DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2015
Volume 9 Number 1
Volume 9 Number 1
Textual Artifacts and their Digital Representations: Teaching Graduate Students to Build Online Archives
Abstract
Co-teaching a digital archives course (ENGL-GA.2971) for graduate students in the English Department allowed us to bring together our expertise in both research and pedagogy from two fields: English Literature and Computer Science. The course built on a core pedagogical principle in Computer Science of teaching through projects rather than from unrelated one-off programming or web development assignments. Teaching the Text Encoding Initiative after students had completed hands-on projects (using xHTML, CSS, and a digital archive working in a standard content management system) enabled the building of technological skill sets in a logical and complementary manner. From a literary perspective, building a digital archive — and teaching text encoding — enabled an in-depth consideration of textual materiality, the processes through which literary scholarship must inform technological building decisions, and the ways in which the act of digitization can be used to ask new questions of the text (or to prompt the text to ask new questions of itself). This paper will survey our techniques and approaches to interdisciplinary teaching, culminating in our usage of text encoding for exploring issues of textuality through digital presentation.
Introduction
This article reflects on the practice of designing and
implementing a course that aimed to teach graduate students
in English the skills to build a scholarly online digital
archive from primary source materials. A founding principle
of our pedagogical practice is the integration of CS and DH
methods. As a still fairly young pedagogical field,
discussion and sharing on this topic might, we hope, be
timely and useful to others. This course was part of an
evolving response to the key current pedagogical challenge
of teaching graduate students in English how to synthesize a
new set of technological skills with literary expertise to
discover new ways of working and new questions to ask of
their texts.
The ultimate ambition of our course was for each student to
digitize text otherwise inaccessible beyond the material
archive. As such the focus was on dealing with manuscript
materials, marginalia and other editorial markings on
typescripts, and materials that had a particular material
instantiation. The students were free to choose their focal
materials to reflect their own interests, and had access to
the manuscripts collections and Fales’ special collections
in the Bobst Library at New York University. The resulting
digital archives included, for example, collections of
nineteenth- or twentieth-century letters by well-known
writers; manuscript drafts of what went on to become
well-known literary texts; type-script drafts of literary
essays; and even a collection of contemporary hand-made
‘zines’. Each archive included images of the documents,
transcriptions, TEI encodings, contextualization through
further reading lists, and prose narratives about their
materials and their digital archival practice.
New York University’s Department of English first offered a
course on creating online archives from primary source
materials in the fall, 2011 semester under the course number
and title ENGL-GA.2957-001 Special
Topics in Literary Theory: Literary Archives and Web
Development. (The course home page, hosted by
the Department of Computer Science at New York University
can be found at http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall11/ENGL-GA.2957-001/DT_openingPage.html).
This course built on earlier experience in the Computer
Science Department on teaching topics in the Digital
Humanities through an undergraduate Special Topics course
CSCI-UA.380
Computing in the Humanities and the
Arts. (CSCI-UA.380 Computing in the Humanities and the Arts has
been offered five times from the fall, 2007 semester through
the fall, 2014. semester; see http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall14/CSCI-UA.0380-002/HC_index_fa14.php).
The undergraduate Computer Science course is taught within
the context of the Computer Science Department Web
Programming minor (http://cs.nyu.edu/webapps/content/academic/undergrad/minors)
and has two pre-requisites (one semester each in computer
programming and in web design) [Engel 2013].
In each iteration of the undergraduate course, the capstone
project included building an online digital archive from
primary source materials; some of the results of this
collaboration between the New York University Library and
Archives and the Department of Computer Science are
described in published essays. [Mitchell et al 2012]; [Bunde and Engel 2010a]; [Bunde and Engel 2010b].
The course under discussion in this article, ENGL-GA.2971
Practicum in Digital Humanities
was given in the fall, 2013 semester in a new format in
which it was designed and co-taught collaboratively by two
faculty members, one each from the English and Computer
Science departments. (The course home page, hosted by the
Department of Computer Science at New York University can be
found at http://cs.nyu.edu/courses/fall13/ENGL-GA.2971-001/DT_index_fa13.php)
As computer systems become more integrated into and integral
to studies in many fields, the development of courses that
offer training in technology is becoming more and more
relevant outside of Computer Science departments. [Guzdial and Forte 2005]. In addition, the role of web
development in current Computer Science pedagogy is widely
studied and discussed [Park and Wiedenbeck 2011]; [Wang and Zahadat 2009]; [Yue and Ding 2004]. From a
pedagogical standpoint, this course offered the Computer
Science department an opportunity to devise materials and a
curriculum to best meet the needs of our growing student
body in the Humanities who wish to augment their studies
with computational and technological skills. As it ran in
2011 the course was very successful in bringing humanities
computing skills to students in the English department.
Building on this success, the introduction of a literature
professor (with expertise in editing, and creating online
archives of manuscript materials) as a co-teacher was
designed to help expand the remit by forging greater
connection with current debates within the humanities, and
particularly within literary studies. The syllabus for the
course can be found in the appendix.
Aims of the Course
From a Computer Science perspective this course sought to
implement and contextualize four current goals and trends in
Computer Science education. Following is a brief description
of each of these goals with references for further
reading.
(1) Project-Based Learning (“PBL”):
Project-based courses are common in computing education. As a method within the problem-based learning toolkit, projects can be used at any stage within a degree program to explore alternative and often more complete solutions to a given problem allowing the theory to emerge as necessary. [Richards 2009]
Students who drop out from a course do not have the opportunity to learn all the material and transfer it. If students understand the usefulness of what they are learning, they are less likely to give up. [Guzdial 2010]
There is a current trend in Computer Science pedagogy to
encourage “project-based learning” (PBL) in place of
“traditional” one-off programming or development
assignments. [Chang and Lee 2010]; [Gülbahar and Tinmaz 2006]; [Richards 2009].
We found that all of the technical skills and technology
infrastructure that we taught could be related to the main
project in this course, which is the online digital archive.
This approach appeared to incentivize the students to tackle
topics outside of their areas of expertise as the results
were immediately apparent (e.g. the ability to manipulate a
variety of images of a manuscript within the context of a
webpage) and moved them closer to their end goal of the
course project.
(2) The Role of Web Development in Computer Science
Pedagogy:
Web development can provide a rich context for exploring computer science concepts and practicing computational creativity. [Park and Wiedenbeck 2011]
Web development has become a serious area of study for
undergraduate Computer Science majors [Adams 2007]; [Connolly, 2011];
[Liu and Phelps 2011]; [Mendes et al 2012];
[Schaub 2009] and for undergraduate
non-majors [Gousie 2006]; [Greenberg et al 2012]; [Guzdial and Forte 2005];
[Kurkovsky 2007]. Web development offers
instructors and students both a granular approach to
teaching technologies by focusing a lesson or assignment on
a single technology (e.g. xHTML/CSS; PHP; using Photoshop to
manipulate images, etc.) as well as the opportunity to study
and work with the many-faceted technological structure of
web implementation (e.g. the underlying relationship between
xHTML, CSS, PHP and a database in the context of modifying
and manipulating a content management system (CMS) site).
