#dariahTeach 22-24 March, Lausanne 2017
1. Keynote lectures abstracts (alphabetical order)
Mark Brown, Dublin City University (IE)
Shaping the Future of Digital Humanities: Off the Rails and Other Critical Tales
This talk adopts the metaphor of planes, trains and automobiles to critically reflect on
the past, present and future of the digital humanities. It tells a mingled yarn of the
seductive promise of new dream solutions for the modernisation of teaching and
learning in the drive for better and faster technologies set against the danger of old
ideas and traditional thinking reinventing the future. It reveals an inherent tension
between social and technological determinism, and economic and wider societal
drivers, and raises the question which way to the future? What direction should we go
and how do we get there? In exploring these questions the presentation confronts the
rhetoric reality gap between the state of the art and the state of the actual and asks what
does literacy mean in today’s digital society? A number of debates associated with
recent claims about the transformative potential of digital learning are then discussed
from a critical perspective. While these debates show the future still lives to a large
extent in the past the language of opportunity is adopted to illustrate through several
examples how today’s educators can re-envision the curriculum through digital
technologies to help produce more critical thinkers, critical consumers and critical
citizens. Finally, we look ahead to the future and consider some of the big challenges
and major change forces facing European educators in such uncertain times.
Darja Fišer, University of Ljubljana (SI)
CLARIN ERIC director of User Involvement
Integrating CLARIN language resources into the classroom environment
Despite the increasing amount, range, maturity and availability of language resources
and technologies, they are still highly underrepresented in curricula and teaching
materials. This is being successfully mitigated by recent bottom-up projects that have
developed digital state-of-the-art educational materials and on-line tutorials initiated
with support from the CLARIN research infrastructure. These projects focus on
various types of corpora, lexical, terminological, grammatical and stylistic resources,
as well as mono- and multilingual language technologies, such as The Language Bank
of Finnland collection of language resources or the WebLicht environment for
automatic annotation of text corpora. The developed materials are suitable for
researchers as well as educators of the future generations of digitally literate users in
the fields of linguistics and language pedagogy, but also in literary studies and other
disciplines of digital humanities. In the talk we give an overview of the educational
activities taken up in the context of CLARIN, discuss the lessons learned and sketch
future plans.
Marianne Huang & Susan Schreibman,
Aarhus University (DK) & Maynooth University (IE)
#dariahTeach Community-based Online Education
#dariahTeach is an open, community-driven online platform for digital humanities
teaching and training materials. At the point of writing, the project, funded by an
Erasmus + Strategic Partnership grant, has developed a platform (a customisation
of Moodle) that represents, as much as possible given time and budget constraints, our
approach to designing and delivering online education materials within a European
context. This talk will explore our approach in the context of the
project’s implementation, issues around developing teaching/training materials for a
field as diverse and fast-paced as DH, and discuss next steps for the project.
Jeremy Knox, University of Edinburgh (UK)
Teaching in the open: developing a critical practice
‘Openness’, having emerged as a powerful yet loosely defined idea in recent years, has
gathered particular momentum in educational circles, associated unmistakeably with
networked technologies. However, calls for ‘open education’ are too often premised on
uncritical notions of universal access to technology, standardised approaches to
education, the downgrading of teaching to ‘facilitation’, and the promise of populations
of self-directing, autonomous ‘learners’. This talk will suggest a number of critical
approaches to teaching ‘open’ courses, and developing a scholarship of ‘openness’ in
education, that are sensitive to the dilemmas and complicities of working with(in) the
web. It will draw on the experience of teaching two different ‘open’ formats at the
University of Edinburgh: an accredited course at postgraduate level, taught in ‘public’
social media spaces; and a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) delivered in
partnership with Coursera. These examples, and others, will be used to draw out key
themes entangled in the drive for openness: a problematic adherence to ‘negative’
openness, focusing on the dissolving of perceived barriers to education; the positioning
of technology as invisible and passive in the educational process; and a ‘data
colonialism’ apparent in the global reach of ‘massive’ courses. A critical practice in
these areas will be suggested to emerge from: working amongst the technologies and
cultural practices of the web, rather than replicating established institutional
pedagogies; recognising our co-constitutive, rather than deterministic, relations with
technology; and developing inclusive and participatory ways of analysing educational
data.
