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Annotated bibliography for Digital Pedagogy

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Summaries mostly written by Emma Dawson as part of David Beck's Teaching Digital Humanities strategic project; some added/edited by David Beck.

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Coiro, Julie, Michele Knobel, Colin Lankshear, and Donald J. Leu, (editors), "Handbook of Research on New Literacies"

Routledge, 4 Apr 2014

This book acts as a review of research by leading digital literacy scholars from around the world, and is as up to date as possible with new technology (as of 2014). The authors intend this book to be used as a reference guide, directing readers to the central issues in a cross disciplinary context, with explanations of theoretical themes throughout; it is indexed as so, to best facilitate this handbook goal. The book is primarily aimed at scholars from the following fields: ICT, library and media studies, cognitive science, educational studies (in all its forms), and linguistics. However, the authors do state their hope that graduate students in all disciplines will also find this text a help during their studies, and to this end the final section of the book contains commentary by top scholars on a selection of relevant studies. These aptly show the merit of multiple interpretations of research and the various uses that outcomes could be put to; ergo this could also be of use to administrators, course directors and institution policy makers. The book is split into six sections as follows: (1) “Methodologies” – looking at current research on new literacies in an extensive variety of areas. (2) “Knowledge and Inquiry” - where several varying perspectives are examined on how it could be best to fulfil the potential of new media in regards to knowledge acquisition. (3) “Communication” - where the latest (as of 2014) research on new communication media is examined e.g. social networking tools. The roles of language and gender are also examined in this section. (4) “Popular Culture, Community and Citizenship: Everyday Literacies” - looks at research in online worlds such as gaming and fanfiction, as well as the issues surrounding the role of digital citizenship. This section also looks at collaborative work and projects. (5) “Instructional Practices and Assessment” – looks at classroom teaching and assessment in a new literacy context from early years education through to HE. (6) This is the section that sees the reprints of articles with critical evaluation and commentary. As a large and detailed handbook, this publication is highly effective. It would be a great reference text for anyone interested in the integration of digital literacy into many aspects of research, teaching, or even day to day life.


Thomas, Lindsay and Dana Solomon. "Active Users: Project Development and Digital Humanities Pedagogy."

CEA Critic.76.2(2014), pp.211-20

This article is based around the Research-orientated Social Environment (RoSE) project, funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Start Up Grant (2011-2012), as part of the University of California. Thomas and Solomon argue that research and scholarship in DH is currently (2014) values more than teaching, curriculum development and student learning engagement. They ask that more focus should be placed on pedagogical techniques, so that the researchers and scholars of the future can become interested in DH as soon in their academic lives as possible. The RoSE project started off with less of a focus on teaching but throughout its development found that the primary goal of the project should be looking at UGs as the main audience, especially in the classrooms of the humanities at HE level. RoSE looked at a student storyboard activity as a tool of investigating issues surrounding the DH for example ‘the future of books’ (the storyboard of this example is included in the article). Following student workshops, feedback on the limitations of the RoSE project was obtained in order to focus the final development of the project. Issues that arose included: concerns over the validity and accuracy of data that was obtained through student designed projects, who would oversee student contributions to database projects in regards to accuracy, as well as many practical technological concerns. Thomas and Solomon then discuss how the RoSE project can be interpreted as part of wider digital pedagogy. The article concludes that the most valuable insight of the project was how crucial it was to use UG students in the developmental process. It demonstrated how “iterative project development itself is a pedagogical technique”. By asking UG students to become involved, it altered the way they thought about not only the DHs, but as how much planning and development goes into how material is delivered to them in a HE classroom setting. The authors end the article with a call to others in the DH to see the value of experimenting and playing with pedagogy, more than educators currently find time to do.


Shillingsburg, Peter. "From Physical to Digital Textuality: Loss and Gain in Literary Projects."

CEA Critic. 76.2(2014), pp.158-68

This article focuses on the digitisation of so-called literary texts (poetry, drama, fictions etc) treated at works of art rather than cultural documents; highlighting the fact that standards of accuracy and precision for these works of art are different from the standards used for cultural documents or texts for linguistic analysis. Questions are raised over what is lost through the digitisation process, not just in terms of accuracy, but regarding the loss of context, for example, from a papyrus or parchments. Shillingsburg has taught students where is it not physically or realistically possible for students to physically engage with primary sources, so it is important to teach them what they are losing through only engaging with digitised representations. Does the integrity of a source need to be sacrificed for ease of accessibility? How do teachers convey this to a generation who see everything digitally? These are questions that Shillingsburg states that educators need to address. He goes on to discuss what exactly he believes makes a digital archive; stating that the text, or facts, alone are not enough. Images of the texts and sources are needed to make an archive trustworthy, in his opinion. Also, he states that the sources having no weight, smell or texture mean that digitised copies are rarely suitable for the best teaching, and that is before the errors that have been included in the digital copies during transcribing. Following this, Shillingsburg details at length the errors that could occur during digitisation. The conclusion states that all the elements that are lost during digitisations could be attempted to be rectified through extensive marking up of texts to include contextual information.


Hawkins, Ann R. "Making the Leap: Incorporating Digital Humanities into the English Classroom."

CEA Critic 76.2(2014), pp.137-9.

This essay serves as a short introduction to the CEA Critic special edition focusing on the Digital Humanities. Hawkins praises the contributing authors to this edition and states that all involved in DH teaching to use the experience of these professors to further engage with UG students on this topic. It is through engaging students with texts in new ways, via DH tools, that they will become excited about exploring what once seemed dulled by overfamiliarity. This introduction ends with a encouraging cry to all teachers to utilise the DH tools available so that their students can reap the benefits.


Bellamy, Craig. "The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Teaching the Digital Humanities through Virtual Research Environment (VREs)"

Digital Humanities Quarterly. 6.1 (2012).

DH is by its nature an interdisciplinary field, with researchers arriving from many diverse disciplines. The author defines DH as “the application and development of computational methods and associated tools to address research problems within the humanities”. Bellamy uses this article to convey his thoughts on how the skills of digital tools should be taught as ‘hard-interdisciplinarity’. Though the task may not be easy, the results of forging new research partnerships and uncovering new lines of investigation to problems within the humanities, makes the formulation of formal teaching methods infinity worthwhile. Bellamy argues that digital tools should not just be provided or made available to researcher in the humanities; but that those in the humanities should be involved in the developmental process. This could especially benefit students in the humanities, who may come to appreciate how knowledge, tools and teaching came to be; rather than just being passive observer-consumers in the classroom. Bellamy then discusses how the DH scholarly community should be collaboratively working to create interpretive frameworks to make sense of newly formed databases and digital libraries. Examples of projects where this occurred successfully are listed and detailed within the article. The article concludes that interdiscipliarity, much like computer technology and digital tools, need not anymore be learned “the hard way” – through necessity of piecemeal trial and error. Rather the students in an HE environment can now be taught DH as a discipline in its own rights and the area is now suitably advanced that the underlying decision making processes can be critiqued, not just teaching of the basic knowledge of how to work the tools adequately.

Fri 18 Sep 2015, 09:37 | Tags: collaboration, interdisciplinarity