Blogging Academia

A HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum open now at http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forums/04-16-09Blogging-Academia

 

Much has been said of maps, and it seems that---with technologies and software such as Loopt, the iPhone, ArcGIS, and Google Maps and Earth---people are becoming increasingly familiar with where, exactly, they are located. Of course, mapping suggests more than "you are here." It implies not only the delimiting of how people relate to each other, to space and place, and to objects, but also the study of how those relationships emerge. What's more, mapping is no doubt a slippery term. As scholars such as Willard McCarty note, it is affiliated with an array of other concepts and practices, such as modeling, diagramming, networking, and representation. With such affiliations in mind, this HASTAC discussion, facilitated by Jentery Sayers and Matthew W. Wilson, seeks to aggregate and unpack how "mapping" (broadly understood) is mobilized in different learning and research spaces, across the disciplines, in the field of the digital humanities:

• How does mapping inform how scholars identify novel patterns in their own research and archives?
• What does mapping afford pedagogy and classroom learning, and how does it foster collaboration and media expansion?
• How do mapping projects by academics alter how they engage their community partners and publics, and vice versa?

Regardless of experience in or familiarity with the digital humanities, we invite participation from anyone who is currently involved in a mapping project. We imagine that contributors could include, but are certainly not limited to, critical geographers, cartographers, literary historians, artists, architects and urban planners, community-based researchers, cultural anthropologists, information scientists, students in digital humanities courses, public intellectuals, and scholars of new media, design, and composition.

Mapping the Digital Humanities
A HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum opening Monday, April 6 at www.hastac.org

 

Much has been said of maps, and it seems that---with technologies and software such as Loopt, the iPhone, ArcGIS, and Google Maps and Earth---people are becoming increasingly familiar with where, exactly, they are located. Of course, mapping suggests more than "you are here." It implies not only the delimiting of how people relate to each other, to space and place, and to objects, but also the study of how those relationships emerge. What's more, mapping is no doubt a slippery term. As scholars such as Willard McCarty note, it is affiliated with an array of other concepts and practices, such as modeling, diagramming, networking, and representation. With such affiliations in mind, this HASTAC discussion, facilitated by Jentery Sayers and Matthew W. Wilson, seeks to aggregate and unpack how "mapping" (broadly understood) is mobilized in different learning and research spaces, across the disciplines, in the field of the digital humanities.

Making Invisible Learning Visible

A HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum with
Randy Bass and Bret Eynon, co-Project Directors of the Visible
Knowledge
Project
Opening Monday, March 23
at www.hastac.org

How do students learn? What
types of learning take place in the
classroom? How do pedagogical and technological tools impact learning?

The Visible Knowledge Project,
a five-year
collaborative effort to study the impact of technology on learning,
began as an
effort to make visible the hidden intermediate processes students
undergo on
the path to learning. The project, co-directed by Randy Bass and Bret
Eynon, involved more than 70 faculty from 22 institutions who not only
experimented with incorporating new media technologies into their
classrooms,
but also drew on the scholarship of teaching and learning in order to
document
and reflect on their findings. Many of these insights are synthesized in the January 2009 issue of Academic
Commons. One of the project?s key findings has been the
importance of digital media in helping instructors to make visible the
modes
and aspects of learning - intermediate learning processes, the
importance of
affective learning, the roles of community or creativity - too often
made
secondary to outputs and accountability.

We encounter questions of
digital media and learning in contexts both
prosaic and designed, from institutional policies to individual
experiments to
collaborative efforts. Teachers and learners of all varieties enter
academic contexts with different levels of technological exposure and
skill,
some of which are immediately productive and others of which need to be
nurtured in order to advance the learning process. This HASTAC
Scholars
Discussion Forum, hosted by Daniel Chamberlain and Chalet Siedel, will
focus on
the questions raised by the efforts of the Visible Knowledge Project
and the
similar projects instigated by members of the HASTAC community and
beyond:

• How are classroom uses of new digital media transforming the nature of learning
  at your
  home institutions?
• What
  new forms
  of evidence of student learning could we be paying more attention to?
  Do new
  forms of learning yield new kinds of readable artifacts of student work?
• What
  kind of
  learning communities should institutions form in order to allow
  imaginative
  pedagogies to be locally shared? How can we leverage social tools to
  make
  these innovations broadly sharable?
• How
  might we
  better link classroom learning to integrative activities outside the
  formal
  curriculum, like undergraduate research, study abroad, internships, and
  service
  learning?
• How
  can emergent
  media technologies be used to encourage creativity in faculty and
  student
  discipline-related work?
• How
  much of the
  challenge of incorporating digital media into the classroom is about
  technological affinity, and how much is it about the uncertainty and
  loss of
  control that accompanies learner-centered pedagogies?