Susan McKenney, University of Twente (NL)
Curriculum materials that support teachers and their learning
Curriculum materials are resources designed for use by teachers in the learning
environment to guide instruction, including textbooks, supplementary units or
modules, or instructional media. Because these materials influence what teachers and
students do on a daily basis, they have the potential to play powerful roles in
educational improvement and innovation. High quality curriculum materials can help
improve student learning outcomes and student attitudes, as well as teacher
understanding of content, pedagogy or course orchestration. But not all materials are
high quality, and not all materials reach their audiences well. After briefly outlining
key mechanisms for teacher learning in higher education, this presentation then
discusses key characteristics of high quality curriculum materials that support those
mechanisms and ultimately, student learning. Attention is also given to the theory of
action underlying curricular features and how these can influence the uptake and use of
resources. The talk draws on research and experience in primary, secondary and
tertiary education, and discusses specific implications for open resources in higher
education.
Rikke Toft Nørgård, Aarhus University (DK)
New (infra)structures for the future university:
beyond digitized higher education?
Universities today increasingly perceive and conceptualise themselves as digital,
online and with global outreach in an attempt to claim ‘future education & new
educational futures’ through utilizing a technophile vocabulary. In consequence higher
education is pressed to become digitalized and globalized as universities rush to utilize
the potentials of technologies and the internet. Presently, we witness an abundance of
initiatives and strategies to construct online infrastructures for the future university in
the form of e.g. MOOCs, digital campuses, global universities, distance education or
virtual classrooms. However, the urge to digitize and globalize higher education
through going online has often caused a concurrent decrease in participation, diversity,
presence, connectedness and community. This talk explores some implications and
possibilities of moving beyond digitized higher education through evoking the concept
of hybridity. Hybrid HE and hybrid university (infra)structures then is characterized by
an effort to critically think beyond the conventional divides of the global and local,
digital and tangible, online and offline, students and teachers, academics and nonacademics, on-campus and in-world – to look for complex entanglements rather than
straightforward dichotomies. Through exploring these entanglements the talk moves on
to present six alternative university infrastructures and HE pathways. Rather than
abandoning the worn-out old and jumping blindly into the digitized new, the talk
investigates hybrid places, hybrid pedagogies, hybrid identities and hybrid education
emerging from such entangled university life worlds. Concretely, the talk offers insight
into hybrid university life forms through described and tried out HE formats, or HE
design patterns, such as open educational labs, public exams, pop-up supervision, interuniversity teaching and community-defined curriculum. Finally, the talk will conclude
with several findings and outcomes in relation to what occurs when universities,
courses, teachers, and students moves beyond digitized higher education.
2. Papers and posters short abstracts (alphabetical order)
Monica Berti, Institut für Informatik, Leipzig University (DE)
SunoikisisDC. An International Consortium of Digital Classics Programs
SunoikisisDC is an international consortium of Digital Classics programs developed by
the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at the University of Leipzig
in collaboration with the Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and the Perseus Digital
Library. SunoikisisDC offers collaborative online courses that foster interdisciplinary
paradigms of learning and allow students of both the humanities and computer science
to work together by contributing to digital classics projects in a collaborative
environment. Students are introduced to a range of technical approaches concerning
Digital Classics and are invited to consider how each technical approach offers new
ways of “reading” texts or material evidence from the ancient world, and provides
cross-disciplinary approaches to the relationship between historical and literary culture.
Michael Bourgatte & Laurent Tessier, Paris Catholic University (FR)
Video ressources and open education: challenges and perspectives
Digital humanities rely on various kind of texts and data, including video data that
become more and more pregnant. Engaging in an Open Education program relying on
video raises two types of questions: how to manage educational interactions around
audiovisual content? And how to address legal issues when video contents are under
copyright? We have tried to answer both of these questions with the implementation of
a secured movie annotation player connected to an open access LMS. At home or in a
library, anyone who is watching a video can annotate it, locating her/his comment on
the movie and share it. The aim of this device is to enhance online and classroom
interactions. During this conference, we will explain the logic of our approach. We will
also explore the challenges still lying ahead.
Marco Büchler, Greta Franzini, Emily Franzini, Maria Moritz,
University of Goettingen (DE)
From Written Manuscripts to Big Humanities Data
'Big Data' finds many definitions. Ulrike Rieß succinctly defines Big Data as: a)
impossible to process manually; b) flat-structured (e.g. texts and images); and c)
heterogeneous and distributed. Interestingly, other definitions also do not contain the
word 'digital'. GLAM institutions were Big Data holders long before the digital era.
The new component of Big Data is its preservation in digital ecosystems. The
implication for digitised Big Data for a Digital Humanities teaching programme is to
cover both scholarly and digital competencies. Furthermore, we train students to
collaborate across different fields and to form high performance teams. Content-wise,
courses focus on the transformation of texts and manuscripts into digital counterparts
for further analysis. One objective is to teach the students to apply acquired knowledge
to different scenarios and, in a second step, teach new knowledge to others.
