…I figured somebody had to, right?

I’m using slack in my grad class this term; so far, so good.

The guy who invented ‘Slack’ is a philosophy major from uvic, I’ve heard, so that makes this practically a DH tool ab initio. Right? <crickets>

@shawngraham: great idea! i’m still figuring out how to use this differently from twitter…

“Between then and now, I think the biggest lesson I’ve learned as a history teacher is that students learn best by doing digital history rather than by learning about digital history.” http://edwired.org/2015/10/20/back-to-the-future-2/

agreed, planning anything new for your next course Jason?

Just starting to think on it, haven’t come down on a plan yet. But certainly the “doing” will still be central to the course like it was last time.

How do you prep students for the idea of ‘productive failure’, of screwing around with things to see what happens if…. ?

http://miriamposner.com/blog/rehabbing-dh101/

@shawngraham: Good question, not sure I have a good answer to that yet. Although I did tell students last fall to be prepared for DH failure to happen, and that was OK.

@shawngraham @jheppler Not exactly the same thing, but in the FemTechNet DOCC, we started our course with a reading of the FemTechNet manifesto, which proudly values ‘making a mess’. Not sure if the Ss internalized, but.

http://femtechnet.org/publications/manifesto/

I taught a 7 student + some auditors grad seminar last year and now an independent study with a grad student. In small groups like this, I have been able to say, “Trust me. I’ll know if you’re working hard (or not). So it’s OK not to complete the assignments perfectly so long as you’re learning and getting better.” Last year’s course was all about RStudio for visualization and mapping. This term is different database technologies for excavation and other archaeological data. Teaching students to look at what the machine is doing - and what error messages it might be spitting out - as part of getting these infernal machines to do what we actually want to them to do is important. The failure is ours, the machines only do exactly what we tell them to. @shawngraham, I don’t know that is right on point, but in the region, I hope.

What’s the current state of the thing on workshops being considered useful? I feel like @miriamposner has written about how workshops sometimes fit too well into the build-it-and-they-will-come problematic, but I can’t locate the ref right now. Everything is situated, so maybe a better Q is: In what ways are people finding various vectors for teaching DH (from large to atomic) worthwhile? What are some emerging models that have promise?

I like when we actually build something germane to the participants’ own research, where they bring a problem to the table first, but haven’t done that very much.

We offer a weekly workshop series at Vanderbilt, which usually draws about fifteen or so people. We use it mainly to expose people to technologies they may not have heard about. The workshops often lead to more extensive pedagogical or research applications. See http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/scholarly/workshopsfall2015.php This model seems to be working fairly well for us.

I should say that we pair the workshops with working groups, which meet weekly and are more like DH seminars. Right now, we’ve got two working groups running: one on SPARQL and another on XQuery.

@andersoncliffb: Are the working group – workshop dyads expected to produce something by the end? (Is there an end?) Do non WG participants come to the workshops?

@triplingual: We’ve experimented with producing concrete products but find that they become too complex for most participants in the working groups. So we basically review fundamentals and think about applications to projects in various areas. The workshops tends to feed to the working groups, not the other way around. We’re definitely still exploring models. We want to remain maximally open to newcomers to DH while still helping more experienced practitioners develop their skills.

Great undergrad DH conference going on at Davidson for anyone interested: https://twitter.com/whitneytrettien/status/662809421479870464

talking about “digital activism” with some grad students later today: anyone have any recent projects / writings they’d recommend? I have some stuff in mind: just curious to see what other people are into!

@jmcgrath: I’m late to respond but see Eric Kansa on neoliberalism if you haven’t already. http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/01/27/its-the-neoliberalism-stupid-kansa/ . The activism is somewhat directed at digital humanities itself so perhaps out of scope. But Eric’s writings along these lines are always good.

video lectures aren’t to blame for poor attendance: http://missunitwocents.tumblr.com/post/132791490035/not-going-not-listening-either-lecture-recording

@sfsheath: Thanks! It’s an ongoing conversation, so I’ll add this resource to what I already have!

hey folks - we’re going to live stream our book launch, ‘The Historian’s Macroscope’, tomorrow at 11.30 eastern. http://j.mp/hmbooklaunch . The book is a gentle intro to DH for undergrads etc.