(3) Inclusion and Computer Science Pedagogy:
.Supporting a workforce that can create, not simply consume, computing technology requires a shift in pedagogy toward problem solving in a gender neutral, culturally and ethnically diverse community. [Pulimood and Wolz 2008]
There is an acute awareness within the Computer Science
pedagogy field that education in Computer Science and
technology must consciously and deliberately address issues
of inclusion so that women and minority students as well as
disabled students should have full access and encouragement
to participate on a “level playing
field”. As female students are well represented in
the discipline of English, the issues of gender and computer
technology were particularly relevant for the course. The
recent research into inclusivity within Computer Science
education [Guzdial et al 2012]; [Pulimood and Wolz 2008]; [Stephenson et al 2007] helps to inform practices and approaches to teaching
technology skills to Humanities students. Open discussion of
discomfort with technology appeared to ameliorate some of
the concern. Furthermore, imposing a rule in classroom
discussion that “there is no such thing
as a dumb question” and that “web technology is constantly evolving and the trick is
to learn how to frame the question” helped to
assuage the students’ fears.
(4) The Development of Computer Science Pedagogy Within
Inter-disciplinary and Cross-disciplinary Areas of
Education:
Computer science holds a unique position to craft multidisciplinary curricula for the new generation of faculty and students across the academy who increasingly rely on computing for their scholarship. [LeBlanc et al 2010]
Computer Science departments must continue to meet the needs
of other departments and collaborate both on University
pedagogy goals and with research [Bills and Canosa 2007];
[LeBlanc et al 2010]. Teaching collaboration
between Computer Science and literature faculty aids the
development of more radically interdisciplinary courses,
which can offer something different from literature courses
that use technologically-enhanced learning or web
development courses that utilize literary texts.
Our course was structured so as to begin with connected but
distinct issues in literature and technology that ran in
tandem, but to work towards the integration of the two sets
of considerations. This integration culminated in the final
section of the course on the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml). From the
perspective of the literature professor, then, the overall
pedagogical aim was to provide a layer of commentary on the
course activities that encouraged students to reflect on all
the technical decisions they made in building their sites as
themselves potentially acts of interpretation of the text
they were representing. Through looking at recent debates
around textual interpretation in literary studies, it was
possible to make connections that enabled students to
consider how their own practice in digital reproduction
might be intersecting fundamentally and significantly with
issues of textuality. This goal was one of teaching the
students how to think in ways that confront the deepest
issues of interdisciplinarity, and to avoid the natural
compartmentalization of skill sets. We maintained the
specificity of the issues within each disciplinary field
while showing the points of intersection by role-modeling
debates between the two teachers. With the main outcome of
the course being the online digital archive, we decided not
to ask the students to write a separate reflective
essay-commentary on their building of those sites, but to
ensure that this reflection was built into the site through
their layout, the choices they made, and through the prose
in their “About” sections.
Also from a literary perspective, it was crucial to the
course that there was the potential not just for a growth in
technological skills informed by considerations drawn from
the humanities, but a growth in awareness of textual
features through attending to the literature in a new way.
In other words, the act of digitization became within the
course a new way of being sensitive to the features of the
text for literary, critical, and interpretative purposes.
The potential for this process to work in two disciplinary
directions simultaneously was particularly interesting
pedagogically because the students came to the course with
varied levels of expertise in technology and in literary
study. The humanities skills the students developed through
the course were those of the literary critic (particularly
in relation to textual materiality), the literary-historical
scholar, and the editor. Depending on each student’s
previous experience and their comfort with literature and
technology, respectively, the opportunities were different,
but for every student the objective was a symbiotic
relationship between the two, with the digitization process
prompting new engagement with the texts they had chosen, and
for the resulting considerations to then go on to inflect
the way they used the technology within their site.
While this article focuses around the collaboration of the
two professors who designed and taught the course, it should
be noted from the outset that the course benefitted
enormously from the involvement of a broader team. The
librarians at the Bobst Library, and particularly those
working within Fales (Charlotte Priddle, Lisa Darms, and
Amanda Watson), provided a session for our students teaching
them how to use special collections and how to handle its
materials. Melitte Buchman from the Bobst Digital Studio
(http://dlib.nyu.edu/dlts/) worked with our
students both as a group and individually to help them
photograph their materials and understand the principles and
practices of imaging. The Systems Group within the Courant
Institute of Mathematical Sciences (CIMS) provided the
technological resources required to host and support the
students’ projects. Working within this broader term not
only helped better support our students but also offered
something in return, as our students provided the library
with high resolution tiff images of the materials they had
scanned.
The Course Syllabus and Structure: Technology
This course met twice each week: once in a traditional
classroom lecture and discussion format; and a second time
in a multi-media lab for hands-on work. Both instructors
attended all of the lecture classes; in addition, the
Computer Science faculty member provided lab sessions, and
the English faculty member offered consultation hours
immediately following each lab session (in practice, there
was much collaboration between the two professors in each of
these additional strands).
Every student was given an account on a production webserver
(http://cims.nyu.edu/webapps/content/systems/resources/i6).
The Courant Institute provides two servers dedicated to
teaching purposes that are used throughout the Computer
Science department: a web-server for students to host their
sites and a database server running MySQL so that students
learn to create and manage their own databases. Students
also worked in the Digital Studio (http://nyu.libguides.com/digitalstudio) and ITS
Multi-media lab which provided scanning equipment and
appropriate software for image manipulation and web
development.
The course was divided into four units. A list of the
technical skills which were taught in each unit is followed
by an overview of the pedagogical practices. The first three
units each entailed a project-based assignment which is
described below as well.
Unit I - Basic web development skills
In this unit of the course, we covered skills and topics
typically taught in a standard introductory course to web
design. These topics include:
- Mark-up languages: Students were introduced to mark-up languages using HTML5 and CSS3 for rendering basic webpages.
- Working with images: Students learned to scan objects to specification; with discussion on image resolution and image file types (.tiff, .psd, .jpg, and .gif in particular) in order to understand how to best implement the process from scanning a manuscript through rendering that image for web viewing at appropriate sizes and resolution. Melitte Buchman, the Digital Content Manager at NYU’s Division of Libraries, provided a guest lecture for the class on meta-data standards for image files as well as on accepted scholarly standards for images used for scholarly purposes.
- File management skills for working on a Unix web server: Students learned to upload files for publication; manage file folders; download files; assess file sizes and permissions; set up .htaccess files to restrict access to portions of their sites when appropriate; and other file management skills.