Carmen Sophia Cadenas, European Documentation Center (IT)
The Digital Librarian as an Ethnographic Researcher: going undercover in the
classroom to collect data on the use of digital resources in language learning
The research has the aim of scanning the landscape of digital resources being used by
teachers and students of courses of Estonian language. For this purpose the author
participated in three beginner level Estonian language courses as an enrolled student in
three different language schools within the city of Tallinn and gathered data by
observing other students performing their regular academic activities in their natural
setting: the classroom. Hence the methodological approach: Ethnography, and the main
data collection technique: Covert Participant Observation. Additional interviews to
both teachers and students have been performed with the purpose of determining:
sources of educational digital resources, development of personal digital collections,
creation of educational digital resources, sharing and exchange practices of digital
resources among colleagues and motivations, barriers and frustrations.
Adam Crymble, University of Hertfordshire (UK)
White, Male, North American –
Challenges of Diversifying the Programming Historian
The Programming Historian is a growing suite of 56 peer-reviewed tutorials to help
humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate
their research. This paper shares progress on ongoing attempts to ‘internationalise’ and
‘diversify’ the project’s community. This includes attempts to address a serious gender
imbalance in contributing authors and reviewers, and an initiative to translate the
project into Spanish before cultivating a Spanish-language community. Our aim is to
work towards a gender- and linguistic-neutral space for the sharing of digital
humanities pedagogy resources.
Vinayak Das Gupta, Maynooth University (IE)
“Developing Electronic Teaching Resources for Indian Universities”
This paper discusses the challenges of developing electronic teaching resources
(published under a Creative Commons license) for Indian universities, specifically in
the field of Digital Humanities. The paper establishes the need for such teaching
methods and considers the problems of implementation using E-QUAL (Enhancing
Quality, Access and Governance of Undergraduate Education in India) — a European
Union funded international collaborative project — as a prototype for such an exercise.
In conjunction with the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University,
India an online teaching module was developed on the subject of Digital Culture. The
paper will discuss the developed module, both in terms of content and delivery, posing
questions that are not only pertinent to the Indian context, but perhaps to the wider
Digital Humanities community.
Nicole Durisch Gauthier and Lyonel Kaufmann,
University of Teacher Education, State of Vaud (CH)
Digitally enhanced teaching and learning as an answer
to the challenge of large classes? An exploratory study
This paper presents the first results of an exploratory study of the problems
encountered by teacher trainers and students in a large first-year lecture class at the
University of Teacher Education, State of Vaud. It is based on semi-structured
interviews among teacher trainers and on focus group feedback. More specifically, it
discusses the extent to which digital tools offer adequate solutions to the problems
identified (e.g. lack of interactivity and accommodation) in the short, medium and long
term. The SAMR (Substitution Augmentation Modification Redefinition) model will
be used to assess the innovative potential of the digital tools and resources under study
at a pedagogical level.
Maryam Foradi and Gregory Crane,
University of Leipzig (DE) & Tufts University (USA)
Online Vocabulary Learning through Generating Manual Translation
Alignment Data in the Context of Citizen Science Project
This paper explores the effects when readers try to align words and phrases in a
translation to corresponding words and phrases in a language that they have not
studied. We present effects on the context- and phrase-based learning of vocabulary,
reading comprehension and comparative investigation of existing translations of
classical resources. The process of manual alignment helps language learners deepen
their understanding of vocabularies (semantic components of terms). Furthermore,
readers find themselves confronted with syntactic patterns in the original text, and
based on their linguistic background in the target language they can often identify the
translator’s departures from the source text. This exercise, in our view, fundamentally
changed the effective relationship between translation and source text, with readers
seeing beyond the translation and beginning to understand elements of the source text
that were previously inaccessible.
Greta Franzini, Emily Franzini, Elisa Cugliana, Nicoletta Guido and Marco
Büchler, University of Goettingen (DE) & Università Ca' Foscari (IT)
Teaching Data Science – An Experience Report from Six International TRACER
Tutorials and Workshops with Mixed Classes
As the amount of digital data increasingly grows, so grows the need for machineassistance to process it. This growth also applies to historical data, and one type of
study requiring machine-assistance is text reuse detection to uncover intertextual
relations –be those quotations, paraphrase or allusions– or to help identify lines of
textual transmission. This contribution summarises our experience in running
international text reuse detection workshops and tutorials in Göttingen (Germany),
London (UK), Tartu (Estonia), Galway (Ireland), Kraków (Poland), Venice (Italy) and
Rome (Italy).
