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Tag: teaching

How we Teach? Digital Humanities Pedagogy in an Imperfect World

Posted in Conferences, Digital Humanities, Digital Pedagogy, and Teaching

I was honoured to give this keynote at the CSDH/SCHN conference at Congress in Calgary on Wednesday.

I would like to start by thanking Susan Brown, Jon Bath, Michael Ullyot, and CSDH for inviting me to speak here. I’m sorry Susan isn’t here because I wanted her to hear this, too, so would someone tweet out to her that it is a particular honor for me to be here because #myDH (as the hashtag goes) is Canadian. Many of the people in this room have been directly responsible in ways they will never know for shaping my relationship to the Digital Humanities and my identity as a Digital Humanist – my training, my professionalization, my research and publication agenda. But more important, you have epitomized for me the possibilities for progressive, collaborative, thoughtful DH, and why that is crucial to the ways in which global DH should be conducted. You have also taught me that those possibilities come with responsibility, and that that responsibility cannot be taken lightly. And so I take this talk very seriously and personally.

Introductory Markup Experiments

Posted in Digital Pedagogy

This week in my HUMN 100 course we began the TEI module, which will see students tagging individual anecdotes in “Tarlton’s Jests” and compiling them into a digital edition. We’ve been wrestling with some computer problems this term that have made the round-table collaborative nature of last fall’s course a bit harder to sustain. Several students have had to work on the lab PCs around the edge of the room, which means their backs are to me, and they’re not connecting with one another, either.

Pedagogical Hermeneutics and Teaching DH in a Liberal Arts Context

Posted in Digital Humanities, and Digital Pedagogy

Katie Faull and I gave the following presentation last week at DH2015 in Sydney, Australia.

This is an abbreviated form of the talk.  The complete version will be published as an article in the near future.

We take our title from Alan Liu’s challenge to DH educators to develop a distinctive  pedagogical hermeneutic of “practice, discovery, and community” What does this look like?  How do we put this into practice?

This paper focuses on our teaching experience at Bucknell University in the academic year 2014-15 to show how the planning, design, and execution of a new project-based course, Humanities 100, introduced undergraduate students to the world of digital humanities through the use of selected digital tools and methods of analysis.

Linn: the Next Generation

Posted in Digital Pedagogy, and Teaching

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything – mainly for lack of time and other writing deadlines, but also because I’ve been unsure what to write about in this space. I was hesitant to write about the course I taught in the fall while I was teaching it, and I’ve been cautious about writing anything professionally-oriented: so many people are writing (oftentimes articulately and also at times in incendiary tones) about alt-ac and DH and the state of higher education and the lack of jobs and and and … I just don’t feel like getting into a social media exchange about it. So I’ve just done a lot of sharing of other peoples’ FB posts and tweets.
But now spring is (supposedly) coming, and I’m starting to think about co-presenting on the first iteration of Humanities 100 with Katie Faull this summer at ACH and DH, and thought it might be a good time to write about teaching and learning again.

Developing a Digital Resource

Posted in Digital Humanities, and Digital Pedagogy

Once upon a time there lived a man named James Merrill Linn.

James Merrill Linn
James Merrill Linn (1833-1897)

He was a lawyer, a member of a prominent family in town, a soldier, a collector of historical factoids and memorabilia. He wrote. And wrote. He wrote letters and journals and memoirs and essays. He wrote contracts and deeds and wills. And, it seems, he saved everything. He saw himself as a witness to history, as someone whose actions and observations were of value in the documentation of that history. After his death someone in his family gathered all of these life papers together and donated them to his university, thinking – perhaps – that someone else would recognize the importance of his words and deeds.