Archive for category Session Ideas

Hacking the Dissertation

How can digital humanities help us reimagine the dissertation? As a mid-program graduate student, I’m standing at the beginning of my dissertation project and I’m interested in hacking the dissertation.

I’ve been thinking about this from a few angles. First, digital sources provide one new way of rethinking the dissertation. Digital archives and collections that offer full text searching provide new ways to do dissertation research, especially in the current climate where graduate research funding may be difficult to find. Second, the actual dissertation itself can be rethought. For example, how could digital sources for a dissertation be archived online to provide a sort of source book for the research project? What would a “digital dissertation” look like? Lastly, how can digital technology improve the process of writing a dissertation? The dissertation is a young scholars first major project, what sort of technologies are out there that every dissertating graduate student ought to try to help them stay organized and get the thing written?

I would love to see something come out of this discussion that could serve as a guide or toolbox for graduate students wanting to hack their dissertations. There are a lot of great reviews and ideas about writing dissertations with digital technologies (for example, Tonya Roth’s blog “Hacking the Dissertation Process” ) but its very scattered and tough to track down and synthesize. We need a more systematic approach to rethinking a digital dissertation.

Multimedia ebooks

As part of my job, I speak to a lot of grad students about what tech projects they’d like to see happen. Increasingly, students are describing something like this: “I work with a text that I know better than anyone else. I’d like the ability to add video, text, and audio annotation to the text — like a multimedia annotated edition.”

The technology to make this happen does exist. A recent Chronicle article describes something similar, and this company is working on “books” that are perhaps even more advanced than my students are imagining.

The problem is, as far as I can tell, creating these multimedia ebooks requires comfort with XML. Much as I’d like for every grad student to possess this knowledge, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

So in this session, I’d love to hear ideas for ways to create multimedia ebooks that might be accessible to the tech-curious grad student who is nonetheless not prepared to invest the time in learning XML. Perhaps these techniques already exist, or perhaps we need to build them ourselves.

Some notes:

  • Adobe InDesign is (purportedly) one way to create multimedia epubs, but my experience with it suggests that learning to create epubs in InDesign is little easier than learning XML
  • The Anthologize plugin for WordPress seems to offer intriguing possibilities. WP is a CMS that many students are already comfortable using, and they’re comfortable embedding video in posts. Perhaps Anthologize could be extended to handle video and audio.
  • I asked a question on this topic over at DH Answers and got some really good responses.
  • I found the Wikipedia article on epub helpful in understanding the standard

Wanted: A New Teaching/Learning Landscape [Session Idea]

Course management systems put educators and their students within electronic reach of each other, but are rarely enjoyable to use. Systemically applied platforms like ULearn (formerly Web CT) and Blackboard seem clunky and outdated. The open-source Sakai Project provides interesting options, but must be customized by the institution and sometimes loses pedagogical effectiveness in that standardization. Textbook publishers like Bedford/St. Martin’s, Pearson/Longman, and Cengage all develop more usable tools tailored to individual disciplines, but those tools are often bound to the use of a particular textbook and cannot remain open for student use indefinitely.

Currently, I am researching alternatives to current course management systems. I want to learn about and help build a pedagogical landscape that jumps the fence of institutional and commercial boundaries and involves dynamic research capabilities and collaborative components. I have been teaching with a digital course space for three years, but I want to grow past it. At THAT Camp I would like gather data on what the best digital teaching environment might look like if it could harness other applications on the web, while still offering a few uniquely useful and adaptable tools within its framework.

Philosophically, this discussion might veer into evaluating the dissolution of boundaries around learning institutions. As we contemplate the impact of new digital systems, we might wonder how much teaching and learning can or should happen on the open web — outside of a log-in screen or behind the digital fence of a school. I would love to hear discussion. Functionally though,  I would like to learn about what things are currently missing from course management systems so that, collectively, we can imagine a new one(s). Even more specifically, I want to discuss how new uses of social media tools and re-imagined assessment methods can augment an online course landscape.

Add points to gamify? My concerns…

Anastasia Salter’s guest post on ProfHacker talks about “gamifying” a course by adding various plug-ins to existing packages (e.g., CubePoints to BuddyPress). Does adding intangible rewards (points and badges) make it a game? Here’s the “yes” perspective from one student:

I think if anything the points system has forced me to participate in class more than I normally would… I don’t respond only to get points, but I actually enjoy responding to what I read. I like giving my point of view and hearing others.

Since Salter’s course is Social Media and Games, I have a suspicion that many of her students are self-selected to look positively on points as a way of “gamifying” a class. All the more power to her if she can get such easy buy-in! I’m a little concerned about the possibility some readers might look at a simple game mechanism (points) and think that’s gamification. If you could make something fun by adding points, taking the SAT would be a barrel of laughs.

Jane McGonigal argues for a different definition of a game: a system with a goal, a set of rules, and feedback that users enter into voluntarily. Yes, points are feedback, but that’s not the only structure one can create.