Jean-Luc Gilles, University of Teacher Education, State of Vaud (CH)
& Salvatore Tinnirello, Assess Group SA (BE)
DOCIMO: an Online Platform Dedicated to the Construction and the Quality
Management of Training Evaluations in a Digital Era
With the advent of the digital age, evaluation tools using information and
communication technologies are increasingly used to meet the needs of learners and
trainers. Our poster will present DOCIMO, an Open source online platform dedicated
to the construction and the quality management of training assessments based on a 8steps quality cycle: Analysis of the objectives of the evaluation; Design of the
assessment; Development of questions databases; Information of the assessed persons;
Completion of the evaluation; Correction and analysis of results; Production of
feedbacks and Macro-regulation to improve future assessments.
Elena González-Blanco & Clara Martínez, LINHD-UNED (ES),
Susanna Allés Torrent, Columbia University (USA) and Gimena del Rio Riande,
Secrit-Conicet (Argentina)
DH Training in Spanish: Digital Humanities as an e-learning platform to teach
between Spain and Latin America
This presentation will focus on the teaching activities of LINHD, a Digital Humanities
Innovation Lab (LINHD) focused in the Spanish-speaking world and hosted by the
Spanish National Distance University (UNED) since 2014. We will give a general
overview of the three main initiatives: standalone courses and seminars, three long
specialized degrees on DH basics, digital scholarly editing and stylometry, and a yearly
summer school. The pillars and innovations of these new programs are online training
and Spanish-speaking resources and teaching materials.
Frédéric Kaplan and Isabella di Lenardo, EPFL (CH)
Optimized scripting in Massive Open Online Courses
Optimized scripting in Massive Open Online Courses. The Time Machine MOOC,
currently under preparation and planned for launch in September 2017 is designed to
provide the necessary knowledge for students to use the editing tool of the Time
Machine platform. The first test case of the platform in centered on the City of Venice
and its archives. The performance of most tasks can be tested using some pre-defined
exercises and evaluation metrics, which allows for a precise evaluation of the level of
mastery of each student. Building upon the script concept developed by Dillenbourg
and colleagues, each tutorial is designed as a parameterized sequence. A simple
gradient descent method can be used to progressively optimize the parameters in order
to maximize the success rate of the students at the skill tests and therefore seek a form
of optimality among the various design choices for the teaching methods. Thus, the
more students use the platform, the more efficient teaching scripts become.
Péter Király, GWDG, Goettingen (DE)
Measuring metadata quality. A quick overview
The quality of metadata record is an issue which generated many discussions in digital
library context, however it is hard to define and hard to measure. Several papers
proposed methods to measure structural elements, which metrics could be in
connection of the quality. In a research project we aimed to create an open source
framework which implements these suggestions, and could be used by cultural heritage
collections. The tool helps teaching in showing different metadata use cases, customs,
and effects of patterns.
Moshe Lavee, University of Haifa (IL)
Back and Forth: A Case Study in Classical Rabbinic Literature as a Model for
Digital Humanities
An Edit-distance based study of of Classical Rabbinic Literature manuscripts was
proved efficient against firm conclusions based on classical philology and revealled
important unnoticed phenomena. The study demonstrates a back and forth model for
DH, which served us in desiging the new BSc Program in DH at the University of
Haifa : constant annd mutual feed beak between computational examinations and
classical Humanity methods.
Ivan Madjarov, Aix Marseille University, Toulon University,
CNRS, ENSAM, LSIS (FR)
Towards a responsive m-Learning design Service-based Framework
for Multi-Device Learning Content Adaptation
For an adaptive m-Learning it is important to deliver user-friendly learning content on
multiple devices with visuals that communicate effectively on all display sizes. We can
proceed either by developing a different version for every target device and browser or
by the implementation of an adaptive and responsive technique for course presentation.
We discuss about the possibilities of responsive technique to adapt learning content
compared to an adaptive service-based approach.
Michail Maiatsky & Ekaterina Velmezova, UNIL (CH),
Natalia Boyarskaya, & Alexey Boyarsky, EPFL (CH)
How to explore and to teach a cultural epoch through an interactive library
(VicoGlossia)
How to deal with complex cultural objects like a cultural epoch? Our platform
VicoGlossia offers a digital representation of a big text collection permitting to reveal,
analyse and discuss a variety of interconnections between texts of a given period.
Intended for a large public, the platform will be assayed on students in Slavic Studies
(UNIL) invited to add and evaluate annotations / comments to texts, to curate results of
automated analysis, to translate, to link “classical” literature to secondary one, to
exchange questions and information, to use existing (and inventing new) statistical and
semantic tools, to build visualizations etc. concerning a particular period (in our case,
Russia in the 1920-30s), therefore training both their hermeneutic skills and e‑literacy.
