Doing DH in the Classroom

Slides at: https://goo.gl/U6phUx

Brian Norberg / brian.norberg@duke.edu / IT Analyst, Trinity Technology Services

with Amanda Starling Gould / amanda.gould@duke.edu / DH Specialist, Franklin Humanities Institute

So Targaryen, Thomas Malory, and Edward Said are in the Same Course Description

Discovery
Ask Humanities questions
- differently
- with contemporary media
Experimentation
Public Engagement or publicity
Attract students to class
- digital = sexy

Unfamiliar Ways of Reading

http://www.meredithgoldsmith.com/about/

New Ways of Looking at Material

Project Megotage & March4OurLives Project

Find Contemporary Media to Work With

socialmovements.trinity.duke.edu

Project Vox Timeline

Give Students the Ability to Curate the Material

Engage the Public and Research Community

Students work more public and goes beyond "writing just for the teacher"
Develop resources for other researchers to use

Pop Art & Sonic Dictionary

Deconstructing DH

When doing digital projects it's best to ask what students can't do to determine what they can do. Students can't:

Collect resources and decide best way to represent them
Pick what tool to use without guidance
Work alone and without clear assessment criteria

What Teachers can do to scaffold their students' digital work

Prepare for imperfect work (your expectations should be similar to those for traditional assignments)
Get student permission

Ask Not What Students Can Do for You...

Decide how much of the class will be digital and when it will occur
Have defined learning outcomes for digital aspects
Create guidelines and, if possible, documentation

Setting Digital Ground Rules

Talk to an IT Person...

some who does a bit of both teaching and technology support. And don't forget librarians, learning innovation staff, and other colleagues can help too.

Type of Digital Projects

Whole Semester (e.g. websites, digital exhibits, databases) - teacher needs to decide on course theme, tool to create project, and guide students on finding, describing, and entering resources with documentation
Replace a Paper (e.g. multimedia essays, timelines, maps) - instead of putting materials in an essay, student puts knowledge into another medium; teacher must decide on possible media and grading guidelines
Lesson Plan (e.g. podcasts, text analysis projects, geospatial projects) - teacher needs to know a little bit about the digital method explored, decide on tools to use, and develop structured activities to build up to final project

Omeka, Drupal, and Wordpress are a web publishing platforms that can be used to share digital collections and exhibits
These are semester-long and beyond projects

Examples: Race and Ethnicity in Advertising (Duke Library), Sonic Dictionary & Project Vox

Omeka, Drupal, Wordpress

The CMSs: Omeka, Drupal, Wordpress

Sway is a cloud-based, interactive storytelling platform from Microsoft.
This is a replace a paper type project
Allows users to create narratives and presentations with content one uploads to the Sway application or finds on the Internet
More flexibility than Powerpoint and less seasickness-inducing than Prezi
3 templates (slide and horizontal or vertical scroll)
Very easy to use; accessible through Duke’s Office 365 Suite

Example: Adapt and Survive & The Haka

Sway

StorymapJS allows users to create spatial narrative by adding images one uploads to the application or images, video, and audio from the Internet to slides that are associated with points on a map or background image
This is a replace a paper type project
Cloud-based application that is extremely easy to use and free; iframeable

Examples: Games of Thrones & City Plaza Solidarity Space (go to digital stories tab)

StorymapJS

TimelineJS allows users to create a temporal narrative by adding images one uploads to the application or images, video, and audio from the Internet to slides that are associated with points in time on a timeline
This is a replace a paper type project
Customize display and behavior of timeline as needed
Cloud-based software that is straightforward to use: data is rendered from a Google Spreadsheet

Examples: Republican Run-Up & ADAPT (go to digital stories tab)

TimelineJS

When the location of objects matter to the information being shown/argument being made.
These locations are symbolized and compared to find patterns that would be hard to recognize otherwise.
Spatial analysis projects are lesson plan projects

What is Spatial Analysis

Google My Maps allows users to create custom maps by dropping pins on a map and associating them with image, video, and other multimedia; add polygons, lines, and directions to highlight connections between points
Easy to use, free cloud-based application; need Google account; iframeable
Not narrative-driven; similar to Omeka’s Geolocation plugin

Examples: Global Ecological Solutions Map & Imaging Kanto

Google My Maps

Story Maps combines of the narrative strength of StorymapJS with the spatial analysis capability of more advanced GIS software
Add narrative text, videos, images, and maps
Cloud-based application available through Duke Libraries ArcOnline license; iframeable; Library Guide

Example: The Uprooted & Legacies of Labor

ESRI Story Maps

Text analysis looks at elements such as word frequencies, co-occurrence, and statistically generated ‘topics’ to perform ‘distant reading’ of large collections
Textual analysis projects are lesson plan projects

What is Textual Analysis?

Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment.
Work with your own corpus or practice on one of the included corpuses
Does work frequency, co-occurrence, word clouds, topic models, etc.; allows exporting of graphs and iframes
Cloud-based application that pairs well with a free text repository like Project Gutenberg

Example: A Republic of Emails

Voyant Tools