I have started teaching a PhD coursework subject at the University of Melbourne, the first year that this type of guided professional development has been offered in PhD research. Our contribution is the first Digital Humanities subject in the faculty; it is a lot of fun to design and teach but somewhat experimental. There are five of us leading the topic (and about twenty PhD students). The instructors have many years of teaching, research, and computing experience and ways of applying computing to teaching and research problems. We have compiled our syllabus from many sources, and thanks to the University of Victoria in Canada and especially Brett Hirsch of UWA for blazing a path for us. It is only a five-week course of two-hour sessions, so we barely get our feet wet in such a large and vibrant field.

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Course Outline:

This subject alerts students to the range of electronic methods available to scholars for document and data capture, collaboration and communication, data analysis, publishing and dissemination, data structure and enhancement, practice-led research, and research strategy and project management. On completion, students will be equipped with a range of practical digital methods as they apply to their thesis (e.g. qualitative analysis of unstructured text using NVivo, use of digital archives and databases, semiotic analysis of text, metadata for describing research material), and also be able to critically assess the potential of digital methods and tools as they apply more broadly to their discipline.

Session One: Introduction and Basic Tools

Reading:

What is Humanities Computing?
What is Humanities Computing, and What is Not?
NINES – an example of digital methods
The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Teaching the Digital Humanities through Virtual Research Environments (VREs)

Please take a look at these examples…

Digital Humanities at Oxford (in particular, look at the ICT Methods)
Arts-Humanities.Net (have a look at methods, tools and projects)
An excellent overview of many aspects of DH is A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Also very useful is …

Berry, David M.
Understanding Digital Humanities [electronic resource]
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
http://cat.lib.unimelb.edu.au:80/record=b4303134~S30

Basic Tools:

Session Two: Modelling and representing knowledge in the humanities: Why do we do it?

Reading

Why digital methods?

Overview – why do we need to understand digital methods? Aren’t we all digital natives?

• • fragility of digital records
  • potential of reusing research data
  • potential of linking between existing and future data
  • What databases are appropriate for PhD research, and why would you need one?
  • Why do we model knowledge in the humanities?

• What is an API, and what are the debates around open data?
• (Practical exercise: make a database and enter some research fieldwork into it), Excel? or a free online service?
• Backing up your data for safekeeping
• Open Access databases as a means for disseminating research
• Repositories and persistent identification of research material

creating data so that it can be reused

• implications
• open source
• structured
• filenames have some system
• repositories understand discipline-specific issues
• PARADISEC as an example of a discipline-based digital repository
• OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

• General DBMS
• http://www.geekgirls.com/category/office/databases/
• Open Office Base
• http://tutorialsforopenoffice.org/category_index/base.html
• http://showmedo.com/videotutorials/video?name=1120000&fromSeriesID=112
• FMPro
• http://www.filemaker.com/

Session Three: Text Encoding, mark-up and meta-data

Reading

Session Four: Scholarly Communication and collaborative and interdisciplinary research and crowd-sourcing

Reading:

1. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen.”Peer-to_Peer Review and the Future of Scholarly Authority’ Cinema Journal 48.2 (2009): 124-29 .fitzpatrick.pdf
2. Krause, Steven D. Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites. Kairos 12.1 (2007)
3. Boyd, Danah. A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium.Reconstruction 6.4 (2006):

Virtual environments, crowd-sourcing, managing interdisciplinary relationships

1. Norcia, Megan A. Out of the Ivory Tower Endlessly Rocking: Collaborating across Disciplines and Professions to Promote Student Learning in the Digital Archive. Pedagogy 8.1 (2008): 91-114.
2. Dan Cohen Can History be OpenSource: Wikipedia and the future of the past http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42
3. Rockwell, Geoffrey Crowdsourcing the Humanities: Social Research and Collaboration, in Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities (Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty eds.) (Craig will hand this last essay out in class)

Discussion