This morning, the students in my undergraduate history of education class confronted an almost completely-dark room except three spots. I asked them to turn in their clearance forms, said that they were committed to the mission, and that while they always had the choice to use Option 6, I hoped they wouldn’t. Then I explained the mission: saving the world from a horrible unwinding of time that had to be fixed when top physicists in this secret organization had pinpointed the trouble (or at least a point of leverage in the past). I told them they had to make education a universally recognized right in the United States by 1900 (and the window open to them was roughly between 1850 and 1900). They could use the organization’s temporal vortex manipulator (i.e., time machine), but they could only take themselves and natural fibers (so no fancy technology), and headquarters could only be guaranteed to be stable for about two months. So they had to lay plans that could be completed with two months of “operations” in the past. They had to be shrewd. They had to brainstorm what to propose for Operation Nudge.

You may recognize that this is a setup for a standard counterfactual discussion in a history class. Except it’s anything but standard as a setup–my students had to solve the puzzle or see the world ripped apart by this temporal anomaly. It was completely hokey, but I stayed in character through the whole exercise, and my (wonderful) class got down to work in short order and tried to figure out in groups what their best targets were. No points. No big win (okay, they voted on which team’s project they wanted to see attempted, but they didn’t know I’d do that). Does it count as a game?

Where are the Humanities in the Digital Humanities? [Session Idea]

Well, I’ve been pondering this little bit for a little while. Feel free to comment, critique, rebuild…

This session idea was inspired by a few things coming out of the recent “Rise of the Digital Humanities” MLA 2011, and two related discussions/provocations.

  1. The first is by Alan Liu (“Where’s the Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?”). Liu argues that “[h]ow the digital humanities advance, channel, or resist the great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporatist, and globalist flows of information-cum-capital, for instance, is a question rarely heard in the digital humanities associations, conferences, journals, and projects with which I am familiar.”
  2. The second is an interesting provocation by fellow THATCamper and Brittain Fellow Andy Famiglietti (“What Does it Mean to do the Humanities?”) in which he poses a question about the model of teaching values: “as much as I like this definition [humanities teach important artistic, cultural, and critical values], I don’t always sleep comfortably with it. It seems to imply that, without the organized study of the humanities, cultures would lapse into collections of mechanistic drones, unable to consider questions of truth or beauty. This simply isn’t true. I’ve seen the inside of technical cultures, geek enclaves and hacker freeholds and they are full of wonder and poetry. Algorithms for decrypting DVDs transformed into epic poems. Romantic jokes about the Fibonacci sequence. Furthermore, again, ask any anthropologist and cultural value is what they do. What’s our niche?”

I think that Famiglietti’s question can open a fruitful discussion for how digital applications can transform or redefine what the humanities do. If, as Bruno Latour recently argued in “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’,” critique “ran out of steam” because “it was predicated on the discovery of a true world of realities lying behind a veil of appearances,” what can the emphasis on building and creating in the digital humanities do to address the issues Liu presents above (474-5)? Or, alternatively, do the digital humanities need to identify with something essentially “humanistic” or have something to do with “cultural criticism” in order to be worthy of the name? If not, what’s the niche of the digital humanities? What do digital humanists do?

Reference
Latour, Bruno. “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’.” New Literary History. 41 (2010): 471-90.

How to Design a Drupal 7 Theme (almost) from Scratch [Session Idea]

Learn how to create a design (almost) from scratch for your Drupal 7 web site using base themes, grids, CSS, accessibility tips, and a tiny bit of PHP. If this session is chosen, the most important thing you can bring is a sketch of your user-friendly web design idea.

Random session thoughts, and room-share offer

I guess I’m the first THATCamp SE camper who’s posting. First, the room-share offer. I have a room Friday and Saturday at the Emory Inn with two beds, and I’ll be happy to share it with a male non-smoker with a strong preference for someone who’s willing to trade some quick-and-dirty Ruby or other DUP (damned useful programming) tutorial for the room-share. (As in, I want to learn for a specific project and have some structured [procedural] programming in my head but no OOP or current-language skills. You teach me a bit, you get a place to crash. Contact me by email.)

Now, for the random thoughts on sessions:

  • This hasn’t interested many at other THATCamps, but I’m going to float it in case it sparks conversation: DH perspectives on humanities assessment. Right now, higher-ed is facing enormous pressure on “outcomes,” by which many of us fear reductionist assessment. The Lumina Foundation got people interested in liberal-arts and higher ed policy together to create its Degree Qualifications description, which is far more friendly to liberal arts than other possibilities. But there are two reasons to look for humanities “native” assessment research: 1) there will STILL be national political pressures to demonstrate what students learn, and 2) regional accreditors (including SACS) are looking for assessments, and a lot of faculty at schools in the Southeast will be pressured towards the reductionist assessments they hate unless they have alternative tools.
  • The Skill Set: What set of skills are likely employers of DH students/graduates going to reward (and hire people for!)? For example, a university library department head told me in the last year that she expects ALL new university librarians will need some familiarity with programming, quasi-programming (WordPress theme hacking?), or something to climb the learning curves as university library software systems evolve. We shouldn’t gear what we do as students, faculty, and professionals entirely to the job market, but especially if someone’s spending money and time on a graduate degree, thinking about this would be appropriate.
  • Games, gamification, game development for the humanities. Instructional design issues, development kits, CubePoints, ChoreWars, etc. (Gain experience points in the session if you protect session attendees from the Ice Boss.)
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