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conversations.value: Do you know a description for a book titled Laying The Foundation about Bethesda, Christian, Church with the genre: Christian Books & Bibles, Ministry & Evangelism?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author for more than 50years has been in pastoral ministry at Bethesda Christian Church in Sterling Heights Michigan. His church has become one the largest worshiping bodies n the state.Pastor the author has authored 6 other books.
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conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for the book?
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conversations.value: Laying The Foundation
  The term "digital humanities" describes a wide variety of scholarly activities. So wide, in fact, that it is increasingly difficult to use the term with any sort of precision. It is helpful, therefore, to think about digital humanities in terms of several subcategories.
  To a greater or lesser extent, libraries have been crucial partners in several of these subcategories. Many libraries—and many more librarians—have been actively engaged with each other and with the wider academic community through social media. They have worked with researchers to create digital corpora for use in text mining and data analysis projects. GIS and data librarians are becoming common and some libraries have even built impressive spaces where researchers can explore this data visually. Digital libraries and repositories are no longer anything new but they do continue to evolve and have occasionally served as the inspiration—and even the foundation—for exciting open-access publications based in the library.
  Libraries and librarians have also been part of the increasing popularity of digital humanities or digital humanities–inflected pedagogy. However, these efforts have not generated the same level of interest as some of the others. Perhaps this is because course-based projects are not as flashy as large-scale, showcase projects. The lack of attention could also be due to a general lack of certainty about what "digital pedagogy" actually refers to. Like "digital humanities" itself, it seems as if the term could apply to any number of things and, as this chapter demonstrates, routinely touches on or incorporates each of the subcategories listed above. Furthermore, at a time when the bulk of library instruction sessions consists of teaching students how to thoughtfully navigate online catalogs, course pages, and online databases, isn't nearly all of our pedagogy digital?
  Possibly; but this chapter will explore a dimension of digital pedagogy that is in some ways an extension of traditional library instruction but is, in other ways, an entirely new pursuit. It will focus on practices that bring faculty and librarians into very close collaboration and create an opportunity for increased student engagement with a range of library resources beyond the catalogs and databases.
  This chapter begins with an overview of what professors talk about when they talk about digital pedagogy and a series of arguments for why librarians should be a part of that conversation. This is followed by a close look at four kinds of class projects that are particularly well suited to librarian involvement: digital mapping, text analysis, multimedia websites/online exhibits, and Wikipedia editing. Before concluding, the chapter addresses some of the staffing, infrastructure, and workflow questions that will undoubtedly arise when librarians become collaborators in digital humanities pedagogy. Because this chapter is necessarily an overview of a sprawling set of questions, concerns, and possibilities, there are frequent pointers to more in-depth sources and examples.
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conversations.value: Do you know three more paragraphs?
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conversations.value: Some professors incorporate blogs into their courses to encourage discussion among students outside of the classroom. For example, as part of his Introduction to Digital Studies class at Davidson College, Mark Sample asks his students to take turns taking on different roles in the class's WordPress blog each week.24 One group, "The Readers," is assigned to write responses to the assigned readings and post them to the class blog. "The Responders" are responsible for commenting on those posts, and "The Historians" are asked to find some other resource online and connect it to that week's topic or conversation.
  Other classes have utilized websites as a kind of digital publication for showcasing student work. This can be as simple as asking students to post their research papers on a publicly accessible website. However, one of the benefits of asking students to post their work online is giving them the opportunity to take advantage of all of the affordances of the web. For example, they can easily link to other resources and incorporate images as well as embedded video and audio files into their work. Students in Brian Croxall's Introduction to Digital Humanities class at Emory University post the results of their final projects—including multimedia content—to the public course website, which, like Sample's blog, is built using WordPress.25
  A third kind of course-based website assignment is the online exhibit. Usually connected to history or cultural studies classes, these projects are about getting students into archives, working with primary sources and then using them to tell a story. Many online exhibit assignments use a tool called Omeka, an open-source content management system (CMS) specifically designed with libraries, museums, and archives in mind.26 What separates Omeka from other CMSs is that it is built around the digitized item–rather than the web page or the blog post—so it is very good for organizing collections and highlighting individual items within them. The tool asks users to describe each digital item using Dublin Core and then allows them to assign those items to collections. Once organized into collections, items can be used in exhibits and contextualized with content written by students. For example, Professor Cathy Moran Hajo worked with students at New York University to build a collection of 1,830 images related to Greenwich Village history and then organized those images into seventy-five student-curated exhibits.27
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conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
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conversations.value: Where the responsibility for providing digital humanities pedagogy instruction should fall will depend on how a library is organized as well as its institutional culture. Some libraries may have dedicated instructional staff who would be able to add these tools to their set of skills with relative ease. For other libraries, it may be the subject liaisons who should take on this role. Whoever winds up doing the instruction, it is a good opportunity for cross training. This not only increases the number of people who are able to collaborate with classes, but also helps raise awareness about what kinds of projects users are interested in and what tools are being used.
  Most of the examples presented in this chapter require no special infrastructure beyond what is typically found in a research library. The exception to this would be CMSs like WordPress and Omeka that can be installed locally though free, externally hosted versions of each exist. Regardless of whether or not a library wanted officially to offer a tool that requires local hosting, some dedicated "sandbox space" can be extremely useful for testing and evaluating emerging tools. Of course, the presence of a sandbox implies that someone is responsible for managing it and providing assistance when a tool or technique needs to be tested.
  The decision to collaborate with faculty and students on digital humanities projects will likely lead to many other decisions. If a library is going to offer Omeka for class projects, who will be responsible for managing user accounts and how long will projects remain live? If a project requires digitization of items from special collections, how will those items be added to the queue and how will they be delivered to the class? Regardless of the project, who in the library will be responsible for instruction and how will that be reflected in their job descriptions? If a project is to result in a public-facing product hosted and maintained by the library, what guidelines for scholarly integrity and quality should it meet? There are many ways of dealing with each of these scenarios that will depend on local circumstances and goals. Time can be saved and frustration avoided if paths through these decisions can be established early and projects can be guided along with relative consistency.
  Digital humanities pedagogy has an experimental, DIY sensibility and uses technology to help students engage with course material. There is an ongoing conversation among faculty who share assignments and tools with one another and it is important for librarians to be a part of that. By partnering with professors who are teaching digital humanities techniques, librarians can build on their role as instructors and reflect the emerging identity of the library as an active and productive space on campus and not only a warehouse of primary and secondary sources. Furthermore, connecting the library to digital humanities work will create new ways for users to work with library collections and give the library a low-stakes way to experiment with emerging tools.
  Some common ways for libraries to collaborate with classes include creating digital maps, performing text analysis, and building multimedia websites and online exhibits. As interest in these kinds of projects grows, more tools and techniques for building them will emerge. By remaining current on developments and trends in the field, librarians can be important collaborators in digital humanities. However, to support librarians in this capacity, libraries need to establish effective training opportunities for staff, ensure proper infrastructure is available, and create workflows that will facilitate innovative work.