Digital Textuality and Tools

A HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum, open now at
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/03-09-09Digital-Textuality-and-Tools

The Global Middle Ages Project (GMAP), spearheaded by Geraldine Heng and Susan Noakes, is an effort to bring together scholars from many disciplines to see what insights and visions of the medieval world appear when collaboration and interconnection become key. One important facet of GMAP is the search to develop revolutionary tools to provide scholars, teachers, and students better access to artifacts such as digitized manuscripts. In this respect, it is one of many current efforts to make classical, medieval and other rare manuscripts available to a wider audience. These efforts confront multiple challenges, such as securing funding, finding effective and helpful ways to deploy new technologies, and publicizing their work widely, among others.

Given that scholars of all levels regularly must deal with texts of all sorts, the next generation of database interfaces--tools that enable advanced cross-referencing, collaborative research, and sophisticated visualizations of data--can apply to digital manuscripts as well as less insistently physical works like contemporary academic journals. Further, the questions raised by GMAP are relevant to any similarly interdisciplinary, interconnected work in other periods.

This HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum, hosted by Angela Kinney and Michael Widner, will focus on the questions raised by the efforts of GMAP and similar projects:

• How can we handle the sheer amount of data produced by digitization projects?
• How can we advocate for the continual upkeep of (now stagnated) digital resources, which are in danger of becoming so obsolete as to be useless?
• How can we stimulate funding for high-quality digitization of manuscripts and digital scholarly editions in an environment where palaeography and textual criticism is not esteemed as ?original? scholarly work?
• Is it worth investigating the implications of digitization on a sociological level?
• To what extent are we ignoring the significant gap between a digital image of a manuscript and the manuscript itself?
• Will widespread digitization efforts change the way we do research? How?
• What sorts of tools and initiatives do we need to improve the ways we research and learn?

Come join the discussion!

The Future of the Digital Humanities

A HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum, open now at
www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/02-02-09The-Future-of-the-Digital-Humanities

Where do the digital humanities go from here?

Digital humanities is not a discipline. It is an attitude towards technology across many disciplines. The changes wrought by the introduction of digital media to study in the humanities are in many ways inevitable--computing technologies have infiltrated every aspect of the academic workplace, even for those who do not think of themselves as working with "digital media." But they invite pressing questions. Historians can read more old books than ever before, but without visiting a physical archive or cracking an actual codex. And, without publishing their findings in print journals. What happens to disciplines built around the book when they no longer need books to do their work?

Joining the HASTAC Scholars for this discussion will be Brett Bobley, director of the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) within the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The ODH's stated goal is "to help coordinate the NEH's efforts in the area of digital scholarship." In 2008, the ODH awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to exciting new projects in the humanities, from text encoding, to interfaces for web access to cultural repositories, to preservation of born-digital literary artifacts. Come join the discussion, moderated by HASTAC Scholars
Kathleen Smith and Michael Gavin, and help decide where the digital humanities should be headed!

The Future of the Digital Humanities

A HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum, starting February 2 at www.hastac.org

Where do the digital humanities go from here?

Digital humanities is not a discipline. It is an attitude towards technology across many disciplines. The changes wrought by the introduction of digital media to study in the humanities are in many ways inevitable--computing technologies have infiltrated every aspect of the academic workplace, even for those who do not think of themselves as working with "digital media." But they invite pressing questions. Historians can read more old books than ever before, but without visiting a physical archive or cracking an actual codex. And, without publishing their findings in print journals. What happens to disciplines built around the book when they no longer need books to do their work?

Joining the HASTAC Scholars for this discussion will be Brett Bobley, director of the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) within the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The ODH's stated goal is "to help coordinate the NEH's efforts in the area of digital scholarship." In 2008, the ODH awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to exciting new projects in the humanities, from text encoding, to interfaces for web access to cultural repositories, to preservation of born-digital literary artifacts. Come join the discussion, moderated by HASTAC Scholars
Kathleen Smith and Michael Gavin, and help decide where the digital humanities should be headed!

Collaboration 2.0

A HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum, open NOW at
http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/1-14-09Collaboration-2-0

What makes for successful collaborations, and how can the Web facilitate these?
Come join the discussion!

Collaboration 2.0

A HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum, starting Wednesday, January 14 at
www.hastac.org

What makes for successful collaborations, and how can the Web facilitate these?

HASTAC Scholars Lindsey Andrews & Patrick Jagoda have just launched our latest HASTAC Scholars Discussion Forum on "Participatory Play: Digital Games from Spacewar! to Virtual Peace". Come join the discussion at http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/11-18-08Digital-Games!

Participatory Play:

Digital Games From Spacewar! to Virtual Peace

Forum open now at http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/11-18-08Digital-Games