A presentation for the Seeding Digital Scholarship event at McMaster's Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship

1. Modular Digital Scholarship:
HUMAN 2DH3
Dale Askey / Paige Morgan
April 24, 2015
Seeding Digital Scholarship

2. A new digital scholarship course is
for students – but also for the entire
community invested in digital
scholarship.

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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?

8. 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

9. Specific Assignments
• All available at http://scds.ca
• StoryMap Assignment
• Public vs. Academic History
• Thinking Critically About Maps
• Digital Resource Evaluation
• Storyboard Script

10. Goal:
For students to use & critically
evaluate their own experiences with
digital resources – and utilize those
experiences in the creation of their
StoryMap.

11. HUMAN 2DH3 as Container
• Topics course
• No departmental ownership
• Highly flexible

12. Itinerant Nature of DH
• Contract work, rather than tenure
• Focus shifts with faculty, department
interests, and changes in availability of
tech

13. Drawbacks
• Requires constant creation, within
content and context
• Without departmental ties, no easy
recruitment or department champion
(needs extra marketing)

14. 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

15. Thank you!