The project assignment for this unit consisted of a website
of a minimum of two pages rendered in HTML5 and CSS3 to
describe an author of the student’s choice and publish two
or three selections of his or her work.
Unit II - Content Management System (CMS)
In this unit of the course, each student installed his/her
own WordPress (http://wordpress.org) site to the teaching
webserver. The Computer Science faculty member, in
consultation with the English Department, decided to use
WordPress in this case as Omeka was not supported on the
server we used and we believed Drupal is too complex for an
introductory class taught within one semester for this
student population. As each student installed his or her own
WordPress site, they had the opportunity to learn
aboutWordPress as an example of a CMS and will be able to
carry this knowledge to future CMS projects.
Specific topics in this unit included:
- Themes (http://wordpress.org/themes/) and child-themes (http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes) for customization: Each student was expected to select and install a WordPress theme of his or her choice based on the content needs of the site. In addition, each student was required to create a child-theme for further customization; one result is that none of the original themes were recognizable in the final sites.
- The students explored additional topics in xHTML and CSS to facilitate their site development including the debugging process such as with Firefox Firebug (https://getfirebug.com/); implementing external style sheets such as Google Fonts (https://www.google.com/fonts) and understanding and implementing responsive design (the way that a site might change configuration depending on whether the user is viewing the site on a desktop, tablet or mobile phone for example).
- We taught a brief introduction to PHP where all students were required to modify the source code in at least one PHP script (e.g. all students were required to modify the default footnote to credit the Fales Archives for their materials; this typically required a PHP script modification.)
- A CMS uses a database “behind the scenes”: Students were introduced to MySQL during lectures. The students were not required to make changes to their data within MySQL but in several instances they required assistance from the Computer Science instructor to do so and these events resulted in positive learning experiences for the class.
- Throughout this unit, we discussed the underlying structure of a CMS and at the end of this unit, we discussed the differences and similarities among the most commonly used CMS’ in the Digital Humanities (WordPress, Drupal and Omeka; with a brief explanation of Django). We also discussed the role of JavaScript in a CMS but the students did not study or modify JavaScript in this project.
The assignment for this unit of the course consisted of their
first draft of an online digital archive based on primary
source materials; content included text and images.
Unit III: – XML and the Text Encoding Initiative
Based on the principle in Computer Science pedagogy of
building skills on a strong foundation, we introduced XML in
the final development unit of the course. In this unit of
the course, we sought to build on the students’
understanding and experience with HTML5 as a mark-up
language in order to contextualize and introduce XML [MacKellar 2012]; [Paterson et al 2005] in general and the TEI application of XML in particular.
Students were introduced to the syntax and structure of XML
as it is used in its narrative form for descriptive
meta-data; students in this course did not use XML to
generate stand-alone datasets. There are significant
differences between XML and HTML; the significantly greater
flexibility of XML was presented to the students as a means
to better annotate and analyze their literary texts.
Students already understood that HTML and CSS separate the
content of a text from the infinite variety of possible
output formats. In this course, we discussed XML
implementation to further describe and define the underlying
literary structure of a text (e.g. a play consists of acts;
and each act may consist of one or more scenes while a novel
containing chapters would be encoded differently in order to
capture the underlying structure of prose). We further
introduced the flexibility and variability available in XML
languages to capture meta-data; specifically using XML tags
standardized in the literary scholarly community through the
international efforts of the TEI Consortium and related
projects. The two professors worked closely together to pick
a series of examples for the first lectures on TEI/XML in
order for the students to make the transition and see the
value of XML over plain text or HTML.
For web presentation of the TEI documents to accompany their
websites, students were offered the choice to use CSS or
TEI-Boilerplate (http://dcl.slis.indiana.edu/teibp/index.html).
XSLT was not taught formally in this class due to the
concern that this is a more advanced topic which could
intimidate students at this level, especially in light of
the complex literary texts that they selected. However, the
Computer Science instructor introduced XSLT briefly at this
time in the course so that the students would understand the
importance of it in web publishing and its wide usage in the
TEI community. Several students expressed an interest in
XSLT workshops such as those conducted by the Women Writers
Project (http://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/outreach/seminars/).
Unit IV: Site Preservation
Preservation is a very important topic with respect to
digital archives from both a literary and a technical
perspective. In the final class, we discussed technological
aspects of the students’ sites which would require
modification for permanent online publication; and how to
render a finished CMS site into a static HTML/CSS site for
permanent publication (this discussion centered on a plug-in
currently available at http://wordpress.org/plugins/static-html-output-plugin/.
Note that this plug-in required modification by the
instructor in order for the students to use it.). The
students understood that such a transition would eliminate
any future issues of upgrades to PHP running on the
webserver in general and to future versions of WordPress in
particular; as well as the value of rendering the site
easier for the Systems administrators to support as MySQL
would no longer be needed to keep their sites running after
such a transition.
The Course Syllabus and Structure: Literature
Interwoven with this technology syllabus was a set of
considerations led by the literature professor. This process
began at the start of the semester through a discussion
about why we might want to digitize texts and what might be
gained; what our priorities should be in deciding which
texts to digitize; which texts might be most at risk of
being lost to us or inaccessible if not digitized; and what
might be the consequences of digitizing text. This class
discussion generated a humanities agenda (of aims and
concerns) to which we returned throughout the course in
relation to our practice. The following two weeks were
devoted to analyzing existing online literary archives:
first a few chosen for collective group attention,[1]
and then those chosen by the students which they analyzed in
ten minute presentations to the class. Students were given a
list of criteria for the scholarly evaluation of such sites,
but also asked to think more generally about what the online
presentation of the material adds (what it might enable the
user to do with the text that they couldn’t otherwise do)
and how it might change our reading of the material
presented. It is through this discussion that one of the key
practices of the course, from a humanities perspective, was
introduced: analyzing how site-building and presentational
decisions are also in key part interpretative decisions that
determine how the material is read. The lessons learned from
this analysis fed into their own project development in
various ways, particularly in relation to their design of
site architecture and navigations. For one student working
with a nineteenth-century manuscript of a novella, for
example, a key opportunity arose from the author’s practice
of dating his work on the manuscript. The student designed
menu options that allowed the user to access the manuscript
according either to date of composition or chapter
structure. This enabled the correlation of the work the
author was doing on the manuscript on a particular day with
the concerns he expressed in letters written on or around
the same day.
For the literary component of this first section of the
course, essays such as Kenneth M. Price’s piece on
“Electronic Scholarly Editions” were used to
introduce many of the key concerns [Price 2013]. However, students were also asked to engage with
thoughts about the practice of textual editing more
generally and to consider the kinds of benefits the online
environment might offer over the traditional paper-based
environment. The issues discussed here ranged from the
ability to rectify mistakes relatively easily in digital
editions as opposed to runs of printed texts, to the kind of
high-level interactivity and hypertextuality that online
archives might offer.
