[This has been cross-posted at Adeline Koh’s website, http://www.adelinekoh.org/.]

Adeline and I are thrilled to announce that we’ll be holding an “unconference” on digital pedagogy as a preconference workshop for the Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in 2013.

What are “Unconferences”?

The ten-year old unconference format emerged as a response to weaknesses of the traditional conference presentation. Unconferences are participant-driven gatherings where attendees spontaneously generate the itinerary. Perhaps the best example of the unconference format in the humanities thus far has been the THATCamps which originated at the Center of History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. The growth of interest in the unconference format within the humanities can be seen by the exponential growth of THATCamps, from one event in 2008, to three in 2009, to twenty-six in 2011.

Why an “Unconference”?

For the last several years, the MLA conference has increasingly welcomed new styles of presentation such as lightning talks and electronic roundtables, all aimed at increasing interactive discussion among the attendees. The organization continues to call for more change. In the Spring 2012 MLA Newsletter (PDF), both the MLA’s Program Committee and its Executive Director encouraged MLA members to consider new forms of presentations for the upcoming convention in Boston.

Our three-hour “unconference” on the subject of digital pedagogy is an attempt to answer this call to re-envision the conference format and introduce yet one more form of presentation at the annual Convention.

Unconference Theme: Digital Pedagogy

Attendees of our Digital Pedagogy Unconference will consider: what would you like to learn and instruct others about teaching with technology?

While interest in digital pedagogy has grown along with the rise of the digital humanities, these two fields are not identical. Although all instructors are being increasingly encouraged to incorporate technology into their pedagogy, not all of these instructors may want to become digital humanists. As such, digital pedagogy has a broad application for scholars of language and literature.

More Soon!

• We expect to offer 50 seats for the unconference workshop and to charge a small fee to sign up.
• Expect a website for the unconference to be forthcoming in the summer/fall of 2012, with more details and instructions about how to sign up.

We’re both incredibly excited, and hope you’ll join us there!

I’m pleased to announce that I have accepted a position as Digital Humanities Strategist in Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons. In this role, which I’ll begin on 1 July, I’ll continue my work to establish our Mellon Foundation-funded center, to manage and develop digital humanities projects, and to work for shifts in the training of both undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities. This position will build on the work that I’ve done in the Robert W. Woodruff Library over the last two years of my CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship.

I’ve often said that the CLIR Postdoc is an alt-ac experience, and perhaps the most exciting thing about my new job is that it’s truly a hybrid position. I hold a joint appointment as a Lecturer in Emory’s English Department and College. I will be teaching one class per year and am a full member of the faculty for purposes of governance. Posts like mine are very unusual for universities, and I’m proud to see Emory taking a lead in this way.

I believe such hybrid positions are in many ways the future of higher education; if we want to help graduate students, in particular, think more broadly about what they can do with their degree, then we need to have them see people working jobs that aren’t just tenured and tenure-track faculty members. They need to have more visions of their possible futures and to have them in their departments. I am hopeful that the classes I teach in digital humanities will help grow new scholars, who are equally at home in the tenure or alt-ac tracks or who can find new ways to apply their humanities training to any job, whether associated with the academy or not.

Achieving all of these goals will certainly require a long-term strategy. And while I like a game of Civilization as much as the next kid who came of age in the early 1990s, I think our situation–in the digital humanities and at Emory–is much closer to a match of Starcraft. While we need a long-term vision, what will really win the day is tactics, as we constantly adjust our work to a rapidly developing field and a whole new range of scholarly communication patterns. Running and gunning is what we’ve been doing in digital humanities for the last several years, and I don’t foresee it changing. So while my card will read “Strategist,” feel free to replace that with “Tactician.”

I’ve been affiliated with Emory for 10 years now. Time to get started on the next decade.

(EDITED to correct the missing sentence fragments.)

On 25 and 26 April, Roger Whitson and I had the opportunity to visit the University of Florida on the invitation of Laurie N. Taylor, Digital Humanities Librarian in the George A. Smathers Libraries. We had the opportunity to learn about the work of UF’s Digital Collections and attended UF’s Research Computing Day, where got to see the some of the work done by UF’S High-Performance Computing Center. On the way to the latter, we stopped in at the protest about the proposal to eliminate UF’s Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, signed petitions, and offered to take any willing computer scientists back to Emory with us.

The following day, we had the opportunity to attend UF’s Spring 2012 Interface Faculty Seminar and first Digital Humanities Day. We heard about different pedagogical strategies being deployed in courses across the university, including social media, wikis, and resources for sharing pedagogical materials. We also heard from about some innovative and long-running digital humanities initiatives at UF, including the amazing Digital Epigraphy Toolbox, which will allow scholars around the world to preserve epigraphic inscriptions using a simple desktop scanner.

Roger and I were flattered to be asked to deliver the keynote for the Interface + Digital Humanities Day event. Given the theme of the event–Open Resources, Open Possibilities–we decided to be as polemical as we could and titled our talk “Theses on the Open Humanities.” We couldn’t find anything to nail them to, alas.

It was an interesting experience for us to figure out how we would compose and deliver a joint keynote. What we didn’t think would be a problem was the Twitter backchannel. In a desire to make the talk as open as possible, we reached out to colleagues to watch the live stream of the event and to tweet along with the talk and the participants in Florida. Unfortunately, our first hashtag got deluged by spammers. As did the second hashtag. We managed to make it through the rest of the talk on the third hashtag. If you want to see the archived Twitter conversations, Roger captured them (sans spam) via Storify.

