6. Adeline
Koh
“At its best, the digital
humanities is about
engaging more critically
with the intersections
between technology
and how we act, think,
and learn.”
7. Uses Available
Tools
Digital Pedagogy
Digital Liberal Arts
Multidisciplinary
Collaborative
Public
8. Digital Scholarship
A gallery of primary sources
A digital scholarly edition
A mapping project
Network/System Visualizations
Computer-aided Text Analysis
3-D Modelling
Multimodal or Media-rich Publications
--adapted from Miriam Posner
e
x
a
m
p
l
e
s
11. “MOOG”: a game-based social media
activity that evolves in response to
student learning and student-initiated
hacks
Collaborative, experiential, self-directed,
globally-connected learning
Join us!
Nov 14-17, 2014
12. October 9
Villalobos
4:30 Drinks
5pm Talk
“What people know about how
to use media matters. The
underlying technologies are
important because of the way
they amplify human cognitive
and social capabilities…The
digital divide now has to include
the divide between those who
know how to get and to verify
information they need just in
time and just in place, those
who can cultivate and call on
social networks…from those
who do not.”
--Howard Rheingold
13. Coming
Events
Basic Photo Editing
Tuesday, September 16, 4pm
Howard Rheingold, Net Smart
Thursday, October 9, 5pm
High-Tech Happy Hour
Tuesday, October 14, 4-6pm
Jazzy Presentations
Thursday, November 13, 4pm
14. Join the
conversatio
n
DigLibArts
Digital Pedagogy Repository
Http://diglibarts.whittier.edu/?page_id
=1060
Whittier DigLibArts Group on
Facebook
@DigLibArts on Twitter
Anne Cong-Huyen, Digital Scholar
Notes de l'éditeur
There is so much about digital scholarship, and teaching with technology, in the news and in journals recently, that it can feel intimidating. Like those who are in the know have a password to a promised land. And I, who always forget my passwords and user names, can feel locked out.
But, In its broadest sense, everyone who uses a computer or a smart phone or email for teaching or research is a digital scholar.
If you want to figure out how to use technology to deepen or simplify your research, or to increase the reach of your publications, then you’re a digital scholar.
Many of us feel burdened by these technologies, overwhelmed by email, or chained to our smart phones. If you want to liberate yourself, then you’re a digital scholar.
Corporate interests want us to believe that “there’s an app for everything”, that technology will solve all our problems. And there may be—but is an app always a good idea? Such “tech solutionism” often begs—or begets—exactly the kinds of questions that we, as academics, are interested in asking.
“To a hammer, everything is a nail.” Even more worrisome, to free apps like Facebook and Twitter and Google, EVERYONE is a nail (or a product). This is the problem with “technology solutionism.” The tools we choose—as everyone in this room knows very well—shape the questions we ask.
So if I choose to use only Microsoft Word and a desktop computer, I’m choosing one set of questions; if I have a lab full of fancy technology, each one of those machines will (ideally) open different kinds of research for me. But each tool also imposes its own limitations, and social and ecological costs. For example: FB privacy issues, the lack of control over our own (and our students’) data, the coming “internet of things”—these things sound to me like the prologue to the Terminator movies… And that is precisely why I study and teach about digital media. Because it is so powerful, and holds so much potential to, as Google admits do evil or not.
Adeline Koh says it best. And she teaches at a small liberal arts college!
Digital Humanities or Digital Liberal Arts? Both have similar values: collaboration, public scholarship, interdisciplinarity.
At Whittier, we call our Center “Digital Liberal Arts” so that the name telegraphs the mutlidisciplinary, liberal arts appropriate, undergraduate focused resources we are building. Bill Pannapacker, who coined the term “Digital Liberal Arts” is coming to Whittier in February 2015 as a featured speaker. Many of you will know of him from his frequent—and usually quite polemical—columns in The Chronicle of Higher Ed. His talk will be thought-provoking, I think!
But a lot of digital scholarship looks much more familiar to us. Much of it is driven by Web 2.0 concepts: participate rather than consume. Share work widely. Make instead of buy. Collaborate (since the skills you need are so varied!)
This might be horror scenario for some folks in my discipline. This is one step in one method of computer-aided textual analysis, called “corpus linguistics.” Basically, I turned a bunch of beautiful, artful, meaningful, richly human nineteenth century novels into bags of words and ran cluster analysis—a type of statistical analysis—on them. I was immensely proud of these dendrograms—in fact, I tweeted a screenshot of them. I need to learn more statistics to understand what I learned, though. And I need to learn some coding skils to transform these humonguous spreadsheets into visualizations that will be meaningful to others.
And, yes, Twitter is my favored social media network. By the way, I love teaching with it. Ever try to teach writers the value of concision? Ask them to tweet their essay thesis! 140 characters max!
This might be horror scenario for some folks in my discipline. This is one step in one method of computer-aided textual analysis, called “corpus linguistics.” Basically, I turned a bunch of beautiful, artful, meaningful, richly human nineteenth century novels into bags of words and ran cluster analysis—a type of statistical analysis—on them. I was immensely proud of these dendrograms—in fact, I tweeted a screenshot of them. I need to learn more statistics to understand what I learned, though. And I need to learn some coding skils to transform these humonguous spreadsheets into visualizations that will be meaningful to others.