Presented as part of "Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities" (#RODH2012) Oct 23-25, 2012, Ireland. More info: www.dri.ie/programme

1. Realising the Opportunities of
Digital Humanities
Dublin
24th October 2012
“The” Digital Humanities Skillset
Aja Teehan,
An Foras Feasa (AFF), National University of Ireland, Maynooth

2. DHumanities Skillset
• No consensus on what DH is, but it is definitely something to do with
Humanities.
• Humanities is composed of many different subjects, there are some
transferrable skills across the many specialisms, these are usually
described as “literacy”. Is this shallow?
• Other skills are area specific, e.g. scholarly editing. We cannot possibly
teach all of the specialist skills required for the various areas.
• So, then perhaps is less a question of “the” DH skillset, and more a
question of “a” DH skillset?
• Q1: Is it possible to define a meaningful set?
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Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities; Dublin; 24th October 2012

3. Digital H Skillset
• “Digital” ... well, computational? algorithmic? modeling? or just digitised?
• These are very specific, technical knowledges that can be used to guide
skills acquisition e.g. programming in COBOL and Java are two different
skills, that rely on same knowledge.
• Depending on your level of granularity:
Skill = algorithmic thinking,
or
Skill = Java proficiency (more difficult to translate across languages
or problem solve outside of the predefined and taught patterns)
• Q2. What do we mean by skills, and where do they fit into knowledge?
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Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities; Dublin; 24th October 2012

4. AFF Skills, Knowledge, Theory, Practice
• At AFF we believe that the answer to Q2 is:
• skill-acquisition should only take place within a framework for
knowledge; theoretical and methodological.
• Conversely, knowledge can only be attained through practice, and
through participation in knowledge generation.
• And that the answer to Q1 is bound tightly to that: we believe it is
possible to define a meaningful set of skills, if we just have one more
component to help us answer the question:
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5. Defined in Relation to What?
• “The” skill-set can only be defined in relation to the objective of the
researcher, or the scholarly community. One Humanist mail asked
“what should you know in order to be eligible for most jobs, funding
opportunities, etc?” The answer was Oxygen, XQuery and brownie
points for XSLT, while XML wasn’t considered “necessary”.
• These are software tools, only one of the many tool types available to
DH researchers, and without methodological and theoretical
frameworks, which are themselves tools, they are useless - unless you
consider the objective to be “get a job”. Activity Theory can help us.
• As a DH community, what is our objective? Personally, I consider the
aim to be contribution to knowledge.
• As AFF, a research institute, educators, what is our objective?
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6. AFF’s Objective
• For us, at AFF, we want our students to be able to participate
successfully in the Discourse of Digital Humanities.
• We believe this requires that students attain Digital Literacy; this is the
basis for “the” DH skillset.
• Digital Literacy is the deeper, cross-disciplinary representation of
generalised activities. These activities allow us to define “the” rather
than “a” skill-set.
• The need for this is expressed, in a single instance, by Hans Gabler’s call
yesterday for a mode of scholarship that allows us “to relate, or model,
the relationships between the pyre of humanities objects passed down
to us over millennia: literary, philosophical, scientific and law cultural
heritage texts”.
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Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities; Dublin; 24th October 2012

7. Digital Literacy
• “the E-Generation, possesses the digital competencies needed to
effectively navigate the multi-dimensional and fast-paced digital
environment of computers ... Like water, the new literacy—much more
broadly defined below than simply the ability to read and write—is a
necessity of life in the 21st century. ... Digital and visual literacies are the
next wave of communication specialization wherein the majority of
people have technologies at the tip of their fingers to not only
communicate, but to create, to manipulate, to design, to self-actualize.”
• “The greatest challenge now is moving beyond the glitz and pizzazz of
the flashy technology and teaching true literacy in this new milieu. Using
many of the same skills we have used for centuries—analysis, synthesis,
and evaluation—we now must look at digital literacy as another realm
within which to apply elements of critical thinking”.
Jones-Kavalier, B. R., & Flannigan, S. L. (2008). Connecting the digital dots: Literacy of the 21st
century. Teacher Librarian, 35(3), 13-16.
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8. Various Definitions
• Digital literacy can be viewed as traditional literacy translated to the
digital environment, plus a whole host of additional literacies arising
from that new environment.
• These literacies include information literacy, lateral literacy, photo-visual
literacy and reproduction literacy. Various definitions, and
categorisations can be found in the literature e.g. “new media literacy”
can be viewed as another form of “digital literacy”.
• However, it is, as ever, more complicated than that.
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Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities; Dublin; 24th October 2012

