Modular Digital Scholarship:

HUMAN 2DH3

Dale Askey / Paige Morgan

April 24, 2015

Seeding Digital Scholarship

A new digital scholarship course is

for students – but also for the entire

community invested in digital

scholarship.

Basic Strategies

• Multiple people (from multiple departments)

need to be involved to prevent siloing

• Build the course around what already exists

• Plan for the course to evolve over multiple

years, rather than just one.

HUMAN 2DH3:

The Great War: On and Off

the Battlefields

• Non-discipline specific

(open to all Humanities

students)

• Six instructors (from SCDS,

Maps & Data, and Special

Collections)

• Overarching theme:

creating a narrative from

diverse data in diverse

formats

Major Activities/Skills

• Text-mining/Distant reading of a small

corpus

• Text gathering for the creation of a larger

corpus

• Small corpus + large corpus investigations

= basis for larger narrative developed from

data

• StoryMap (built in ArcGIS Online):

developed to present data narrative

Activities scaffolding towards the

StoryMap are designed to prompt

students to think about aspects of

digital humanities outside of the

classroom as well as within it.

Assignment Meta-Questions

• What does “significant/historically significant”

mean?

• How does significance affect access &

availability of materials?

• What makes a resource engaging?

• What is the relationship between

engagement, historical significance, and

available data?

Scaffolding Activities

• Developing a visual narrative based on pure

interpretation

• Assessing & evaluating goals and choices

made in public and academic history

projects

• Gathering websites/resources to use as

models based on student preferences

• Writing creative scripts that are revised and

adapted into StoryMap format

Specific Assignments

• All available at http://scds.ca

• StoryMap Assignment

• Public vs. Academic History

• Thinking Critically About Maps

• Digital Resource Evaluation

• Storyboard Script

Goal:

For students to use & critically

evaluate their own experiences with

digital resources – and utilize those

experiences in the creation of their

StoryMap.

HUMAN 2DH3 as Container

• Topics course

• No departmental ownership

• Highly flexible

Itinerant Nature of DH

• Contract work, rather than tenure

• Focus shifts with faculty, department

interests, and changes in availability of

tech

Drawbacks

• Requires constant creation, within

content and context

• Without departmental ties, no easy

recruitment or department champion

(needs extra marketing)

Advantages

• Students come from highly varied disciplinary backgrounds

• Ability to pick topics that are immediately relevant

• Allows for teamwork and collaboration to be a major component of the course

• Possible to bring in outside expertise, drawing others into campus DS/DH community

Thank you!