Our address has likewise been archived, so you can watch us and our slides. In the interest of making the presentation as accessible as possible, however, we decided to cross-post an approximation of the presentation on our blogs, along with our slides.

While the title of our presentation is “Theses on the Open Humanities,” we recognize that not everyone is a humanist. It is just as easy to retitle this, “Theses on Open Teaching.”

I thought I’d squeeze Walter Benjamin into the discussion. Apologies to those of you who don’t know who he is. It also gives a sense of what we are trying to do in this talk, and that is to sketch what Benjamin calls a constellation. This means, that when using digital technology, we are still in the experimental phase, so we really don’t know what we are doing yet. We’re doing stuff and seeing what happens. When talking about the future of the University, you don’t really know what the fruit of your efforts is going to be, but we’re forging ahead. The ideas that we have are rough sketches, or a constellation, of what is possible, but obviously there are a lot of other things that you can do too.

We’re trying to connect the stars, but we might be a little off.

We’re structuring this as a series of theses that we’re going to present to you as offerings or arguments about what the open humanities or the Open University can be. Our first thesis is “Open Source equals Open Possibility.”

What can open source do? What are the complications? This is a riff on the theme of the conference. “Open Resources, Open Possibilities.”

What is open access? What is open source? Is there a difference between the two? What do they really mean? A lot of people throw these terms around without really defining them. There are many ways to talk about free and open resources. There’s the free software movement, the copyleft movement, the creative commons movement. The two we are interested in this talk are open access and open source. There’s a really great definition of open access by Peter Suber in which he says that it literature that “is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” What’s key here is the idea of digital distribution. The open access movement depends upon digitial distribution because you want to distribute your work to a wide variety of people.

Fun fact: Peter Suber is a philosophy professor, a copyright lawyer, director of Harvard’s open access project, and a senior researcher at SPARC. What we’re finding, and this is reflected in the career that is coming together for me, is that many of the scholars emerging in this world of digital technology and open access are hybrid scholars. They do a lot of different things. We were talking at the Research Computing Day, and there was this question about tenure. I made a comment that some people are going to be open to the new forms of scholarship emerging now, and some people aren’t. The scholars coming up for tenure in the next few years are probably going to have to do both traditional and digital work. And that sucks, because that means that we are going to have to do double the work. But that’s where we are right now. The type of scholar that’s needed is what Suber exemplifies: the scholar who dips his/her hand into several different places and mashes them together and tries to see what comes out of that.

Different initiatives within the open access movement. One is HathiTrust: a consortium of libraries that emerged after Google started digitizing books. Google would go into these libraries, and offer to digitize books if Google could keep a copy on their network. Libraries jumped at the idea, but didn’t realize that Google wouldn’t digitize multiple copies of the same book. If they digitized Huckleberry Finn at one library, they wouldn’t digitize it at another library. HathiTrust is a collaborative pool of digitized resources, or a gigantic digital library, that emerged due to this problem.

Here is one of the complexities of the emerging digital environment that involves HathiTrust. HathiTrust is currently involved in a lawsuit with the Author’s Guild over so-called orphan works. Orphan works are works still under copyright, but where the owner of the copyright can’t be located. These are works that are not being published, so they are simply unavailable. HathiTrust is trying to make these resources available. The Author’s Guild disagrees. So, navigating this new terrain is difficult sometimes.

Another thing I wanted to show is MediaCommons. It’s run by Katherine Fitzpatrick, author of a powerful book on Open Access and Peer Review called Planned Obsolescence. She’s an advocate of post-publication review, which is about leveraging the resources of the internet to widen the scope of peer review to non-academic audiences. Planned Obsolescencewas reviewed online before it was published. She invited anyone who wanted to comment on her work to do so.

One cool publishing platform run by MediaCommonsis In Media Res, in which authors engage in curations. Authors will post a YouTube video, or some form of electronic publication, embed it on their site, and write around 400 words about that media object. The point of this is not to create a finely-crafted argument, but to start a conversation.

Another really cool thing that’s occurring in open access right now is this public statement that Harvard made on April 17th. They said that they can no longer pay the 3.75 million dollars that it costs to buy journals every year. Harvard is saying that instead of paying for these journals, we need to start encouraging our professors to publish in open access venues. On the opposite side, in my own field literary studies, Steven Shaviro has recently blogged about the contract he received from Oxford University Press that wanted to make his most recent book into work-for-hire. This means that Shaviro would have never owned the rights to his work. So, these are the struggles that are occurring now around Open Access. Scholars, especially from the sciences, are refusing to do work for journals run with these kinds of policies. They are saying that until these journals make their resources more open, they aren’t going to work for them.

I wanted to talk about the difference between open access and open source. Open access is really about dissemination of content. Open source is more interesting, at least in the digital humanities where I work. The open source initiative says, that open source is really about promoting “free redistribution and access to an end product’s design and implementation details.” This generally refers to software. So it says “I have this program. I am going to make the code for this program freely available, so you can take parts of it and do interesting things with it.” And, yay, UF for embracing Sakai, which is an open source Learning Management System. There are striking differences between the centralized, proprietary development structure that Blackboard uses. Sakai developed as a group of Universities that got together and collaborated on a piece of software. Sakai has a folksonomic approach to the production of their LMS.

So this question: “Why Open Source,” is interesting. Currently Blackboard has acquired many of the support companies that work for Sakai. Blackboard says, on their website, that they see that the future is open source, so they want to provide open source and proprietary solutions for different groups of people. Scholars in the DH community are looking at this with skepticism. Blackboard has acquired all sorts of different companies that have provided LMS services, like WebCT for example. So, many people are saying “Really? Do you really care about open source?” 

