Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics
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DIGITAL HUMANITIES PEDAGOGY Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics Edited by Brett D. Hirsch http://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2012 Brett D. Hirsch et al. (contributors retain copyright of their work). Some rights are reserved. The articles of this book are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported Licence. This license allows for copying any part of the work for personal and non-commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Details of allowances and restrictions are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ As with all Open Book Publishers titles, digital material and resources associated with this volume are available from our website at: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/161 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-909254-26-8 ISBN Paperback: 978-1-909254-25-1 ISBN Digital (pdf): 978-1-909254-27-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-909254-28-2 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-909254-29-9 Typesetting by www.bookgenie.in Cover image: © Daniel Rohr, ‘Brain and Microchip’, product designs first exhibited as prototypes in January 2009. Image used with kind permission of the designer. For more information about Daniel and his work, see http://www.danielrohr.com/ All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), and PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) Certified. Printed in the United Kingdom and United States by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers Contents Page Acknowledgments vii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 </Parentheses>: Digital Humanities and the Place of Pedagogy 3 Brett D. Hirsch I. Practices 31 1. The PhD in Digital Humanities 33 Willard McCarty 2. Hands-On Teaching Digital Humanities 47 Malte Rehbein and Christiane Fritze 3. Teaching Digital Skills in an Archives and Public History Curriculum 79 Peter J. Wosh, Cathy Moran Hajo and Esther Katz 4. Digital Humanities and the First-Year Writing Course 97 Olin Bjork 5. Teaching Digital Humanities through Digital Cultural Mapping 121 Chris Johanson and Elaine Sullivan, with Janice Reiff, Diane Favro, Todd Presner and Willeke Wendrich 6. Looking for Whitman: A Multi-Campus Experiment in Digital Pedagogy 151 Matthew K. Gold 7. Acculturation and the Digital Humanities Community 177 Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair vi Digital Humanities Pedagogy II. Principles 213 8. Teaching Skills or Teaching Methodology? 215 Simon Mahony and Elena Pierazzo 9. Programming with Humanists 217 Stephen Ramsay 10. Teaching Computer-Assisted Text Analysis 241 Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell 11. Pedagogical Principles of Digital Historiography 255 Joshua Sternfeld 12. Nomadic Archives: Remix and the Drift to Praxis 291 Virginia Kuhn and Vicki Callahan III. Politics 309 13. On the Digital Future of Humanities 311 Jon Saklofske, Estelle Clements and Richard Cunningham 14. Opening Up Digital Humanities Education 331 Lisa Spiro 15. Multiliteracies in the Undergraduate Digital Humanities Curriculum 365 Tanya Clement 16. Wikipedia, Collaboration, and the Politics of Free Knowledge 389 Melanie Kill Select Bibliography 407 Acknowledgments This collection began as a result of my time at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, where I spent a year as a postdoctoral research fellow and, despite shipping my entire library of English Renaissance literary studies in the expectation (perhaps naïve) of teaching it, found myself tasked with designing and teaching undergraduate courses in digital humanities. Thankfully, support and guidance was always close to hand. In particular, the “Three Musketeers” of the Humanities Computing and Media Centre—Greg Newton, Stewart Arneil and Martin Holmes—fielded my many questions with good humor and shaped my understanding and appreciation of the subject. Michael Best’s expertise is matched only by his generosity, and I am eternally grateful for his ongoing mentorship and friendship. Michael Joyce, Cara Leitch, Tassie Gniady, Kim S. Webb, Meagan Timney, Paul Caton and other past members of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab were always willing to share their ideas, assistance and commiserations. Other members of the Faculty of Humanities, Elizabeth Grove-White, Janelle Jenstad, Erin Kelly, Gary Kuchar and Jon Lutz were equally welcoming and supportive. My time in North America afforded me additional valuable opportunities to discuss ideas with digital humanists from further afield, such as Richard Cunningham, Alan Galey, Ian Lancashire, Alan Liu, Kenneth Price, Geoffrey Rockwell, Stan Ruecker, Stéfan Sinclair and Kirsten Uszkalo. Back in the Antipodes, conversations with Toby Burrows, Hugh Craig, Willard McCarty, Jo McEwan, Jenna Mead, Philip Mead, Harold Short, Margaret Stevenson and Chris Wortham have been instructive. A Research Development Award from the University of Western Australia generously supported my own humble contributions to this collection. Open Book Publishers has been a pleasure to work with, and I thank Alessandra Tosi, Corin Throsby and Samuel Moore for enthusiastically viii Digital Humanities Pedagogy guiding this volume into its print and electronic manifestations. We are delighted to be a part of this exciting publishing venture, and fully support its vision. I am also grateful to Daniel Rohr, a talented product designer based in Darmstadt, Germany, for generously allowing me to use a photograph of his stunning Brain and Microchip project for the volume’s cover. We have all heard the joke that bringing together academics to produce a collection such as this is like herding cats. Thankfully, I could not have hoped for a better lineup of contributors—practical, principled and political. No cats were herded in the making of this volume. B.D.H. Perth, July 15, 2012 Notes on Contributors Olin Bjork is a lecturer in English at Santa Clara University, “the Jesuit University in Silicon Valley,” where he teaches first-year writing courses as well as upper-division courses in Internet culture and technical writing. His research interests include Computers and Writing, Digital Humanities, John Milton, and Textual Studies. In 2010, he completed a three-year post doc at Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media and Communication, were he taught courses in technical communication and Web design. He received his PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin, where in addition to teaching literature and composition courses he served as assistant director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab, then known as the Computer Writing and Research Lab, worked as the English department’s webmaster, and collaborated on digital “audiotext” editions of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (http://www.laits. utexas.edu/miltonpl) and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (http://www. laits.utexas.edu/leavesofgrass) for UT-Austin’s Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services. His current research centers on print and digital interface design for editions of literature and other texts. Vicki Callahan is an associate professor of Cinema Practice at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) in the School of Cinematic Arts. She is the author of Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade (Wayne State University Press, 2004) and the editor for the collection, Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History (Wayne State University Press, 2010). Vicki is the author/organizer of the Feminism 3.0 website (http://www.feminismthreepointzero.com/) and, with Lina Srivastava, she co-authors Transmedia Activism (http://www. transmedia-activism.com/). Her interests in silent cinema, feminist theory, and digital media intersect around questions of emergent/disruptive x Digital Humanities Pedagogy technologies, new modes of writing, social justice, and alternative or counter narrative forms. Tanya Clement is an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She has a PhD in English Literature and Language and an MFA in fiction. Her primary area of research is the role of scholarly information infrastructure as it impacts academic research libraries and digital collections, research tools and (re)sources in the context of future applications, humanities informatics, and humanities data curation. Her research is informed by theories of knowledge representation, information theory, mark-up theory, social text theory, and theories of information visualization. She has edited multiple digital editions of the poetry of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and published pieces on digital humanities in several books and on digital scholarly editing, text mining, and modernist literature in Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative, Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. She is the co-director of the Modernist Versions Project, and associate editor of the Versioning Machine (http://v-machine.org). Estelle Clements is a PhD student in media at the Dublin Institute of Technology, where she is completing her dissertation on digital civics in pedagogy on an ABBEST scholarship. A former high school teacher and theatre director, she completed a Master’s degree in the history of medicine at Newcastle University in 2007 on a Wellcome Trust Scholarship. Estelle also holds Bachelor’s degrees in education, classics, and theatre from Acadia University, Nova Scotia. Richard Cunningham is a professor of early modern English literature, rhetoric, and digital humanities in the Department of English