Teaching the students about metadata was a crucial part of
the first half of this course and the topic was introduced,
from the literary-studies perspective, through the scholarly
debate around textual materiality. The technical information
about metadata standards was provided through the online
pamphlet — “Understanding
Metadata” – published by the National Information
Standards Organization (http://www.niso.org/publications/press/UnderstandingMetadata.pdf),
but that was really secondary to getting students to first
consider why it might be important to record
and represent certain types of information about the texts
they were digitizing, and what they would want
to record in order to capture various different aspects of
the textual object. To bring this issue alive from the
perspective of literary scholarship, the students were given
some relevant literary scholarship in advance of the class.
For example, Nicholas Frankel has written about the
significance of reading text within the context of the book
as a material object, using as his example Oscar Wilde’s
Poems – a beautiful and
elaborately-designed book shown to them in the University’s
special collections the following week [Frankel 2000]. This scholarly work gave an
agenda to thinking about textual materiality and provided a
powerful example of the kinds of interests humanities
researchers might have in a book’s extra-textual features,
and how those features might be considered necessary for the
interpretation of a text. For the class itself, the
literature professor brought in some examples of books that
raised interesting issues of materiality, and discussed with
the students which aspects they would want to represent in a
digital rendition and how they would go about giving that
information in the form of metadata. These examples included
not only texts that are elaborate or unusual in their
material instantiation but, for example, a fairly plain
mid-twentieth-century book that had an old photo tucked
inside the front cover; it was not clear the photo had any
relevance to the book other than through the life of a
previous owner, and the students were asked to discuss what
they would do with it in their digitization process. The
students were also asked to bring in any textual-object of
their choice and talk briefly — and in light of the kinds of
issues they had seen explored in the set reading — about
what and how they would want to represent it in addition to
its text.
The benefit of approaching the issue of metadata through
literary scholarship around textual materiality was that it
enabled a much deeper engagement with the issues of creating
a digital representation. These would not have emerged had
we simply instructed the students of the need to record, for
example, the particularities of the place, date, and
publication of the particular edition they were digitizing,
or the physical location and call number of the manuscript
they might be working with. The discussion around the
importance of issues of materiality to the interpretation of
text brought to light all kinds of other aspects of the
physical text that might be important in representing it in
a digital format: both through metadata and through the
photographs and scans they were to create. For example, we
discussed the importance of giving the online reader images
of the cover and front-pages and end-pages of a text, and
considered the ways in which sites that had not done so
might limit the questions scholars could ask of the texts
they represent. In light of recent scholarship on the
history of paper, we also considered the potential
importance of giving information such as the type and weight
of paper used as part of the metadata, and the significance
of such information to certain kinds of scholarly questions
(see [Price 2012]).
Issues of materiality central to the course were given an
interesting twist through one student’s focus on
contemporary “zines”. Often created by hand rather than
on a computer, and exploiting a rawness that appeared to
oppose the aesthetics of new technologies, the students were
encouraged to think about how these pieces posed interesting
theoretical, and sometimes practical, questions for the
process of digitization. One zine in particular, which was
folded in such a way as to give the potential for many
different views of its content depending on how it was
unfolded, exploited the three-dimensional possibilities of
paper in space. Although with enough separate images from
different angles (or within a video or animation), these
possibilities could be captured and uploaded to the digital
archive, the zine was clearly designed to challenge the
two-dimensional textuality of both the traditional codex
technology and digital textuality. The introduction of
literary-theoretical frames for thinking about the insistent
materiality of these items led the student to write to the
authors with questions both about their intentions and to
ask permission to digitize the zines. The replies were often
revealing of a reaction against digital culture and can be
summarized with reference to the “8
ball” collective website, where they insist on
“MORE ZINING, LESS BLOGGING”
(http://8ballzinefair.com/ABOUT). By encouraging
the group to think about what it means to digitize items
that were created (in part, at least) in opposition to
digital culture, we were able to provide a particularly
interesting and challenging perspective on the processes the
students were undertaking.
This discussion about the material instantiation of text (in
relation to very varied examples from the nineteenth to the
twenty-first century) led by the literature professor was
part of the preparation for students to go into the
university library’s special collections department to
choose the materials they wanted to digitize. Attending a
session organized by the library staff, the students learned
about the collection, and how to handle its materials. The
library staff also covered copyright issues that continued
to play an important role in class discussions throughout
the course as permissions were clarified, sought and
granted. The following weeks of the course focused, from the
literature perspective, on helping the students to choose
their texts; and culminated in using one of the classes to
present their materials and discuss them with the other
students in the class. At the presentation the students were
asked to give a rationale for their choices, including
thoughts on the textual, critical/historical and technical
significance of their selection. This discussion, in a
roundtable format, was particularly useful because the
students had chosen very different kinds of materials to
digitize: sharing their work with each other enabled them to
learn from the very different challenges they were each
facing, and to broaden their understanding beyond the issues
their own materials posed. Over the next couple of weeks,
when the class time was devoted primarily to the technical
issues of building their sites, it was possible to ensure
the “literary” considerations stayed with
them by asking them all the time to think about and develop
that connection between the building decisions they were
making in their archives and the issues of textuality and
materiality introduced earlier. This was something the
literature professor took up with students particularly
during the lab sessions when there was the opportunity to
address these issues individually and to encourage them to
think about the particular problems and possibilities their
own materials offered.
We brought all of this back into class again in week eight,
when almost the whole session was devoted to another
literature-led roundtable with each student presenting their
site under construction and explaining in ten minutes why
they had chosen the proposed site architecture and to give a
rationale, from a literary and scholarly perspective, for
the technical choices they had made. They were asked to
consider not just how their materials could best be
presented, but also who their intended audience was and how
a desire to be useful and relevant to a broad audience might
inflect the design of their sites. At this point the
students were asked to consider what kind of interest their
texts might hold within current scholarly fields of enquiry
and how to connect with and aid those users, but also how
they might make their sites sustainable in a literary,
rather than a technological sense, by keeping their
materials open as far as possible to the kinds of questions
future users might want to ask of them that we cannot now
necessarily predict. As an example, introducing archives
that had not digitized the advertisements at the back of the
nineteenth-century periodicals they represented, we
discussed how such materials were now considered of great
interest to scholars both in their own right and as context
for the articles that had been digitized. All the students
reported making changes to their sites as a result of the
reflective process they undertook in presenting their
rationale to others. Listening to each others’ presentations
and discussing them afterwards also helped significantly in
sharing good practice and introducing new possibilities for
each project. At the end of each presentation the student
was asked what they might enable through their digitization
of the text that could not be done before. Here they were
asked to go beyond the more obvious answers that related to
preservation and access to think about how their
digitization strategy enabled the texts to ask new questions
of themselves; the ensuing discussion was particularly
formative for shaping the next phase of site building the
students undertook in the course.