Great quote from Audrey Waters, who writes about educational technology. She calls what Blackboard is doing “open washing,” which she defines as “having the appearance of open source and open licensing for marketing purposes while continuing proprietary practices.” It makes you question the reason why Blackboard made this decision. If Blackboard acquires all of the major open source LMSs, what does this mean for the future of open source in the Learning Managment community? There’s a huge question surrounding Blackboard’s intention with this move. I’d like to hand it over to Brian. There’s been a movement in the DH community to use CMSs like WordPress as LMSs to make all of this more open and public.

Our second thesis is that “Being open connects you to reality.”

One of the difficulties of academic work is that it can frequently be insular. We write articles or books to a relatively small group of people. We often give conference presentations at the same organization, to the same people, year after year. In a certain sense, our work can become robotic.

In the last two weeks, the value of academic robots has been debated following an article in Inside Higher Ed. The article reported on a study conducted at the University of Akron on automated essay scoring software. The researchers compared the performance of the software with that of trained human graders on a sample of 22,000 essays.

Surprisingly (or not–it is, after all, the 21st century), the Akron team found the differences between computational and human scoring to be minimal.

Of the many responses to this article, the ones that struck me most were the ones that critiqued not the ability of the software but the type of writing that they are asked to grade: standardized exams.

The University at Buffalo’s Alex Reid perhaps put it best, “If computers can read like people it’s because we have trained people to read like computers. [...] And FYC essays are perhaps the best real world instantiation of the widget, the fictional product, produced merely as a generic example of production. They never leave the warehouse, never get shipped to market, and are never used for anything except test runs on the factory floor.”

If we as academics feel like we’re working in a walled garden…

…an ivory tower…

…or fortress of solitude (take your pick), imagine how our students feel. Too often, we ask them to do work that isn’t connected to the outside world. Being open can change this.

In the fall I taught “Introduction to Digital Humanities” in the English Department at Emory. As a class, we read about the history of the field and its current trajectories and we wrote and built together. Rather than funnel the students’ work from them to me and back in a closed loop, however, we decided to be open, and all of the students’ work was posted to the course’s public website.

As I’m sure many of you have found when having your students blog, there is a real change when the students are no longer writing solely to you but instead are writing to one another. Discussions become easier when the students have already started responding to the course materials. The discussion, after all, has begun prior to the beginning of class. When working in the open, student writing also improves because, as studies have shown, students care more about what their peers think than their professors (see Cathy N. Davidson, Now You See It, New York: Viking, 2011, p. 101).

But as pedagogically useful as writing to one another was, the students’ experience of the class was transformed when the people they were writing about began writing back to them. We would, for example, read an essay by Stephen Ramsay. The students would blog about it.

And then, lo and behold, Steve would interact with my students. My students got comments from other theorists and critics of the digital humanities, but also from publishers, project managers, and interested members of the public.

It wasn’t simply that my students got to talk with experts either; they became experts themselves. My students gave group presentations about different digital humanities projects and blogged their analyses. A few weeks later, I learned that my students were being cited in other undergrad classes.

The technology matters here. If we’d been using a tool that put us in a walled garden, it wouldn’t have mattered if that tool was open source. Instead, we had to be working visibly and consciously in the public.

Being open with our work meant that we were no longer studying something disinterestedly. We weren’t building widgets; we were building a conversation. And by being open, we became connected to reality.

So I want to talk about another way of thinking about openness, and so our third thesis is a little bit of a joke: openness is antithetical to jargon or openness </3 jargon. They’re both jargony, right?

This is an issue that came to a head with a recent post by Alice Bell. She’s talking about scholarship, but it is connected to what Brian was talking about earlier with his teaching. There are different ways that our gardens become walled. See Bell’s quote. This is really important. I talked with Ryan Cordell on Twitter, and I asked him why public work in the humanities is so important. And he answered, if we are going to be enclosed in our little holes writing our work, why should the public care about funding us?

Similar question, and this is coming off of what Brian said earlier. Who are our students writing for? I love this image, because, this is the image of me grading after a bunch of students have sent in their work. We’ve all had this experience, because we’ve all had the 50 papers at midnight, and we’ve all stared at them, and half of them have horrible thesis statements, and we get more and more aggravated, and who knows how accurate your grading is in these moments? And you really have to question, is this really why your students are writing? Is this their audience?

One of the things I’m thinking about doing in the fall, is to create an Omeka assignment. I really want my students to start thinking about what audiences they are writing their work for, and how does their writing reflect that. It’s one thing to do what Brian’s done and make student work accessible on the web. It’s another thing to ask your students about what kinds of audiences they want for their work, and how they are going to edit their work to make it accessible to these different audiences? I’m going to have my students curate their entire course on Omeka. Omeka is a WordPress for museum exhibits and curations. The people at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University created a museum version of this where you can produce online exhibits. I had my students curate their next class, and then take it to a publisher and see what that means.

A lot of people have used Omeka in the past to teach students about metadata. And metadata is a funny thing. If you ask someone about metadata, their basic response is that it is data about data. That’s true, but it doesn’t tell you anything. Metadata is the way that data is structured in any online program. In the humanities, this leads to many interesting questions. Why, for example, is Churchill seen as an actor in the Battle of Yalta? What does that mean, rhetorically? You could ask questions like that. 

