Games are also unpopular with many students, often women (though not in every case). The CS course I’ve envisioned would focus on projects with applications to disciplinary interests, seeking to appeal to both women and men studying humanities. But I can certainly change those preliminary ideas if games or another focus would make a more helpful DH emphasis while retaining inclusivity.

I doubt we’ll ever stop having to learn technologies on our own. But strategically accelerating the process might make a huge difference. People in my field may attend sessions called ‘workshops’ and ‘tutorials’ to learn the current technological tools or practices. Such sessions typically occupy a half-day or day just before or just after a professional meeting; or, a site not connected with a conference may offer a workshop, perhaps lasting two days or more. Are there comparable models for training sessions in humanities fields? Perhaps a similar strategy could help people in DH to get a good start in some aspect of technology and how it could apply to DH scholarship and teaching.

So, my proposed topic is something like “Training and/or education in computing.” Here, I’m thinking of “training” as learning how to use technological tools and practices, and “education” as learning some disciplinary principles about computing. The latter requires some additional time and effort, but it offers deeper understanding, and greater flexibility and adaptability to new technologies as they (continually) arise. One can train without educating (or while educating very little), but it doesn’t work well to try educating without hands-on learning strategies, which could very well include training.

Faculty members may or may not have the time or interest for the deeper education in addition to their training in DH tools — I’d like to know. For students, I’m committed to try both educating and training a few through an introductory CS course with applications in DH, if I can determine what “applications in DH” may mean for them.

I’d also like to suggest that the introductory computer science course Dick mentions could be really helpful for faculty, too. Well, something like it, anyway–would that there were more time for faculty to take courses as well as teach them! 🙂

I’m serious about that. I find myself in a boat similar to the one that Molly describes. I have some very limited technical skills, and I can teach some of these to my students–but having a stronger background myself would be useful, both for my teaching and for my own work.

Perhaps we could have some conversations around the idea of “Self-Help for the Untrained Would-Be Digital Scholar/Teacher: Figuring Out What to Learn, and How to Learn It 101.”

Yes, that. I’d like to propose a session entitled something along the lines of Oh Crap: I Discovered an Interest in the Digital Humanities after Grad School and Now Have No Clue How to Learn Various Digital Skills.

For instance, despite the facts that I’ve built a website and am currently revising my library’s site, my understanding of css hovers at the what-happens-if-I-change-this-bit? level. I suspect many of us are either currently learning by mucking about, or have faced the need to learn new tech skills without much support in the past. What strategies are best for developing these new skills on the job?

I’m very eager to have this conversation. I don’t know of any models for such a course, and I’m sure it will take multiple offerings to settle, but if interested folks can sit down in a room together and talk about what we all do and want to do, I’m confident we will find plenty of material for us to teach CS principles through DH examples and practices, giving humanities insights about computing and experience with some relevant tools and techniques.

I wonder if enough others are interested in this idea to consider a session…

I’ll be very interested in talking with you about that introductory course. I’m in the process of designing an “Intro to DH” course for St. Norbert, and one of my challenges is figuring out how to convey the necessary technical skills to my students. I have some technical abilities, but not enough to encompass the range of possible approaches my students might take in the course. In other words, I’m going to have to rely on either students’ prior knowledge, or on what they can pick up independently and quickly. A collaboration with computer science would make sense, but none of our small CS faculty are particularly interested in the digital humanities (I hope they’re only not *yet* interested). I’d love to talk about how CS faculty and humanities faculty can collaborate to create such courses.

(A) Where does computer science fit in the digital humanities conversation? My field is more about designing computation than using standard software or media; but when I talk to a colleague in another field, we can usually identify at least one computation to design relevant to that colleague’s research interests that may extend beyond what was formerly feasible. Might this be a useful niche for computer science in digital humanities?

My twisted take on question (B) and some followup comments: How might an introductory computer science course help prepare students for digital humanities? We plan to pilot such a course in the Fall, and I’m naturally hoping to collect examples THATCamp for inclusion in our course. But as computer scientists, we especially want to help students learn creative ways to think about computation, and how to design and create computations of their own for answering questions in humanities disciplines. Are there particular software systems or forms of media that have sufficiently wide usage among digital humanists that we should seek to include them in our course?

I have mixed feelings about on-line degrees, although I often use on-line components in my courses. What’s the general feeling about the relationship between the digital humanities and on-line degrees? and what kinds of things could we be doing to ensure a broader definition of digital humanities while utilizing the best practices of on-line courses?
JoAnne Ruvoli

There is also the question, which you touch on so beautifully here, of how much we should be burdened with teaching the technology at the expense of teaching our subject area. I spend an inordinate amount of time teaching my students how to use a simple ruler in MSWord, or the basics of how to edit a blog. Who should be responsible for this? If the answer is “us,” then should we be asking for “lab hours” four our humanities classes in order to teach these skills?