The second half of this session was devoted to a round-up of
the challenges students were facing with their projects from
a literary, rather than technological, perspective. The
agenda here was determined in key part by the problems, and
solutions, that had arisen with students individually in the
lab sessions (which often highlighted more general issues
they should all consider). The agenda included a discussion
of issues around the principles of manuscript transcription.
Here the students were invited to consider the well-worked
out transcription statement represented in a site such as
the Bentham letters (given there in full to aid
crowd-sourced transcription) and how it might help them
develop principles for their own transcription (http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/).
Editorial experience was also used to encourage the students
to think about the significance of recording uncertainty,
introducing the need to balance a natural desire for
definitive and interpretative transcriptions with a strategy
that left open possibilities for other meanings that might
become relevant in the future. Also raised here was the
general, and related, issue of fidelity versus
clarity/usability, and clutter versus functionality, to help
the students think about the challenges they were all facing
in deciding how much detail to present and how many
different functions to build into their sites. The
possibility of offering different views of the material, so
a reader could choose either a simple or more complex view
and functionality, was a particularly useful point around
which the professors could role-model the interplay of
technical and scholarly considerations. Another major topic
at this point was the use of visualization and mapping to
enable the students to present data in new ways. With one
student using a map to locate manuscripts geographically, we
were able to introduce the idea of using visualizing more
generally in other, non-geographical, ways to help get more
out of their data. For example, another student had been
wondering which of the many and varied published editions of
her novella to provide alongside the manuscript version she
was digitizing; one solution discussed with her was to use
the software tool Juxta (http://www.juxtasoftware.org/) to show the
relationship between the manuscript and various different
published editions, showing visually the areas of greatest
similarly and difference between them.
This process of reflecting on the literary issues at stake in
their building procedures ended with the students being
asked to imagine what they might enable their users to do
with their materials in an ideal world — and what the
literary or scholarly value of those digital experiments
might be. This was the basis for a discussion of how the
course instructors might be able to help the students
implement some of those ideas in a realistic form within the
time and resources available. For example, a student who was
interested in large-scale crowd-sourced transcription
created a game-inspired transcription quiz in the form of a
WordPress blog. She used this to address some of the
challenges of legibility posed by the author’s hand-written
marginal comments in the type-written manuscript she was
digitizing. Another student who was digitizing an archive of
mid-twentieth-century letters written from New York City
plotted the addresses from which they were sent on a
historically accurate map of the city. She used KML (a
mark-up language based on XML for use with Google Maps) to
identify the geographical positions, and then superimposed a
map from the archives of the New York Public Library over
the Google map to make the mapping historically relevant.
Adding a geographical component to her work enabled her to
analyze the importance of the location of writing to its
content — a process that revealed interesting
connections.
Text Encoding: Further Integrating Technological and Literary Considerations
The course culminated in teaching encoding to the students so
that they could add a further layer of information to their
sites, experimenting with what the TEI might be able to
offer their projects. First we used the “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams
in order to introduce mark-up of basic metadata and poetic
structure from a technical perspective. Then we turned to a
passage from Hamlet and a
chapter from Huckleberry Finn
to teach the TEI conventions for encoding drama and prose.
We taught this collaboratively, going through the literary
passages with the students identifying which features one
might want to encode, and showing how those features would
be rendered in the XML. The Shakespeare example enabled us
initially to introduce the idea of the TEI header and the
kind of metadata that could be recorded there: both in
relation to the creation of the electronic edition, and in
relation to the specificities of the edition drawn on for
digitization. It also enabled us to show some of the key
tags and attributes for working with dramatic text. Chapter
twenty-one from the Mark Twain novel was chosen to enable a
more complex engagement with TEI through its playfulness
with genre: here the characters engage in a muddled and
half-remembered enactment of a Shakespeare play. The
play-acting within the text enabled us to show how one might
mix prose and drama tags to render the text in interesting
and useful ways. In addition, the text invited a series of
notes in the encoding disentangling the lines from different
Shakespeare plays that were muddled together in a single
soliloquy. The chapter also has instances of southern
dialect that could be translated in the text encoding (thus
rendering it searchable in standard English), and other
textual features (such as a playbill centered in the middle
of a page) that raised interesting questions about encoding
practice.
Following on from this class teaching the language of the
TEI, the literature faculty member led another session
focusing on the literary and critical significance of
encoding. The chapter The Text Encoding
Initiative and the Study of Literature by James
Cummings provided a good starting point for the students to
think about the history of the initiative and its more
theoretical and critical implications [Cummings 2013]. The students had read this
chapter in advance of the class, and had also prepared their
own notes towards the encoding of the first textual example
we looked at in this session: Shakespeare’s Sonnet no. 116.
Working through the sonnet with them gave a chance to think
about a different genre through TEI. Starting with a
literary critical reading of the sonnet, the students were
asked to think about the rhyme scheme and meter. Noting the
possibility of rendering the overall meter and rhyme scheme
in the header, we also discussed, for example, the
implications of the fact that the rhyme scheme does not in
fact appear to comply to this scheme in modern English, and
how we might reflect on that in the TEI. Similarly the
opening lines of the poem (which invoke the liturgy of the
marriage ceremony) are not in the standard iambic meter, and
this enabled us to discuss what kind of metrical mark-up and
interpretation might be noted through the TEI. The goal here
was to begin to think about the variety of purposes for
which encoding might be used, and to start to show the
variety of ways one can note a particular feature of the
text through the TEI depending on what one wants to achieve.
Having worked through the sonnet in detail, we then gave them
the poem “Love Sonnet” by John
Updike and asked them how they would encode it [Updike 1969, 66]. The poem has one
complete first line (“In Love’s rubber
armor I come to you”’) but the subsequent
thirteen “lines” of the sonnet are indicated purely by
a letter marking the position on the page where each line
would end. The letter given to mark each line ending
crucially also represents the strict rhyme scheme of the
sonnet. From a technological perspective, the aim of this
exercise was to get the student to produce an XML encoding,
but from a literary perspective it was also to ask students
to think about the act of encoding and to recognize the poem
as itself in some ways a challenge to some of the
structuralist assumptions upon which TEI is founded. The
poem is a post-modern parody of the conventional nature of
love poetry, gesturing towards the generic, iterable and
predictable nature of the romantic sonnet. As such, the poem
is a gesture towards a sonnet rather than a sonnet itself,
and in this way it raises questions about the kinds of
classifications on which encoding is based. The poem has
fourteen lines, and the rhyme scheme one would expect from a
Shakespearian sonnet, but does that make it a sonnet, and
should it be identified in that way in the TEI? What happens
if we try to encode this poem in the way we tagged the
Shakespeare sonnet? What questions does this ask of the
poem, and what might it miss or misrepresent? To encode this
poem as a sonnet is to explain its own joke in a rather
heavy-handed way, but the joke is also in some sense on the
process of encoding, which the playfulness of the poem seems
to evade. Looking at this poem with the students aimed,
then, to explore and question in practice some of the issues
that Jerome McGann identified when he wrote that because the
TEI “treats the humanities corpus –
typically works of imagination – as informational
structures, it ipso facto violates some of the most
basic reading practices of the humanities community,
scholarly as well as popular”
[McGann 2001, 139]. Overall, then, the
seminar introduced a theoretical engagement with the TEI as
well as teaching students how to use XML.
