The news below is from multiple email lists. Please see the website for HILT: http://www.dhtraining.org/hilt2015/
Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching (HILT) Institute 2015 – Registration Open!
The Humanities Intensive Teaching and Learning (HILT) Institute will be held July 27-31, 2015 on the campus of the Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).
HILT 2015 is sponsored by the Center for Digital Scholarship at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis University Library, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland, and MATRIX: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University.
We’ve got an exciting slate of classes taught by incredible instructors. Courses for HILT 2015 include:
CROWDSOURCING CULTURAL HERITAGE
led by Mia Ridge and Ben Brumfield
Successful crowdsourcing projects help organizations connect with audiences who enjoy engaging with their content and tasks, whether transcribing handwritten documents, correcting OCR errors, identifying animals on the Serengeti or folding proteins. Conversely, poorly-designed crowdsourcing projects find it difficult to attract or retain participants. This class will present international case studies of best practice crowdsourcing projects to illustrate the range of tasks that can be crowdsourced, the motivations of participants and the characteristics of well-designed projects. We’ll study crowdsourcing projects from the worlds of citizen science, investigative journalism, genealogy and free culture to look for lessons which might apply to humanities projects. We’ll discuss models for quality control over user-generated projects, explore the cross-overs between traditional in-house volunteer projects internet-enabled crowdsourcing, and look at the numbers behind real-world projects. Finally, the course will give students hands-on experience with several different crowdsourcing platforms for image annotation, manuscript transcription, and OCR correction. Students are encouraged to bring their project ideas and some scanned material for the lab sessions.
DE/POST/COLONIAL DIGITAL HUMANITIES
led by Roopika Risam and micha cárdenas
“…we must discuss, we must invent…” —Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
From Sandra Harding’s interventions in postcolonial science studies to Radhika Gajjala’s articulation of digital subalternity to Kavita Philip’s work on postcolonial computing, postcolonial approaches to technology have provoked lively discussion. New conversations have emerged around essential questions: can the digital be “decolonized?”; what are the limits of decolonial, postcolonial, or anti-colonial approaches to digital cultures?; and how can these theoretical approaches be marshaled to build communities, tools, and justice?
Together, we will explore these questions at the intersections of theory and praxis as we consider how tools can be theorized, hacked, and used in service of decolonization. This course undertakes this task through three goals: 1) learning about, understanding, analyzing the history and present processes of colonization, decolonization, neocolonialism and the postcolonial, with attention to local, hemispheric and global contexts; 2) analyzing digital technologies, with attention to how they intersect with humanities disciplines such as art, literature and performance, and how they produce, reproduce or enact processes of colonization; and 3) inventing new and/or alternative technologies, or new uses of existing technologies, that work against colonization and post-colonial legacies that maintain social injustice.
Our days will be spent engaging with theory, hands-on experimentation, and reflection on practice. Theoretical topics may include digital labor, subalternity, embodiment, and aesthetics. Applied activities may include Scalar-based game design, mobile media/film/photography, digital exhibits, and mapping. In the spirit of our theoretical approach, we emphasize accessiblity and low-cost technology, as well as creativity and interpretation. Therefore, no prior experience with theory or practice is required, just an openness to discuss and invent the theories and practices of De/Post/Colonial Digital Humanities.
DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY: DESIGNING AND ADAPTING PROJECTS FOR ALL USERS
led by George Williams and Erin Templeton
In order to successfully reach a wide audience, digital projects must take into account the variety of potential users and their diverse needs.. Not everyone accesses information in the same way, though we often assume otherwise. For example, people with disabilities of many different kinds–sensory, physical, and cognitive–represent a significant percentage of users for many digital projects, but most of these projects are designed without thinking about accessibility. However, digital humanists can ensure that they are designing for all users by taking accessibility into account from the beginning of a project. And existing projects can be adapted to improve their accessibility.