9. Digital Literacy as More than Digital
• Lankshear and Knobel’s paper, “Digital Literacy and Digital Literacies:
Policy, Pedagogy and Research Considerations for Education” cautions
against the reduction of digital literacy to information management,
manipulation and production, and against the notion that digital literacy is
about understanding the code (in both registers) required to encode and
decode characters. All communication is socially situated, and it is the
social situation that is of paramount importance for whether or not the
student is successful in participating in the Discourse.
• All too often, the formal methods of skill-teaching are separated from
the social (in this case DH research) context.
Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2006). Digital Literacy and Digital Literacies: Policy, Pedagogy and
Research Considerations for Education. Digital kompetanse, 1(1), 12-24
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10. • President Percirion (Lankshear, 2006)
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11. Which Discourse?
• Digital Literacy is not a set of skills that purely relies on encoding and
decoding in digital characters. Reading and writing in the digital world
are just as tied to social context, intent and Discourse, as they are in
the real. Furthermore, there is a unique social context, intent and
discourse within the digital world, that sits atop the real world, and it is
necessary for the students to become part of that social context, and
to participate in the Discourse, through praxis; being DH scholars,
rather than learning about DH. This necessitates authentic learning.
• As such teaching the history of DH, the standards of DH, or
consideration of the implications of DH, will not, of itself, enable DH
students to gain digital literacy, or to participate in the DH discourse.
• Discourse is not merely what is being tweeted, or mailed - it is not
“social” in the way these sites often operate. Discourse, in this
context, is scholarly, reflexive communication that helps to shape
Humanities praxes and DH praxis. 11
Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities; Dublin; 24th October 2012

12. Be a DH Scholar
• What is central to “digital literacy” is marginal in digital literacies.
• If the aim is to contribute to knowledge, by joining the discourse,
through attaining digital literacy (which first requires literacy, literacy in
the digital medium, and then digital competency) we must teach DH
students how to be DH, not about DH. At AFF we create an authentic
learning environment to support this; students apply skills within real
DH research projects, using DH and CS methodologies, contextualised
within theoretical frameworks ... and then consider the implications.
• Students require an ability to negotiate between the three different
registers used in DH: standard in CS, standard in H and standard in DH
are three very different things.
• They must decide for themselves which identity and activities they
consider to be worthwhile and valuable, and they must then have
access to the tools they need in order to be able to equip themselves
to join those identity-groups and activities.
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Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities; Dublin; 24th October 2012

13. Support: Pedagogic Tools
• The MASUS diagnostic instrument, “assesses the student's ability to
write about a given body of knowledge in a reasoned and critical way,
together with their ability use the language resources appropriate for
the required task.” (Bonnano, H & Jones, J. (1997) Measuring the Academic Skills of
University Students: The MASUS Procedure, A Diagnostic Assessment. Sydney: University of
Sydney, Learning Centre Publications) Importantly, it is applicable across all
disciplines.
• MASUS was re-examined and adapted in light of digital literacies
requirement, and we use it as a means to provide feedback to students
on their digital literacy based on the ability to produce a suitably
encoded piece of written text, that is appropriate to the DH genre,
uses the correct language register, decides between appropriate and
inappropriate sources, evaluates those sources, correctly interprets
them, adheres to academic language, and is properly presented (in a
digital format).
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Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities; Dublin; 24th October 2012

14. DH Digital Literacy Demands Reflexivity
• Tying of literacy to the audience: contextualised discourse. “Digital
literacy enables us to match the medium we use to the kind of
information we are presenting and to the audience we are presenting it
to.” (Lankshear, 2006)
• For all disciplines moving to the digital medium, “cut and paste” is not
enough; identification, assimilation, evaluation and reintegration and
representation is effective digital literacy. DH demand more...
• In addition, for DH students, AFF expects, and therefore supports,
• an ability to participate in the highly sophisticated discourse not just
through digital literacy, but about digital literacy, and
• a meta-cognitive approach to reflexive thinking about the
implications the new digital literacies hold for their traditional
subjects.
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Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities; Dublin; 24th October 2012

15. Thank You
Questions?
learndigitalhumanities.ie
aja.teehan@nuim.ie
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Realising the Opportunities of Digital Humanities; Dublin; 24th October 2012