice.edu/cnx_content/shape/m34316.htmlPosted 7 years ago Permalink -
In December of 2001, the Wheaton College (Norton, MA) faculty voted to "teach together" in various combinations. This unique alternative to a list of requirements provides an exciting way to explore different areas of knowledge and different approaches to problems. Courses are linked across any two of six academic areas: creative arts, humanities, history, math and computer science, natural sciences, and social sciences. Pairs of connected courses may be taken in either order and do not need to be taken in consecutive semesters, although departmental planning across campus attempts to offer each course of a connection within a year of the other.
"Computing for Poets" (COMP 131) is connected with two courses in English: "Anglo-Saxon Literature" and "J.R.R Tolkien". For example, in the connection with Anglo-Saxon Literature, the relationship between Old English poems has been a vexed question for nearly 150 years. Because students may take the courses in either order, both English and Computer Science faculty participate in syllabus design and make several guest lectures in the other course to help reinforce the connection between the disciplines.
For students majoring in the humanities and taking the computer science course, an exposure to the application of computers to manage the storage and retrieval of written texts shows by example the many new opportunities for scholars of ancient and other written works. In particular, the "Poets" course teaches computer programming as a vehicle to personalize the exploration of vast collections of poems and corpora now available online, including stylometry and authorship attribution. Course work includes a rich exposure to pattern matching with regular expressions, parsing large collections of XML files (e.g., corpora marked up according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) schema), building a concordance, examining the top-N words in your own writing, and elementary statistical methods for authorship attribution.
(For syllabi and sample programming assignments [Python], see lexomics.wheatoncollege.edu ).
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
I have never taught a course specifically focused on the digital humanities. But I really enjoy inserting a few DH-lite assignments into my regular courses. The goal is to get students transferable digital skills.
With that, I offer my survey classes a chance to build a collaborative timeline. You can find my assignment--which is adapted from one by Jason B. Jones at my blog: http://www.briancroxall.net/2010/02/03/assignment-the-american-century-geospatial-timeline/.
For my course on media theory, I asked them to crowdsource an annotated bibliography of articles on media theory and related to the texts we were reading. That assignment is available at http://www.briancroxall.net/2010/01/18/final-annotated-zotero-group-bibliography-assignment/.
Thanks all for sharing your ideas here. It's giving me ideas about what I could do the next time I start teaching.
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
This is a terrific thread.
I integrate DH style assignments into several of my classes, but my favorite class in a seminar of juniors and seniors called Adventures in Digital History in which the students actually do some DH of their own.
In this course they are split up into groups, given broad topics, introduced to a "digital toolkit" of open-source tools, and then asked to design and build their own digital history projects.
The course sites can be found (along with links to each students own narrative project blogs and the projects themselves) for 2008 and 2010.
[The question of a DH-undergraduate curriculum came up at the 2010 THATCamp Prime -- the notes from that session are here.]
Posted 7 years ago Permalink -
Elizabeth Glascock
MemberAs an undergraduate, I approach this with a different perspective albeit slightly skewed due to where I study.
I was first introduced to a digital humanities tool in my basic writing seminar Freshman year, Spring 2007. The primary goal of the course was to create a research paper on an aspect of The Great Gatsby. My prof. recommended the use of Zotero. This requirement opened the gateway of what exactly is possible.
Personally, I feel that Zotero should be a commonly known resource among undergraduate students; however, most that I associate with have no clue about it. As an English major, I hate to say that it may be a downfall of our basic Composition courses. Who does it fall on to teach students in their beginning semester how to research beyond google? AND make the most of this researching time?
With the influx of Blackboard and Angel sites for classes, the opportunity to open student's eyes to digital humanities is much greater. Recommending links to collaborative sites that offer more information than google ever will. Also, offering links to free downloadable tools that students are not aware of.
Most undergrads are coming out of a generation that does not know what it is like to be without a laptop, wireless internet, or a cell phone. A lot of students are very open to the ideas behind digital humanities to an extent where it could easily be incorporated. Quite frankly, a discussion based around social networking, microblogging, et als effects on humanities most likely will engage more students. It may potentially pull them away from facebook chat long enough to pay attention.
Posted 7 years ago Permalink
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