This course will take a two-fold approach: students will read and discuss key works from disability studies scholarship in order to consider various applications for the digital humanities; these readings will form a critical framework for students’ hands-on work with tools that enable them to evaluate and create scholarly digital resources. Mornings will involve readings-based discussions on topics such as emerging standards for accessibility in digital environments, the social model of disability, user-centered design, and embodiment. Afternoons will be reserved for guided individual exercises and small-group work. Students are encouraged to bring their own projects or project ideas in order to evaluate them for accessibility and to make or plan changes as appropriate. Knowledge of and experience with web design is not required, but curiosity and a willingness to learn are a necessity.
DIGITAL PEDAGOGY AND NETWORKED LEARNING
led by Lee Skallerup-Bessette and Jesse Stommel
Many argue digital humanities is about building stuff and sharing stuff, reframing the work we do in the humanities as less consumptive and more curatorial—less solitary and more collaborative. In this workshop, participants will experiment with ways technology can be used to build learning communities within the classroom, while also thinking about how we can connect our students to a much larger global classroom. We’ll start at the level of the syllabus, thinking about how we organize and structure hybrid courses and digital assignments, before delving into specific tools and critical orientations to technology.
Participants should expect that the workshop will be hands-on, collaborative, and iterative; we will be using and building, experimenting with the pedagogy we are learning, making our learning environment as we go. The course has no prerequisites. We will work together across skill levels, experimenting with new tools, while adapting and remixing our pedagogies. This isn’t about digital tricks or gimmicks, but a profound re-examination of how we teach. The best digital tools inspire us, often to use them in ways the designer couldn’t anticipate. The worst digital tools attempt to dictate our pedagogies, determining what we can do with them and for whom. The digital pedagogue teaches her tools, doesn’t let them teach her.
DIGITAL STORYTELLING
led by Jarom McDonald
When YouTube launched to the public in 2005, the now-ubiquitous red play-button logo contained a simple yet powerful tagline, “Broadcast Yourself.” Inherent in such an imperative is a concept that’s at the core of this course — in today’s wired world, digital video is a powerful storytelling medium, one that can influence constructions of identity, community, culture, and the nature of narrative itself. In this course, we’ll explore the interactivity and narrative of digital video by positioning it as a tool for seeing, exploring, expressing and critiquing within the digital Humanities.
We will look at the various forms of dynamic storytelling, investigate the history of the video medium and what bearing it plays on the broadcast zeitgeist of today, explore formal techniques of digital storytelling including subjectivity, sequencing and transitioning, rhythm and repetition, interactivity, linearity, and meta-narration, tackle analytic tasks such as video annotation and video data analysis, and grapple with the physics of representing moving images in digital form. We will also emphasize, in addition to understanding the theories and specificities of digital video, how we might start acquiring production skills — including exposure to multimedia editing tools, working with codecs and compression, and, of course, leveraging online video dissemination channels such as YouTube. Ultimately, this class allows for students to begin to develop a critical perspective of engaging with digital video in the Humanities as a way to articulate fundamental, narrative-driven application of these rapidly changing paradigms.
Students will need to bring with them a new-ish laptop and a cell-phone (or other portable device) capable of shooting video, but no other equipment is needed nor knowledge assumed.
GETTING STARTED WITH DATA, TOOLS, AND PLATFORMS
led by Brandon Locke, Thomas Padilla, and Dean Rehberger
Starting a digital humanities research project can be quite intimidating. This course is designed to make that process less so by exploring tools and platforms that support digital humanities research, analysis, and publication. We will begin by reframing sources as data that enable digital research. We will work throughout the week on approaches to (1) finding, evaluating, and acquiring (2) cleaning and preparing (3) exploring (4) analyzing (5) communicating and sharing data. Emphasis will be placed across all stages on how to manage a beginner digital research project in such a way that helps to ensure that your project remains accessible, that the process is well documented, and that the data are reusable.
