Live Blogging DH09 — Session Ten
Posted by John Theibault on June 25th, 2009
I arrived slightly late to the second afternoon session of DH09 because I got distracted looking at two posters during the coffee break. Both were very interesting works on Africa. Hamilton College professor Angel Nieves has produced a living history archive of the Soweto uprising of 1976. It is available at http://www.soweto76archive.org. The second is a wonderful beta for layering information on maps of Africa, produced by Harvard’s GIS lab: http://cga-3.hmdc.harvard.edu/africamap/. Check both of them out.
The first paper of this session is by John Keating and Aja Teehan, who I heard present on a different topic earlier in the conference. This paper deals with delivering a humanities computing teaching module at the undergraduate level. I arrived as they were discussing their theory of learning before they move on to the pragmatics of the course. They derived their ideas of what to teach in part by researching topics from previous DH conferences. Key topics covered in lectures were text and textuality, entity-relationship modelling, tree modelling, SQL and XQuery, UML, metadata standards, and critical evaluation of projects. They required students to build a project using TEI.
The second paper is by Amanda French and Peter Wosh from NYU. They are discussing digital teaching of archives and public history. Wosh provides background on where the program itself came from. As they became more committed to bringing digital humanities to the program, they decided they wanted someone who specialized in digital humanities itself, not in history or archives. That person was Amanda French. French asks whether Digital Humanties’ goal is to “colonize” traditional humanities disciplines. All disciplines are “digital” but their not “digitally literate.” She took a survey of digital skills of incoming students. They were familiar with “the web” (facebook, blogging, etc) but not really able to create digital projects. They have now defined a curriculum sequence to build competencies. One student created an online archive about the culper spy ring and benedict arnold.
Our third speaker was unable to make it to the conference, so we get out a little early this time. That’s a good thing because there will be a presentation by Jon Orwant of Google Books at lunch time. I’ll try to blog that too.