It was in light of this reflective engagement with the TEI —
on its possible limitations and problems as well as its
benefits — that we asked the students to consider TEI in
relation to their own projects. The key question was what
problems could TEI solve for them, and what could it offer
the user of the site that was currently not otherwise
possible. The work we did in class on encoding various
genres of literary text complemented the work we did with
the students in the lab session which focused primarily
around their own project work with manuscripts. One key area
for discussion here was the potential for the TEI to render
searchable the textual-content captured and presented
primarily through images. The students’ work with
hand-written manuscripts presented particularly interesting
possibilities here, in relation to providing options for the
interpretation of complex and problematic script, and for
presenting issues of manuscript materiality. For example, a
project digitizing nineteenth-century hand-written letters,
in which additions were often placed in the gaps on the
page, prompted class debate on how best to render this text
and useful discussion about the complementarity of
manuscript image and text encoding. In addition to
transcription, the students also used the TEI to note
additional contextual information as well as the usual
metadata. For example, the student who digitized letters
written from various locations in New York City used the TEI
to encode the geographical data. Another used the TEI to add
information about the hand-drawn images that appeared in her
text, thus enabling a further explanatory and interpretative
commentary that altered the way the text would be read.
Assessment
The structure of the assessment reflected the structure of
the course more generally in that we began with smaller
separate technical and literary assignments and then brought
the two together in the main project. The first two
assignments (building a small website for the purposes of
studying HTML and CSS; and evaluating existing on-line
text-archive sites) were assessed by the Computer Science
and English faculty members respectively. The final online
digital archive and the TEI-encoded literary texts were
assessed by the two faculty members together. The course
ended with the students formally presenting their sites to
the group for the final assessment in order to maintain the
group dynamic and the sense of peer-sharing which had been
so important throughout the course.
Conclusions
Just as the Digital Humanities is an emerging field, so is
the pedagogy associated with it. Case studies such as those
described in Digital Humanities
Pedagogy: Practices, Principles, and Politics
[Hirsch 2012] show a variety of pedagogical
goals both within and between different disciplinary areas
in the Humanities. Lists of competencies such as those cited
in Specification 3 in Digital_Humanities
[Burdick et al 2012, 132–133] offer a different
approach: documenting specific technical skills required for
humanities students and scholars to successfully create and
implement computational and digitally-based research and
publications. Our collaborative approach — of building on
principles of Computer Science pedagogy in combination with
teaching principles of digital literary scholarship — aimed
to provide our students with the best of both worlds.
The principles of our collaboration might be summarized under
four points. The first being the preparation we did before
the course: planning how we would interconnect the concerns
of our respective disciplines conceptually and practically
in relation to the structure of each class. The second being
the weekly meetings we had to monitor and adjust the course
content and pedagogical approach. The third category relates
to the differences in disciplinary teaching methods. Our
collaboration involved an integration, or alternation, of
the seminar — or roundtable — discursive style of the
humanities with the more lecture-driven style of Computer
Science complemented with lab sessions. Fourth, and finally,
we sought to role-model interdisciplinary collaboration in
various ways throughout the class, showing the students that
the same question might have two different answers: one
technical and one from a scholarly humanities perspective;
we then pursued the connections through discussion with the
class, and through discussion with each other in front of
the class. While at the start of the course we presented the
introductory technological skills and the key humanities
questions separately, the goal was to achieve convergence of
these perspectives over the length of the course by teaching
the students to see every technical decision they made in
building their sites as an interpretative gesture (and to
see their interpretative and critical analyses as having a
technical embodiment).
Various problems and challenges arose as we taught the
course. For example, the imaging of the primary materials
occurred early on in the semester and generated a great deal
of enthusiasm that resulted in students imaging more
material than they could reasonably work with; in the future
we would ask students to think more carefully at this stage
to limit the focus and give more scope for the qualitative
rather than quantitative work. We also ran into problems
with the ever-changing technological environment. For
example, Google was phasing out support for KML, which
required a new solution to be found for one student’s
mapping work; and TEI-Boilerplate turned out to serve our
purposes less well than expected in the CMS environment. In
terms of pedagogical approaches, we adapted the course as it
progressed to fit the needs of the students; in particular,
we worked to build in greater opportunities for discussion
and sharing information between the students and their
respective projects. In addition, once we began working with
the students on their individual projects, we decided to use
the particular challenges they were facing with their
materials as our examples in the class lectures.
We have engaged with other departments to see how the course
might be modified to become suitable for a broader range of
humanities students. Our initial assessment suggests there
would be ways to develop the course to cater to students
from a range of disciplines in Literature and History. For
example, introducing EAD (Encoded Archival Description: http://www.loc.gov/ead/) along with TEI as
examples of XML languages would be useful for history
students and complement work done by literature students and
history students using TEI with manuscripts and documents.
The addition of an historian to our teaching team would be
essential in enabling us to expand our interdisciplinary
conceptualization and theorization of the online archive in
conjunction with this expanded technological syllabus.
Having taught the course once we are also considering the
following changes for the second iteration: the addition of
a lecture on XSLT formatting the TEI examples used earlier
in the class; and the addition of more reading and
discussion on the theory of TEI.
Finally, we have found that teaching collaboratively enabled
us to think about new research practices. This connection
has not always been obvious:
From the outset, it was clear that teaching together in connected courses would be good for our students. What was not so clear was how good it would be for the faculty’s professional development and research output. [LeBlanc et al 2010]
Yet, as we worked together, we better appreciated the overlay
of our fields of study, and ideas for new research
collaborations emerged. Digital Humanities is an area in
which collaboration can be particularly valuable to ensure a
depth and breadth of both technical and conceptual
knowledge, and through our collaboration we felt able to
explore profound methodological intersections between the
fields of technology and the humanities.
