Today, three archivists (I was one) and three historians met to discuss what skills and resources were important when teaching a capstone history subject – not as part of a dedicated ‘digital humanities’ course, but as a necessary introduction to the digital aspects of their discipline. Here are some of the things we came up with.
Perhaps typically given archivists were involved, we talked about the need for a solid, clear and sustainable mental model for naming files, structuring digital records and controlling versions. This should be an easily implemented, systematic approach which is extensible and generalisable rather than project specific, and which is independent of particular software, systems or tools. Research data management skills like this are sometimes viewed as basic or self-evident, but I continue to be surprised at how few people do this well.
We talked about managing references. Bibliographies and lists of references are essential personal resources, but in an increasingly collaborative and open digital scholarly environment they should also be managed in a form which makes them machine readable. Store citations and references as fielded data. Use software such as Zotero or other tools (making sure you have an exit strategy in place). No more Word-based bibliographies which need to be parsed further down the track before they can be shared.
On citation – and one of my personal bugbears – cite what you see. Always. Without exception. I see too many lists of references in books, journal articles and on websites where the publications and archival sources cited give no indication as to whether a journal was viewed in hard-copy or online; or do not specify whether someone referred to a physical newspaper, or microfilm, or the National Library of Australia’s digitised newspapers, or another source.
Similarly, viewing a digitised archival record online as part of a published digital finding aid is not the same thing as viewing a physical record in a reading room. The informational content may be the same, but the citation required is different. I am sure the degree to which people rely on digital and digitised resources is significantly greater than is suggested by citations. This practice of unintentional concealment needs to change.
Furthermore, people need to be taught how to cite web pages and other online resources well, and how to use metadata (including in the page source) to construct an accurate reference to what they saw. And, when citing digital sources which are not inherently static, the responsibility for ensuring a copy of the content cited is preserved and retrievable often defaults to the researcher.
When working with archival resources, or published material – anything really – historians and other researchers need to know how to digitise effectively. We need to teach people to digitise records of all types in a way which keeps them contextualised, citable, tied to provenance, preservable, discoverable and more. And historians need to know how to deal with ‘born digital’ collections. To quote a colleague, when considering primary sources they need to know how to ‘open a digital box’ in the same way they are trained to open and work with a physical box of records.
We talked about some key resources. In Australia, start with Trove. Again, it seems self-evident for those who know and love Trove, but don’t assume people know. For content outside Australia, it’s worth checking out resources like DigitalNZ (New Zealand) the SNAC prototype (United States), Archives Hub (United Kingdom) and Europeana (Europe) to get a sense of the sorts of things available.
When looking to introduce historians to digital tools and their possibilities, start with Tim Sherratt’s Trove tools and others available via WraggeLabs Emporium. Track some trends in QueryPic and think about how to develop credible, evidence-based narratives around the results. (Beware spurious correlations!).
Look at some networks using SNAC’s radial graph demo, or visualise some Twitter networks using Mentionmapp. But don’t get too carried away. It’s true, networks (like bow ties) are cool. But in general we avoided talking about ‘cool stuff’ – fancy visualisation software, mapping tools, digital curation and exhibition software, database systems and more – not because these things aren’t useful or exciting, but because people need to learn some foundational ideas and skills first. Students need to know how to navigate, interrogate and cite digital resources, and how to manage and maintain their own digital research data, before being introduced to complex analytical techniques or multi-layered dissemination options.
That’s the selected highlights, though we covered a lot more. I’m interested in what others think. What basic digital techniques, skills and ideas should we be teaching to history students, or to any students for that matter?
And before I go, a plug for those interested in digital history, digital humanities and the contemporary challenges of teaching: coming up in October this year, THATCamp Melbourne 2014, Pedagogy, to be held at the University of Melbourne. Registration is open now. Find out more at http://www.2014.thatcampmelbourne.org/
June 11, 2014 at 8:51 am
These are all great points Mike. As someone who is very happy in the digital domain I reference online material with the same care I use with published articles, but non-digital natives need some training that online material is just as valid as paper, but the reader might need more careful directions to find it, including access dates in case the bloody thing has disappeared.
The “cite this” button on Trove is great, but I think it’s used less than it should be. In my experience researchers view a page on Trove as they would a microform reader, so they’ll note it down using the same conventions. Sad to say, writers have always had a bad habit of citing newspaper articles without referring to the headline, and just cite the masthead, date and sometimes the page number. No historian I have ever met cites the MF reel number for a paper, so I guess they don’t worry about capturing article identifiers and stable URLs either. There definitely needs to be a wider conversation about this in the historians’ community.
Did you know that when you are cutting and pasting from Trove and the ADB, you also pick up the colour coding, so end up with blue and yellow footnotes? Pretty but very hard to turn off (I will experiment with Paste Special).
June 11, 2014 at 9:50 am
Thanks Naomi. Re: your coloured citations, in newer versions of Word if you right click with your mouse you will see three paste options. The one on the right (with an ‘A’) is ‘text only’ paste which will ignore the formatting and colours. Not as easy as a keyboard shortcut, but still handy.
June 11, 2014 at 9:01 am
I am in furious agreement with everything in this post! One thing I would add with regards to digitisation (which might be more for established researchers rather than a skills issue for early career researchers) is skills in task analysis and designing workflow – in particular, I am thinking of being able to distinguish between tasks that require the intellectual input of a researcher and tasks that can be done by others. I also think researchers could be more aware of professional standards and practices for digitisation. I’ve seen a lot of researchers allocate vast amounts of their own and their RA’s time to basic transcription and imaging that could be outsourced really effectively either locally or overseas, freeing up researcher time for tasks that do actually require intellectual intervention. I also despair when I see research teams going to Dick Smith and buying a crappy $100 off-the-shelf scanner, that they then use with a monitor that’s never been calibrated and software that’s been designed to work with modern printed documents but may not be the best choice for historic materials. The results of all this may be OK for personal research but are certainly not good enough for much else – in some cases, poor quality will have knock-on effects (e.g. a hastily made decision to scan at a lower resolution or to choose bitonal rather than greyscale or colour to save on storage (without of course bothering to find out about what storage options are available at the institution or elsewhere!) → reduced OCR accuracy → wasted time on corrrection and lack of searchability). Understanding and being able to specify digitisation standards (including QA processes), managing contracts with vendors and so on would be useful skills, not necessarily for the research itself but for the effective management of the research.
The other thing not mentioned here that I think is essential for any kind of digital research is an understanding of intellectual property as it applies to primary sources and their digital surrogates. A lot of projects could have much wider impact if researchers had a greater understanding of copyright and licensing, as well as related things such as cultural institutions’ approach to donor agreements, cultural property rights when working with certain types of community and so on. It’s not a very sexy topic, unfortunately, and most people just switch off, but failing to address these things early in a project can lead to problems later.
June 11, 2014 at 9:46 am
Completely agree Sam – we did have a chat about intellectual property, copyright and the obligations on researchers with regard to archival material in particular. It’s an area that definitely needs to be part of a historians training.