By engaging in these questions, Tonya Howe argues that you give students a better understanding and more systematic understanding of how things are categorized. Students become more cognizant of how knowledge is put together. This can change, she argues, how we conduct searches. And I’d argue that it is even more profound than this. From a humanities standpoint it’s really about how we conceptualize what we know. And how can the structure of data change this?

Our fourth thesis is “Openness is not Homogeneous.”

In recent months, you might have read about some interesting experiments in open education. During the Fall 2011 semester, a Stanford computer science professor and a Google Exec offered a free, online version of a course on artificial intelligence.

160,000 students enrolled.

In January of this year, Sebastian Thrun left his tenured teaching position at Stanford in order to start Udacity, which aims to offer online courses to even larger audiences. (So at least there will be one way left for people at the University of Florida to study Computer Science.)

Udacity isn’t a new idea. MIT has been making its course content available for almost 10 years with OpenCourseWare. There’s Khan Academy, which has amassed more than 144 million views across 3,000 videos. Roger’s Omeka project is similar to these endeavors by taking specialized content and making it available publicly.

This one-to-many approach is one way of making our teaching open. But it’s important to recognize that—again—openness is not homogeneous. Multiple openness can take place within the university and our teaching.

I want to tell you about another project from my Intro to DH class. One of the novels we read was Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. House of Leaves is a story about a tattoo shop assistant who finds a manuscript of an academic text written by a blind man about a documentary about a house that’s bigger on the inside than the outside. A film that does not exist.

It’s 700 pages of postmodern, post-print experimental writing. A horror story that literally requires decoding.

Crucially, it’s a book that’s too hard to read by oneself. You’re not supposed to read it by yourself. That’s one of the reasons it works great in a class. But if it works with one class, I wondered, how would it work with more?

So I put out a call on Twitter for people to have their classes read along with mine.

And in short order, I had four collaborators from four different institutions; we paired a small liberal arts college for women, a small public institution, and two large public universities with my medium-sized private school.

We tossed around a couple of ideas for assignments, but what we decided upon was a collaborative forum where the students would ask questions and speculate about the text’s many mysteries. Not coincidentally, we designed the forum to resemble the original HoL forums, where people parsed out the text in identical ways following the book’s release in 2000.

Each class had its own schedule, but we generally started reading at the same time so the students would be close to one another and avoid spoilers.

For another twist, three of the courses met in the exact same time slot, so we used Google Hangouts in the three different classrooms to bring all 40+ of our students together for an hour-long discussion. The discussion was guided by questions that had not really had much attention paid them in the forums. We began by discussing why the setting of the novel in Los Angeles mattered.

From there, someone asked about the other setting, Virginia. One of my students opined that it didn’t matter like LA, that it had just been picked at random. The students in Zach Whalen’s class at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg Virginia, however, thoughts very different. They helped my class and the other understand portions of the novel in the context of Virginia’s history.

My students responded really well to this project. One of them wrote, “Several times, I was struck by analysis of a certain character or event on the forums that significantly changed or enhanced my understanding of the novel. I just felt like my understanding of the book would have been much more incomplete had I not had access to the forums.”

The amazing thing about this experiment was that it wasn’t hard at all. We have the tools that make such openness possible: the Internet, free forum software, Google Docs for co-writing assignments, and (fortunately) academic freedom to experiment with how we do our work.

While the outcomes of this project are open on the web, the experience of building the forums together was not open. And it was in that experience of making rather than just absorbing where we differed from Khan Academy.

Instead, we opened the classroom in a different way. Udacity might be one way to be open with how we teach in the 21st century. But it’s not the only way. Openness is not homogeneous.

Brian talked about the fact that there is a lot of software out there that you can use, a lot of it based on Google, a lot of it made by these large corporations. There’s another long term goal that those of us in Universities need to embrace. And this goal is driven by our fifth thesis, “We can’t depend upon other people to be open for us.”

It is exemplified by an experience I had having my students tweet last Spring. I taught a course on William Blake and asked students to tweet three times during class discussions and at least three times outside of class during the week. I found that using a Twitter backchannel really made them engage with the poem in ways that I had never experienced with students before. I did this while teaching at Georgia Tech. Tech has a policy where every student has to have a laptop. So, that made it easier to require them to tweet. So, that’s an inversion in terms of how people usually think of banning – for example – Facebook from the classroom. I say, no, I want you plugged into the web. I just want you to be doing that while achieving course objectives. The amount of material generated by this project is fascinating to me. So, I calculated that, basically, each individual students generated roughly the equivalent of 100 pages of text while tweeting. This blows the Florida State Gordon Rule out of the water, in quantity if not quality. But thinking about quality also, I found that students would retain much more knowledge and become more inquisitive while using Twitter. They engaged the text on a deeper level, and they were constantly asking questions back and forth. Some student would have a question, and another student would answer it before I could even respond. After most of my classes, I’d go on my computer and check out the back channel, and I found that several times, the backchannel conversation was more interesting than the conversation I was leading in class.

There’s a question about evaluation, when it comes to Twitter. I don’t want my students saying “I’m thirsty” and having it count for classroom participation. David Silver developed this method of assessment that he calls “thick and thin tweets” and he says that the “I’m thirsty tweets are thin, while tweets that accomplished more were ‘thick.’” I didn’t discourage thin tweets, by the way. Thin tweets are important for building community. You get the sense that the people you are talking to are actually real people, rather than quotes on a screen. You can see that they have children or cats or they had a bad day at work. These are all important insights when building a community on Twitter. Twitter isn’t just talking to each other, it’s about learning about each other. So, I didn’t not want them to post thin tweets, I just didn’t count them toward their requirement. So, here’s an example of a thick tweet by Mark Sample. Kelli Marshall put it on her blog, and she pointed out that there were at least four levels to this tweet. 1) It’s asking a question; 2) it’s referring to an authoritative source (ProfHacker); 3) It’s talking about teaching with Twitter; 4) It mentions that the article on ProfHacker is about teaching with Twitter; 4) And it’s linking to an essay. So, there’s a lot going on here. I want to teach this notion of concision with Twitter. You can do a lot with it.