Appendix I: Course Description and Syllabus
The interface of technology and the humanities represents a
key to the future, yet many students feel they lack the
skills to access this potential. This course offers an
introduction to web development and digital publication
especially created for students in the Humanities, with a
view to equipping you with knowledge foundational for
reflective engagement with the new media of literary
creation and dissemination. Students will survey the
principles of current technologies and apply them through
practice as they learn the skills and techniques for
formatting and publishing archival materials in a web-based
environment. The course builds towards the creation of a
digital edition, giving you the opportunity to work with
primary source materials available through NYU's rich
archival collections (these include a wide variety of
printed texts, manuscripts and images from which to select
according to your interests).
The course will consist of a traditional classroom lecture
and discussion format as well as computer lab sessions to
promote and assist students as they work on each of their
three projects in this course. Each student will have an
account on a production webserver to post their work and
learn to install and configure a WordPress site specifically
tailored to his or her primary source materials. Topics and
assigned projects will begin with an introduction to mark-up
languages and building a site of related web pages followed
by a project centered on encoding and annotating digital
texts for scholarly purposes. The final project involves
photographing or scanning, transcribing, and encoding
digital texts to build an online archive.
| Week | Topics Covered |
1 |
1st hour
–Literature: introduction to digitization /
literary projects 2nd hour – Technology: Introduction to
web design, mark-up languages and related
technologies. Lab - Hands-on: Project #1 -
Unix; HTML, xHTML, CSS |
2 |
1st hour –
Technology: Advanced CSS; Web-authoring
software; Integration of text and graphics on
the web 2nd
hour – Literature: Introduction to selected
scholarly literary archival sites and critical
discussion. Lab: Hands-on: Project #1
continued |
3 |
1st hour –
Literature: Students present the scholarly
literary sites to the class which they have
prepared in assignment #1followed by
discussion. 2nd hour – Technology: Advanced
CSS Lab: Hands-on: Project #1 - Advanced
CSS |
4 |
1st hour –
Technology: Working with image files: file types
and how to use them (GIF, JPG, PNG for use on
the web as well as RAW, TIFF, PSD for archival
purposes); discussion on image compression,
digitization standards, and related topics;
instructions on scanning images using a flat-bed
scanner as well as working with cameras to
capture images of archival materials. 2nd hour –
Literature: Introduction to concepts in Metadata
and building their collection; preparation for
session in the archives on the next
day. Lab: Guest Lecture: Meeting with
Library and Fales Archives staff to discuss
working with primary source materials,
instructions on handling the materials, and
copyright issues. |
5 |
1st hour –
Technology: Guest Lecture in the digital imaging
lab. The students worked in the imaging
lab with both professors present to accomplish
the following in the second hour: 2nd hour -
Technology: hands-on training on scanning and
photographing primary source materials; review
of Library of Congress and related standards;
overview of file management practices.
2nd hour
– Literature: approval of the primary source
materials selected. Lab: Project #2.
Students are requested to set up a web page
hosting sample images for review. |
6 |
Part 1 (1.5 hours): Technology – Introduction
to working with a CMS; in-class demonstration of
a WordPress installation, configuration and
implementation; as well as themes modification
and downloading themes appropriate the students’
selected archival materials. Part 2 –
Literature: ½ hour: Round table discussion as
each student describes his/her content selection
and literary/scholarly focus. Lab: Project
#2 – Install the CMS and start building the
webpages for the contextualization
(introduction, bibliography and related pages);
configure the “child-theme”; continue working
with images |
7 |
Technology Class – 2 hours: WordPress and CMS
concepts; in-class demonstration of site
customization; integration of text and
images. Lab: Project #2 Students begin
building the cataloguing section of the
site. |
8 |
Literature Class – 2 hours: discussion on
problems and possibilities that students
encounter with their selected texts (including
discussion of the principles of manuscript
transcription). Lab: Project #2 – Students
continue work on their project. |
9 |
Technology – 1st
hour: ½ hour each on technical problems and
questions students have about their individual
sites; and a summary on the contents expected
for the technical “about” page on the
site. Technology 2nd hour: Introduction to XML, encoding
text and XML-TEI. Literature: poems by
William Carlos Williams. Lab: Hands-on:
Completion of Project #2; Students begin work on
Project #3 (XML-TEI) |
10 |
1st hour: Technology: Class lecture and
discussion on XML-TEI. 2nd hour:
Technology/Literature: Encoding Hamlet’s Soliloquy and the Soliloquy from Huck Finn (Chapter 21,
excerpt) in XML-TEI. Students are asked to
encode Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 for the
following week. Lab: Project #3 – XML-TEI,
continued |
11 |
1.5 hours: Literature - Case study on
sonnets. Last ½ hour: Technology -
introduction to XSL/ XSLT Lab: Project #3
– XML-TEI, continued |
12 |
1st hour:
Technology Site sustainability (e.g. creating a
static HTML/CSS site from a CMS site for
preservation purposes and permanent
installations and technical questions that came
up. 2nd hour:
Literature – Discussion on the “about”
statements from a literary
perspective. Lab: Completion of materials
and preparation for class
presentations. |
13 |
1st hour: Student
Presentations in lieu of a final exam 2nd hour: Technology
– Additional requested topics included WordPress
for blogging and considerations in
crowd-sourcing; using Oxygen for editing XML;
and other technical questions and topics that
arose as students worked on their
sites. |
14 |
Student Presentations in lieu of a final
exam. Discussion on future projects and
where to go from here. |
Table 1.
Assessment and Grade Distribution:
- Assignment #1 (Humanities site evaluation) – 10% of the final grade
- Assignment #2 (Proposal for project #2 – selection of Fales materials, including rationale) – included in the project #2 grade
- Project #1 – Build a unified site on an author of the student’s choice - 20% of the final grade
- Project #2 – Online digital archive based on primary source materials using WordPress - 40% of the final grade.
- Project #3 – Use TEI to encode several representative samples of literary texts in the student’s archival site - 30% of the final grade
Notes
[1] For
example,The Rossetti
Web (http://www.rossettiarchive.org/); The Carlyle Letters Online
(http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/);
The Shelley-Godwin
Archive (http://shelleygodwinarchive.org/).
Works Cited
Adams 2007 Adams, D. Robert.
“Integration early: a new approach
to teaching web application development.”
J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 23, 1
(October 2007), 97-104.
Bills and Canosa 2007 Dianne
P. Bills and Roxanne L. Canosa. “Sharing
introductory programming curriculum across
disciplines.” In Proceedings
of the 8th ACM SIGITE conference on Information
technology education (SIGITE 2007). ACM, New
York, NY, USA, 99-106.
Bunde and Engel 2010a
“Computing in the Humanities: An
Interdisciplinary Partnership in Undergraduate
Education.”
Journal of Archival
Organization, 1533-2756, Volume 8, Issue 2,
2010, 149–159
Bunde and Engel 2010b Bunde,
Janet and Deena Engel. “An
Inter-Disciplinary Approach to Web Programming: A
Collaboration Between the University Archives and the
Department of Computer Science,”
Digital Humanities Conference,
London.