Karen O’Donnell, CODEC Research Centre, Durham University (UK)
False Binaries: Digital Education
and the Challenge of Training Priests Online
Can (and should) you train to be a priest (mostly) online? Education for ministry is not
only about the transmission of knowledge and skills, but explicitly about the formation
of the whole person—including spiritual formation. Many Christian educators have
challenged the idea that adequate transformative communities can be formed online
and that there is any way in which spiritual formation can take place in the digital
environment. I argue that these claims are based on an unchallenged and false set of
assumptions about the relationship between the digital world and the (so-called) ‘real’
world. The digital world is a material thing and our interaction with it is as embodied
as any other interaction. Instead of persisting with a perceived binary between the
digital and the ‘real’, I propose a model of augmented reality that transgresses
perceived boundaries and allows for a continuous sense of reality.
Gábor Pálko, Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest (HU)
& Gábor Tamás Molnár, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest (HU)
Active text apprehension and teaching literature through/in the medium
of the information and communications technology (ICT)
In our presentation we would like to give an account of a Hungarian research project
focusing on digitally enhanced/mediated education in secondary schools and teacher
training. The final goal of the project is to create course materials that present an active
and interactive approach to text comprehension with a special focus on digital
technologies. Our intention is to help foster a learning environment in which digital
competences and old-fashioned literacy can develop simultaneously. In this
presentation we will outline the framework of the project and reference existing good
practices.
Michael Piotrowski, University of Lausanne (CH)
History is the Future of Online Learning
Many people believe that computer-based teaching and learning only started to
emerge in the 21st century. In fact, however, much of it dates back to the 1960s. It is
hard to revolutionize learning, if only because the human intellect does not evolve at
the same speed as technology; however, one of the greatest obstacles to advancing
learning is the historical amnesia of the field, which leads to a continous reinvention
of the wheel. This talk is meant as a position statement: I argue that in order to
advance e-learning and to realize sustainable improvements in teaching and learning
it is imperative to study the history of e-learning and its successes and failures.
Neale Rooney and Susan Schreibman, Maynooth University (IE)
The digital in the Classroom:
a detailed study of the 1916 in transition project
This paper explores the creation process of the 1916 in Transition lesson plans for
secondary school students focusing on the Irish Easter Rising of 1916. The goal of the
project was to develop a series of freely-available resources for teachers utilising
online manuscript material. These lesson plans were created in a collaborative
environment with teachers working alongside with members of the Department of
Education, the Military Archives of Ireland, and the Letters of 1916. This presentation
will discuss the development process as well as two use cases from teachers who
utilised the resource in the classroom.
Sasha Rudan, Oslo University (NO)
Holistic education - DH toolset and methodologies for sustainable and frictionless
science-art-society cycle Long abstract online on dariah.eu/teach
Philippe Ruffieux, University of Teacher Education, State of Vaud (CH)
Sqily : collective validation of skills
I suggest presenting you a system of skills sharing on the model of learning by teaching and
skills trees used in hybrid training. The interest is to be centered on the communications
between students who must validate the skills of their peers. The platform structures the
knowledge to offer a personal way to everyone. It organizes the interactions around the
competences in order to favor the scaffolding. The expert-tutors increase their feelings of
competence and learn in depth through their teacher posture.
Kassahun Tilahun, Debre Berhan University (Ethiopia)
Addressing Diversity in Distance Learning: Theoretical Foundations and
Practical Approaches of Using Open Educational Resources in Higher Education
Institutions of Ethiopia
The paper gives a scholarly background on the concept and application of OER in
distance learning, particularly its usage in teaching and learning of HEIs of Africa. By
encouraging student-centered participatory learning, OER offers the opportunity to
move away from teacher-controlled transmission of knowledge. Learners are given
greater control, are responsible, can become more independent and self explanatory.
Despite the attractiveness of OER, it faces a number of challenges. OER as a concept
covers a range of applications, learning methods and processes. The paper argued that,
today is the time that Africa should start using OER facilities in all of the academic
institutes so as to lessen the burden of learner and involve them in cost effective
educational systems. Particular emphasis is given to Ethiopia.
Daniela Vaj, University of Lausanne (CH)
A new digital Wunderkammer for education
Wonderalp is a digital cabinet of curiosities that transforms any tablet or computer into
an Early Modern Wunderkammer. It is also a valuable teaching tool because it explores
the history of natural sciences in the Alps. Wonderalp is the last multimedia production
of the platform Viaticalpes & Viatimages, whose goal is to study the images published
in travel books from the middle of the XVIth to the beginning of the XXth Centuries.