Here’s a network relational map of different tweets from THATCamp CHNM 2010. It shows the relationships that are formed and the Twitter chatter that goes back and forth between these people. In blue, it’s only a one-way follow. One-way follow means that I may follow you, but you may not follow me. Two-way follow means that we follow each other. And it gives you a sense of how Twitter generates a community. The conversations that occur generate a feedback loop of follows and increasing levels of engagement within conversations.

I also wanted to mention Jesse Stommel’s Twitter Essay. Jesse told his students to create an essay in 140 characters. And I want you to say something meaningful in 140 characters. This is a different way to think about language. A lot of people who criticize Twitter argue that nothing meaningful can be said in 140 characters. And I respond, really? Where’s your imagination? Have you read a haiku, or any genre of lyrical poetry? What about Ezra Pound’s Imagist movement? Is that not meaningful? This is a brilliant response from one of Jesse’s students to his mention of doing something with queer theory in a tweet. The student basically queers the word itself. It has this performative aspect to it that you couldn’t really achieve without the limitations imposed by Twitter. It forces these new kinds of ideas to emerge in your students.

So, this thesis is really about why you can’t allow other people to be open for you. This is especially the case with Twitter, since Tweets are ephemeral. Twapper Keeper was a really awesome online resource designed to archive tweets based on a hashtag. So I thought I’d archive my student tweets, and then use them when I went about writing on my Blake class. Twitter changed its API policy in 2011 so that Twapper Keeper could not archive the tweets.

This is from Twapper Keeper’s blog.

This was a devastating blow to the DH community. Think about how much potential research was lost when the API terms changed. There are other options, like the Archivist, and another from Martin Hawksky which uses Google Docs to archive. But both of these are essentially commercial solutions.

This is all to say that the humanities have to be a community of practice. The University has to be a community of practice. It can’t rely upon Google. However cool Google is as a company, it is still not fundamentally interested in the public good. This is precisely what DH and other digital forms of scholarship can contribute that proprietary companies cannot: a public and open source approach to useful tool building. It needs to start developing infrastructure to do that. Universities have started that project, but it really hasn’t trickled down into the disciplines, at least in literary studies.

So this is a quote about the imminent demise of CISE at UF from the Dean of Computing at Georgia Tech. It’s very interesting. I think the quote is absolutely correct. The future of the University, whether we like it or not, will be shaped by digital technology. It’s just the reality that we face. I tend to like it. Obviously there are political issues, in terms of advocating for departments like this, that will help this situation. But we also need to think about the political structures in our departments and what we count as useful and tenurable work. And so I included the bottom quote by Olin Bjork, who works in the digital humanities, because it is ironic and because it underlines the problems we are currently facing in our departments today. It’s stupid that he gets more credit for writing about databases than he does actually building them – especially since we are currently facing a need for building new tools that aren’t reliant upon proprietary models. It is absolutely stupid that it is difficult in a lot of departments to get credit for tenure for designing databases and scholarly tools. That should be front and center. That kind of work should be the priority of our humanities departments.

As Roger’s just said, we can’t necessarily count on others to be open for us. We need, then, to work to be open, to, perhaps, having others fork with us.

Such a stance–a default to openness–need not only be linked to the tools that we are using. It can also be the mode in which we treat our intellectual work.

We all know what it means to build on the work of those who have come before us. Acknowledging that work and how it has shaped our own research is one of the functions of an article’s lit review. And we expect our own research to be cited in such ways in the future.

But what would it mean for us to think similarly about our teaching?

Designing assignments is hard work; creating a new class is even more difficult. If you’re anything like me, when you’ve decided to do one or the other, you don’t work ex nihilo. Instead, I ask friends and colleagues for examples of what they’ve done. I then adapt and build upon their work.

And in some cases, where their assignments are truly excellent, I just steal–all the best pedagogues do the same.

Why don’t we acknowledge the provenance of these ideas when we’re teaching? We already have a model for recognizing the work of others in our publications, and that might be able to work for our teaching.

But there’s another model that we can build on, taken from software development, which Trevor Owens recently observed in a Twitter conversation. That model is “forking.”

“Forking” takes place when you share your code with someone else, perhaps via a tool like GitHub, a repository for open source code that supports version control. Developers can share code using GitHub and then other developers can add on to that code, with the repository tracking all the changes.

If a developer wants to take a piece of code down a different line of development, she “forks” the code. The fork shows the provenance of the code while still allowing you to adapt it to your own needs.

Finding a platform to “fork your syllabus” would not only allow you to give acknowledgments to those whose work you drew on, but it would invite others to make use of your syllabus for their own development. I wrote about these ideas on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog, ProfHacker.

And as luck would have it, Lincoln Mullen forked me and posted instructions on ProfHacker for using GitHub to do just this: sharing your syllabi.

When I designed my Intro to DH course, I consulted many friends and colleagues, and I blogged about these inspirations. I also licensed the work on my course website with a Creative Commons license, inviting people to fork with my work. But I’m now building a repository for the same materials in GitHub.