Burdick et al 2012 Burdick,
Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfield, Todd Presner,
Jeffrey Schnapp. Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, Massachusetts:
MIT Press (2012).
Chang and Lee 2010 Chang,
Ling-Chian and Greg C. Lee. “A
team-teaching model for practicing project-based
learning in high school: Collaboration between computer
and subject teachers.”
Comput. Educ. 55, 3 (November
2010), 961-969.
Connolly, 2011 Connolly,
Randy W. “Awakening Rip Van Winkle:
modernizing the computer science web curriculum.”
In Proceedings of the 16th annual joint
conference on Innovation and technology in computer
science education (ITiCSE 2011). ACM, New York,
NY, USA, 18-22.
Cummings 2013 Cummings,
James. “The Text Encoding Initiative and
the Study of Literature.” In A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed.
Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. Chichester, West Sussex:
Blackwell. 451-457.
Engel 2013 Engel, Deena.
Embracing the Digital Humanities: A
Course on Computing in the Humanities for Undergraduate
Computer Science Minor Students
http://db.grinnell.edu/sigcse/sigcse2013/Program/viewAcceptedProposal.pdf?sessionType=poster&sessionNumber=2
SIGCSE 2013.
Frankel 2000 Frankel,
Nicholas. Oscar Wilde’s Decorated
Books. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
2000.
Gousie 2006 Gousie, Michael
B. “A robust web programming and
graphics course for non-majors.”
SIGCSE Bull. 38, 1 (March
2006), 72-76.
Greenberg et al 2012
Greenberg, Ira, Deepak Kumar, and Dianna Xu. “Creative coding and visual portfolios for
CS1.” In Proceedings of the
43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science
Education (SIGCSE 2012). ACM, New York, NY, USA,
247-252.
Guzdial 2010 Guzdial, Mark.
“Does contextualized computing
education help?”
ACM Inroads 1, 4 (December
2010), 4-6.
Guzdial and Forte 2005
Guzdial, Mark and Andrea Forte. “Design
process for a non-majors computing course.”
SIGCSE Bull. 37, 1 (February
2005), 361-365.
Guzdial et al 2012 Guzdial,
Mark, Barbara J. Ericson, Tom McKlin, and Shelly Engelman.
“A statewide survey on computing
education pathways and influences: factors in broadening
participation in computing.” In Proceedings of the ninth annual
international conference on International computing
education research (ICER 2012). ACM, New York,
NY, USA, 143-150.
Gülbahar and Tinmaz 2006
Gülbahar, Yasemin and Hasan Tinmaz. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ728907.pdf.
Implementing Project-Based
Learning, 2006.
Hirsch 2012 Hirsch, Brett D.,
Ed. Digital Humanities Pedagogy:
Practices, Principles and Politics, Cambridge,
UK: OpenBook Publishers (2012).
Kurkovsky 2007 Kurkovsky,
Stan. “Making computing attractive for
non-majors: a course design.”
J. Comput. Small Coll. 22, 3
(January 2007), 90-97.
LeBlanc et al 2010 LeBlanc,
Mark D., Tom Armstrong, and Michael B. Gousie. “Connecting across campus.” In
“Proceedings of the 41st ACM
technical symposium on Computer science
education” (SIGCSE 2010). ACM, New York, NY, USA,
52-56.
Liu and Phelps 2011 Liu, Yi and
Gita Phelps. “Challenges and
professional tools used when teaching web
programming.”
J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 26, 5
(May 2011), 116-121.
MacKellar 2012 MacKellar,
Bonnie K. “An XML course as a
springboard for teaching fundamental computer science
ideas.”
J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 27, 3
(January 2012), 15-21.
McGann 2001 McGann, Jerome.
Radiant Textuality: Literature
after the World Wide Web. New York, Palgrave:
2001.
Mendes et al 2012 Mendes,
Antonio Jose, Anabela Gomes, Amilcar Cardoso, and Luis
Paquete. “Increasing student commitment
in introductory programming learning.” In Proceedings of the 2012 IEEE Frontiers in
Education Conference (FIE) (FIE 2012). IEEE
Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 1-6.
Mitchell et al 2012
Mitchell, Eleanor, Peggy Seiden, and Suzy Taraba, Eds.
Past or Portal? Enhancing
Undergraduate Learning through Special Collections and
Archives. American Library Association. Chapter
7 in "Pedagogy": New York University:
Computing in the Humanities @ NYU Libraries by
Janet Bunde, Deena Engel and Paula Feid.
Park and Wiedenbeck 2011 Park,
Thomas H. and Susan Wiedenbeck. “Learning web development: challenges at an earlier
stage of computing education.” In Proceedings of the seventh international
workshop on Computing education research (ICER
2011). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 125-132.
Paterson et al 2005
Paterson, James H., Frances McCormick, and Gerry Creechan.
“Teaching XML in a web development
context.” In Proceedings of
the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and
technology in computer science education (ITiCSE
2005). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 359-359.
Price 2012 Price, Leah. 2012.
How to Do Things with Books in
Victorian Britain. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Price 2013 Price, Kenneth M.
“Electronic Scholarly
Editions.” In A Companion to
Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and
Susan Schreibman. Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell, 2013.
434-450
Pulimood and Wolz 2008
Pulimood, Sarah Monisha and Ursula Wolz. “Problem solving in community: a necessary
shift in cs pedagogy.”
SIGCSE Bull. 40, 1 (March
2008), 210-214.
Richards 2009 Richards,
Debbie. “Designing Project-Based Courses
with a Focus on Group Formation and Assessment.”
Trans. Comput. Educ. 9, 1,
Article 2 (March 2009), 40 pages.
Schaub 2009 Schaub, Stephen.
“Teaching CS1 with web applications
and test-driven development.”
SIGCSE Bull. 41, 2 (June 2009),
113-117.
Stephenson et al 2007
Stephenson, Peter, L. Miguel, Joan Peckham, Jean-Yves Hervé,
and Ron Hutt. “Using undergraduate
interdisciplinary research to promote computer
science.”
J. Comput. Sci. Coll. 22, 3
(January 2007), 98-104.
Updike 1969 Updike, John.
Midpoint. New York: Knopf,
1969.
Wang and Zahadat 2009 Wang, Ye
Diana and Nima Zahadat. “Teaching web
development in the web 2.0 era.” In Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on
SIG-information technology education (SIGITE
2009). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 80-86.
Yue and Ding 2004 Yue, Kwok-Bun
and Wei Ding. “Design and evolution of
an undergraduate course on web application
development.” In Proceedings
of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and
technology in computer science education (ITiCSE
2004). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 22-26.
URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/1/000199/000199.html
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