Throughout this course, we will examine several existing projects, and move through the process of collecting, cleaning, and structuring humanities data and sources and plugging them into tools and platforms to analyze, visualize, share, and publish the data and analysis. Exploration of these stages of project-building will include a technical walk-through, as well as an examination of the tools and their underlying methodologies. Participants are strongly encouraged to bring their own research material to work with, but sample data will be provided.
HUMANITIES DATA CURATION PRAXIS
led by Trevor Muñoz and Katie Rawson
This course is for people who have or are making textured, rich humanities data and want to be able to use, share, and preserve their information. We will take a multi-faceted approach to the challenges of curating data that integrates
* immediate, practical concerns of preparing, transforming, and analyzing data,
* strategic tasks of mapping data models and developing maintenance plans,
* and foundational thinking about the role of data curation in research.
We will move between hands-on work with data sets and tools to discussions about the nature of data curation. Working with the tools like IPython notebooks and OpenRefine and with open data sets in a variety of formats from institutions like the Metropolitan Museum and the Digital Public Library of America, we will explore topics such as defining data quality and identifying data problems; translating data models between different systems; developing best practices for data reuse and interchange. Participants will be able to use data from their own research or work with practice sets we will supply.
We ask that people who take this course have some experience using open source software, including reading technical documentation and help forums, and that they have a basic understanding of programming (e.g. what is a variable, some familiarity with loops, etc.). Please contact the instructors if you need guidance in attaining these prerequisites in time for HILT.
HUMANITIES PROGRAMMING
led by Brandon Walsh and Wayne Graham
This course focuses on introducing participants to humanities programming through the creation and use of the Ruby on Rails web application framework. This course will introduce programming and design concepts, project management and planning, workflow, as well as the design, implementation, and deployment of a web-based application. Technologies covered in this course will include git, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, Rails, and relational (and non-relational) data stores. Over the course of the week, we will work through the practical implementation of a developing and deploying a small-scale web application.
LARGE-SCALE TEXT ANALYSIS WITH R
led by Mark Algee-Hewitt
Text mining, the practice of using computational and statistical analysis on large collections of digitized text, is becoming an increasingly important way of extracting meaning from writing. Whether working on survey data, medical records, political speeches or even digitized collections of historical writing, we are now able to use the power of computational algorithms to extract patterns from vast quantities of textual data. This technique gives us information we could never access by simply reading the texts. But determining which patterns have meaning and which answer key questions about our data is a difficult task, both conceptually and methodologically; particularly for those who work in the humanities who are able to benefit the most from these methods.
Large-Scale Text Analysis with R will provide an introduction to the methods of text mining using the open source software Environment “R”. In this course, we will explore the different methods through which text mining can be used to “read” text in new ways: including authorship attribution, sentiment analysis, genre studies and named entity extraction. At the same time, our focus will also be on the analysis and interpretation of our results. How do we formulate research questions and hypothesis about text that can be answered quantitatively? Which methods fit particular needs best? And how can we use the numerical output of a text analysis to explain features of the texts in ways that make sense to a wider audience?
While no programming experience is required, students should have basic computer skills and be familiar with their computer’s file system. Participants will be given a “sample corpora” to use in class exercises, but some class time will be available for independent work and participants are encouraged to bring their own text corpora and research questions so they may apply their newly learned skills to projects of their own.
PROJECT DEVELOPMENT
led by Simon Appleford and Jennifer Guiliano
This course will explore the fundamentals of project planning and design including, but not limited to: formulating appropriate disciplinary questions for digital humanities research, investigating digital humanities tools and resources, structuring your first project, critical path scheduling, understanding roles and responsibilities, risk management, documenting your project work, writing your first grant proposal, budget setting and controls, building the project team, and selecting and implementing project management tools and software.
This is an advanced course and, as such, you are expected to have an understanding of the definition of digital humanities. Materials will be covered through lectures, discussions, presentations, and hands-on activities. Participants will get the most from the course if they arrive with at least some sense of a potential digital humanities project that they would like to develop throughout the week.
For more information about HILT 2015 and to register for courses, please visit: http://www.dhtraining.org/hilt2015/