And I wonder: will our students better understand citation if we cited our own sources more regularly in our work?

Perhaps if I wasn’t so concerned with appearing like my idea of “A Professor” in my classes, perhaps if I told my students that I looked up what I just told them about William Faulkner’s home life in the Wikipedia as I was preparing for our discussion, maybe they would realize that citation is necessary.

We’re lucky today that we have so many tools that can assist us to be open. We just have to embrace a shift in perspective. We have to be open to people forking with us.

These, then, are our six theses for the open humanities, or perhaps Open Teaching. We’ve been interested to see the conversation that’s already happening on Twitter, and we’re excited to hear from you now. Help connect us to reality!

Thanks.

As someone who went to grad school in large part due to a fascination with Derrida, I perhaps shouldn’t be surprised that so much of academia seems to be about deferral. Nevertheless I’m always surprised to see something that I wrote months or years ago show up, out of the blue, in its finished form. That happened last week, when I got the print version of an essay I was invited to write for The Academic Exchange, “A Forum for Emory Faculty, Work, Life, and Thought.” My piece, “An Experiment in Progress” (PDF) looks at the relationship between libraries, digital scholarship, teaching, and undergraduate research. Along the way, I talk about the final project for my course “Introduction to Digital Humanities” and several of the projects that we’ve been working on in DiSC this year. If you can’t wait to see the launch of the projects and don’t mind spoilers, you’ll want to take a look!

I was also recently notified that the Twitter assignment that I designed in 2008 for a class at Emory and revised for inclusion in a Spring 2010 course at Clemson has been cited in a white paper (PDF) from OnlineCollege.org. (Talk about zombies/deferral…) True to the white paper’s title–”Implementing Live Twitter Chat Discussion Sessions”–it gives an introduction to Twitter and how it might be used in the classroom or for conducting larger events, like #FYCchat. If you’ve never used Twitter, I’d perhaps recommend starting with a ProfHacker post or two, but this white paper might give you some different strategies aimed particularly at structuring asynchronous chats. What I find most interesting about this whole thing is how my assignment has become a resource–and a citation!–for others, simply by the fact that I’ve shared it online. As Melissa Terras has recently shown, what’s not to gain from making our work public?

It’s that time of the year again: the Day of the Life of the Digital Humanities or Day of DH. As has been the case since 2009, hundreds of digital humanities practitioners will take to the blogs and Twitter (follow #dayofDH) to talk about what they do throughout a single day’s work. The goals of the project are various, but among them are highlighting the wide array of activities that fall under the banner of DH. It also doesn’t hurt to sometimes remind people who wonder if college professors work hard enough exactly what we do with our time.

When registering to participate, one of the things you will be asked to do is provide a definition of what “digital humanities” means. If you’ve been around this conversation any time at all, you know that this is a great way to start fights. (And trust me, you don’t want Matt Kirschenbaum to crane kick you.) But in true digital-humanist fashion, asking that question is a great way to create a data set as well.

If you’ve previously participated in the Day of DH festivities (Feats of Strengths, included), you don’t actually have to provide a definition this year.

Oh thank god it's no longer required that you define digital humanities to sign up for #dayofdh. I have "define DH" fatigue.

March 26, 2012 11:45 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@dancohen

Dan Cohen

And while I thought about skipping the definition this year, I decided it would be interesting to compare my definition this year to last year’s. Here’s what I wrote then:

When I’m asked, I like to say that digital humanities is just one method for doing humanistic inquiry.

This year’s definition starts in the same place but explains what I mean by “humanistic inquiry”:

Digital humanities is just one method for conducting humanistic inquiry. Doing research in the humanities often boils down to finding a pattern–in a single text or across several texts–and then providing an interpretation of that pattern. In digital humanities, computation is used to assist in pattern recognition, pulling out patterns that would be difficult for humans to find unassisted. Interpretation of that pattern, however, remains the most important part of the process.

As I taught my undergraduate “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” I found that the emphasis on pattern recognition was the best way to help the students connect their previous work in the humanities to the experiments we ran in that class. I lose points on brevity, but I hope that I’ve picked up enough on clarity to make it worth it. We’ll see how I do in 2013.

My oldest recently turned 9. And with birthdays, it turns out, come gifting opportunities. While there are always some good standbys for him (e.g., LEGO), he’s really been enjoying the Tin Tin collections from our public library. Since it’s been hard to get him to read long narratives—or even listen to them—we have been excited to encourage him. And so I took to Twitter to get recommendations for something age appropriate.

Looking for graphic novel / comics suggestions for a 9yo.

March 4, 2012 10:22 pm via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite

@briancroxall

Brian Croxall

As I’ve come to expect from the great real-time community of Twitter, I got a lot of suggestions that were new to me. I also got more than a few requests to share all of the suggestions. So here’s a condensed list of everything that was mentioned:

• Asterix & Obelix
• Bone
• Tin Tin
• Little Vampire
• Owly
• Salt Water Taffy
• Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers
• Time Warp Trio
• Super Dinosaur
• Lucky Luke
• Amulet
• Complete Peanuts box sets
• Calvin and Hobbes
• Reed Gunther
• Tower of Treasure
• Taiko
• The Boom! Studios Muppet Show Books
• G-Man
• Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors
• Sketch Monsters
• Johnny Boo
• The Shy Creatures
• Secret Science Alliance
• The Little Prince
• Buddha
• Ramayan 3392 AD
• G-Man
• Wizard of Oz graphic novels
• Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade
• Marvel Showcase and Essential collections
• Shazam!
• Unshelved
• Amelia Rules
• The Courageous Princess
• Usagi Yojimbo
• Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
• The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology
• The Baby Sitters Club graphic novels
• Cartoon History of the Universe
• The Magic Flute (adaptation of the opera)
• Tales of Vishnu
• Kaliman (if you read Spanish)

Now, I know that some of these are comics or comic strips rather than graphic novels proper. But since they were suggested, I’m including them just the same. And there were some overwhelming winners on this list. I’ve ordered it roughly with the volumes with got the most mentions toward the top. Without question, Asterix & Obelix, Bone, and Tin Tin got the most votes.

