After being at the DHSI at UVic last week, my idea of what we can accomplish over the course a two term class has changed. This realization comes in part from my own movement from someone who had never coded to someone increasingly comfortable with editing .json files and simple html. So, if a non-techy medievalist such as myself can learn it in a week (≈ 24 hours of instruction) I guess I can expect students to pick up a fair bit of it over two terms (in class, ≈ 24 x 3 hours = 72). We do have a lot of book history to learn, mind you.
If we structure the class correctly, I think, then we can lead students on a quest –starting with social media and ending with simple programming. Students will be expected to use #medievaltwitter (for networking, watching for calls for papers or finding ideas about what is joining on in medieval DH), to blog about their thoughts on the exercises and readings, before moving over to the relatively user-friendly CMS Omeka as well as the more arcane worlds of GitHub and IIIF to display their work in progress.
The assignments are organized around a spiral curriculum, in which students address a topic and then return to it for at least one further pass. We will start by getting people used to the online environment by using familiar environments – Twitter and blogs. These platforms allow the students to share their experience using other tools. But the real focus is on the uncatalogued medieval material in the holdings of Carleton University. Over the course of the year , each student will work on a single folio to describe, transcribe and analyze it. Their folio then becomes the central focus of students’ work as they consider it from different perspectives and with different tools. What was it like, for example, transcribing a medieval document with pencil and paper? And then how did it differ when using a tool such as Recogito or Transkribus? What changed when inputting a catalogue record modelled on manuscript catalogues to putting that information into Omeka, which uses Dublin Core. By the end of the first term, students will have used Omeka to present a detailed description of the folio. In the second term, I will ask students to present much of the same information, but this time they will be encoding the information as a TEI file that they will make available through a Github Jekyll site.
As I think about all the possibilities, I realize that the key to teaching this course is having a lot of material prepared beforehand. Having templates created and tested beforehand, as well as workflow sorted out will mean that the class should run smoothly. To help with workflow, I created a slack group today for the class and integrated a google drive (where all the manuscript images are currently located), a google calendar (to keep track of deadlines and the presentation schedule) as well as other things I don’t know if they’re useful or not (such as Polly – to allow easy polling of the slack members, and Todo, to create todo lists).
And so, we march on.
