“Innovations in Resources for Teaching History and
Archaeology”
Pauline
McCormack
DISH Project, University of Glasgow
pauline@arts.gla.ac.uk
The DISH (Design & Implementation of Software for History) Project
provides computing resources and advice for historians (including art
historians) and archaeologists in six departments and three related institutions
at the University of Glasgow. In three laboratories containing 40 networked
microcomputers, DISH offers some of the most advanced facilities in the UK for
computing specific to the study of history and archaeology. Areas in which the
Project is particularly strong include the use of databases and historical
datasets for teaching and the provision of multimedia tutorials for
archaeologists.
The Project also provides a number of specialist applications such as statistics
and mapping programs and is a beta test site for the international Remote Access
to Museum Archives (RAMA) project.
DISH would demonstrate and discuss the setup, applications, datasets and
textbases used in day to day teaching, as well as the philosophy of including
the use of computers in teaching the humanities. In particular we would like to
talk about an on-going project involving the transfer of teaching data from DOS
platform databases to a Windows platform database. This exercise has brought
into focus issues such as: optimising commercial software for specialist use;
the difficulties in defining the boundaries between teaching the use of
computing tools for historical analysis and the analysis itself; the reluctance
of very busy academics to move away from tools which work.
We would also demonstrate our wide range of archaeology tutorials which range
from the introductory package "Archaeology at Work" to more technically-specific
subjects including lithics, bones, archaeological statistics and grid
references.