There were also some suggestions for graphic novels that people acknowledged were probably too old for 9 year olds, but here they are for the record:

• Persepolis
• The Rabbi’s Cat
• Vampire Loves
• X-Men: Dark Phoenix Saga
• X-Men Legends Volume 3: Arthur Adams
• Castle Waiting
• Kill Shakespeare
• Kings in Disguise

If you want to see the original tweets that led to this list, as well as who suggested what, check out the Storify I made with all the tweets. Apologies for not citing you all by name in this space, but I want to get this published.

Ultimately, we ended up getting him the first Asterix & Obelix omnibus (which has 3 different stories in it) and Super Dinosaur. Both have been great hits. We were also able to get Owly and almost all the Tin Tin volumes from the library. I’ll be hunting for more soon.

Building on several panels at the 2012 MLA Convention that separately considered digital pedagogy (“Building Digital Humanities in the Undergraduate Classroom,” “Digital Pedagogy,” and “New Media, New Pedagogies”) and games (“Digital Narratives and Gaming for Teaching Language and Literature” and “Close Playing: Literary Methods and Video Game Studies“), this electronic roundtable will generate discussions about the use of games in the teaching of literature, languages, and/or writing.

More than simple discussion, however, we will highlight concrete implementations of games in the classroom. Presenters will engage in informal discussion or offer interactive electronic demonstrations, lasting no more than 4 minutes. These presentations will take place at stations with appropriate audiovisual equipment around the meeting room. The remainder of the session’s time will allow the audience to circulate among stations, asking questions of the presenters. Those attending the session will leave with discrete assignments, activities, or ideas that they could build on in designing their own courses.

We welcome abstracts for presentations on any topic linking games and pedagogy, including the following practices:

• Games for language acquisition
• Interpretive games (e.g., the Ivanhoe game)
• Games as platforms for discussions or activities
• Gamification (as subject, as method); critiques of gamification (as subject, as method)
• Student- or group-designed games
• Games played inside/outside the classroom
• Game modification
• Social games in the context of a social/classroom space

Types of games may include but are not limited to the following:

• Video games
• Board / card games
• Virtual Worlds / MMORPGs
• Alternate Reality Games (ARGs)
• Social games (e.g., Cow Clicker, Farmville, The Nethernet)
• Spatial Games (e.g., foursquare, Shadow Cities, geocaching)

This roundtable session will feature up to eight presenters. Presenters are welcome from a broad range of institutions with a range of contexts and budget demands. Selection of participants will be based on a cross-spectrum of styles, classrooms, student experience, successes, and failures.

Send 300-word abstracts and bio to brian [dot] croxall [at] emory [dot] edu by 15 March 2012. N.B. All panelists will need to be MLA members (or have their membership waived) by April 7th.

I am organizing this session on behalf of the MLA’s Committee on Information Technology.

What follows is my talk for a session at the 2012 MLA on “#alt-ac: Alternative Paths, Pitfalls, and Jobs in the Digital Humanities.” I’m thrilled to be speaking on the panel with a fantastic collection of alt-ackers that I admire: Julia Flanders, Matt Jockers, Shana Kimball, Bethany Nowviskie, and Lisa Spiro.

• Good afternoon, all. My comments today are titled, “Five Questions and Three Answers about Alt-Ac.”
• I’m tremendously pleased to see this panel and the one that directly follows it happening at this year’s MLA.
• The need for ongoing conversation about alternative academic careers was brought home to me again recently when I received a rejection notice—a very kind one, I might add—for a tenure-track job that I applied to this fall.
  
• Nine hundred applicants. You don’t need statistical analysis or to be a digital humanist to figure out those odds.
• As Amanda Watson put it on Twitter, these sorts of odds make it clear that we must rethink graduate education and not ignore different paths for employment after the PhD. And that’s exactly what alt-ac can be.
  

My Job

• In my current position as a CLIR post-doctoral fellow at Emory University’s Woodruff Library, I’m lucky to be exploring the alt-ac track.
  
• My principal responsibility is to develop and manage digital humanities projects in DiSC, Emory’s Digital Scholarship Commons. I also taught an Intro to Digital Humanities this semester.
  
• In the past year, I worked to get DiSC off the ground, along with three colleagues. All of us are on the alt-ac track together.
• And this situation brings me to the first of my promised questions:
  
  What’s the relationship between DH and alt-ac jobs?

Relationship Between Alt-Ac and DH (Question 1)

• As many of you may have seen, Stanley Fish recently had a piece in The New York Times, where he talks about the rise of the digital humanities at the MLA. His observation is a bit behind those (Howard 2009; Pannapacker 2009; Howard 2011; Pannapacker 2011) who made similar statements about the 2009 and 2011 MLA…but we’ll give him a break. He is Stanley Fish, after all.
• What you might not have seen was the very smart response to Fish from Ted Underwood, who teaches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature in the English department of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
  
• Underwood suggests that one of the reasons why DH is not the future of literary studies is because it “is not a movement within literary studies.” It’s equally at home in history departments (the slate of DH activities happening at the AHA right now certainly bear witness to this fact), in art history, in linguistics, in libraries, and many more corners of the campus.
• Underwood calls digital humanities “extra disciplinary.” We might say the same thing about alt-academics.
• One of the obvious connections between DH and alt-ac, then, is how extra-disciplinary they both are.

The Future (Questions 2 & 3)

• Question #2: Is alt-ac the future of DH?
  
• Well…not entirely. We have the creation of tenure track positions—and occasionally cluster hires—at places such as Maryland, Nebraska, Iowa, Clemson, Northeastern, and more. These positions are clearly not alt-ac.
• But insofar as scholarship in the Digital Humanities tends to require collaboration on multiple scales, those in these positions will in fact be “alt”—marked by difference. The pursuit of tenure for these scholars won’t be the same as those who have previously been promoted.
• What’s more, I think alt-ac is the likely track for most positions in the digital humanities—and probably for the university as a whole.
• In fact, let’s face it: the university is already primarily populated by people who are non-fac. And many of the non-fac are the alt-ac.
• That being said, alt-ac cannot mean short, terminal contracts; alt-ac cannot be a continued casualization of labor in the university. Instead, we should look to models elsewhere in the university—libraries, administration, research only positions—for helping us structure these career paths, both within and without DH.
• What’s more, these must be career paths. We need to think about how to create opportunities for advancement.
• Now let’s turn it around (question #3, by the way): Is DH the future of alt-ac?
  
• No.
• There many different ways to get your “alt on” that don’t involve building things (as Stephen Ramsay would have it). You can find alt-ac careers in a library, in a museum, in an archive, in a federal agency, in a think tank, or even—dare I say it—in administration.
• So it’s not necessarily helpful for us to frame alt-ac as only being a thing that happens in digital humanities.
• Again, one of the lessons of “alt-ac” as a concept is that there is intellectual labor in getting things done, in accomplishing the very impressive and real work of the university, throughout the whole university.

Bonus Questions

• And finally, a question (#4) that I’ve heard no one ask aloud: how should the MLA deal with the rise of alt-ac?
  
  After all, sessions like this have little to do (on the surface at least) with the study of the modern languages.
• #5, and the kicker:
  
  Can the MLA shift its purpose from representing those who teach and research modern languages to those who study or studied the modern languages?
• This simple shift would be enough to make the whole of what we’re discussing—to say nothing of the panelists—belong unequivocally at this annual Convention. I’m not sure that it’s something that alt-ac needs so much as a way to keep the MLA relevant with what the transformations we’re facing.

Conclusions

• More than either an object or method of study, the digital is something that is happening to the humanities in the 21st century.
  
• And alt-ac is something that is happening to universities.
  
  It is not the only thing nor is it necessarily the most important. But it’s happening and in some cases it’s a very good thing.
• Perhaps in 2017 (or ’18 or ’19) we’ll be reading a piece from Stanley Fish talking about the rise of reconfigured, hybrid professionals at the MLA. And if in 2018 he’s a few years late in noticing the rise of alt-ac, well, so much the luckier for the rest of us who will have been the beneficiaries of the future’s accelerated arrival.
• Thanks.
  

I was flattered when Rob Nelson of the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab asked me to participate in a NITLE Webinar Event talking about Teaching DH 101. I’ll be joined this afternoon with my good friends (and fellow ProfHackers) Jeff McClurken and Ryan Cordell. We’ll each be speaking for about 10 minutes and then taking questions from the audience.

I’ll be talking about my just concluded “Introduction to Digital Humanities” course and these are some of the links that I’ll be sharing or referring to as I speak.

EDITED: The recording of the seminar is now available for viewing.

• Where I work: the Digital Scholarship Commons at Woodruff Library
• Resources for Designing the Course
• Student breakdowns
  • Class standing
  • Gender split
  • Majors
• The Course
  • Syllabus
  • Reading Schedule
  • Assignments
    • Mapping Mrs. Dalloway (KMZ)
    • Re-networking House of Leaves
      • Mark Sample explains the assignment
      • House of Leaves Forums
    • Final project
      • Carol Ann Duffy manuscripts at Emory
  • Key essays
    • John Unsworth’s “Scholarly Primitives“
    • Stephen Ramsy’s “Who’s In and Who’s Out”
    • Mark Sample’s “The Digital Humanities is Not About Building, It’s About Sharing”

In the haze of quickly writing something yesterday about the great workshop on alt-ac that will be happening at the HASTAC Conference, I forgot to do the most important thing: ask for your help. I have a few things in mind for how you can help the workshop be more successful, even if you won’t be with us in Ann Arbor.

1. Share job application materials with us. The workshop will include a discussion of how application materials for alt-ac jobs differ from tenure-track positions. We are particularly interested in looking at cover letters. If you have a cover letter for an alt-ac job to which you applied—whether that application was successful or not—and would be willing to share, please send a copy my way. If you have a copy of the ad for the position, that would be even better. We will of course redact your name and any other information that you feel concerned about.

2. Share advice with us. If you were going to give someone tips about alt-ac—about applying for jobs, about seeking mentors, about the positives or the perils, anything—what would it be? Please leave comments to this post or submit them via Twitter using the hashtag #altacadvice. We will collect this information and share it publicly with the workshop and with the wider world.

With your help, we can make this workshop better and more effective for those who are exploring the interesting interstices of the academy.